The U-Boat War: 1939-1945

May 2022

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  Sam Willis
  From the Society for Nautical Research in partnership with Lloyd’s Register Foundation, I’m Sam Willis. And this is the Mariners Mirror podcast, the world’s number one podcast dedicated to all of maritime history. Hello everyone and welcome to the Mariners Mirror podcast, it’s time for a bit of underwater history. On the 24th of May 1945, the supreme commander of the German navy, Admiral Karl Dönitz, recorded the following words in his war diary, Wolfpack operations against convoys in the North Atlantic, their main theatre of operations and at the same time, the theatre in which air cover was strongest, were no longer possible. They could only be resumed if we succeeded in radically increasing the fighting power of the U boats. That was the logical conclusion to which I came, and I accordingly withdrew the boats from the North Atlantic, we had lost the Battle of the Atlantic. To find out more about the U boats role in the Second World War, I spoke with Larry Patterson, who has written a new and importantly global history of the U boat during the Second World War. Larry has developed a lifelong interest in U boat history inspired by both of his grandfather’s, one of whom was an Anzac during the First World War, and the other a Royal Navy Stoker in the second. He spent a period of time as a member of the Royal Navy Submarine Museum’s, archive working group, specialising in U boat records. And his work challenges the accepted historical narrative of the role of U boats in the Second World War. As ever, I hope you enjoy listening to Larry as much as I enjoyed talking with him. Here is Larry

  Sam Willis
  Larry, thank you very much indeed for joining me today.

  Larry Patterson
  My pleasure. Thank you very much for having me here.

  Sam Willis
  I was just sitting downstairs reading your book. My kids were in the room and I asked them to suggest two questions about German U boats that they wanted answered from the world expert in Germany U boats. They’re slightly abstract, but very good first question for my daughter Beatrix Willis. She wants to know what would happen if there was a murder on a U boat.

  Larry Patterson
  If there was a murder on a U boat. You know I’ve never actually thought about that.

  Sam Willis
  Is there a safe area people could be locked away in

  Larry Patterson
  Not really? I mean, there were They were always you could lock them in the toilet. Although if the U boat was outbound, it only had one functioning toilet. So that wouldn’t be any use. No, there’s no there’s no brig as such or anything like that. Not on a combat U boat anyway. So no, you’d be in some trouble.

  Sam Willis
  With A Murderer. I think it’s just because we’ve all watched ‘ Murder on the Nile’, Agatha Christie and boats going on? And that the second question for my son, which is a cracker? Would you prefer to be on a U boat with 50 versions of yourself? Or 50 versions of your worst enemy?

  Larry Patterson
  Oh, my God, there’s a toughie. Yeah. I’d probably narcissistic as it sounds; I’d have to say myself. There we go.

  Sam Willis
  That’s what I think

  Larry Patterson
  At least I know the answer to the arguments, you know,

  Sam Willis
  However dangerous that would be. So the podcast has been hijacked by my kids. We’ve got some good answers there. So let’s talk about you and you’re interested in U boats and what you’ve come to learn about the U boat war and how that’s changed perspective. When did you first start becoming interested in in the under underwater world?

  Larry Patterson
  Actually I’ve been interested in the second world war since I was a kid, mainly, you know, I grew up in the countryside in New Zealand, and there are a lot of second world war veterans there. My grandfather, one grandfather was in the Royal Navy in the Second World War. My other grandfather was in the Anzacs in the First World War. So it’s sort of a topic that’s always interested me, but it never really focused on U boats, per se until I lived in France in the late 90s. I lived just outside of Brest where the first U boat flotilla and the ninth were based. I’m a diving instructor, so I was I was doing a lot of diving on wrecks there. Not so much U boat wrecks in Breast but the ships that used to shepherd them in and out of harbour and minesweepers and so on. A friend of mine an American author, John Gorn, who wrote a fantastic book about the Battle of Brittany, the Americans and the Germans on in 1944, sent me a microfilm of the first U boat flotilla war diary. Handwritten war diary, I had this old slide projector from my dad. And I shone it through there. And I just remember being absolutely fascinated by this document. And it kind of took off from there, really. And that was the genesis of my first book, which was the first U boat flotilla. It’s just again it’s their war diary really and expanded on it. And since then, it’s just kind of grown. You know, I’ve got, I’ve got an interest in World War Two in general, the Wehrmacht as a whole. And it’s sort of just, almost by accident focused on U boats.

