Roger Moorhouse is a critically acclaimed historian and author specializing in modern German and Central European history, with books covering the Polish War of 1939 and a Berlin-eye view of the Second World War, among many others. It was therefore only natural that we bumped into him at We Have Ways Fest 2025, and that we took the opportunity to talk to him about his new book on the German experience of the U-boat war: Wolfpack.
Your new book, Wolfpack, came out on 9 October. For people who don't know what it's about, could you explain it, please?
The Battle of the Atlantic and the U-boat war is an integral part of our collective wartime story, and of the wider story of the Second World War. It’s also an interesting subject, and it's inherently dramatic. So after the last book, when I started vaguely thinking about what I'd do next, that jumped into my mind. But it struck me when I started looking at it, that there isn't much from the German side. It's all told from the viewpoint of the destroyers and the merchantmen, and the U-boats are pretty much invisible, literally and metaphorically. So I decided to shift that perspective by 180 degrees and tell the story of the Battle of the Atlantic from the German perspective, using German sources – archival sources, Kriegstagebücher, the war diaries, memoirs. Very often a shift of perspective is as good as finding a new archive, because it forces you to ask different questions, which gives you different answers, and before you know it, there's a different strand of the narrative.
Why do you think it's not been done before?
The short answer is probably a slight lack of imagination, and maybe a lack of language skills, but that's rectifiable. There's also a tendency in the English-speaking narrative naturally to focus on our boys and our fight and to frame it in those terms, which precludes the German perspective. The best works on the Battle of the Atlantic might have an aside, where they will refer to commanders like Günther Prien or Peter Cremer (who wrote a brilliant memoir which is translated into English), but they won't necessarily frame the whole thing from that viewpoint.
Do you think also that the horror of being in the Merchant Navy and being struck by a torpedo out of nowhere has meant that people maybe don't want to understand the German perspective?
I do mention that in the Introduction. The exigencies and requirements of the moment, certainly, do not permit any sort of concern for the fate of the U-boatmen. It would be mad if you're in a convoy to think, 'Those poor boys in the U-boat, how they must be suffering in the storm'. No one would ever think that. And to a large extent, the post-war literature for many years, and even decades, essentially took the same view. But I think now, eighty years on, we can and should be able to afford the time to think about what it was like for the opposition, for the Germans.
Are there many German submariners left alive now?
There aren't any left. The last one died about two or three years ago. We just have their memoirs and diaries. There's a brilliant private archive in a place called Cuxhaven in northern Germany, which collected testimony and other archival materials. Their holdings are amazing, frankly, and I did a lot of work there. So the material is available, it just hasn't really found its way into the narrative yet.
Perhaps one reason why there are no remaining veterans of the U-boats is because the survival rate was catastrophic, and the ones who did survive ended up damaged.
Absolutely. The U-boat war has the highest death rate of any arm of service in the Second World War: 75 per cent. It's huge. And many of those who survived were profoundly damaged. I once had a family lunch with my German mother-in-law. I'd already started working on the book, so unfortunately I can't claim this as an origin story, but I was telling them what I was doing. My mother-in-law said, ‘One of my uncles was in the U-boats.’ I’d never been told this before, but after the war he used to come to the house in the middle of the night, and they had to call the police. She said that because he was so damaged, he spent the rest of his life in a series of psychiatric institutions. It reinforced my determination to tell the story in the way that I wanted to tell it. It's very instructive that he was so damaged by his experience – and he was only 22 when he joined up – that he never recovered from it mentally. That's quite astonishing.
It does seem as if life in a U-boat was a particular brand of hell. What were the qualities that were needed? And what made people go into it?
It started off as a volunteer force, where anyone who went into the Kriegsmarine generally would be given the option of the U-boats, although some would be pulled in or recommended for it. Then very quickly it's brought under conscription. Ideally, you'd be short. An informal criterion was to be five foot eight and below. They also liked people to be single. They sought out people with practical skills: plumbers, mechanics, electricians. They wanted those skills because, obviously, in a depth-charge attack, you need to be able to repair stuff rapidly, so a mechanic or an electrician has a particular advantage.
Interestingly, the socioeconomic profile of U-boatmen is different from the other branches of service. For one thing, it's mainly lower middle class. And it's not necessarily boys from Bremen and Hamburg, but very often it's boys from inland. There's a slightly cynical view that maybe inland areas like Westphalia and Saxony were targeted because young men there didn't know the realities of life at sea – recruiters could say ‘It'll be a wheeze. You'll love it. Come and join the Navy.’
