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.
A more familiar title may be Das Boot.
From Amazon:
The thrilling wartime novel that inspired Wolfgang Petersen's Academy Award-nominated, blockbuster film! Written by an actual survivor of Germany's U-boat fleet, Das Boot is one of the most exciting stories of naval warfare ever published, a tale filled with almost unbearable tension and suspense. In autumn 1941, a German U-boat commander and his crew set out on yet another hazardous patrol in the Battle of the Atlantic. Over the coming weeks they brave the ocean's stormy waters and seek out British supply ships to destroy. But their targets travel in well-guarded convoys. When contact finally occurs, the hunter quickly becomes the hunted, and a cat-and-mouse game begins as the U-boat hides deep beneath the surface of the sea. Soon, claustrophobia becomes an enemy almost as frightening as the depth charges exploding around them. The release of this supremely gripping, merciless intense story commemorates the 60th anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.
From Amazon:
The thrilling wartime novel that inspired Wolfgang Petersen's Academy Award-nominated, blockbuster film! Written by an actual survivor of Germany's U-boat fleet, Das Boot is one of the most exciting stories of naval warfare ever published, a tale filled with almost unbearable tension and suspense. In autumn 1941, a German U-boat commander and his crew set out on yet another hazardous patrol in the Battle of the Atlantic. Over the coming weeks they brave the ocean's stormy waters and seek out British supply ships to destroy. But their targets travel in well-guarded convoys. When contact finally occurs, the hunter quickly becomes the hunted, and a cat-and-mouse game begins as the U-boat hides deep beneath the surface of the sea. Soon, claustrophobia becomes an enemy almost as frightening as the depth charges exploding around them. The release of this supremely gripping, merciless intense story commemorates the 60th anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.