  Sam Willis
  So we should say, for those of you who don’t know, that in Breast we have the wonderful u-boat pens, There’s some fairly serious archaeology there which can inspire you to U boats. Tell us a little bit about that about the pens.

  Larry Patterson
  The pens are amazing, when the you most first use Breast harbour and, and there were several U boat bases on the French Atlantic coast, which was a major advantage of the Germans having invaded France. So they established bases in Brest, Lorient, Saint-Nazaire, La Rochelle, and Bordeaux. And obviously, in the beginning in Brest, and in all these harbours, U boats are just using the fishing ports or the naval port, whatever facilities are available. And British bombing at that stage hadn’t really sort of kicked off in a major fashion. Brest, it was also the home of the Admiral Hipper called in there and you had the Scharnhorst and the Gneisenau now on the Atlantic coast, and they became targets for the Royal Air Force. So you know, it’s really obvious that they needed this sort of shelter so they built these enormous U boat pens which are really incredible structure and they’re all still standing at the present just so big, you know.

  Sam Willis
  If there’s if there’s something that actually is a manifestation of what a evil genius in a Bond film might be operating out of, it’s like that. So there let’s describe them. It’s a huge concrete bomb proof bunker open to the sea is that about fair.

  Larry Patterson
  Pretty much, monolithic construction, I mean, just enormous. The one in Lorient is the most complex, actually a complex of three bunkers, one of which is open to the sea, and two of them were on land behind that one. And the U boats used to be lifted up on a cradle and, and moved in and out of the maintenance bunkers on land, absolutely fascinating sort of piece of engineering. They’re built by the organisation Todt. And ironically, the British never took the opportunity to bomb it, when it was under construction, they waited until it was constructed, and then bombed it and sort of destroyed the towns around it. And I think they put a hole, one hole in the Brest bunker, which was actually done by 617 squadron, the Dam Busters, they dropped a Tallboy on it, and it actually penetrated the roof of the bunker, and there’s photographs of Allies troops standing next to this hole. It’s absolutely incredible. The same kind of construction that you saw in V2 bunkers in the Pas de Calais. This idea that those sorts of bomb proof bunkers had been built in the First World War, but not to the scale, and obviously, they were on the English Channel at that point. So really impressive. Absolutely amazing. But the one in Brest is still in use by the French Navy.

  Sam Willis
  Is it that is extraordinary? The fact that the British didn’t bomb, it seems a remarkable oversight. So obviously, the British had learned of the threat of U boats from the First World War. So the second world war, the Germans have U boats, they’re using them from early on in the war, they take France that gives them easy access to the Atlantic, therefore, it changes everything. What was going on? Why didn’t they attack?

  Sam Willis
  We don’t know. Well, I mean, let’s talk about the threat of the U boats. And kind of, to a certain extent, learning from the past the outbreak of the Second World War, with the British expecting there to be a direct threat.

  Larry Patterson
  Its a very good question. It was kind of a matter of priority of targets more than anything else. And it just wasn’t felt to be that level of priority. They knew they were under construction. It’s a very unusual omission. I mean, Bomber Harris was he was a clever guy, he wasn’t an idiot or anything. So what can I say?

  Larry Patterson
  They were and they weren’t. They got punished quite badly in the first world war in 1917, when Germany had always done the limited, sound like contradiction, unlimited, unrestricted campaigns and always shied away from it. In 1917 when they were facing sort of starvation in Germany, backs to the wall, they unleashed the unrestricted submarine campaign, by which U boats could sink ships without warning, within whatever areas they prescribed to be a war zone. It took a heavy toll in the First World War, but it was mastered by convoying. By gathering the ships together and putting an effective escort around it, it kind of robbed the U boats opportunity to inflict that crippling blow. So there was this mistaken belief that U boats had actually been mastered. By the time the Second World War came around, Churchill was quite sort of paranoid, justifiably so, paranoid about the U boat threat. Germany entered the war with only 57 new boats, 57 combat units 30, which were like type two coastal boats. So it was sort of it was perceived as a threat, but not the war winning threat that it soon became known as. Also Britain had developed ASDIC, you know, effective sonar, and all this kind of thing. They felt that they, even though they, ironically, had actually ignored anti-submarine warfare to a certain degree in the interwar period anyway. But they were aware of the U boats, so they weren’t as worried as they perhaps should have been. I think it’s fair to say.

