Hi Pete,
First in case you haven’t come across it there is a good book on Milag out there:

Thomas, Gabe. Milag: Captives of the Kriegsmarine. Merchant Navy Prisoners of War. Published by: The Milag Prisoner of War Association. ISBN: 0-9525498-08. Copyright: D.N. Gabe Thomas.

Now as to living conditions on a U-boat. By most standards they were horrible. However, most of the U-boat men I have talked to about this seem to agree that they got used to it to a degree as they had no other choice. That’s just how it was, and they learned to live with it and focus on the task at hand.

U-boat officers were screened for their ability to function in the tight, uncomfortable confines of a U-boat.

To start with there were no provisions on a U-boat for passengers, space simply had to me made for them and sleeping accommodations were at a premium as there weren’t even enough bunks for each crew member to have his own.

I have read of a couple of cases where crew that didn’t normally have to hot bunk had to share their bunks with merchant seamen when they weren’t using them & one case of an ordinary seaman having to bed down on the deck inside the boat.

Sleeping on a boat that operated 24/7 was not easy to get used to. People were up, moving around all the time & they had to talk to each other. Equipment was being repaired or serviced around the clock not to mention the noise the equipment that was running made. The lights were never completely off either.

And there was just no spare space. When the boat left port with a full load of torpedoes & food the crew was really crammed together. There was food & supplies in every nook & cranny and it was also hanging from the ceiling. Some of the torpedoes were also stacked on the deck inside the torpedo rooms (where most of the crew slept) to make things even worse.

As the patrol proceeded, some of the food & supplies was consumed and perhaps some of the torpedoes were fired and that made a bit more room for the crew to move around but there was still precious little space.

Even the crew didn’t have the run of the boat. While submerged, they had to have permission to move from one section of the boat to another in order not to affect the balance of the boat or get in the way of someone doing his job.

All this would have made staying inside a U-boat pretty unpleasant and boring. They could try to talk to the crew but only the officers were likely to speak English. Still the accounts I have read seem to agree that they were well treated by the crew & in some cases they were actually friendly.

None the less they were in a strange scary, dangerous place, in the hands of the enemy, and they rarely knew what was going on around them & they were frequently alone.

Actually the crew just wanted them to sit in one place and stay out of the way…

They were sometimes allowed to come up to the bridge while the boat was surfaced and conditions permitted. Once on the bridge, they could smoke if they wished (as long lighting up would not give away their position at night etc.) and they could get some fresh air and perhaps sunshine. Of course it might be freezing or snowing instead….

The temperature & humidity inside a U-boat was poorly controlled. It could be freezing or 110 degrees Fahrenheit. There was no air conditioning as we know it and the heaters were electric and were fine while on the surface but when the boat submerged, they might be switched off to conserve the batteries.

It seems it was always humid inside a U-boat whether it was hot or cold.

There were only 2 heads for the whole crew & one of them couldn’t be used for the first week or two of the patrol because it was used to store food. Additionally they wouldn’t work at all when at depth because they had no storage tanks. You had to flush directly into the sea and after a certain depth you couldn’t work the pump due to the water pressure. There were buckets to be used when the heads couldn’t be used.

The smells took getting used to as well. 50 or so men crammed together in the confines of a U-boat without proper showers or ventilation quickly created a funky stench, especially when it was hot. Later in the patrol some of them used a cologne that was issued to them to try to deal with the smell.

There was also the smell of oil and grease, the diesel engines, rotting food, and the buckets (which sometimes spilled their contents on the deck & down into the bilges to make matters worse).

Additionally most of the crew hot bunked which meant when they woke up and got out of bed to go on their watch, the next guy crawled into the already warm bunk. They used the same sheets & pillows etc. & they just had to deal with the resulting smells.

U-boat food however was very good by wartime German standards & was better than the civilian population had at its disposal. After the first 2 weeks, they had to scrape mold off the bread and not too long after that they ran out of fresh bread completely and had to eat canned bread which it seems nobody liked. After a while the food tasted like diesel fuel and all the other smells in the boat but again, the crew got used to it to a degree. Typically, prisoners ate the same food the crew ate.

Medical facilities were generally slim. Typically U-boats did not carry doctors though they sometimes did. The radio operators were trained in first aid (a 3 or 4 week course as best as I can tell) and later in the war they had an enlisted man trained like a paramedic on some boats. The officers also got some medical training at the naval academy.

I guess in summary a U-boat was a very uncomfortable place to be confined and for the most part the confinement was 24/7. It just had to be endured.
Hope this helps.

I have also sent you a Private Message (PM).

Regards,

Ken Dunn