Download or read book Hitler s Wonder U Boats written by Jak P Mallmann Showell and published by US Naval Institute Press. This book was released on 2018-02 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Launched during the last days of the Third Reich in an attempt to restart the Battle of the Atlantic, the majority of the revolutionary Electro-U-boats never saw action. Instead, they became the forebears of the Cold War's much dreaded hunter-killer submarines. Slotted in among the highly technical information in the German U-boat Museum were some fascinating personal logbook annotations from men who served in these boats. These non-technical, human anecdotes form the core of this book. Rather than compiling a technical treatise, Hitler's 'Wonder' U-Boats makes maximum use of the personal accounts to tell the human story of how this new generation of submarines went to war under the incredibly harsh conditions that prevailed at the time. Accompanied by more than 100 images, this unique operational information is mirrored with similar reports from conventional snorkel-fitted U-boats, which were at sea at about the same time, to provide a good comparison with earlier types. The result is a work that makes it easy to appreciate the improvements that were made in such an incredibly short period of time to place the Electro-U-boat among the great technical achievements of the 20th century.
Download or read book The Mystery of U 33 written by Nigel Graddon and published by SCB Distributors. This book was released on 2010-08-18 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The incredible story of the mystery U-Boats of WWII! Graddon first chronicles the story of the mysterious U-33 that landed in Scotland in 1940 and involved the top-secret Enigma device. He then looks at U-Boat special missions during and after WWII, including U-Boat trips to Antarctica; U-Boats with the curious cargos of liquid mercury; the journey of the Spear of Destiny via U-Boat; the "Black Subs" and more. Topics covered by Graddon include: U-33: The Official Story; Survivors and Deceased; August 1985-the story breaks; The Carradale U-boat; The Tail of the Bank Event; In the wake of U-33; Wrecks; The Greenock Lairs; The Mystery Men; "Brass Bounders at the Admiralty"; Max Schiller through the Lens; U-Boat Special Missions; Neu-Schwabenland and Station; Mercury Rising; The Holy Lance; U-boats in Scotland-Fact in Fiction; Admiral Karl Donitz and the U-Boat fleet; U33: Argo of the Grail; The Female Pope; U-Boats with cargoes of liquid mercury, more. Thoroughly documented with photos and official documents.
Download or read book Hitler s U Boat War written by Clay Blair and published by Modern Library. This book was released on 2010-07-21 with total page 848 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Clay Blair's best-selling naval classic Silent Victory: The U.S. Submarine War Against Japan, is regarded as the definitive account of that decisive phase of the war in the Pacific. Nine years in the making, Hitler's U-boat War is destined to become the definitive account of the German submarine war against the Allies, or "The Battle of the Atlantic." It is an epic sea story, the most arduous and prolonged naval battle in all history. For a period of nearly six years, the German U-boat force attempted to blockade and isolate the British Isles, in hopes of forcing the British out of the war, thereby thwarting the Allied strategic air assault on German cities as well as Overlord, the Allied invasion of Occupied France. Fortunately for the Allies, the U-boat force failed to achieve either of these objectives, but in the attempt they sank 2,800 Allied merchant ships, while the Allies sank nearly 800 U-boats. On both sides, tens of thousands of sailors perished. The top secret Allied penetration of German naval codes, and, conversely, the top secret German penetration of Allied naval codes played important roles in the Atlantic naval battle. In order to safeguard the secrets of codebreaking in the postwar years, London and Washington agreed to withhold all official codebreaking and U-boat records. Thus for decade upon decade an authoritative and definitive history of the Battle of the Atlantic could not be attempted. The accounts that did appear were incomplete and full of errors of fact and false interpretations and conclusions, often leaving the entirely wrong impression that the German U-boats came within a whisker of defeating the Allies, a myth that persists. When London and Washington finally began to release the official records in the 1980s, Clay Blair and his wife, Joan, commenced work on this history in Washington, London, and Germany. They relied on the official records as well as the work of German, British, American, and Canadian naval scholars who published studies of bits and pieces of the story. The end result is this magnificent and monumental work, crammed with vivid and dramatic scenes of naval actions and dispassionate but startling new revelations and interpretations and conclusions about all aspects of the Battle of the Atlantic. The Blair history will be published in two volumes. This first volume, The Hunters, covers the first three years of the war, August 1939 to August 1942. Told chronologically, it is subdivided into two major sections, the War Against the British Empire, and the War Against the Americas. Volume II, The Hunted, to follow a year later, will cover the last years of the naval war in Europe, August 1942 to May 1945, when the Allies finally overcame the U-boat threat. Never before has Hitler's U-boat war been chronicled with such authority, fidelity, objectivity, and detail. Nothing is omitted. Even those who fought the Battle of the Atlantic will find no end of surprises. Later generations will benefit by having at hand an account of this important phase of World War II, free of bias and mythology.