  Sam Willis
  It was interesting that what you said about just the coastal U boats, there’s obviously a danger when talking about U boats to assume that you’re talking about the same thing, that a U boat was a U boat. Can we just talked a little bit about the different designs of U boats, how many different types were there at the start of the war.

  Larry Patterson
  At the start of the war, there were three types, type II, which is a small, basic coastal U boat, which actually did make it into the Atlantic. They could carry a very limited number of torpedoes, three torpedo tubes, small crew, very uncomfortable on a long voyage; they were really designed for the North Sea. Then you had the type VII, which was your medium size U boat. And that’s the one, that’s the famous one that’s the backbone of the U boat fleet, the one made famous in ‘Das Boat’ and so on, Designed for the Atlantic, first actually went into action in the Spanish Civil War, covertly. Ultimately, carried the U boat war they ended up going as far afield as, Freetown, West Africa, the Caribbean, places like that. With the help of refuelling either by other U boats, or by refuelling U boats, which were develop later in the war. Then at the beginning of the war, there was a type I, and that was the large U boat and that was an entirely unsuccessful design. They only built two and they just didn’t handle well, they weren’t very good. That was swiftly replaced by the type IX which was in development as the war began. That became your long range U boat and that was the one that ranged to the United States, Gulf of Mexico, Caribbean, and ultimately made it as far as New Zealand.

  Sam Willis
  I did not know that. Tell me about the New Zealand one.

  Larry Patterson
  The New Zealand one was a type of what they call type XI D II is a long range boat. There were a certain number of U boats that were assigned to the Indian Ocean, not only to attack British shipping, but they then moved on to Penang eventually and founded a U boat station in the Far East. This kind of came on the back of this transport missions by U boat to swap technology with the Japanese forces. Anyway one of these boats U 862 by guy called Heinrich Timm, he wanted to make a point, and in 1944 he sailed into the Pacific. Made it down to New Zealand, chased a ship off the coast New Zealand and basically missed his opportunity to fire, and sank one ship of Sydney, which was the only ship sunk by U boat in the Pacific.

  Sam Willis
  Hmm, interesting stuff. So we’ll talk about these designs. The follow up question is pretty obvious. But were they all the same at the end of the war?

  Larry Patterson
  How do you mean?

  Sam Willis
  I mean was there a significant design change and improvement in in U boats, by the end of the war? Had the weapon fundamentally changed?

  Larry Patterson
  Yes and no, the actual combat U boats that went into action. The bulk of them remained the same sort of boats that they entered the war with. Obviously, with upgrades, various conning tower configurations, different flak weapons, upgraded sort of technology if you like. Essentially they were unchanged and they were obsolete. The Germans had in the meantime, thrown a lot of effort into producing what’s been known as the electro boats. W classic Second World War stereotypical U boat is not actually a submarine, it’s more a submersible. They were designed to operate surfaced. They weren’t actually designed to fight underwater. They were designed to be able to escape underwater if they needed to. The most effective use of U boats in the very early stages of war are by people, particularly Otto Kretschmer, and Erich Topp and people like that, the famous aces. They would stay on the surface where they had a good surface speed, they could outrun certain destroyers, they had a very low silhouette. They were like torpedo carriers that would get in amongst, these guys would actually penetrate inside a convoy, open fire and then escape at speed. The idea of the electro boats was they had a massive battery capacity, which meant that they operated predominantly submerged, because by the latter stages of the war U boats were forced underwater. They couldn’t operate surface because of Allied radar, which completely misjudged its effectiveness and all this kind of thing. So they developed this electro boat technology where boats would basically remain submerged for much longer, capable of firing at greater depths, using more advanced sophisticated weapon guidance systems, so on and so on. It was a sort of a flawed project right from the word go because of the fractious nature of German industry under the Nazis. The type XXI, the famous one never really went into action. There were two war patrols with no effect. The rest of them, some were sunk enroute to Norway before they became operational, some were sunk in training, most were destroyed in shipyards. But there was a smaller version, a type XXIII Electro boat. It was actually one of those that fired the very last torpedo attack of World War Two and sunk the last two ships of the war. It was a small design, it was an effective submarine, it carried two torpedoes, that was it, no more than a midget submarine. So its effectiveness was never going to be that great. They were also originally, part of the idea of them was they were going to be transferred to the Mediterranean and used in the Mediterranean. By the time they became available, that war was already lost. Yes, it was a technological shift, but in the actual combat boats, it was a matter of patching up obsolete designs really, and they were they were completely outmatched by the end of the war.

