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Post by artraveler on Feb 14, 2020 15:09:25 GMT -8
Grey Wolves: German U-Boats in WW II
An Amazon Prime Documentary in three parts
The number of documentaries about WW II must exceed the recorded battle deaths in the war. However, the number of documentaries about the U-boats that presents an honest picture of the men who went to war in them is few. Grey Wolves is written and narrated by Michael Leighton. Since the end of the war, Nazis of any kind, have been a kind of personae non grata. Progressives tar every German serviceman as a Nazi regardless of their true status. I don’t think I am defending Nazis by taking an honest look at history.
The men, boys really, most in their late teens their captains were often in their early 20s volunteered for duty on these boats. The conditions were appalling, cold, humidity, marginal food, lack of sunlight and the growing with every day, realization that they would not live through the war. Indeed, most did not live out the war, 75% of all U-boats were sunk and over 40,000 men died in them.
This documentary holds back nothing about the U-boat war in the Atlantic. A lot of the time is spent on how the U-boats of WW II came into being from WW I. There is archive film, German, that I have never before seen and the soundtrack is full of German military music from the war. There is no glorification of Hitler or Nazis. Actually, criticism because Hitler tended to neglect the German Navy and the U-boats especially. Admiral Raeder and Admiral Doenitz failed to push the importance of the Navy. However, as Hitler became more deranged and the ultimate outcome of the war more obvious, Hitler ran from one shinny object to the next. The U-boats could have been a war asset instead of a drain of manpower and production. Albert Speer is given credit for keeping the U-boats operational in the last years of the war.
Today’s submariners have almost no knowledge of the conditions their grandparents lived in. Our modern submarines, even desal/electric, are clean, air-conditioned, have quality food and compared to the boats of WW II roomy. A modern Ohio class SSBN is the size of a WW II cruiser, 18,000 tons, and carries enough, non-nuclear firepower to sink a WW II fleet and never be seen.
We tend to forget that even our enemies suffer the same conditions in war as we. The U-boat war in the Atlantic was brutal with little margin given. It was not a gentleman’s war and the act of heroism was actually boarding these sewer pipes and going to war in them. The English and the Americans learned how to counter U-boat tactics and by the end of the war could sink them almost at will.
On another note. The music of the war. German music of the war era is either sentimental or martial. Detrick or brass bands. The British music was more fun and easier to dance to. Of course, there is also a sentimental variant. Vera Lynn is still popular in the UK. In the US, however, there is always a note of optimism. Glenn Miller, The Dorsey brothers, Benny Goodman, Kay Kaiser and the ever-present jazz, New Orleans, Chicago, Kansas City, or New York. Even the deepest blues speaks to a better time. IMHO the music of the war era contributed as much to winning the war as the strongest tank, fastest plane and the M-1 Garand.
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Post by Brad Nelson on Feb 14, 2020 15:24:11 GMT -8
I'll give it a look if I haven't seen it already.
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Post by timothylane on Feb 14, 2020 16:34:39 GMT -8
I've read a LOT of books on the U-boat war (and a few covering other navies' submarines as well -- enough to do an article on submarine warfare for Salem Press a decade or so ago). The Germans and Americans both had severe problems with their torpedoes. The US didn't really correct the problem completely until 1943. The Germans were luckier -- they captured a British submarine in 1940 that still had its torpedoes, and those functioned very well.
A number of my books dealt with conditions in the submarines, including books by both British and German commanders. (I also had Doenitz's autobiography.) A British officer mentioned that he knew of only one submarine sailor who actually tried to bathe regularly -- and he ended up with scabies. One of the problems was having to go deep to avoid depth charges, and wait them out -- with the air in the boat steadily losing oxygen. No one ever worked up (or perhaps even thought of) somehow imitating gills to get air from all the sea water surrounding them.
The Allies developed several technological inventions that were useful in the U-boat war. High-frequency direction-finding (Huff-duff) enabled their ships to locate U-boats at sea when they used their radios to report back (as they did quite frequently). Eventually they also broke the Enigma code, though this was done later than for the Luftwaffe and the Army. (The Kriegsmarine had longer experience using radio, and better communications security along with it.) Centimetric radio could locate surfaced boats from a distance, and late in the war could even detect the snorkels. They also kept developing new weapons, such as improved launchers for depth charges and later AS rockets.