Download or read book Hitler s War Beneath the Waves written by Michael FitzGerald and published by Arcturus Publishing. This book was released on 2020-01-01 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the beginning of World War II, the devastating impact of German submarines on both the Royal Navy and merchant shipping saw Britain on the brink of starvation and defeat. The enemy was formidable. U-boat crews saw themselves as an elite and they preferred to scuttle their vessels at the end of the war rather than surrender. They suffered the heaviest losses of any branch of the German services: out of 40,900 men, 28,000 were killed and 5,000 taken prisoner; by 1945, the average age was 19 and the survival rate was only three missions. This is the story of how the Allies redressed the balance of power, focusing in particular on the role of the wolfpacks of U-boats in the Atlantic, whose stealthy presence beneath the waves ensured that British ships diced with death every time they put to sea.
Download or read book U Boots Escape to South America written by Mariusz Borowiak and published by Kagero. This book was released on 2019-03-15 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A captivating story of German submarines that fled to Argentina on the eve of the Third Reich's capitulation, unwilling to surrender to the Allies. The authors of the book discovered numerous unpublished documents in England, Argentina, Germany and the USA. They debunk myths and expose lies concerning the escapes of the German Nazis and the transportation of large amounts of treasure, mainly gold, as well as documentation of the most valuable military projects of the German Reich, which were supposed to turn the tide of the war. The book uses documents from interrogations of the U-Boot commanders who were sent to a special POW camp near Washington for prisoners of exceptional importance.
Download or read book Hitler s U boat War written by Clay Blair and published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. This book was released on 2000-04 with total page 909 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The second volume in Clay Blair's history of Hitler's U-boat war, covering years 1942 to 1945. Told chronologically, it is divided into two sections: the war against Britain and her empire, and the war against the Americas. Clay Blair served in World War II in the submarines. He chronicles dramatic scenes of naval actions and makes interpretations and conclusions about all aspects of the Battle of the Atlantic.
Download or read book Hitler s Gray Wolves written by Lawrence Paterson and published by Skyhorse. This book was released on 2017-05-16 with total page 397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Next to nothing has been written about the U-boat war in the Indian Ocean. This is the story of a forgotten campaign. The battle began in August 1943, when a German submarine arrived in the Malaysian harbor of Georgetown. In total, nearly forty U-boats were assigned to penetrate the Indian Ocean, serving alongside troops of the occupying Imperial Japanese forces. The Japanese allowed U-boats to use Malaysia as an operational station. From that base, they mixed with Japanese forces on a hitherto unseen scale: a move which spread the U-boat war throughout the vast Indian Ocean and into the Pacific. Success in this theater of war held a real chance to swing the tide of battle in North Africa in favor of Rommel, but the Germans essentially did too little too late. The joint action also gave U-boats the opportunity to penetrate the Pacific Ocean for the first time, attacking shipping off the Australian coast and hunting off New Zealand. Plans were even afoot for an assault on American supply lines. The cooperation' also brought into stark relief the fundamental differences of German and Japanese war aims. After the crews of Italian supply submarines joined the Germans and Japanese, relations between the fighting men of the three main Axis powers were often brutal and almost constantly turbulent. Stories of U-boats laden with gold and treasure stem almost exclusively from boats destined to and returning from Japanese-controlled Malaysia, laden with material exchanged between the two major partners of the Triple Axis Alliance.
