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Roger Moorhouse, "Wolfpack: Hitler’s U-Boat War 1939-45" (HarperCollins, 2025)
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Roger Morehouse
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
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Roger Morehouse
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Roger Morehouse about his book titled Wolf Inside Hitler's U Boat War, published by William Collins in 2025. Helping us understand what it was like to be in a U boat, how U boats were organized, strategically, militarily, of course, in for example, British history. U boats in World War II are a really big deal, but usually from the outside perspect. And this book really helps us literally get into the U boat. What did it smell like? How did people. How did soldiers end up on a U boat? And of course, what this meant in terms of the wider war itself. So clearly we have a lot to discuss. Roger, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
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Roger Morehouse
My great pleasure, Miranda. Thank you for having me.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Could you please start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book?
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Roger Morehouse
Yes, I'm a freelance historian. I do a bit of teaching actually in Poland, but that's not my main enterprise, as it were. So I write popular history basically. And this one, this book I decided to take on when I started to look into the subject. So I'd done a bit of military before. I don't. I don't necessarily just do military history, but I've done a bit of military before. And I started looking at the U boat war as a sort of possibility. And the gap that sort of struck me straight away was that there's very, very little on the German side of things traditionally told, as you just explained, very much from the perspective of the surface of the merchantmen and the destroyers and so on, with the U boats and their crews kind of a very distant second, if at all. They're sort of literally, metaphorically unseen. So I thought there's a gap there in the historiography essentially that I could reasonably fill. I speak fluent German, so lots of German sources that traditionally don't tend to see the light of day in the conventional English speaking accounts of the Battle of the Atlantic. So I thought that was a good area to look at.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Can you in fact tell us a bit more about the sources that you've used for this and of course how you managed to find them and piece them together?
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Roger Morehouse
Yeah, I mean, actually the interesting thing here I suppose is, as I'm sure a lot of our listeners will appreciate, is that when you try and change shift a perspective, it's almost as good as kind of finding a new archive in a way because it forces you to sort of ask new questions. The material very often leads you in a slightly different direction anyway. So there's nothing particularly new about the material. All of its kind of been there. It's just that it hasn't really been mined proper properly in the English speaking sort of literature on it. So you know, it's the Bundeslige, the Militaire Archive in, in Germany, those two. And then particularly the. There's a private archive up in Cuxhaven in the north of Germany which I used quite extensively. I had a couple of visits there and that was. That's essentially been a. A collection of what from my purposes it was most useful as a collection of first hand accounts. So very often U boat veterans were sort of sending in their unpublished memoirs and diaries and things like that, which are all catalogued there. There aren't. There are no surviving U boatmen now, of course, we should add. So they're all sort of cataloged in this archive and that was a really, really useful trawl through those to sort of see what U boatmen were saying, you know, themselves either at the time or subsequently in their, in their memoirs. So that, that was really, really useful. And then in Addition to that, obviously, you know, the U.S. archives and the British Archives, the National Archives, really useful for the intelligence reports from captured U boat crews. So through most of, mainly the early phase of the war. So up until really about 44, I suppose the, the last few are really 1944, which is in, in itself quite telling. I'll come on to that in a minute, if I may. But they'd, you know, they, they are capturing U boat crews fairly regularly and they're all subjected to interrogation obviously. And they produce, the naval intelligence produces intelligence reports which is a collation of all of that material. And it's done, it's done per boat. So really interesting in terms of looking at morale, looking at, you know, you know, they ask them all sorts of things about their, about their life ashore, for example, what's it like, you know, what do you do when you're off duty in l', Oreal, for example? So all these things are asked. But most interesting is actually the, the eavesdropping reports because as, as I'm sure you'll know, the British policy was basically to eavesdrop on the prisoners in places like Trent park, for example, in North London where they'd be, you know, they'd be called for interrogation and they'd go back to the cells and very proudly tell their fellows all the things that they hadn'. Interrogators. But of course the interrogators were listening, you know, had. Had microphones in this, in the cells themselves. So that the sort of raw transcripts of those conversations are also available in the National Archives, which is really, really interesting stuff. You know, it's where they're sort of complaining about, you know, their own conditions and the fact that the, the next generation of submariners were sort of hopelessly inexperienced and you know, not, not anywhere near as good as we are sort of thing, you know. So all of that material actually is all there if you look for it. So, you know, in a sense there's nothing blindingly new in terms of archival revelations, but it's just looking at the.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Stuff that already exists, which is always very intriguing. So thank you for explaining sort of what the different pieces are that you're putting together so that now we can discuss them a little bit. Did you want to jump towards the end of the war first or shall we start from the beginning?
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Roger Morehouse
No, let's start at the beginning. Why not?
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Alright then. So the obvious beginning is where do we get these World War II U boats? Obviously there are a lot of technical improvements when we get to World War II, but there were some submarines used in World War I. So is that where the World War II fleet begins?