There's a lot of propaganda around convincing young men that fighting in U-boats is a heroic choice. They would say that it's a service for Germany and the Reich, but also that it's safe, which I thought was grimly amusing. There was a series of propaganda articles in the Völkischer Beobachter, the Nazi newspaper, that had laudatory profiles of commanders as heroes. One of the articles was allegedly following three young recruits – probably aged either seventeen or eighteen – going through their training, and the last word is given to one of them, who says, ‘I love all the camaraderie and the training is great, and I've got all my mates with me, and I can't wait to serve out at sea. After all, what could go wrong?’ You read that and think ‘Erm, Quite a lot!’ But it was an excellent bit of propaganda, showing how they sanitized it for domestic consumption.
Putting together a crew is also interesting. There are a lot of accounts that show the creation of a crew as a very sensitive process: you needed to have a mix of people that fundamentally got on, and maybe more so than in any other branch of military service. In the confines of a U-boat, you can't have a troublemaker: it was either shape up or ship out, with bells on. There are a couple of commanders who say, ‘We always want someone that can play the accordion, so we can have a sing along. We always want team players.’ Anyone who has played football, for example, is great because they know how to work in a team. That whole process, which I go through in the book, of how you put together not only the U-boat itself, but also the crew, is fascinating.
Were there any elements that stood out as different from the way the Germans conducted submarine warfare, compared with the experience of other nations?
Only the scale of it. The Germans very quickly expanded the U-boat force after the outbreak of war. Effectively, they start with something like 27 combat U-boats, which is a very small force. Over the whole course of the war, they produce over 850 combat U-boats. That's bigger than anyone else's fleet. They saw the potential of the tonnage war – admittedly too late – and put a lot of effort, a lot of resources, and ultimately a lot of men into it. Of course, the scale had downsides: so many young men are being drawn into it and increasingly, as the war goes on, they are really badly trained. At the beginning, they were well trained and often they'd served in the Navy proper: some of them had five years’ experience before they even set foot on the U-boat. By the end, people are being pulled from desk jobs in the Navy and given maybe six weeks of training – a bit of navigation, a bit of gunnery – and then put in command of the U-boat. It's insane how fast it is. So, not only are they up against vastly enhanced and improved Allied countermeasures and Allied technology – not least like the cracking of Enigma, which enables us to know where they are – they're also vastly inferior crews. That combination is absolutely toxic. The statistics are brutal. If you look at the beginning of the war, the average crew had a statistical lifespan of between seven and nine missions, and a mission is probably two months. By 1943, when the war starts turning in the Allies' favour, that's already down to two or three missions. From 1944 onwards, it's basically hovering around one mission. From that stage on, they're essentially on a suicide mission.
And it's a hell of a way to die. In the book, you mention that they trained in how to escape, but there were very few successful escapes. It goes back to psychology: if you're claustrophobic, you're buggered.
Oh, completely. They had the same training in the Royal Navy and in the US Navy. There were dive towers, where they could simulate a submarine sinking. You have to equalize the pressure, escape from the conning tower, and swim to the surface. You have to conquer your fear, essentially by flooding the thing you're in. That's a psychological challenge in itself, never mind going up through this pillar of water. And to become a submariner you have to do it numerous times. There was this thing called the Dräger lung, which is a sort of rebreather, almost like a Mae West life preserver, which had a charcoal mixture in it that would pull the carbon dioxide from your breath, and therefore allow you to breathe for longer on the same breath. But it's largely a psychological comfort blanket because the number of submariners that got out of a sunken U-boat using Dräger lungs is vanishingly small. In reality, a combat situation where it’s dark and you’re at the bottom of the sea is vastly different from any practice session. And the water is often so cold that you can't survive more than a couple of hours, tops. The realities were absolutely brutal.
Yet there were people like Admiral Dönitz, who thought 'This is great'.
Dönitz had fought in the First World War, and he completely saw himself as being first and foremost a submariner. Of course, there was also the strategic potential of the tonnage war, which the rest of the German high command took a while to see. Dönitz was constantly battling for resources and steel and men, but in terms of recruitment and so on there's an awful lot of wishful thinking.
Does the development of the U-boat force and the conduct of the Battle of the Atlantic provide a good example of the issues within Nazi Germany, or do you think it's a bit different?
