U-995

You are walking along the sand-dunes on the German shore of the Baltic. On your right is the seaway leading down to Kiel; today there is a brisk onshore wind blowing white horses off the wave-tops. On your left the dunes are higher, bearing sparse bushes and a few stunted trees. Ahead of you is the small seaside settlement of Laboe – two hundred houses, a couple of hotels, three or four restaurants.

You turn the corner of a sand-hill and are suddenly confronted by a long, grey shape sitting on the beach. It’s U-995, the last surviving Kriegsmarine U-boat in Europe. The first thing to strike you is its pristine condition as the sun sparkles on its steel plates. You notice its strange design, streamlined yet bulbous, with three serious-looking guns on a kind of balcony perched on top. Then you might consider the sheer incongruity of this sinister war-machine parked among the deckchairs, kite-surfers and lolloping dogs: it’s as out of place as a space-rocket.

A little further along the coast at Heikendorf, U-995’s improbable resting-place begins to make sense. Here is the site of the U-boat memorial, a circular wall bearing the names of 30,000 mariners whose own resting-place is at the bottom of the sea. They are listed crew by crew on bronze plaques – hundreds and hundreds of them. Relatives have placed occasional photographs among the names and these attest to the extreme youth of the U-boat sailors; their faces could, and probably should, have been smiling out instead from portraits of student sports-teams.

U-995 has been lovingly preserved by the German Marine Association. Doorways have been cut in the bow and stern to allow visitors to walk the length of the interior, for U-995 is now a museum. Unless you are familiar with submarines you will be astonished by the complexity of the machinery, electrics and hydraulics. Every surface is festooned with pipes, wires, dials, control-wheels, levers, switches and gauges. There is something magnificent about the ingenuity of U-995’s builders: the pressure-hull is crammed with motors to propel the boat, submerge it, surface it and trim it. At the stern, giant electric dynamos charged enormous batteries to drive U-995 at seven knots under-water; in the next compartment, two banks of massive diesel engines gave her nearly twenty knots on the surface.

The U-boat is long but narrow. There is hardly any space for anything, least of all people. The bunks are squashed in amongst machines, pipe-work and equipment; there is a galley – about the same size as a small office-desk – and one toilet (the other was used as a food-store). Yet 45 people lived in this tube for up to 12 weeks on end... 1,500 km out into the Atlantic, endless patrolling, no water for washing or shaving, no fresh food after the first few days, more patrolling, maybe combat... then the long journey back to base on the west coast of France.

The whole point of U-995, and every other U-boat, was to fire torpedoes at enemy ships. They were good at this, sinking nearly 3,000 merchant vessels and nearly 200 warships during World War II. U-995 shows why: the torpedoes themselves are huge, finely-engineered precision missiles with 250 kg warheads; the apparatus for aiming and firing them – optics, range-finders, computing devices, hydrographic tables, torpedo-room crews, adjustable fuses, compressed air – turned the entire craft into a single weapon controlled by the skill of its captain. Good captains and lucky captains would return to the pens with a string of pennants fluttering from the mast-head, ready to be feted and for two weeks’ carousing with their crews.

Towards the end of 1942 it didn’t matter how good the captains were, and there was no more luck. The British, Canadians and Americans saw U-boats as a deadly threat and made winning the Battle of the Atlantic their number one priority. Rapid advances in airborne and naval radar meant that U-boats could be spotted from over the horizon; ultra-long-range aircraft meant there was nowhere to hide, not even in the middle of the ocean. Allied escort craft learnt how to hunt, trap and kill the U-boats beneath the surface of the sea. Eight hundred were destroyed, and their crews with them.

As you stumble, crouching, through the air-locked compartments inside U-995, you can’t help wondering what it must have been like for these hunters to have been hunted in their turn. They knew they only had 20 hours’ supply of air; when it ran out they would be forced to surface and confront the guns of an enemy much larger, much faster and much more heavily-armed. Even if they lasted that long... depth-charging quickly became a science and the U-boat hunters were adept at ‘cat-and-mouse’ tactics using sonar. With a destroyer overhead they must have known that their chances of survival were slim. They might not have known quite how slim: today we have figures to show that 70 per cent of crew-members were drowned inside their U-boats.

The story of the submarines tells us something about the frailty of ethics in twentieth century warfare. At the beginning of World War I a U-boat was required to stop its quarry, make sure that the crew and passengers got into lifeboats, and only then sink the vessel – usually with its deck-gun. The rules were soon broken on both sides: some merchant ships were equipped as decoys, pretending to surrender and then attacking the U-boats with concealed guns as soon as they were within range, while the more aggressive U-boat commanders abandoned the conventions and sank their victims, using torpedoes, by surprise.
U-boat warfare in World War II was unrestricted, by order of the High Command. Yet there are stories of U-boat captains putting merchant crews into lifeboats – and even supplying them with provisions and cigarettes – just as there are stories of fighter pilots, on both sides, guiding stricken victims safely to earth before flying off with a friendly wave. It seems that neither total nor totalitarian warfare can completely extinguish the human instinct of decency.

That said, we must face the fact that the Battle of the Atlantic was warfare at its most dreadful. Highly-trained submariners used the superlative technology of their ‘grey wolves’ to send thousands of civilian sailors to a ghastly death. When the tide turned, these same young men were killed in an equally horrible manner, and in roughly equal numbers. For what? Nothing changed. We can only salute the bravery of the seamen on both sides, deplore the psychotic old men who wasted their lives, sympathise with the grieving relatives, and admire those who displayed nobility at a time when it won no applause.