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Roger Morehouse
Essentially, yes. So, you know, it's quite easy to assume, given that Germany was forbidden from having U boats by the Treaty of Versailles until 1935, effectively, that, you know, there's a sort of complete break in terms of technology, in terms of construction and so on, but that's not the case. So the U bet that they had at the end of the First World War, which is known as the UB3, which was, you know, for the time was reasonably, reasonably sort of up to date, reasonably state of the art. That sort of essentially continued with a few. A few modifications and innovations into the interwar period. And the Germans are actually still building U boats under license in Holland, so through a series of shell companies and sort of, you know, a bit like we imagine, I suppose, Russia now with its, with its sort of shadow fleet and its various methods by which it sort of avoids the strictures of international law. The Germans were doing the same thing in the interwar period. So, you know, they were producing U boats for anyone that would pay basically as a commercial enterprise using shipyards in Holland. And, you know, they. So they sold U boats in the 1920s to, for example, the Finns and the Turks, as on a commercial basis. So there is a sort of a continuity through that of the. Of both technology of personnel to some extent, which, you know, that in itself, I think, is. Is rather an interesting, you know, element that it has that continuity. Then, of course, once they are then permitted to. To build U boats again by 1935, then they're sort of hitting the ground running the opening period of U boat construction up until essentially, I suppose, the middle of the war, they're running with the same sort of technology as they had at the end of the First World war. So the UB3 is basically sort of repurposed and sort of renovated, essentially, and it becomes the type 7, which they are producing, you know, from 1935 onwards. And that becomes the backbone of the U boat fleet in World War II. So about 70% of what they produce, they produce over a thousand U boats during World War II. About 70% of those were these type sevens. And that's the sort of the workhorse of the. Of the fleet. And it's essentially a submersible, we should add. So it's not a. Not a true submarine in that it, you know, it spends most of its time on the surface, probably 90% of its time on the surface. If it were able to you know, motors on the surface. It only really submerges to either attack or to evade counterattack. So the idea of this being some true submarines is rather erroneous. Interestingly, the Germans, they do develop what could be described as the first true submarine in the type 21, which is a sort of later version that they produced from 1944 onwards. Never sees combat, incidentally, because of all the teething troubles that they had with it. But that was, you know, much more comfortable underwater. It's faster underwater than it is on the surface. For example, unlike the Type 7, has a snorkel, so it can essentially stay submerged for much, much longer and is indeed designed to do so. So that's really the first true submarine. So that's what we're sort of dealing with. So it's a relatively, you know, they're relatively primitive, as I said, crucially, it is a submersible rather than a submarine, but within that, broadly comparable to what other countries, the US and the UK, for example, are producing at the same time.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, that's very helpful to understand sort of where this tech is coming from, sort of how new is it and what exactly these boats can and cannot do. So that's a very good foundation. Thank you. What about, then, the people in them? Who were the sailors? How were they selected and trained? I mean, obviously these, these submarines can't pilot themselves. So tell us about the humans.
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Roger Morehouse
Yeah, So a type 7, as I said, the backbone of the fleet would have a crew of around 50. I mean, bear in mind it's, it's, it's just over 60 meters long, a type VII. And in terms of the sort of interior, as I call it, habitable space, I suppose it's roughly equivalent to, I think, two London Underground carriages, if you can kind of imagine that. Two. Two subway carriages. And within that you've got, you know, two enormous diesel engines. I mean, over 300 liters each, which is a huge engine. The electrical electric motors as well. Of course, you've got, you know, torpedoes. You know, at any one time you might have about, you know, six or eight torpedoes actually within the vessel you had storage beyond that, outside the pressure hull for others. But you could have six or eight torpedoes. And they themselves are three meters long. They're huge things. And, you know, all of the hand wheels and gauges and all of the sort of control surfaces that you need, plus 50 men. The men literally sleep amongst their torpedoes. You know, they're on top of each other, that there's absolutely no space whatsoever inside. So crew of 50 in terms of training, you've got conscription, of course, Germany reintroduces conscription from 1935 initially just, you know, you'd have conscription to the, you know, a group of conscripts we brought into the navy. And from that the U Boat arm would select its, its cadres. And it tended to be quite rudimentary selection procedure. For example, there's one account that I use in the book of the selection taking place where they basically say anyone that's under five foot eight step forward and a group of men do, and they say anyone that's single step forward and that, you know, some of them step forward again and said, you know, basically that's our recruiting base. So if you were particularly keen to go into the Uber arm and you had particular skills that were prized by the Uber arm, then you could volunteer and you could get in through that way. But I said it's mainly by conscription and it's a fairly, a fairly sort of blunt weapon by way by which they select people. The training then is, is, is initially the same as, as normal naval training. So it's sort of essentially basic military training. And then you get, initially at least you get put into the U Boat arm, selected for the Uber army and they would do additional training. Quite rigorous at the outset. Actually the U boat training at the beginning is really very, very thorough with things like the escape chamber was a common one that they had to get through and had to get through many times, which is where they had a facsimile of a U boat conning tower at the bottom of a sort of perhaps 20 meter water tower. And you had to basically practice escaping from a submerged submarine, which wasn't easy and I think was tough on the nerves. And it's interesting that everyone had to go through that and everyone had to do it numerous times. And yet the numbers of submariners that actually escaped from stricken submarines once they, once they're, you know, once they're down and, and on the bottom as it were, are vanishingly small. So I think you can see that this is, I mean I say in the book, I think this is essentially a sort of psychological comfort blanket as much as anything, but it was an essential part of the training. So it's, it's very, very rigorous. Once you get through all of that training and go, you know, you go down, you're sort of driven then, then down different pathways as to whether you'll be, you know, sort of, you know, in the navigation area or in the technical area or in, you know, taking care of the torpedoes. For example, whatever, whatever area it might be. And then the, the commanders themselves could, had a degree of leeway by which they could sort of curate their own crews to some extent. Because. And the logic for this is, is quite obvious that I think within a, within a U boat in that confined space, as I said, with around 50 crew, you, you can't afford to have people within that who don't get on with each other, who don't mix, who don't, you know, want, want to play along, if you like. So if there were, you know, individuals that were so troublesome, then the U boat commander would, would, you know, pretty, pretty quickly get them out and pass them on to somebody else. So they're always looking for people with, you know, particular skills, like, you know, carpenters, for example, people that knew how to use, use, you know, their hands, tools, practical skills, electricians, plumbers, that sort of thing, mechanics, anyone with those skills. And they were actually going through that procedure. They talk about, you know, they, very often they wanted people who were sort of players of team sports because they had that, that element of collaboration within them or the experience of that. So you can see how, although it is a, you know, a conscript navy within that, the commanders themselves have a degree of leeway in trying to, to create sort of harmonious crew for themselves.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yes, especially in those incredibly tight conditions. You would really want someone who, you know, loved playing football or rugby or something where it's kind of like all working together towards a goal.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
So let's talk then about those goals. What were you both supposed to do and supposed to not do, at least in theory?
