War Under The Waves

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Speaker 1 Hi there, Al Murray here, co-host of WW2 pod We Have Ways of Making You Talk. Did you miss out on our incredible fifth weekend festival of premium war waffle in September?

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Speaker 1 To sweeten the deal, we've prepared a small teaser of James M. Scott and Roger Morehouse's talk about submarine warfare.

Speaker 3 So what about conditions?

Speaker 2 Oh yeah, conditions. You go first.
Let's talk about the Germans first.

Speaker 3 And this was a part that I particularly wanted to bring out in my book because I think a lot of the literature on this, and there is a fair amount on the Battle of the Atlantic in general, the sort of main spur for the book was that it occurred to me when I started looking into it that it's very often, or normally, it's very often from the perspective of the surface.

Speaker 3 It's the merchantman and the destroyer, and it's an essential part of our wartime stories, all of that. But the U-boat that's attacking them is literally and metaphorically invisible.

Speaker 3 You know, you don't know what number it is, you don't know how long they've been at sea, you don't know who the commander was.

Speaker 3 Sometimes that becomes part of the story, but it's not an intrinsic part of it, right? So they're kind of an invisible enemy.

Speaker 3 And what struck me was that when you're researching a thing like this or looking for a new project, it's very often a shift of perspective is as good as a new archive, right?

Speaker 3 Because as soon as you shift the perspective, it forces you to ask different questions, you get different answers, all of that.

Speaker 3 So what this book is, is essentially to try and shift it to the German perspective and look at their experience of the war in the Battle of the Atlantic and elsewhere.

Speaker 3 As soon as I made that shift, then what began to loom very large, or certainly in the materials that I had, was how utterly, utterly grim it was to be in a Type 7 U-boat, right?

Speaker 3 It's basically, it's about

Speaker 3 67 meters long. That doesn't mean much to most people, but if you imagine two tube train carriages, that's about it.
That's about the space of the U-boat, right?

Speaker 3 And then you've got two enormous engines. which are huge.
They're over 300 liters each, which is anyone that knows how big their car engine is, it's probably one and a half liters.

Speaker 3 These are 300 liters each. Vast things.
You've got the electric engines

Speaker 3 for underwater use. You've got torpedoes everywhere.
The ordinary ratings sleep among the torpedoes in hammocks, right? So they're on and around the torpedoes.

Speaker 3 If you ever have the chance, there's a place up near Kiel, a place called Labour, L-A-B-O-E, on the Kiela estuary. where U995,

Speaker 3 which was the last surviving Type 7 U-boat, is still there. It's up on the shoreline at La Beau as a museum ship.
If you're ever in the area, go and see it. And you walk through this thing,

Speaker 3 the only point at which two grown men could actually pass each other without kind of shuffling in an embarrassing manner is actually in the centrala around the periscope.

Speaker 3 Everywhere else is shuffling like that. You go through the thing and you go out the other side and it says, this is a Type 7 U-boat.
This had a crew of 50. And you go, where do they stand?

Speaker 3 Like, never mind, work and

Speaker 2 they're small.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Like, how do they even fit? Never mind, do what they had to do.

Speaker 3 So, you know, as soon as you start looking into that, then, you know, all of the accounts talk about what they call the U-boat stink, for one thing. The U-boat stink is a thing.
I don't know if it's

Speaker 3 the same thing in the America. I did a talk the other day at Duxford, and a guy said at the end, yeah, said, my dad used to serve post-war in the Royal Navy and submarines.

Speaker 3 And he said, it absolutely was a thing in the Royal Marines, in the Royal Navy as well. But there's one instance where an U-boat comes into port, San Jose or somewhere, flips open the Conning Tower

Speaker 3 and the shore crew literally sort of reel back in horror at the stench that comes out.

Speaker 3 And it's a mixture of diesel because there's diesel everywhere.

Speaker 3 And you know, if you spill diesel when you fill your car, you know about it for days. It's horrible stuff.
So there's diesel everywhere. They've been basically wet for probably two months.

Speaker 3 So it's mold. A lot of them will have been sick because as I said, you spend most of your time on the surface.
So seasickness doesn't go away.

Speaker 3 If you suffer from it and you're in the Navy, you suffer from it. You know, so it's pretty hideous stuff, body odour, right?

Speaker 3 They were allowed to take one spare set of clothes, one spare set of underwear.

Speaker 2 Who needs more? For two months.

Speaker 3 For two months. And they didn't wash.
Now, that image from Dust Bought of, you know,

Speaker 3 bearded U-boatmen coming back up the gangplank, it looks kind of quite romantic and a bit kind of piratical. They stank.

Speaker 3 They wore beards because they didn't wash, so they didn't shave. So the U-boat stink is absolutely a thing.