It's a bit of an outlier, actually, and this is something that struck me very clearly. I'm familiar with the worst effects of Nazi policy and Nazi war-making, having written on Poland and on the Holocaust in the last book. So, I was fully expecting to see a smattering of atrocities. I was surprised only to see one, which is the reasonably well-known case of the Peleus. It was a Greek-registered merchantman that was sunk near Ascension in the Mid-Atlantic in the spring of 1944. They essentially machine-gunned the survivors, or at least the debris that the survivors were clinging onto. Three people survived. It's a pretty grim chapter. As a caveat, it's quite possible there were similar instances that are lost to history, where maybe the crew sank a ship, killed all the survivors and then were themselves sunk, so there's no one to tell the story.
And, of course, you've got the Laconia Order as well.
Yes, but the significance of that is disputed. I think it's less controversial perhaps than how it was interpreted at Nuremberg. It is a very interesting case that I go into in the book, and it is possible there were other atrocities, but the fact is there's only one that’s documented. Incidentally, there's only one documented atrocity in the US submarine war against the Japanese, which is the USS Wahoo – a very similar case, where they machine-gun survivors. I'm not making that equivalence, because that would be daft, but nonetheless it's an interesting juxtaposition which suggests that the U-boat war was conducted, to a large extent, as cleanly as the American submarine war in the Pacific. Of course, then you have to explain why, particularly when German soldiers are committing atrocities hand over fist in Eastern Europe. (They were also doing it in Western Europe – think of Oradour, for example – but less regularly.) Yet the U-boat war is somehow relatively clean, and it's a conundrum, not least because Dönitz himself was a convinced Nazi. My explanation is that Dönitz did not permit the organs of indoctrination to come into the U-boat service.
But as a convinced Nazi, why wouldn't he?
That's the question. Basically, I think he viewed it as an unwanted imposition from the upstart non-naval service. He's a sailor to his bones, so he sees himself as a representative of that arm of the senior service. There's a natural objection to imposition from outside, even if he's ideologically aligned with it. That's one thing. But it's more than that: he viewed it as fundamentally unnecessary because he thought, ‘I'm on board. I agree with the aims of the regime. My men obviously do too, because this is an essential part of how they see themselves as Germans’. I don't think he could imagine any contradiction between being a loyal German sailor in the Kriegsmarine and not being on side with Nazi ideology. Also, there's no room to allow political officers to ride along on a submarine: you're losing a crewman if you have a political officer. It's unnecessary. And as they didn't allow political officers, it remained a cross-section of German society: some commanders are believing Nazis; others are not. Crucially, that element of active indoctrination during the war is therefore absent, played out in that lack of anger, if you like, the lack of an ideological edge in dealing with survivors at sea. There’s also the old-fashioned 'solidarity of the sea', where everyone’s battle to some extent is against the sea. That is very much in evidence in the early phase of the war up until the Laconia Order in 1942. Until that point, German U-boat crews are more likely to help the sailors they've torpedoed than they are to do anything remotely prejudicial towards them. They would give them blankets at the very least, if not water and biscuits, and say 'The land's that way'. With the Laconia Order that had to be stopped. It's a really important thread of the book, looking at how German submariners viewed, and were obliged to treat, the enemy – and that did change. But the one fact that's incontrovertible is it's the cleanest war of the European theatre.
Do you think if Dönitz had been given his own way, the Germans could have won the Battle of the Atlantic?
It's a good question. It's certainly clear that he was not given the support and the resources that he wanted, when he wanted. When he did get it – a 300-strong U-boat force, which meant 100 U-boats in theatre at sea, 100 refitting and refuelling, and probably 100 going between the two – it's only at the end of 1942, by which time it's too late. The window is closed: the Americans are in the war, the Liberty ships are rolling off the shipyards in America. There is an argument that if the potential were fulfilled much earlier, maybe even pre-war as Dönitz had requested, then the scenario might be different. It's the problem with counterfactuals: you can't change one parameter and then run the scenario like it's a computer program where everything else is the same. That's not how history works; that's not how life works. Nevertheless, it looks like that might have been the case. But, of course, had he been rearming more aggressively and building more U-boats pre-war, there would have been some reaction on the Allied side. The British might have ramped up merchantman or destroyer production.
Would that have been the case? The Allies, apart from the French, seemed more concerned with disarming. Yet even the Weimar Republic was determined to undo Versailles, to rearm, and we just shrugged. Was there the social, cultural, and financial impetus to challenge Germany?