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Roger Morehouse
Yeah, this is quite an interesting one because I think one of the headline acts of the opening phase of the war, and this is the anniversary of this was, was only last week, is the. The sinking of the Royal Oak in scapa Flow in 1939, which is one of those sort of great sort of propaganda coups really, by the Germans, you know, the the commander that did it, who's gunther Prien aboard U47, was brought back to Germany as a hero and became one of the first sort of poster boys really of the Third Reich. And that was a big shock to the British, not least because Scapa Flow had been kind of penetrated and you know, a capital ship had been sunk with the loss of over 800 lives incidentally. So this was a sort of shock to the British. It was a, it was a. Philip to, to Carl Dernitz, the head of the U Boat arm, you know, this really vindicated his advocacy for U boats as an, as an offensive weapon, which is something he'd been arguing for, for, for years and very often arguing against the opposition of others or the indifference of others within the Nazi hierarchy. So this is really a seminal moment. But we have to bear in mind this is not what U boats are supposed to do. The whole intention of the U boat conflict in World War II, as Donitz foresaw it in the same way as it had been in the First World War, is to hit merchant tonnage, is to hit merchant ships, to try, you know, with the strategic goal of knocking Britain out of the war by strangling its supply lines. So, you know, if you know, Royal Navy vessels, that is the escorts of those convoys in a sense get in the way or make themselves a target, then they'll try to engage them. But the main purpose is to hit merchant vessels. So this is the so called tonnage war. So in a sense, I suppose perhaps the sort of popular view that grew out of that attack on Scapa Flow and the Royal Oak is rather erroneous because it's almost like a commando raid versus sort of infantry warfare. In a way it's a one off spectacular. That wasn't what U boats were really designed to do. So the outset of the war, I mean the, the British begin convoy operations pretty much on the outset. So from from 3rd September onwards. So the U boats are initially, you know, working not necessarily within wolfpacks. That's the sort of technology or a tactic if you like, that had been, had been discussed, you know, very extensively in the inter period. A lot of the sort of discussion papers and sort of thought exercises, if you like, of the nascent Kriegsmarine in Germany had been around wolf pack tactics and how they should best be instituted. But at the beginning they just don't have the numbers to do it. So you know, Donitz goes to war in 1939 with 27 combat U boats, which is a vanishingly small Number, he'd always wanted 300. That had been his sort of goal, to have a 300 boat fleet. And that would even. That would have meant that you'd have, you know, essentially 100U boats at sea in theater at any one time. The other 200 might be refitting or traveling to and from, but you'd be able to maintain a fleet of at least 100 in theater. So if he had, you know, if he said he goes to war with a grand total of 27 combat U boats in. In 1939, you can see that, you know, he probably had maybe 10 or 12 actually in theater at any one time, if you follow the same. Same ratio. And it simply wasn't enough for him to carry out. Carry out wolfpack operations. So they're sort of operating singly at the beginning of the war and just, you know, to some extent, just trusting on potluck in the western approaches as to whether they are able to engage enemy vessels or not. But as I said, that what they're doing is ideally targeting the merchant traffic coming into Britain. And if necessary, if it's under escort, then you have to engage the escorts as well.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, so that's very interesting, especially as you said, given sort of the famous bits that we often remember versus what the sort of main focus was meant to be going after then these convoys. Obviously, if Britain is doing this from the very beginning of the war, then the assumption is that this would be an effective tactic. So on the other side of it, on the U boat side, how dangerous was it to go about pursuing these fleets? What were the particular dangers that U boats faced? Did it change over the course of the war?