  Sam Willis
  Was there a kind of a decent match between what the boats were capable of, and the strategy for using them?

  Larry Patterson
  Yes and no. Have you ever been on the U boat in Kiel, a type XII U boat in Kiel, if you ever get a chance you should visit it.

  Sam Willis
  I have not, but I will put it on my list.

  Larry Patterson
  Oh, definitely, U 995, and you go on that and you, you go through and there’s four or five people with you, and it feels crowded already. Now when you consider that one of these things had up to 50 people aboard. That conditions for the crews were quite often horrendous, particularly later in the war when they were forced underwater to operate submerged, using snorkels and so on. So they were asked to do things that it took quite a feat of endurance on behalf of the crews to be able to do so. To be fair, the crews rose to the challenge. This type of boat ended up going as far afield as the Caribbean, that that’s quite something. People would come back and be in a hell of a state when they came ashore. What they were asked to do by Karl Dönitz they were capable of doing, aside from the fact that the technology wasn’t really up to the job after I would say 1942. Radar had sort of defeated their surface possibility, airpower just absolutely hammered them. From then on, or even earlier, the German technological advancements weren’t leading the race, they were reacting to allied advances. Radar became a major problem, so they developed the radar detectors of varying efficacy. If that’s a word, I think that’s a word, isn’t it? Then they tried flak boats and all this kind of stuff, most of which didn’t work. They were sort of stopgap measures for what was really effective allied developments. You know, they really dropped the ball, the Germans, and in many ways.

  Sam Willis
  What about the global nature of the war? You mentioned here that they were in the Caribbean that they were in New Zealand. When did this kind of major global approach to the U boat war come about?

  Larry Patterson
  Well, this is one of the premises of the book really, because people think U boats also think of the Battle of the Atlantic, by Battle of the Atlantic, they think the Battle of the North Atlantic, the North Atlantic convoy routes between Britain and Canada and the United States. And that’s fair to say that that was Dönitz main sort of target. As early as 1940 he pushed a couple of U boats towards the Mediterranean. There was one U boat that entered the Mediterranean and actually made it back out again. That was the only U boat in the war to return from service in the Mediterranean, all the other ones that went into the Med, stayed there and were sunk, or destroyed in port. He pushed boats down to West Africa, Freetown, which was a major merchant staging post for convoys coming up from South Africa. Of course, once the United States was in the war, he he launched an attack on the American east coast, which is famously known as Operation Paukenschlag. This is like a perfect example of the reality of the U boat war, because Operation Drumbeat, Paukenschlag, is his major offensive on the US. Your taking on the greatest industrial power there is, and you do it with six U boats, you’re not going to actually, you’ll frighten the hell out of there, and you will cause some havoc, there’s no doubt about it. You know, you’re not going to cripple the United States with the initial wave of six U boats, which is whittled down to five by one aborting prematurely. There were attacks on Canada, the most successful attacks of the war were actually off West Africa. The most successful single offensive of the war, concerted offensive by U boats, was a small number of type IX in the Caribbean who were targeting the oil transport from Venezuela. They were gathered around Aruba and Trinidad, and that kind of area. That’s actually where the greatest single successes where U boats were. They went into the Indian Ocean, they made it as far as the Arabian Sea. Once they were in the Indian Ocean, when they were there hunting around South Africa and Madagascar, there were there were quite a lot of successful missions. Ultimately with British codebreaking, and British naval power, they were defeated there too. Most of the U boats that ended up based in the Far East, achieved very little for what was massive voyage. I mean a U boat that sailed as far as the Indian Ocean, if it returned to France, it would take six months out of that U boats life. Not only the voyage itself, which one of them was a record breaking voyage of months at sea, but once they’re back the rest and recuperation of the crew, the maintenance, and so on. So it was a major commitment of very scarce resources, because he didn’t have the U boat numbers he wanted, until not 1943, by which time in my opinion, Germany had already lost the war anyway, you know, so it was never going to work.

