Wolf: U-Boat Commanders in World War II. This item is unavailable.Wolf: U-Boat Commanders in World War II

Cultivated by the Allied press during the war and fostered by films and novels ever since, the image of a U-boat skipper held by many people is the personification of evil: the wolf who stalks the innocents. Quite the opposite image is shared by U-boat veterans and others sympathetic to their work: the knight who endures unrivalled danger and fights nobly. Yet another popular image depicts the submarine operator as a beleaguered sailor swept along by events beyond his control. To see whether a pattern emerges, this book examines the lives of many U-Bootwaffe officers, including prominent commanders such as Karl Doenitz. Drawing on a wealth of primary documents, and also interviews and correspondence with some of the commanders themselves, the book follows individual officers from their youth and early naval training, through their wartime experiences and into the often bitter peace that followed. The close examination reveals that many were extremely different from the pictures typically drawn of them, and as varied in their thoughts and actions as other fighting men on both sides.

Designed for visual impact, this album combines photographs, paintings, and propaganda posters to illustrate a German crewman's life in submarine combat. For narration and interpretation of the Battle of the Atlantic, frankly better sources exist, but sometimes a lavish pictorial excites more readership interest. Full-page spreads abound, sorted among return-to-port receptions, interiors of U-boats, combat, sinkings, and death or rescue at sea, or relics like the sub pens in French ports or the U-505 in Chicago. Nazi naval insignia are represented through such items as Dx9a netz's baton and uniform and ace captain Gunther Prien's decorations, evidently left ashore before he was sunk. The damp grimness of the U-boat experience, conveyed in stills from Das Boot and in sidebar quotations from the most famous U-boat book, Iron Coffins by Herbert Werner (1969, o.p.), is evident throughout, lending readers a tactile first acquaintance with this critical phase of the war. Gilbert Taylor