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Roger Morehouse
Yes, it changed very radically over the course of the war. Is it. What's interesting to add here is that you have the imposition in the interwar period of what were known as the prize rules, which was essentially a passage in international law, if you like. This is something that had been added to various naval treaties in the interwar period. And it was intended, I think, essentially to make U boat warfare legally unviable. And the prize rules essentially stipulated that, you know, if a U boat is. Or a submarine is to engage a merchant vessel in time of war, it first has to stop the vessel. It has to ascertain first, you know, verify whether it's an enemy vessel or not, which means you have to stop it. You have to sort of speak to the commander. You have to find out where it's coming from and to what it's carrying and so on. And then if it's if it's deemed to be an enemy vessel, you have to give the crew time to. To disembark. You can then torpedo the empty vessel. So this is all written into law, I think, in 1935. But then the submarine commander is responsible for the crew that's been disembarked. So it doesn't mean he can just sort of point them to land and say, off you go. He is actually responsible for their safety. So this is, as you can see, it's quite an extreme way, I think, essentially of trying to make submarine warfare unviable. Interestingly, the Americans don't follow this at all. In the Pacific war is worth mentioning. And the Germans do try, surprisingly, they do try to follow these rules as far as is possible in the opening phase of the war. So there are various examples of U boat crews, you know, stopping merchantmen, obviously, when they're not in convoy, because if they're in convoy, that's impossible. But if it's just a sole sort of merchant vessel, you know, the routine was that they'd be stopped, inquiries would be made as to, you know, what they're carrying and where they're going from and to. And so on. And they would, as far as was possible, they would try to follow the rules to some ridiculous ends. It must be added. There's one example, I think it was U30 I mentioned in the book that stopped a merchant vessel off the Irish coast in the Western Approaches and proceeded by the book and sank the vessel. And the crew were all disembarked. And then because the sea was running, you know, quite, quite high, the U boat commander actually decided to tow the, the lifeboats from this particular vessel to the Irish coast, which took, you know, more than. More than 24 hours, which, when you think about it in time of war is absolutely absurd and makes the U boat itself a target in the way that it's never really designed to be. And this is a complaint that a lot of you boat commanders made at the time and saying that this is just unviable, that we're like, this is. Why are we still trying to follow these rules? This is ridic. But remarkably, this continues. So this idea that. And it does kind of play into a sort of much older tradition, which I think is quite an interesting aspect. This is one that I sort of try and bring out in the book. The idea of the old fashioned sort of solidarity of the sea, you know, the traditional solidarity between seamen, between naval personnel doesn't matter which side they were on in the conflict. But you know, once, once you've sunk the vessel, you know, there's. The onus is to some extent on you to take care of the crew. You know, that that does persist to a surprising degree in the U boat arm in World War II. And to a surprising degree because we know what, you know, the overlaying of a very brutal ideology, you know, what effect that had on, you know, soldiers on the Eastern front, for example, particularly less so on the Western front. But we would have assumed perhaps that there would be numerous atrocities committed, but there really aren't. There's one war crime committed in 1944, for example, around the sinking of the Pelias off Ascension in mid Atlantic. And I mean there's a sort of a sin by. A sin by a mission, if you like, of the sinking of the Athena in 1939, which would probably have been a war crimes trial at the end of the war had its crew survived, but they didn't survive the war. So, you know, there's actually many more examples of U boat crews actually helping those whose vessels they've just sunk than there are the opposite of, you know, sort of that wanton cruelty and atrocities being committed, which I found surprising because I didn't expect to see that. And it partly comes from that, you know, trying to follow those prize rules. And partly it's that. That surprising persistence of this old fashioned sort of solidarity of the sea mentality. But nonetheless it's surprising. And the end result is actually that the U Boat arm is, or sorry, the U Boat war is actually, I think the cleanest theater of World War II, bar none, is. Which is. Is quite remarkable.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that really is remarkable. So I'm glad you highlighted it and helped us understand kind of what the conflicting norms are I suppose that we see in this moment. It definitely brings a different complexion to kind of how we think of the war fighting aspect of the U Boat theatre. But of course the sailors on board are not fighting all the time. It's not 24 7. There's lots of kind of waiting for things to happen. So what was that life like on board? What did they do do when they weren't fighting? Why did it smell so bad? What did they eat? How did they get resupplied? What was life like beyond the fighting part?
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Roger Morehouse
Yeah, I mean there's a lot in that, Miranda. So forgive me if I missed something. You feel free to come back to it. Yeah, I mean that's, that's, that is a big part of what I wanted to try and do with the book. Is to bring that stuff across because, you know, this is the stuff that's sort of missing from the conventional narrative of the Battle of the Atlantic and the wider U boat war. You know, there's that great line that, you know, warfare is 90% boredom and 10% terror. And you can kind of see that in the U boat arm that does change. That ratio does change incidentally, you know, as the war goes on after about 1943, you know, the, the, it's sort of the terms of engagement, if you like, shift very, very considerably against the U boatman and it be and that that ratio would become a rather less, rather less boredom and rather more terror. But yeah, that time, that sort of downtime is, is, is a significant part of the narrative. And essentially, you know, U boat crews worked on either a six or a four hour rotation. So they'd have either six or four hours on, on duty and then six or four, six and four hours off duty. And then you know, the, the rest of it would be, would be sleep and so it would rotate. So you know, if you imagine that, you know, your, your body clock for example, would, would just be up the wall completely, it