Speaker 3 You know, the conditions are gruesome and of course they're all hot bunking so if you've got scabies a lot of them you know skin infections absolutely rife because of the damp because the conditions they had cockroaches on board of course because cockroaches are everywhere so they used to sort of you know infect the skin because they'd bite the skin as well i mean it's absolutely atrocious this kind of the the idea of actually trying to tell that i thought wow i've got to do that again just to just a sort of last point on this i was talking to my in-laws my mother-in-law is german for my sins and we had a family lunch i'd already started working on the book by that point we had a family lunch and uh and she said oh yeah my my uncle was in the u-boats and i went like really you know what you never told me this um she said yeah yeah he was he survived the war and um i remember he used to come to our house uh in the middle of the night he's he basically spent the rest of his short life after the war in a succession of psychiatric institutions like damaged by what he'd experienced and he used to break out and then go to go back to his family home because it was the only place he knew and then they had to phone the police and he'd be taken back again and she remembered this and that and she didn't know anything else about him but she remembered him coming in the middle of the night and then them having to call the police and that sort of made me think that's an angle that i've got to really look into You would be a great naval recruiter.

Speaker 2 I mean, the way you ask for

Speaker 2 a wife on board, like come join the German undersea service. We got cockroaches, body owner, scabies.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's true, it's true.

Speaker 3 But the weird thing as well is that, and I go into this in the book as well, is the propaganda output in terms of the U-boat war was all, you know, glamorous and clean-shaven.

Speaker 2 Cruise ships. Yeah, it was like, yeah, they portrayed it, obviously heroic, of course.

Speaker 3 But, you know, absolutely the polar opposite. And there's this wonderful moment which I picked up out of, I think it was in the Fürchesche Bohrbachter, you know, the Nazi newspaper.

Speaker 3 newspaper, there was a huge series on, you know, U-boat trainees and so on, recruits. And this is when they actually want, you know, needed the manpower.
I think it was dated about 41, spring of 41.

Speaker 3 And there was this one, they followed in one article, I mean, it could be semi-fictional, it wasn't, you know, Nazi propaganda after all, but they followed these three recruits through their training.

Speaker 3 And at one point, at the end of this article, one of the recruits says, you know, we love the camaraderie.

Speaker 3 The training's really good. We really know what we're doing.

Speaker 3 We're ready to go and fight for the cause and all this thing. And then he says, What could possibly go wrong?

Speaker 2 You have no idea.

Speaker 3 You have no idea what you're going to experience.

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah. Well, you know, the American experience was a step up from

Speaker 2 that for sure. And if anybody, there are over a dozen World War II submarines on display in different cities around the United States.
So if you're ever in the U.S.,

Speaker 2 from Mobile, Alabama to Baltimore, San Francisco, Cleveland,

Speaker 2 even Little Rock, Arkansas, Muskegon, Michigan. There are a number of American submarines that are there as

Speaker 2 display ships, museum ships. It's very much worth checking out.

Speaker 2 Don't get me wrong, it was definitely an austere experience. And I think one of the things that it was an all-volunteer experience in the U.S.

Speaker 2 So you had to basically raise your hand and volunteer to do it. You did get the promise of extra pay, which was a huge incentive.

Speaker 2 And I think, quite frankly, for a lot of these young men who were children of the Great Depression, which for folks who may not be all that familiar with was an incredibly dire economic time in the United States and during the Dust Bowl, the Great Depression and whatnot.

Speaker 2 And so the promise of coming to work with a submarine service where you had an open icebox policy, which meant if you were hungry, you could eat it any time a day.

Speaker 2 You could literally go in and it would whip you up a sandwich was enough to sell that deal for a lot of these guys to do it. But conditions were incredibly tight.
They hot bunked.

Speaker 2 They were 18 inches apart in their bunks. Showers were the same way.

Speaker 2 In fact, the showers were mostly used for storage and you sort of ate your way through the provisions, freed up space and things like that. So those things were a luxury as well.

Speaker 2 And same thing, you know, you're traveling halfway across the world pretty much to Japan. You know, you're not getting much exposure to sun.

Speaker 2 You're you're not getting much fresh water, things like that. There was a great reunion down at the drum, which is a submarine in Mobile, Alabama.

Speaker 2 And they They've actually pulled the drum out of the water to keep it from rusting. And so it's on this sort of platform, but you have to go up these stairs in order to get there.

Speaker 2 And one of the drum survivors came back and he was in a wheelchair and couldn't get up there.

