Hello

I am doing some work on a couple of u-boat commanders who joined the Kaiser's navy after 1900, but before WW1, as officer cadets. I have their service records and therefore their promotion dates and their ships and shore establishments.

However, I want to get more of a feel of what this standard pre-u-boat training was like. I find that the numbers each year were quite low, 200 entrants of which, perhaps, 150 would make it to Leutnant. They seemingly trained on a limited number of ships and the training programme seemed to stay relatively unchanged.

The men became identified by their class year of entry, for instance, Class of '07. Because these young men spent several years in close company, the comradeship was generally high although there were clearly social and personality differences. For instance, I have just been reading the details of a 50th anniversary party for the Class of '07 held in 1957 (Freiburg archive) with a surprisingly high number of attendees / survivors.

For other reasons, I have just finished reading Patrick J Kelly, Tirpitz and the Imperial German Navy, and found that the early chapters gave me a lot of what I wanted, but, of course, Tirpitz was Class of '65, so a little out-of-date for me.

I then thought of some other obvious candidates, Canaris, Class of '05; Doenitz, Class of '10; and I have sent off for biographies of these men.

So my requests: 1) Are there any other English-language life biographies out there of German naval officers, not necessarily u-boat officers, probably Classes of '01 to '12, that have a few pages / an early chapter on their training years (as well as dealing with, later, the career that made them famous)? 2) Are there any other sources anyone can suggest?

And a special personal request to uboat-net: Is there any way of pulling off from the site the names of commanders by class year, particularly Classes of '05 and '07. I can slog through all of the names, but ...

Many thanks
Chris Heal