Download or read book Hitler s Attack U Boats written by Jak P. Mallmann Showell and published by Frontline Books. This book was released on 2020-09-30 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A definitive introduction by a highly recognized authority who writes beautifully and clearly.” —Naval Historical Foundation The fact that German submarines almost managed to cut off Britain’s vital imports during the First World War hadn’t been forgotten by Hitler—and when, in 1935, he repudiated the Treaty of Versailles, Britain, magnanimously, signed an Anglo-German Naval Agreement. This allowed the Germans to build their submarine strength up to one third of the Royal Navy’s tonnage. When war broke out in 1939, German U-boats went quickly into action, but with only four years of production and development, the main armament of these submarines was considerably weaker than equivalent boats in other navies and many other features, such as living conditions, were also significantly inferior. Yet, the German U-boat onslaught against British merchant ships in autumn 1940 was highly successful because the attacks were made on the surface at night and from such close range that a single torpedo would sink a ship. Soon, though, Allied technology was able to detect U-boats at night, and new convoy techniques, combined with powerfully armed, fast modern aircraft searching the seas, meant that by 1941 it was clear that Germany was losing the war at sea. Something had to be done. The new generation of attack U-boats that had been introduced since Hitler came to power needed urgent improvement. This is the story of the Types II, VII, and IX that had already become the ‘workhorse’ of the Kriegsmarine’s submarine fleet and continued to put out to sea to attack Allied shipping right up to the end of the war. The Type II was a small coastal boat that struggled to reach the Atlantic; the Type VII was perfectly at home there, but lacked the technology to tackle well protected convoys; while the Type IX was a long-range variety modified so it could operate in the Indian Ocean. This book by the renowned Kriegsmarine historian explores these attack U-boats at length, including details of their armament, capabilities, and crew facilities; the story of their development and operational history; and just what it was like to operate such a vessel.
Download or read book The Burning Shore written by Ed Offley and published by Civitas Books. This book was released on 2014-03-25 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On June 15, 1942, as thousands of vacationers lounged in the sun at Virginia Beach, two massive fireballs erupted just offshore from a convoy of oil tankers steaming into Chesapeake Bay. While men, women, and children gaped from the shore, two damaged oil tankers fell out of line and began to sink. Then a small escort warship blew apart in a violent explosion. Navy warships and aircraft peppered the water with depth charges, but to no avail. Within the next twenty-four hours, a fourth ship lay at the bottom of the channel— all victims of twenty-nine-year-old Kapitänleutnant Horst Degen and his crew aboard the German U-boat U-701. In The Burning Shore, acclaimed military reporter Ed Offley presents a thrilling account of the bloody U-boat offensive along America’s east coast during the first half of 1942, using the story of Degen’s three war patrols as a lens through which to view this forgotten chapter of World War II. For six months, German U-boats prowled the waters off the eastern seaboard, sinking merchant ships with impunity, and threatening to sever the lifeline of supplies flowing from America to Great Britain. Degen’s successful infiltration of the Chesapeake Bay in mid-June drove home the U-boats’ success, and his spectacular attack terrified the American public as never before. But Degen’s cruise was interrupted less than a month later, when U.S. Army Air Forces Lieutenant Harry J. Kane and his aircrew spotted the silhouette of U-701 offshore. The ensuing clash signaled a critical turning point in the Battle of the Atlantic—and set the stage for an unlikely friendship between two of the episode’s survivors. A gripping tale of heroism and sacrifice, The Burning Shore leads readers into a little-known theater of World War II, where Hitler’s U-boats came close to winning the Battle of the Atlantic before American sailors and airmen could finally drive them away.
Download or read book The Mathews Men written by William Geroux and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2022-11-01 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Vividly drawn and emotionally gripping." —Daniel James Brown, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Boys in the Boat From the author of The Ghost Ships of Archangel, one of the last unheralded heroic stories of World War II: the U-boat assault off the American coast against the men of the U.S. Merchant Marine who were supplying the European war, and one community’s monumental contribution to that effort Mathews County, Virginia, is a remote outpost on the Chesapeake Bay with little to offer except unspoiled scenery—but it sent an unusually large concentration of sea captains to fight in World War II. The Mathews Men tells that heroic story through the experiences of one extraordinary family whose seven sons (and their neighbors), U.S. merchant mariners all, suddenly found themselves squarely in the cross-hairs of the U-boats bearing down on the coastal United States in 1942. From the late 1930s to 1945, virtually all the fuel, food and munitions that sustained the Allies in Europe traveled not via the Navy but in merchant ships. After Pearl Harbor, those unprotected ships instantly became the U-boats’ prime targets. And they were easy targets—the Navy lacked the inclination or resources to defend them until the beginning of 1943. Hitler was determined that his U-boats should sink every American ship they could find, sometimes within sight of tourist beaches, and to kill as many mariners as possible, in order to frighten their shipmates into staying ashore. As the war progressed, men from Mathews sailed the North and South Atlantic, the Caribbean, the Gulf of Mexico, the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean, and even the icy Barents Sea in the Arctic Circle, where they braved the dreaded Murmansk Run. Through their experiences we have eyewitnesses to every danger zone, in every kind of ship. Some died horrific deaths. Others fought to survive torpedo explosions, flaming oil slicks, storms, shark attacks, mine blasts, and harrowing lifeboat odysseys—only to ship out again on the next boat as soon as they'd returned to safety. The Mathews Men shows us the war far beyond traditional battlefields—often the U.S. merchant mariners’ life-and-death struggles took place just off the U.S. coast—but also takes us to the landing beaches at D-Day and to the Pacific. “When final victory is ours,” General Dwight D. Eisenhower had predicted, “there is no organization that will share its credit more deservedly than the Merchant Marine.” Here, finally, is the heroic story of those merchant seamen, recast as the human story of the men from Mathews.