  Sam Willis
  You mentioned the code, Enigma code is interesting. For those of us who haven’t heard about that, can you just talk a little bit about the German submarine code?

  Larry Patterson
  Well, the Enigma machine was used by all German armed forces. They all had their separate code nets. The Luftwaffe had its code net, the army, the Waffen SS, so on and so on. The Kriegmarine now had these Enigma codes, they looked like a typewriter, they are in a box, very sophisticated coding machine, brilliant invention. The U boats have their specific code net, their style of encoding and sending messages. In the beginning of the war, Polish, codebreakers had already made advances into the army and certain elements of the Navy, but the U boat, code net was relatively secure. But part of the downfall was they also had various different keys, there was one key that you both use when they’re in home waters, and when about to go in and out of port, and that was broken by the allies, but the combat U boats remained quite sort of secure. But in 1941, of course, not only had various parts of Enigma machines being captured from combat U boats but they captured an entire Enigma from U 110 And, and that was it. Once the Enigma codes were read, because of the nature of how u boats were deployed, it required a centralised control from Karl Dönitz in charge of the U boat fleet. He would allocate an area on a grid chart, a naval grid chart of where the U boats would operate and all this kind of thing. That required a lot of radio traffic and information. Once the Allies had actually broken that code, they knew exactly where the U boats were. They managed to not only reroute convoys around it, but they sometimes targeted certain U boats, like when they developed these refuelling U boats, which were crucial for long distance missions. They targeted them and sank them all and so. The Germans had a mistaken belief that the Enigma was impenetrable. It was a it was a brilliant machine, a very, very clever piece of engineering. It had been penetrated, the battle of El Alamein on land, was helped enormously by the fact that Montgomery knew exactly what was going on. On the other side, I think the Germans, by and large during the Second World War, I think it’s fair to say that in many ways, there’s never been a war fought by someone that knows exactly what’s going on, on the other side to such a degree is what the Allies had in the Second World War. Which is hats off to, you know, the Polish cryptographers, but also Bletchley Park, who put the finishing touches on all this and Alan Turing and people like that. It’s a fascinating story in itself.

  Sam Willis
  The Germans didn’t have any inkling that this was going on.

  Larry Patterson
  They did, people kept ringing alarm bells, Dönitz himself was sort of going hang on a minute, you know, this is a bit odd. I mean, there was one example of three U boats that met in a in an island in the middle of, you know, middle of nowhere to sort of swap equipment and so on. And the British turn up, the submarine just happens to be there. And then as well, what are the odds, you know, so, but they basically, there was an admiral in charge of in charge of cyphers, essentially, and he kept doing these investigations. And he operated on the principle that, there’s a certain amount of arrogance here, there’s no way they could break it. So they operated from that standpoint, rather than being devil’s advocate and going, I think they’ve broken it. How could they have done this? So it was misplaced sort of arrogance, if you like.

  Sam Willis
  Let’s talk about the U boats at the end of the war, I’ve got an order from Dönitz here “Every enemy vessel which serves the landing, even if it ferries only half 100 sailors or a tank is a target demanding the total commitment of the boat. It is to be attacked, even if one’s own boat is put at risk. When it is a matter of getting at the enemy landing fleet, no thoughts must be given to the danger of shallow water, or possible mine barriers or any other consideration. Every man and every weapon of the Enemy destroyed before the landing reduces the enemy’s chance of success. But the U boat, which inflicts losses on the enemy at the landing has fulfilled its highest task and justified its existence, even though it stays there.” There’s a lot going on there, isn’t it?