would be non existent. And also in, you know, in addition, they tended particularly in the opening phase of the war they tended to motor on the surface by night and spend where they could. They would spend the days submerged for safety reasons. So again, body clocks completely sort of subverted in that sense. So that was a problem in itself. They tended not to wash. Crucially there's quite strict rationing of fresh water. So most of them tended just if at all to sort of have a splash in a sort of bowl of fresh water. But other than that, they didn't tend to wash. We have this rather romantic image of U boat crews being sort of very, very elaborately bearded, which comes from things like Das bought the film from the 1980s, you know, and that's true, that's absolutely how it tended to be. You can see numerous sort of photographs of E boat crews coming back from patrol, all very elaborately bearded and all filthy incidentally. So the, the corollary of that was that yes, they were bearded, but they also stank. They, they were allowed to have one change of clothing, one change of underwear, crucially one chain of underwear for what could be an eight week patrol. So essentially they wore the same clothes for eight weeks, didn't tend to wash very much, so hence the beards. But this all contributed to this, this famous U boat stink, which is something that comes out from a lot of the firsthand accounts, they all talk about the smell. And it wasn't just bo, there were lots of other ingredients to the U boat stink as well. So, you know, the most obvious one I suppose is diesel. Two massive diesel engines that have, that are running pretty much all the time, at least whenever, whenever you're on the surface. So, you know, the diesel gets everywhere. Anyone that's ever spilled diesel when they're filling their car will know what filthy stuff it is, how difficult it is to get out of your clothes, for example, if you get it on your clothes. So you know that that's an integral part of the stink. And then you've got things like halitosis. So a lot of them, you know, even early in the war, because they're, because they're spending most of that patrol, maybe if we take that sort of standard eight week patrol, they would have fresh food for about two weeks and then after that they're on tinned food. One of the results of that was the, was the reemergence of scurvy on U boats. So they did tend to sort of take crates of oranges and so on to try and improve that situation. But, you know, there was a one crew that was taken prisoner, was examined by Royal Army Medical corps doctors in 1941 and it found that half of those that survived were suffering from advanced scurvy to such an extent they had oral sepsis. So this wasn't just one, just gingivitis, this was actually oral sepsis that was diagnosed. So you can imagine what, what addition that would have been to the U boat stink in that particular vessel would been rather, rather hideous. So body odour, halitosis, diesel mold would be another one because, you know, basically everything is wet all the time and there's no facilities for drying, of course, because there's just no space for anything. So everyone is essentially damp all the time. So particularly in the tropics later on, because the U boat war spreads into the Indian Ocean, for example, you know, conditions there were particularly bad. There's one account of a vessel, you know, watching the mould grow on the inside surfaces of the submarine as they went through their mission. So that would have been another contributor. And of course vomit is the last usual ingredient because just because you're, you know, sailors doesn't mean you don't get seasick. And as I said, they spend most of the time on the surface anyway. So, you know, seasickness would have been a contributor as well. So if you imagine all of that mixed up, then that's getting close to the, to the U boat stink, which was, which was evidently a horrible thing. And the best they could do usually was to try and cover it up with aftershave. So they used to sort of spray around aftershave to cover it up themselves so you can add aftershave to the mix. So yeah, that sort of supply situation is interesting. As you mentioned in your question, the U boats would set sail for, you know, as I said, about an eight week patrol. Absolutely. Rammed to the gunnels with, with supplies, with food supplies and so on, which, you know, the fresh stuff would then be sort of eaten over roughly two weeks and then you're left with, with lots of tinned materials which would be even bread. I mean they had tinned bread. Don't ask me quite how they did that, but they had tinned bread. So, you know, tinned everything after about the first two weeks. Supply of food was generally pretty good and reasonably generous and reasonably varied because they were acutely aware within the German navy of the importance of, importance of food in the maintenance of morale. So, you know, the supply was generally pretty good and you know, in within the sort of first year of the war or so, you've already got the, you know, the question of resupply is one that looms very large. So they initially start using German supply vessels that are moored in neutral ports, for example, like particularly in Spain. So they now before they have the French ports on the Biscay coast in places like Lorient, St. Malo and other places they're using these supply vessels moored in Spanish ports so that they don't have to go all the way around the British Isles to get back to German ports to resupply and refit and so on. So they use that. And then later on it's the French Biscay ports, which makes life an awful lot easier after some of the 1940. And then later on they have this admittedly small network of supply vessels, both surface vessels and supply submarines which, you know, arrange these, you know, clandestine rendezvous in mid ocean and can, can pass over, you know, diesel or torpedoes or food or even they, a lot of them used to carry doctors aboard so they could even take care of any sort of injured crew or those that are, that are suffering from various diseases which incidentally because of the conditions were rife. So there is a sort of a modicum of a, of a sort of supply and care network being put into place, but that very quickly becomes the sort of the, the, the Achilles heel, if you like, because it's it's attacked by, attracted by the British via Enigma decrypts and is pretty quickly attacked.
- [38:20]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hmm. Okay, this is not sounding great as an experience to be on, I have to say. You know, you were earlier, it was like, oh, it's the cleanest theater of war. That sounds great. The ingredients of the stink, on the other hand, definitely don't make this sound enjoyable. So how do they sort of mentally deal with this? Imagine we're sort of three weeks into an eight week patrol. Everything stinks. You're on to tinned bread. How do you not sort of all kill each other in a 16 meter long tin can?
