Neither Sharks Nor Wolves: The Men of Germany's U-boat Arm, 1939-45

Narratives of convoy battles, technical treatments of U-boat types and even the memoirs of 'aces' have shed little light on the reality of routine, grime and terror experienced by the average U-boat crewman. This book explains what it was like to serve in a U-boat service itself. In researching the details of the men and officers who manned the U-boats the author has been able to discover where they came from, what occupations they held, their career-tracks in naval service, and the associated functions they performed on board. As a result new answers have been found to a number of questions which have never been systematically addressed. How many men served on U-boats? Were they all volunteers? Did morale truly remain high throughout the conflict? Did the U-boat force gradually deteriorate into a 'children's crusade'? What was the true relationship between the naval service and National Socialism? Based on questionnaires returned from over 1000 veterans, and sources at the U-Boot-Archiv in Cuxhaven, this book gives an account of what service in the U-boat arm was really like.

Although countless books have been written about the U-boat war in the Atlantic, precious few facts have come to light about the men who served in the submarines that wrought such havoc on Allied ships. Eager to get beyond the stereotypes perpetuated in movies and novels and find out who these elusive sailors really were, archivist Timothy Mulligan started searching official records. Eventually he went straight to the source, conducting a survey of more than a thousand U-boat officers and enlisted men and interviewing a number of them personally. The result is this character study of the German submarine force that challenges traditional and revisionist views of the service.
Mulligan found striking similarities in the men's geographic and social origins, education, and previous occupations, particularly within the specialized engineering and radio branches of the submarine force. The information he gathered establishes quantifiable patterns in age, length of service, and experience, as well as the organization's overall recruitment policies and training standards. The numbers and losses of U-boat personnel are also fully examined.

Beyond these objective characteristics, this study lists such subjective factors as morale, treatment of enemy ship survivors, and the relationship of the submariners to the Nazi regime, and it confirms a serious crisis in morale in late 1943. The roles played by the head of the U-boat arm, Grand Admiral Karl Donitz, and its organizational chief, Admiral Hans-Georg von Friedeburg, are thoroughly addressed. Mulligan concludes that the U-boat arm quickly evolved from a handpicked elite to a more representative sample of the German navy at large but continued to be treated as an elite force. The only comprehensive investigation yet published, this book also draws on POW interrogations of U-boat survivors and documentation of Kriegsmarine personnel policy obtained from German archives.

Timothy Mulligan
Hardcover with d/w 340pp Chatham Publishing 1999 1st Ed

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