  Larry Patterson
  An awful lot going on there. That’s quite an infamous episode. And you vote history really, which people still argue about to this day, people who weren’t there, because essentially, that was to counter the D Day landings. Normandy 1944. Dönitz in that kind of fiery way, that a lot of the German leaders but particularly Hitler did, they demanded total commitment, total obedience, total this out and the other and, and it was thought to inspire their troops. Where it went slightly wrong was, it’s been interpreted as an order to ram your U boat into the enemy. There’s lots of differences of opinion about whether that was actually given as an order. One U boat commander Herbert Werner, who wrote a fantastic autobiography called Iron Coffins. In it, he relates that he was at a meeting of the first U boat flotilla officers, when their commander Werner Winter gave that order from Dönitz. Basically someone said to him, so does that mean that we should, if all else fails, we should ram the enemy, and he said, Yes. Now, I’ve spoken to a man called Hans-Rudolf Rosing who was what they call FDU West, and he was in charge of all the logistics of the western U boats based in France. He used to go around these U boat bases, and he looked after them when they were ashore. He didn’t have operational control when they’re at sea, that was handled by Dönitz. but he had a control over the repairs, where they were stationed ashore, and all this kind of thing. Very important guy in the U boat chain of command. I asked him, because he’s often blamed for giving this order to ram U boats And he told me that at no point did they actually say ram your U-boats into the enemy, but they did say total commitment. They said you have to take chances, because basically the U boats were being used as an anti invasion measure, for which they were completely unsuited. They were going to be outmatched by the enemy. It turned out to be exactly that, a lot of U boats they left the French ports to attack the Normandy fleet and achieved absolutely nothing, most of them were sunk. It’s a bit of a grey area that one, people still argue about it. From the horse’s mouth, I’ve got this kind of thing that Dönitz didn’t believe in suicide missions. It was that kind of Third Reich rhetoric, complete commitment back to the wall, last shell, last man, all that kind of stuff.

  Sam Willis
  It’s an extraordinary moment as well. And also this this, this next one here, I thought this was a fantastic paragraph. This is from Dönitz himself. ‘My U-boat men. Six years of U boat war lie behind us, you have fought like lions, a crushing material superiority has forced us into a narrow area, and continuation of our fight from the remaining basis is no longer possible. U boat men, undefeated and spotless, you lay down your arms after a heroic battle without equal. We remember in deep respect our fallen comrades who have sealed with death, their loyalty to the Fuher and the fatherland. Comrades, preserve your U-boat spirit with which you have fought courageously, stubbornly and imperceptibly through the years for the good of the Fatherland. Long live Germany’ , Give us a bit of a context of what’s going on here with this final message to the U boat crews.

  Larry Patterson
  That’s the end of the war. Basically that’s when Dönitz gave the order to ceasefire. He kind of hit, by this stage he was no longer simply commander of the u boat service, he was commander of the entire German Navy. The war was lost, he actually concentrated a lot of resources on those last days to evacuating civilians and troops from, from the east, in the Baltic, and all this kind of stuff. This was the tail end of a campaign he’d mounted inshore in British waters, where the U boats were told to go close in land and operate using snorkel devices. So they could remain submerged, and attack British shipping in there, which was initially quite successful, took the British by surprise. But again, it was never going to alter the balance of the war, the war was lost on land. In the air, it had been lost years before, and basically, he was ordering his troops to ceasefire. In his opinion, the Navy had never done anything to blemish its record in combat or anything like that, which is why naval records are so available. They were actually protected in a castle, Castle Tambach and handed over to the Allies intact, or virtually intact. Dönitz considered that the Navy had nothing to hide, nothing to fear from the victors and so on. That was his last sort of big message to his men. Nearly three quarters of the U boat service were killed. They continued to sail in obsolete machines, they knew they were backs are truly against the wall, and they’re odds of survival were very slim. Yet they did continue to sail, and part of this is a legacy, a hangover from the First World War where a revolution in the fleet actually kicked off, a major mutiny at the end of the First World War, and he was determined this wouldn’t happen in the second, the Navy would fight with honour and all this kind of thing. So that’s, that’s the context of that. Yeah. And of course, at that stage, he was also the head of Germany too, because Hitler was dead.