Speaker 2 So one of the guys who, one of the docents who worked on there went and got a rag that was used inside of the drum for you know cleaning up and things like that but it had been in there forever and he put it inside of a ziploc bag and he brought it down to this guy who opened up this ziploc bag and smelled this huge smile went across his face is that smell of that stink after all those years he can remember it and uh and so yeah that's very much that that that smell you know another thing i always found fascinating about it too is life on board is you know how do they eat and things like that because you know when you're traveling initially you head out to sea you got all this fresh food and produce and things like that but the law goes quickly that goes very quickly and you know um and then you're left eating you know canned goods and things like that so one of the huge issues was constipation and nobody likes to talk about that but that was a major issue for these guys and of course the different parasites and things like that that you're going to develop and so i i interviewed this cook uh for my book on it he said one of the biggest problems that you ran into is all the weevils that you would end up getting in your flower and he said he said i initially would spend all this time just sort of sifting these things out, these little bugs out.

Speaker 2 He said, but you know, then I realized it was just easier to bake bread, throw some rye seeds in there, and the guys would never know the difference.

Speaker 2 And then another one of those stories, too, is the rodent infestations that would invariably happen. They would come on board with the supplies and things like that.

Speaker 2 And on one of the boats I was writing about in the Silversides, they captured these two mites and these guys, these torpedo men, this is how bored they are, right?

Speaker 2 Well, they basically kept them as pets and they came up with this backstory where they were Romeo and Juliet and like they would feed them down in the torpedo room and all this and so uh so they became like beloved creatures uh albeit you know flea infested rodents and uh so finally after they had this battle action against the Japanese at one point you know they're kind of coming to grips afterwards and whatnot and they realize that they can't find Juliet anywhere that this she has run off apparently and then they finally discover that they accidentally shot her out of a torpedo tube.

Speaker 2 And so, and that was actually one of the letters I found from one of the guys so uh you know I guess problem solved other than a home a lone lonely lovesick room

Speaker 2 and uh loved it

Speaker 3 so no that's a I mean that's another point another add actually to the to the U-boat stink you mentioned you know you got actually food provision on on the U-boats was actually pretty generous was one of the sort of few aspects where they you know they did deliver on the propaganda yeah so it was generous because it's essential for morale I mean and I talk a lot in the book about about you know the various methods deployed to maintain morale, because more so than probably in any other scenario in war, you can't afford to have someone who is grumbling or complaining about everything or, you know, picking fights with people.

Speaker 3 And it did happen. They had this thing called, they called it tin can rage, where there'd just be a massive ball and then everyone would calm down.

Speaker 3 But anyone that is genuinely kind of disruptive, they get them out.

Speaker 3 get them transferred to another boat. So the food supply was generally pretty good.
Morale was maintained. That was one one of the ways they did it.

Speaker 3 Of course, the fresh food, as you said, lasts about two weeks and then it's gone. And then it's all tin stuff.

Speaker 3 If they were lucky and they found a nice sort of juicy merchantman, certainly early in the war, where you've got

Speaker 3 more latitude in the way they do their sinking, so they would basically order the crew to abandon ship and to disappear and then they would torpedo it. But they could always also send...

Speaker 3 a boat and a whey party to go and loot it and find whatever they could, margarine, you know, bread, whatever it was. So that was a sort of an augmentation to the diet.

Speaker 3 And then they had supply ships and the supply network, which is all very significant.

Speaker 3 But the end result was that a good proportion of U-boat crews basically had scurvy, which again, we don't consider that as a thing, but it completely was.

Speaker 2 No, exactly. But it was.

Speaker 3 And there was a wonderful account of... The

Speaker 3 Royal Navy intelligence, when they used to capture crews or the remnants of U-boat crews, and they'd be taken back and interrogated and all of that.

Speaker 3 And they put that together in an interrogation report. And these are all in the National Archives.
And one of these, the crew were in particularly bad health.

Speaker 3 And they sort of handed them over to the RAMC, the Army Medical Corps, and they looked, you know, examined them.

Speaker 3 And they said that half of the sample they had, they had about 30 men, half of them were suffering from scurvy, and half of those that were suffering already had oral sepsis, right?

Speaker 3 Basically gingivitis and all the rest of it. So can you imagine the...

Speaker 3 add to the U-boat stink, you know, half of your crews got halitosis, like chronic halitosis from your teeth basically falling out of your out of your head i mean this and then scurvy doesn't bear thinking i'm scurvy i mean again you do such a good job selling the german navy

Speaker 1 wow that was great wasn't it truly fascinating roger's new book about the u-boat war by the way is well worth a read really really good stuff if you want to hear the rest of the talk as well of hours of other exclusive member content subscribe now at patreon.com slash we have ways that's patreon.com slash we have ways with the subscription to we have ways, you can enjoy ad-free listening, priority access to new series and ticketed events, regular live streams, a weekly newsletter with book and model discounts, and bonus episodes.

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