The Americans had a very embarrassing problem dealing with the U-boats of Operation Paukenschlag (Drumbeat), which led to very heavy losses off the coast (sometimes within sight of beachgoers, such as a tanker sunk off the Florida coast). This was especially true off Cape Hatteras aka Torpedo Junction. (One U-boat commander reported his results in poetic form: "Midnight, darkness black as ink. Off Hatteras, the tankers sink. While Roosevelt sadly counts the score, another fifty thousand tons by Mohr." Mohr later came up with a German class of miniature subs, which they racistically called the Neger class. KFZ will probably understand why.)
I have no doubt that music contributed more to victory than the strongest tank (which was probably the Tiger II aka King Tiger) or the fastest plane (which was the Me-262 jet fighter).
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Post by kungfuzu on Feb 14, 2020 21:16:43 GMT -8
I think they should have called it the "Othello" class.
Karl Marx was nicknamed "the Mohr" because of his dark coloring.
I believe I have mentioned it before, I have been in a WWII sub and it was very small and tight inside. The head was extremely small and at the back of the thing. I can't imagine spending weeks at a time, in one of those things.
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Post by timothylane on Feb 14, 2020 21:59:59 GMT -8
Elizabeth and I toured the captured U-boat (U-505, I think) in Chicago. I don't think they showed the heads, though I believe we saw the Enigma machines as we passed through.
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Post by Brad Nelson on Feb 15, 2020 8:59:04 GMT -8
Artler, they have some good quotes from some of the sailors. One had a comment that basically called Hitler a monster foisted on the German people. A couple more comments were of the type of being caught up in a war not of one’s making.
History is full of men and civilians getting caught up in wars not of their making where they are forced into the situation to either join their countrymen or join the enemy. There are some wonderful and notable exceptions (Dietrich Bonhoeffer), but they all tend to meet the same fate.
So I think it’s reasonable to assume that the circumstances for many of these sailors were of the “got caught up in” variety. For the captains and higher-ups, that’s when I think any nuanced view of them will fall into a moral abyss.
I watched the first half of the first part last night. The take-away factoid that stands out in my mind is that it said that there was very little change in the U-boats from WWI to WWII. And the reason apparently is that there did not need to be. By the end of The Great War, they had a very fine underwater boat indeed.
This first half mentions that it went from a more gentlemanly wolf pack, where British sailors were allowed to get into lifeboats before their boat was sunk, to a “total war” one fairly quickly. The reasons for the change weren’t given. But one assumes it was because the British were getting better at quickly hunting down the U-boats. Or the Germans were just becoming more savage. Or both.
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Post by timothylane on Feb 15, 2020 9:10:37 GMT -8
One reason for the decline in kindness is simply that more and more of the fighting occurred against Allied convoys. A submarine sinking an individual ship can try to be decent to the survivors. A submarine sinking a ship in a convoy has to get away in a hurry. Merchant ships often had a gun (indeed, a US liberty ship once fought a German commerce raider to a draw -- both ships were sunk), and for that matter they could ram a submarine. (The subs were very fragile, and it didn't help that even a single seemingly minor hole would be enough to keep them from submerging.) And that doesn't even consider the escort that might be just a short distance away.
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Post by Brad Nelson on Feb 15, 2020 9:22:29 GMT -8
Yes, the convoy aspect makes sense. I'm not sure why the documentary failed to mention that if that was the cause. Maybe it goes into more detail later on.
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Post by Brad Nelson on Feb 18, 2020 13:41:52 GMT -8
A couple more points stand out (at least for me) in the latter half of the first episode:
+ Hitler pulled a lot of U-boats out of the Atlantic to the Mediterranean to support the resupplying of Rommel. Dönuts did not like this. But then it sounds as if the real problem was that they needed more U-boats —enough for both theatres of operation.
+ England had U-boats. Who’d have thunk? I’ve heard very little about them. But they apparently had their share of successes.
+ The Americans (us!) were slow to react to the U-boats that Dönuts used effective off the coast of America and Canada right after the Americans (us!) entered the war. The Germans basically had unhindered access for a while.
+ Apparently the above was exacerbated by Admiral King’s supposed distaste for the British. The British had warned us what was likely going to happen.