  Sam Willis
  Yeah, he’s an interesting character. And he lived until 1980.

  Larry Patterson
  Fascinating sort of guy. A mass of contradictions, like a lot of these people who, by virtue of being such a high ranking officer in the Third Reich, there’s mighty skeletons in them their cupboards. At the same time he was kind of revered by his men to a degree, not often seen, I don’t think that’s necessarily true, but he was definitely revered by his men. They called him the lion. And he made a big deal and in the early days, when he was who’s in charge of U boats, and not the Navy, he’d be if at all possible, he’d be present when U boats came home he would debrief officers personally he wanted that personal touch with his men and it definitely paid off.

  Sam Willis
  He seems to have sidestepped the hunting for people associated with Nazi Germany. Released from prison in 56. Then retired, just lived North-western Germany.

  Larry Patterson
  Essentially, it’s such a complicated subject, isn’t it? I mean, there’s a kind of an idea that he put forward the idea he didn’t know what’s going on in concentration camps and so on. It’s not true. Eric Topp asked him when he came out of prison, and apparently Dönitz broke down in tears. He was a guy who I think it’s fair to say he was a military man, he wasn’t a political animal. But he was also at the same time, he subordinated himself completely to the nation. And at that time, the nation it was very, I think the word is autocratic isn’t. Hitler was the embodiment of the nation. I remember both Eric Topp and another officer Juergen Oesten, who is fascinating guy, U boat officer, told me that Hitler had the ability to make Dönitz feel fat, in his own words, like a little sausage. Like an insignificant man, he allowed them to swim in a soup of emotion and all this kind of thing. That’s the way he put it. So he, for example, when the July 20 plot when people tried to kill Hitler, Dönitz this was one of the first people on the radio saying,’ these traitors, these traitors, we’re going to root out these Jewish Bolshevik traitors’ and all this kind of stuff. Was he anti semitic, I don’t really know, probably to a degree that a lot of those guys were just by virtue of the times. Again, I’m not apologising for the man.

  Sam Willis
  He was certainly unrepentant and what he did in the war and stood by it all,

  Larry Patterson
  He was actually found guilty of waging aggressive warfare was the quote, sort of weird at Nuremberg. One of the men that appeared in his defence for his not only given the infamous Laconia order, but for waging unrestricted warfare, was actually Admiral Nimitz of the US Navy. He went in and he said, the minute we declared war on Japan sorry, Japan attacked us, and we then declared war. We waged unrestricted warfare, we just we went through it with our submarines; we sank anything that we could find that was Japanese. So one of the staunch defenders in the Nuremberg trials was an American Admiral, you know. The U boats, they really didn’t have anything to apologise for, I don’t think so. Anyway, it’s a it’s a bold statement, because I imagine a lot of merchant mariners would, will take issue with that. When you’re talking about something like this, and you’re dealing with statistics and numbers and stuff, it’s hard to imagine the horror of being in a ship, that’s torpedoed out of nowhere, that’s, that’s war.

  Sam Willis
  Well, Larry, it’s been fascinating talking to you and thank you very much indeed for your time. And I hope you’ve inspired lots of people to find out more about the U boat war.

  Larry Patterson
  Thank you very much

  Sam Willis
  Thank you all so much for listening now please don’t just listen to the Mariners Mirror podcast. Please also check out the Mariners Mirror podcast YouTube channel, where you will find some truly magnificent new things to see. Not least the quite brilliant new videos we’ve made filming the world’s best ship models with the latest camera equipment. There’s also some fantastic animation work to be seen there. Now this podcast comes from both the Lloyd’s Register Foundation and the Society for Nautical Research. So do please take the time to check out everything that both of those wonderful institutions have been up to. You can find the Lloyd’s Register foundations History Centre and Archive at hec.lrfoundation.org.uk. And the Society for nautical research at snr.org.uk where you can join up to enjoy all of the numerous perks of membership including four copies of the printed Mariners Mirror journal every year, online access to over a century’s worth of maritime history scholarship, online seminars and you can even come to dinner on board HMS Victory. Lucky you

Category: World War 2 | Submarines | Seapower