How grim was life on Hitler's U-boats?

Statistically, they were on a suicide mission. That's Roger Morehouse's assessment of the odds facing Hitler's U-boat crews in the final years of the Second World War. Here, in conversation with Spencer Mizen, Roger relates the story of these missions from the German perspective, a tale encompassing scurvy, sleep deprivation, terror, and acts of astonishing kindness. Let's kind of start at the beginning of the war. What was the German high command's attitude to the U-boat fleet at the outbreak of hostilities in 1939?

Did it regard it as potentially a war-winning weapon? Not really. No, I think on the way, it was kind of a slightly out on limb, a little bit unloved. You know, Dernitz, who, the head of the U-boat armor, spent most of the sort of few years pre-war, after Germany had been permitted to have U-boats again, you know, desperately trying to sort of sell the idea of this as a tactical weapon in the future war and saying, well, you can attack Allied shipping, you can essentially strangle Britain out of the war, you can at least strangle Britain to to a position where they would be willing to negotiate.

And he'd really been in sort of very stiff competition with every other branch of the German military, you know, for m for raw materials, for steel, for manpower and all the rest of it, which is a it was a very difficult situation for him. And to a large degree, he sort of lost out in that. And he complained in his memoir that, you know, a lot of his superiors were what what he called, you know, continentally obsessed, which is, you know, meaning that they they were obsessed about the land war and especially going east. you know, Leibans realm and all of that sort of thing.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (33 minutes, 6,712 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 5 episodes for $3.49, and monthly plans are cheaper still.