It is a trope, immediately recognisable. A U-boat emerging from the depths, menacing; a brutal hunter, devoid of all humanity. Torpedoes launch, mercilessly locking onto their prey, engulfing the unwitting quarry in flame and death. On the surface, panic erupts as men burn and drown, or scramble for any temporary safety in the featureless expanse of the Atlantic. The deed done, the mechanical beast once again submerges, leaving its victims to die – slowly or quickly – in the unforgiving water above.
For over eighty years, this has been the image of the German submarine during the Second World War. It is a looming spectre, a menace that would appear from nowhere, wreak havoc and destruction, and then disappear just as quickly. It is terrifying and debilitating: even the ‘great man’, Winston Churchill himself, admitted that ‘The only thing that ever really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril’. But it is not just the Predator-like ability to come and go at will, nor the strategic danger presented by the Battle of the Atlantic, that makes the U-boat war so enduringly disturbing. Instead, it is the fate of the survivors: stranded, exposed to the elements, slowly baking or freezing, starving, and dying of thirst while surrounded by water.
Yet, this is an emotional response, which barely leaves space for the facts – or, indeed, for the other side. At last, however, there is a historian who has challenged it and, in Wolfpack: Inside Hitler’s U-Boat War, Roger Moorhouse excels in presenting an entirely new perspective. Surely, Moorhouse asks, as we approach the centenary of the start of the Second World War there is now room to consider the other aspects of the U-boat war; to leave aside those immediate gut reactions – reactions that still fuel the various media industries – to approach the subject with objectivity?
This, of course, is a rhetorical question, because Moorhouse goes on to write a thrilling, compelling and enlightening history of the U-boat war told from the German point of view. Through detailed research, using archives and resources rarely touched by anglophone historians, and astonishing statistics whose presentation belies the amount of work that has been done behind the scenes, we are left in no doubt about the potential – and ultimate fruitlessness – of the U-boat arm. With more than half of all combat U-boats failing to sink anything, ever, there can be no argument other than that the idea was worse than the reality. This, of course, is not to imply there was no inherent danger, just that – as with so much about the Nazi regime – treasure and energy were misspent and mistimed.
But well-honed arguments, backed up by irrefutable evidence, about the true extent of the threat of the U-boat is only half the story. Instead, what really confounds in Wolfpack is the human angle. No longer are we allowed to think of the men inside the machines as nameless, faceless automatons, or devils hell-bent on causing as much damage and suffering as possible. For Wolfpack is a deeply personal story: of fear, of suffering, of a death rate ‘unmatched in any other branch of service, in any army, in any theatre of the Second World War’, and of the all-pervading stench of weeks spent in tightly packed, increasingly airless tube surrounded by all manner of filth and detritus. But also of camaraderie, of optimism, of bravery and, indeed, of chivalry – of the times where the ‘solidarity of the sea’ overrode more immediate, political concerns and compelled these alleged ‘demons’ to provide the enemy with sustenance, with medicine and, occasionally, with a lift into port.
To many readers, immersed for decades in the media stories of the U-boat war, this last might be hard to credit. And anyway, as Moorhouse says, ‘It matters little if a single theatre of a war was fought with a modicum of honour when the cause as a whole was so morally sullied as to be synonymous with evil itself.’ But, if anyone can make us reassess our treasured opinions and to consider another perspective, then it’s Roger Moorhouse.
