The U-boat pens at La Rochelle

You are 18 years old in 1942 and have been called up into the German navy. You are told that you are to serve in the U-boat command under Admiral Doenitz. You feel excited and probably a bit awed: the U-boat crews were lionised as an elite.

You are not given a choice. Unlike the British and American system, German U-boat conscripts were not volunteers.

You are told about the wine, women and song on the Atlantic coast bases; you are told about the comradeship, the magnificent contribution of the U-boats to Germany’s war-effort, the privileges and awards which will come your way. You are not told about the risks.

Over 75 per cent of U-boat crew-members perished in World War II, a lethality rate only approached by members of RAF Bomber Command at 50 per cent.

With this in mind my friends Euan and Pascal and I approached the U-boat pens at La Pallice in La Rochelle with mixed feelings. This vast construction, one of five on the Atlantic coast of France, had defeated all efforts by the RAF to destroy the protection it gave to its 10 submarines. The pens were seen as wasps’-nests and the RAF mounted increasingly intensive raids, with increasingly powerful munitions, in an attempt to strangle the U-boats at the point where they returned for repair and re-provisioning.

It didn’t work. La Rochelle (and Brest, Lorient, St Nazaire and Bordeaux) were plastered with high-explosive bombs month after month. The cities were badly damaged but the U-boat pens suffered hardly a scratch. They were designed and built by the Todt Organisation to be indestructible. So they were, and they are still there to this day.

As we walked up to the pens through the present-day dockyard the true scale of the construction dawned on us. It was like approaching the Great Pyramid: from a distance there was nothing to tell you how vast, how gargantuan the reality would be when you stood next to it.

The first thing to hit us was the smell. A combination of oil, fuel, rust and decomposition. Next was the sheer bulk of this massive edifice: thick walls of concrete, 30 metres high, as if someone had made a model on a desk and said: ‘Build that’. Which was exactly what Albert Speer did when he took over the Todt Organisation. We marvelled at how the labour could have been recruited and managed. Was it slaves?

History has wrongly attributed the construction of the pyramids to slavery, thanks to the credulity of Herodotus. They were, in fact, built by volunteers – skilled masons – who deemed it an honour to serve their King’s immortality. In a different way, so it was with the U-boat pens and the entire Atlantic Wall: most of the work was done by craftsmen who were paid more than they could have earned in civilian life. There were indeed slaves – a normal part of any Third Reich construction project – but in the case of the Atlantic fortifications and the U-boat pens they were a minority.

We walked round the perimeter of this huge, concrete castle and then through the dark central access tunnel, 10 metres high, which enabled German lorries to bring torpedoes, shells, new engines and replacement parts to the U-boats floating in their bays under 20 metres of concrete protection. The air was dank; sounds were muffled by the thickness of the concrete walls, just as they must have been 70 years ago. We walked out onto the jetty which protruded from the centre of the covered bays; this was where the bands played and the young girls threw flowers to encourage the crews on their way out into the Atlantic and to congratulate the lucky ones who came back flying the skull-and-crossbones at their masthead.

In 1941 most of them enjoyed the flowers, champagne and wild nights at La Rochelle’s boites de nuit. In 1943 few did. By 1944 so may U-boats had been sunk at sea by allied air attack that hardly any did: overall, 793 U-boats and their crews failed to return. Doenitz called off the Atlantic campaign.

The impression made on us by the La Rochelle U-boat pens was sinister: they look sinister, they had a sinister purpose, they accounted for innumerable human lives in both their construction and their operation. They stand there to this day as indestructible monuments to the megalomania of the Third Reich.

The U-boat campaign was the only threat in the Second World War to seriously worry Churchill. If it hadn’t been for radar the allies could have lost the war; it was airborne radar which sounded the U-boats’ death-knell.

The allies learnt how to eradicate the U-boat menace at sea, but could never touch them in their French bases. Which is why the pens at La Rochelle, still standing and with their camouflage paint intact, silent today but redolent with the clang and clatter of their busy activity in 1942, send a shiver up one’s spine.

We thought with sympathy about the feelings of the U-boat conscripts. What did they think when they stood, as we stood, on the embarkation jetty? Did they suspect their fate – the fate of most of them – trapped in a cramped metal tube which would be crushed by pressure as it sank into the depths after bombing by allied aircraft? We hoped not: ally or adversary, we hoped these young men would only be thinking of the good times they had in La Rochelle... wein, weib und gesang.