Download or read book U Boats in the Mediterranean written by Lawrence Paterson and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2019-03-05 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between September 1941 and May 1944, the Germans sent sixty-two U-boats into the Mediterranean. To get there, the boats had to pass through the Strait of Gibraltar?the British-held entry point, where nearly a third of them were sunk or forced to turn back. Of the submarines that made it into the clear, calm waters of the Mediterranean, not one of them ever made it back into the Atlantic: They were all either sunk in battle or scuttled by their own crews. In U-Boats in the Mediterranean, Lawrence Paterson puts the campaign into its strategic context, showing how it coordinated with Rommel's Afrika Korps in the Western Desert and the U-boat battle in the Atlantic. He describes the weapons and tactics the commanders used to try to overcome the difficulties of operating in the shallow waters and and how increasing Allied dominance of the air took its heavy toll. Paterson details the U-boat triumphs such as the sinking of HMS Ark Royal, and the torpedoing of the battleship HMS Barham, which provided one of the best-known images of the Second World War at sea. Making full use of firsthand accounts by veterans, official German records, and Allied archives, the book puts a spotlight on a neglected aspect of the U-boat war and shows the courage and fortitude of the men on both sides of this savage conflict.
Download or read book Hitler s U Boat Bases written by Jak P. Mallmann Showell and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a concise historical background to the rise of the Nazi U-boat fleet, and the part it played in the Second World War. The author examines in detail how and why each of the bases in France, Germany and Norway were designed and built, and how they were defended against attack, while listing which boats were based where and when.
Download or read book U Boats at War in 100 Objects 1939 1945 written by Gordon Williamson and published by Frontline Books. This book was released on 2019-10-30 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ‘The only thing that ever really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril,’ wrote Winston Churchill in his history of the Second World War. ‘I was even more anxious about this battle than I had been about the glorious air fight called the Battle of Britain.” In reality, the Kriegsmarine had been woefully unprepared for the war into which it was thrown. The Command-in-Chief of submarines, Karl Dönitz, himself a verteran U-boat captain from the First World War, felt that he could bring Britain to its knees with a fleet of 300 U-Boats. But when war broke out, he had just twenty-four available for operational use. Despite this, the U-Boat arm scored some incredible successes in the early part of the war, raising the status of the submarine commanders and crews to that of national heroes in the eyes of the German people. The ‘Grey Wolves’ had become super-stars. Small wonder then that the U-Boat war has fascinated students of military history ever since. This book, using a carefully selected range of both wartime images and colour images of surviving U-boat memorabilia from private collections, describes 100 iconic elements of the U-Boat service and its campaigns. The array of objects include important individuals and the major U-Boat types, through to the uniforms and insignias the men wore. The weapons, equipment and technology used are explored, as are the conditions in which the U-boat crews served, from cooking facilities and general hygiene down to the crude toilet facilities. Importantly, the enemy that they faced is also covered, examining the ship-borne and airborne anti-submarine weaponry utilised against the U-boats. The U-Boats began the war, though small in number, more than a match for the Allies and created carnage amongst merchant shipping as well as sinking several major warships. The pace of technological development, however, failed to match that of Allied anti-submarine warfare weaponry and the U-Bootwaffe was ultimately doomed to defeat but not before, at one point, coming close to bringing Britain to its knees.
Download or read book U boats Offshore written by Edwin Palmer Hoyt and published by New York : Stein and Day. This book was released on 1978 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We very nealy lost WWII. Not at Pearl Harbor nor in the land battles of Europe, but on our own doorstep. This is the story of what happened in the early days of the war when Nazi U-boats were sent against the East Coast of America.
Download or read book Hitler s U boat war written by Clay Blair (Jr.) and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Hitler s U boat War written by Clay Blair and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Neither Sharks Nor Wolves written by Timothy P Mulligan and published by Naval Institute Press. This book was released on 2011-08-15 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