- [38:53]
Roger Morehouse
Yeah, it's a very good question. And this is one that again loomed very large in my research or came to loom large. Your question, how do they not kill each other? There was a phenomenon called the germs called Blech collar, which literally, I suppose you'd literally translate as tin can rage, which was, you know, these sort of outbreaks of spontaneous violence. I suppose, you know, there'd be a fight and everyone would pile in and then suddenly it would stop and everyone. And they'd say, well, what was that about? You know, and go back to whatever they'd been doing before. So obviously there was some, I mean, to some extent, I suppose that's the nature of men in warfare, in stressful situations that will happen in every theater. But I think given the confined spaces, the claustrophobia and the general level of stress in a U boat, I think it was probably exacerbated so much so that essentially it had its own name. But that wider question of the sort of psychological effect I think is a very important one. It's one that wasn't really talked about at the time. So the, you know, this sort of came to my notice really when I, I found an account in the archive of a Navy doctor who was actually looking into this at the time. And he makes the point that nobody, you know, upstairs, further up from him, up the hierarchy is interested because, you know, it sort of conflicts too much with the, with the sort of Nazi image of manhood and all the rest of it. And very few of the men actually want to come forward for the same reason because they see it as a sign of weakness and it's, and it's somehow shameful. But combat stress, or what we've now called ptsd, is very obviously a thing and he appreciates that. And he's putting together, trying to put together sort of a rather piecemeal manner, but trying to put, put together a study of the symptoms. And it's everything from, you know, insomnia and panic attacks, palpitations, all the way up to nervous breakdown. And there's. There's even an example, a case of suicide of a commander who. Who during a depth charge attack, pulls out his service pistol and shoots himself. So once I read that and then sort of started to look back at some of the firsthand accounts, then you start to see, you know, much more evidence of this and become more attuned to it. And it seems to be, you know, I think it's essentially, it's rather rife really, and, and, and, you know, it was very much the norm to suffer from it in some way. And that's not necessarily this, the sort of spectacular, you know, nervous breakdown element, although there's evidence of that as well, but, you know, just rather lower level, you know, sort of panic attacks. As I said, there was one commander, for example, who had such chronic insomnia that he used to try and, you know, he used to dive to 50 meters, at which point, you know, essentially at 50 meters, if, if it's running a storm on the surface, at 50 meters, it will be relatively calm. So it's the position at which the water will pretty much always be calm. So he used to dive to 50 meters just to try and get some sleep. You know, that. I mean, we can't diagnose why he had insomnia, but there's a good bet would be that this was a symptom of ptsd. So it seems that this is a fairly rife thing. And there's the other sort of circumstantial, sort of anecdotal evidence from, you know, particularly from the post war, you know, of those, the few survivors, only one in four of the Uber arm actually survived the war. So 75% death rate, which is astonishing. But of those few survivors, you know, many of them were just broken by the experience and sort of spent the rest of the war in rest of their lives in psychiatric institutions. So, you know, this was an element, I think, that we haven't really examined at all before in the context of the U Boat war. And it's particularly rife, I think, given that, you know, the confined nature of what they're trying to do and the additional element of claustrophobia. And of course, the knowledge that, you know, from the opening phase, I suppose those stresses are always there, but in the opening phase of the war, it was easier to cope with to some extent, because you felt like you were. It felt like you were winning, essentially. You know, your statistical lifespan, not that they necessarily mean knew this, but the statistical lifespan of the U boat crew at the beginning of the war is between seven and nine missions, seven and nine patrols. By the middle of the war, 1943, it's down to two to three patrols. And then from then on it, it deteriorates further. So by the end of 1944, the statistical lifespan of a U boat crew is less than one patrol. So at that stage, you know, they would have known. They won't necessarily have known those statistics, but they would have known that the war had massively turned against them. They were essentially fish in a barrel to a large extent. They were completely at the mercy of allied countermeasures, which had vastly improved over the war, become much more effective and much more deadly. And they would have known that. And that, I think, was crucially that's another element of that psychological stress that, that they're under.
- [44:33]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, the fatalities here are really quite striking, so I'm glad you highlighted that. But it is on this countermeasures part that I think we should go to next because it does definitely get a lot worse for the U boats as the war progresses. What is causing that? You discuss in the book sort of almost a technological cat and mouse of kind of, you know, the British break this code, but then the U boats do this instead, and then there's this bit of radar and then that. So why does it. What is the turning point for the U boats? Why is it getting worse? And what are these sort of continual adaptations on both sides?
- [45:09]
Roger Morehouse
Yeah, again, there's a. There's a lot in that. The U boats themselves, you know, they, they go to War in 1939. They initially have what they call themselves the happy time, which is when they're sort of scoring good figures. Allied countermeasures against them are less than entirely effective, as it were. You know, they're more, they're more defensive in nature. They're not yet. The allies are not yet sort of going over onto the, to the, to the offensive. So they're much more trying to defend the convoys against. Against attack. And the U boats are, you know, develop tactics like the developing wolf pack tactics, once they have the numbers, are very good at engaging those convoys very effectively. So, for example, if you had a wolf pack of maybe 5 or 6U boats engaging a convoy, and the convoy could be, let's say, for instance, 40 merchantmen and perhaps five or eight escort vessels, what they tended to do was have a couple of U boats that would sort of fire in was firing torpedoes from the outside into that convoy and perhaps, you know, hit a couple of vessels at which point the escorts would fan out and to try and to try and engage them. And then you'd have another couple of U boats that would essentially surface inside the convoy itself. And then they could go up and down the lines of the convoy and the convoy went in, went in, in sort of columns, if you like. And they would literally be, you know, middle of the night, but they would be essentially sailing up the lines of the convoy, picking off the best targets, usually things like tankers, while the escorts of course are off trying to hunt the, you know, the U boats that had attacked from the outside. So, you know, that was the sort of standard tactic and it was hugely effective. And you can see how, you know, by exploiting the