There's no political imperative amongst the Allies until probably Munich in 1938 – although you could say perhaps with the Rhineland in 1936 – which is very late in the day: it's only a year before war breaks out. So, you're right. It's only at that point that there's a visible response from the Allies in terms of war production. Western politicians in the late 1930s were deluding themselves by saying, ‘They're allowed to rearm. They're just like every other state: we've got a navy; they can have a navy. And maybe if you allow them all those things, it will stop Hitler being so angry, and it will pull his teeth a little bit.’ That was the logic of Appeasement. But again, to run that counterfactual, had Dönitz had loads of money and steel and men thrown at him in, say, 1937, that would be yet another piece of evidence to indicate to Western politicians that there was something more sinister going on, and it might have advanced a response. It's always the danger with counterfactuals. It's an intellectual parlour game.
Your next book will focus on the Night of the Long Knives; why did you pick that particular aspect of Nazi Germany?
There isn't really a book on it, is the short answer. It gets talked about a lot, obviously, as part of Hitler's rise to complete power: he comes to power initially as part of a coalition government and then gets rid of his coalition partners, but it's still the old functioning system to a large extent. And then gradually through 1933 and ending with Hindenburg's death in August 1934, that's whittled away and dismantled piecemeal. One of the big changes is the Night of the Long Knives, so it’s mentioned a lot, but curiously it’s not the focus of any book despite the drama and the shock value: General Kurt von Schleicher, the chancellor before Hitler, was the most prominent victim. It's like Rishi Sunak being assassinated by Starmer!
If you could go anywhere in history, or see any event in history with a safety bubble, where would you go and why?
My obvious answer would be that I'd love to ride on a U-boat, as long as I can be protected from harm. That would be fascinating. There are three surviving wartime U-boats: two in Germany and one in the US. I've been to the two in Germany, one of which is ultra-modern for the time, which was a Type XXI. It was built at the end of the war – it never saw combat – and is comparatively comfortable: it's quite generous with headroom, for example. The other is the Type VII, which is the workhorse. About 70 per cent of the whole fleet during the war was Type VIIs, but this is the only one to survive, based at the Navy War Memorial in Laboe near Kiel. I've been inside that numerous times, and it's frankly terrifying. It's not built for people who are over five foot eight, and there's no point at which two grown men can pass each other in comfort without doing a slightly embarrassed shuffle. Yet an information board says, ‘This had a crew of 50’, and you think, ‘What? Really? How is it even possible for 50 men to be in that space, never mind working, fighting and living for two months on a patrol?’ It's an astonishing thing. So, to actually experience that would, I think, be amazing.
Do you have a less obvious answer?
I did a book a long time ago on the Nazi-Soviet pact called The Devil's Alliance. One of the set pieces in it is the signature of the pact itself on 23 August 1939. It's one of those moments: Ribbentrop flies into Moscow, they go into the Kremlin. Molotov is there. The German ambassador to Moscow is there – who's been in Russia for four years and has never actually seen Stalin before. So, they're all in this one room in the Kremlin, for the discussions initially and then for the signature. There are photos and there are eyewitness accounts from various people, not least Hitler's photographer who was there to take pictures to show Hitler. Hitler was obsessed with the shape of Stalin's ears, which is weird. He had this thing about ears being representative of racial fitness – whether your earlobe was joined at the bottom or not. But this is one of the seminal moments of the twentieth century, so I would want to go and watch that evening of discussion, negotiation and signature.
If you could have a dinner party with anyone from history, who would you have?
I'm very twentieth century! It'd be hard to avoid Churchill: he'd be a good drinking partner, he's a fabulous raconteur, he's very funny, he's very witty. He'd be gloriously indiscreet as well, which I like: just add alcohol and things would happen. I think I'd include someone who would add a bit of spice to the evening, perhaps even a Stalin. I find Stalin quite fascinating. He is a hideous character, as we well know now, but he's still curiously mysterious and quite hard, I think, to fathom as a human being. So, he'd be interesting. But then, of course, if I'm getting pissed with Churchill, I'm not really going to have the attention span to psychoanalyse Stalin. So maybe that wouldn't work terribly well, but it would be a fun start. We can add in someone like Kathleen Harriman who would, I'm sure, bring out the best of both and make the whole thing swing. So, there we go. That's brilliant: that's a dinner party!
Roger's new book, Wolfpack: Inside Hitler's U-Boat War, can be purchased here.