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Post by kungfuzu on Feb 18, 2020 13:48:47 GMT -8
Almost everything I have read about King indicates he was an absolute scoundrel. I can not recall having read one good thing about him.
I believe the Navy is the most political of our military branches, which is saying a lot. Through the years, they have even done despicable things to divert attention from institutional failings. An example of such, is the link below.
I wonder how much King was a product of or creator of this culture.
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Post by Brad Nelson on Feb 18, 2020 14:42:31 GMT -8
Oh, I remember that turret explosion. Wasn’t there a homo lover’s spat connected to that? That’s what I recall. What’s the real story? I could read all that but I’d like to buy the Crib Note.
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Post by kungfuzu on Feb 18, 2020 14:53:11 GMT -8
That was the Navy's lie and one I thought stank from the beginning. The bastard Navy PR men had no problem blackening an enlisted man's name, so long as they could deflect attention from their institutional malfeasance.
Sandia Labs had a look and came to the conclusion the explosion came from too much force when ramming in the powder charges, i.e. something the Navy should have known about. In the end, the thing was white-washed and it was determined that no sure reason could be determined.
I had noted a number of such lies and dishonorable actions by the Navy throughout history. But this one convinced me that the Navy was the most corrupt branch of the military service and that is saying something, given the corruption of military bureaucracies.
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Post by timothylane on Feb 18, 2020 15:05:34 GMT -8
British submarines were especially important in the Mediterranean against Italy, though they had some successes against the Germans. The light cruiser Karlsruhe was scuttled after being torpedoed by a British submarine while returning from Norway in 1940. The light cruisers Leipzig and Nuernberg were both hit by torpedoes in late 1939, and submarines might have done it.
One of my books on submarine warfare, as I mentioned earlier, was a memoir by a British submarine commander. (They had real problems with trawlers because the torpedoes often ran too low to hit them.)
Of course, everyone had submarines. The French had a lot of them, including the U-cruiser Surcouf with 8-inch guns. It never accomplished anything. Italy and Russia had plenty of submarines, with the Russians using them to sink 3 German ships carrying people fleeing from the Baltic and Prussian enclaves in 1945. At the time a couple of them were the greatest shipping disasters in history. (This was actually the finest hour for the Kriegsmarine, carrying 1.5 million people back to Germany -- double the totals from the British withdrawals from Dunkirk, France, Crete, and Leros combined, and over a considerable distance -- with a loss of about 2%.) Even smaller countries had them; the Germans got the Schnorchel from the Dutch.
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Post by timothylane on Feb 18, 2020 15:09:59 GMT -8
I think it may have been King's daughter who said he was even-tempered -- he hated everybody.
Doenitz wanted to concentrate solely on sinking as many British merchant ships as possible. Sending U-boats to the Mediterranean and Arctic was very useful strategically at times, but incompatible with his overriding goal (sinkings in the Arctic were severe only for a few convoys, most notably PQ-17 and PQ-18, though this also led to the British holding up on them for much of 1942).
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Post by Brad Nelson on Feb 18, 2020 15:17:36 GMT -8
So you’re saying that it is a gay thing.  |
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Post by kungfuzu on Feb 18, 2020 15:24:57 GMT -8
By chance, I came upon another very good example of the military bureaucracy's corruption.
I guess I am just a contrarian. I am not a commie, but I don't worship the present fetish that the liars call "free-market capitalism." I know we need a strong military but I don't worship at the altar of "military infallibility."
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Post by kungfuzu on Feb 18, 2020 15:30:46 GMT -8
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Post by Brad Nelson on Feb 18, 2020 16:07:21 GMT -8
Of course one can be critical of the military without being a Commie. What has made this aspect socially difficult is that 95% of the criticism of the military is coming from the anti-American types.
So, in conservative circles, you have to first get out your pack of Crayons and draw the basic shapes and pictures for your conservative friends that explains, I’m not criticizing the military because I hate America.
Still, that doesn’t necessarily solve all problems. And by the time you get into the minutia that being critical of the military doesn’t necessarily help the Left (and whether it does or not, surely some objective criteria exist or we’d all go cuckoo), you may be like the guy who is up to his ass in alligators and forgets that his initial purpose was to drain the swamp.
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