English translation from the German. Covers German U-boats; very thorough...
Buchheim has an illustrative style which in other writers can be very tiresome - but somehow in this book it serves to highlight the extreme psychological stress of life on a WW2 U-boat - the claustrophobia, helplessness under fire, the total reliance on the split-second judgements of one man, the 30 year old commander they call 'The Old Man'. The only recourse for an individual trapped in this hell is to withdraw into an internal reality in which past events, opportunities taken and opportunities missed are examined in the same minute detail as the internal features of the boat, and the colours and textures of the waves and the clouds on the rare excursions to the tower. The only thing which goes unexamined is the future: best not to think beyond the immediate, in a world where life can be snatched away in an instant. The real shock of this book is that it is first hand documentary written by one of the few that got away.
