It is May 1943. You are three hundred feet under the North Atlantic, sitting
on a steel floor in your socks, trying not to breathe — because the sound of a
rubber sole on a deck plate is enough to get you killed.
Roughly 39,000 men went to sea in German U-boats. About 30,000 of them were
killed and another 5,000 came home only as prisoners. Three out of four never
made it back, the worst survival rate of any service arm Germany fielded in
the entire war.
This is how the most feared predator in the Atlantic became the most hunted
animal in the war — and what the job was actually like in between. The
hot-bunking. The cologne the navy issued because the smell was an operational
problem. The single toilet shared by fifty men, next to the galley. And the
eight weeks in 1943 when radar, the Leigh Light and the closing of the
Mid-Atlantic Gap flipped the entire campaign.
CHAPTERS
0:00 Three hundred feet down
1:27 1940: the Happy Time
2:31 Fifty men in a steel tube
3:38 One toilet, fifty men
4:16 They were not really submarines
4:54 Radar and the Leigh Light
6:03 Black May 1943
6:29 Thirty seconds to crash dive
7:08 The depth charge attack
9:07 Trapped on the bottom
9:46 Lost to a toilet: U-1206
10:38 The arithmetic
11:32 The full picture
A note on the numbers: casualty figures for the U-boat arm vary by source
depending on whether you count all personnel or only those who sailed on
operational patrols. The figures used here are the commonly cited ones —
roughly 30,000 killed of about 39,000 who went to sea, and close to 800 boats
lost out of some 1,100 that sailed.
#ww2 #history #uboat #submarine #animatedhistory
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