darkness, by exploiting their own ability to submerge and then sort of, you know, re emerge elsewhere and so on surface elsewhere, you know, they could, they could really effectively attack those convoys. But then later on in the war that shifts. So from late 42 to 43. So Donitz incidentally gets his 300 fleet, 300U boat fleet in the middle of 1942. So there's this huge ramping up of construction of U boats. So he gets what he always wanted, which was his 300U boat fleet middle of 42. So from then on he's effectively able to go toe to toe with the Allies by then, which he does in mid Atlantic. So from then on until the spring, early summer of 1943, you know, this is essentially like two heavyweight boxers sort of going at each other in the ring. But the, the problem I suppose that the U boats have is that they can't be replaced as quickly as the Allies can replace merchantmen. So then it comes down to the industrial capacity of the respective powers. And the Germans just can't build enough U boats quick enough. So they're essentially being sunk sort of one to one by that spring of 1943. And the reason for that shift is, you know, there are numerous reasons. So on the Allied side, countermeasures do improve radically. So they are able basically not just to have this sort of defensive attitude towards U boats to actually, but to actually go and engage them much more effectively. Using asdic, for example, using sonar, later on using air attack with aerial radar. So this I think is a game changer. So you know, if you imagine a destroyer bearing down on a U boat, the U boat can essentially do, on the surface at least can do a similar speed that the Destroyer can. So essentially if you're, you know, you've got a destroyer chasing, you can probably, you know, you can evade it and if necessary, you dive and then, you know, you try and get away that way. But if you're attacked from the air, by the time you actually spot the aircraft bearing down on you, you, you have about a minute in which to submerge and try and escape. And it takes a u boat about 30 seconds to submerge. So they've, you know, the, the margins are extremely tight. So although we have this sort of stereotypical image of U boats being engaged and destroyed by depth charging, that was actually the least effective method of, of engagement. The most effective statistically is aerial attack by, by aircraft equipped with radar, because they could see the U boats from anything like up to about 15 miles away and then they could be bearing down on it. And as I said, you know, by the time the Uber actually saw them, it was, it was arguably too late. So that's the most effective. The next, the next most effective was actually the use of a thing, a development which comes in on Stream in 1943, which was called Hedgehog, which was a, rather than a depth charge, which is a fairly dumb weapon, it was essentially a barrel bomb with a, with a barometric fuse. The Hedgehog was, was a spigot mortar which, which exploded on impact. So if you have an impact on, on the hull of, of EU boats, that could be, that was devastating. So the U boat is not going to be able to surface after that. It was just going straight down. So the conventional, in the, in the opening phase of the war, the conventional sort of scenario by which U boats are destroyed is that, you know, they are damaged by depth charging. And in the depth charge, if it goes off within about 20 meters of your vessel, that's usually enough for you to cause damage. Any closer than that, the damage obviously is that much worse and you could be forced to the surface. So the U boat would be forced to the surface, you know, to, for essentially the commander says, you know, we can't, we can't sustain this sort of damage in perpetuity. We've got to surface. So they do and they are permitted to surrender themselves and scuttle the vessel. So essentially that was the pattern, which is why at that opening phase of the war you have so many of these accounts, as I mentioned earlier on in the archive, of U boat crews being interrogated by naval intelligence. That drops off after about 1944. There are no more because the methods of counterattack are so much More effective. The use of hedgehog is so destructive to U boats that essentially they're not taking prisoners anymore. There are no prisoners to take, which is a really dramatic shift, you know, 43, 44. So, you know, that's key. So that, that sort of shift in technology in the way that they engage the U boats is very important. The use of Enigma intelligence, of course, is vitally important, not least in being able to sort of initially, in a defensive way, to root convoys away from the wolf packs where, you know, they are, but then later on in a much more offensive manner to enable hunter killer groups, as they called them, groups of vessels, often with aircraft carriers on, in tow, to, you know, to give that aerial element that I mentioned that they then actively hunting down U boats. And they had this policy of what they called hunting to exhaustion. So they would literally, you know, it was no longer defensive, it was much more offensive. And they would literally wait on the surface. They would. They would be able to pinpoint where the U boat was using asdic, wait for it to surface, then it be engaged, and then they'd engage it under the water with, with depth charges or with hedgehog. And it's like a constant thing. So very often the boats are being subjected to sort of depth charge attacks of over 24 hours, which is about the limit that they can stay underwater, incidentally, at which point they're forced to surface and, you know, either engage on the surface, which is extremely hazardous, or they have to surrender themselves. So this is where, this is where the wall really just turns against them in a, in a. In a very, very dramatic way. If you add into all of that the fact that we're now down, say for example, by 1943, you're down to the second, but probably third generation of U boat commanders and crews and a lot of the training procedures and so on, training requirements have been in inverted commas, streamlined by that point. Point, you've got crews and commanders who are much less well equipped than the first generation. Those people like Gunter, Priya, Noto, Kretschmer and so on, who were, you know, the first sort of, you know, the heroes of the U boat arm, all of whom left, you know, departed the scene in 1941. Incidentally, Kretschmore was taken prisoner. Prien was killed. Joachim Schepke was the third of that sort of triumvirate. He was killed as well in March, March 41st. So, you know, those, those with that huge experience have all left the scene. So you're down to the second and third generation who are, you know, of necessity have, have much, much less experience, their training has been much less thorough, so they're actually less well able to engage or to defend themselves against a much more effective Allied counterattack. So it's a sort of, it's an agglomeration of all of those aspects. That means that the war completely turns against the U Boat arm from about 1943 onwards. And I always give just one last thing I realize is a very long answer, Miranda, and I apologise. But one illustration of this is one U boat that I often mention, U427, which was launched in the summer of 1943 and it survived the World War. So it was in theater essentially for the last two years of the war. And if you look at its statistics, which are not unusual for that period, it sinks precisely nothing. So it doesn't sink a single Allied vessel, but it is subjected to over 600 depth charge attacks. And that shows you. Is really illustrative of the way in which the war turned for the U Boat arm.
