Hi Vinny,

As I mentioned in my post I don’t necessarily consider Blair a good source. His work is seriously distorted by his extreme bias in favor of the American navy. At least some of his work is simply sour grapes and the result of the “not invented here” syndrome.

That said, his work (it consists of 2 volumes: The Hunters & The Hunted) does contain a lot of good information and it covers the whole U-boat War pretty well. The problem is that until you have done the necessary research yourself you aren’t in a position to recognize his agenda so I generally recommend it for more experienced researchers.

If this topic is really new to you I recommend starting with Das Boot, the movie or the book. It is essentially a novel based on actual events that are dramatized and presented somewhat out of order (it is a composite of multiple U-boat patrols) but it does a good job of describing what it was like to serve in a U-boat. It will introduce you to the duties & responsibilities of the commander & crew and make future research more understandable. The drunken bar scene is deemed unrealistic or “just literary license” by a lot of the surviving U-boat men and some of them don’t like the author but in general it is a good introduction to the U-boat world. It presents the men not as the drooling Nazis the media made them out to be but as the very human men they were.

A lot of us got our start on Werner’s Iron Coffins (including me) but it turns out that there are some significant problems with it too. It is sold as an actual account but a considerable degree of “literary license” was taken and some of the information is incorrect, especially the “Ramming Order” stuff.

Another good book on the U-boats themselves is:

Showell, Jak P. Mallmann. U-Boats Under the Swastika. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1987. ISBN: 0-87021-970-7. Copyright: Jak P. Mallmann Showell, 1987. It introduces you to the various types of U-boats among other things.

At any rate there are many facets of the U-boat war and there are good books on many of them – it just takes time to get to the point where you can sort out the good ones from the bad.

Regards,

Ken Dunn