Naxos gives three separate warnings, amplitude 4 to 5. Starboard diesel started but owing to in-sufficient exhaust pressure the safety valve lifts and the exhaust gases escape into the boat, filling all compartments and necessitating the wearing of escape apparatus.Ġ503. Bomb or depth-charge concussion has apparently fractured a tappet lever on the port diesel. For example, the commander of U 218 wrote:Ġ400. It does so better than most, and its extracts from captains’ logs, brief, cool and objective, give a remarkably direct access to their experience. There are other potential readers, however: like all highly-specialised publications, this book opens a window on to another world, in this case a world of shocking discomfort (submarines spent most of their time on the surface, where they pitched and rolled horribly), confinement and continual danger. Six hundred and ninety-nine of these U-boats were sunk by direct enemy action, 85 by collision, German mines or internal explosion 154 surrendered after the capitulation, 218 scuttled themselves, and two were interned. They sank 2603 Allied merchant ships amounting to 13,500,000 tons and 175 men-of-war and auxiliaries. Who will read the book now that it is offered to the public? Former submariners, no doubt naval historians concerned with the last war (though they will have to put up with a wholly inadequate index) and those who like to give their general ideas a skeleton of statistics: for example, Germany began the war with 57 U-boats and built 1153 more in the course of it. It is a handsome, well-printed book, and although it is written in an austere official English, which no doubt faithfully reflects the original German, it reads more easily than its general appearance and numbered paragraphs might lead one to suppose. But now that the 1945 U-boat is, in comparison with the nuclear-powered monster of today, as archaic as a stage-coach, and now that the secrets of Ultra and so many other sides of intelligence have been given away, the work has been published in this facsimile text with additional notes from Allied sources. The three volumes, now somewhat shortened though still amounting to about 200,000 words, were for many years a classified document. Few men could have been better-informed and as he was methodical, conscientious, untiring, he and his assistants produced a work in three volumes, abundantly illustrated with charts and diagrams, of the first importance for anyone interested not only in the strategy, tactics and technology of submarine war as it was then fought and the impact of intelligence upon it, but also in the day-to-day running of a U-boat and life aboard. Fregatenkapitän Hessler commanded a U-boat in 19 he then served on the staff of the Flag Officer, Submarines and for the purpose of writing this book he and the German naval officers who helped him were given access to the War Diaries and the primary sources of the Kriegsmarine. The first of these books is of a kind that rarely comes into the hands of a general reader: it is a highly-detailed account of the submarine war seen from the German side and it was written by a Kriegsmarine officer after the war at the request of the Admiralty and the United States Navy Department.
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