- [55:37]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, I mean that example encapsulates everything you've just described for us. It really, really is such an intense change and especially given what you were telling us earlier about conditions on board and then you're adding 24 hours of depth charges. I mean, it really is not a good situation for the U boats by then and definitely explains individual boats having to surrender. What happens then when we get to the end of the war? Hitler dies. There's now not just one U boat surrendering after a particular attack, but kind of the entire arm being finished. What is that like?
- [56:12]
Roger Morehouse
Yeah, it's a. But the interesting thing, I suppose in this is that Donitz actually succeeds Hitler as head of state, so he's named as Hitler's successor in, in Hitler's testament. So the last week of the war effectively is under Donitz's own. The, you know, Third Reich is under Donitz's command. So he spends most of it actually, you know, via his deputies, you know, trying to negotiate a way out of the war. This is where you have those separate negotiated pieces, for example, at Reims and then later at Luna, Berg Heath and so on. And he's trying to delay as much as possible, particularly against the war against the Soviets, because he's trying to evacuate as much as possible military personnel and civilians from the east and to prevent them falling into the hands of the Soviets. So there is hence this sort of rather piecemeal surrender, the sort of messy end of World War II. But in amongst all of that Donitz had given an order for his U boats. When the order came, he said, you know, this is how it is to proceed. I will give the order. He'd send out a code word. And his U boat crews at that point were essentially to scuttle. They were to scuttle themselves. So there was a. The idea of surrendering your vessel to the enemy was viewed by most U boatmen, I think most naval crews generally, if you look at how the German navy reacts to the order to surrender their vessels at the end of the First World War, that sort of mass scuttling in Scapa Flow, for example, you can see how it was viewed. The idea of surrendering your vessel to the enemy was viewed with distaste, really, by. By naval personnel. And they had the same distaste at the end of the Second World War as well. So naval crews generally tended to want to scuttle themselves. So a lot of them scuttled on that order. Some of them then did surrender. So there was some network set up. So the order was given that you were to surrender to the nearest Allied port, for example, to where you were. There were some objections taken to that. For example, there was a couple of U boats up in the Arctic and their nearest Allied port would have been Murmansk, but of course, that's surrendering to the Soviets. So they weren't prepared to do that. So they sort of, you know, essentially motored west and surrendered at, I think, the north of Scotland in those couple of examples. So they had procedures in place. A lot of U boats simply scuttled themselves where they were when the order was given. Those that tended to be at sea generally surrendered to the nearest Allied port as instructed. The British actually had a network set up or procedure set up. They set aside Loch Erebol, which is right at the northwestern corner of northern Scotland, so very close to Cape Roth, if we. If anyone knows the geography, geography up there. And Loch Erebol is very deep and very wide, so it's perfectly able to accommodate large numbers of surrendering vessels. But crucially, and you can read this in the Allied correspondence around, was sufficiently far away from everywhere else in Britain that if there were to be some sort of protest or uprising, if you like, by German U boat crews, it could at least be contained, and even the news of it could be contained. So for propaganda purposes. So that was the reason that Erebol was chosen as it was. You know, the U boats that surrendered at Erebol, I think it was about 30 from memory, didn't cause Any trouble at all. And then later on they would. They were sort of ferried down to the west of Scotland where a couple of places where the crews were taken off, and eventually to Loch Ryan, which is near Stranrar, and Lisa Halley, which is off Londonderry in Northern Ireland. And those two places were kept for where all the surrendering vessels were sort of collected and eventually towed out into the Western Approaches and sunk, which is an operation called Operation Deadlight, which is in itself really interesting. I mean, I cover that as the. The sort of epilogue to the book. It's a really interesting episode. 116U boats, you know, the last of those that were. That surrendered themselves were taken out and sunk, essentially used for target practice in the winter of 1945 to 46 off the northern Irish coast. And you know, that again, it sort of is kind of an interesting illustration of the coming stresses and strains of the relationship with the Soviets because the British and the Americans were very keen that the latest U boats didn't fall into the hands of the Soviets because they didn't want the Soviets to have the technology, for example. So you can see there's a little thread there. One of the threads of the coming Cold War is already in evidence right at the end of the. Of World War II.
- [61:31]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah. And in many ways that kind of takes us full circle back to where we started with the threads of World War I, very much building into the story you told us about World War II. So very interesting to see those continuities and also endings kind of both in the same moment and probably a good place as well to draw our discussion to a close. Leaving me with just the final question of whether there's anything you might be currently or looking to work on now that this book is done, whether or not it's U boat related. Anything you want to give us a brief sneak preview of?
- [62:01]
Roger Morehouse
Well, this is one of the. One of the great things about being freelance, Miranda, is that I, you know, I have sort of free choice that I want to go and land on next. And I've done, as I said before, I've done a bit of military before. This obviously has been military. I'm quite happy to take us take a step back into the political arena. So the next book is actually on the Night of the Long Knives, the Nazi purge in 1934, to have a look at that, because there's very, very little on it. I mean, obviously it gets discussed in a lot of the sort of standard histories and so on. It's a key part of that sort of, you know, the building of Hitler's dictatorship. But there's no sort of single volume sort of scholarly study of it. And it's sort of naturally dramatic anyway, so I'm going to be doing that. So I'm looking forward to getting stuck into that. Well, imminently, actually, once I sort of finish promoting this one, I'll be straight back in the archive to look at that subject.
- [63:01]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, while you are in those archives, of course, listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled Wolf Inside Hitler's U Boat War, published by William Collins in 2025. Roger, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [63:14]
Roger Morehouse
My great pleasure. Thanks for having me.