Of some interest to the SubSim community, particularly those SH3 and SH5 players might be Black Flag: The Surrender of Germany's U-Boat Forces by Lawrence Paterson, ISBN 978-0-7603-3754-7.
The disposition of the boats and the men of the U-Boot waffe is generally a footnote in the final chapter of most books referencing the battle of the Atlantic but Black Flag takes the reader from the very last days of the Third Reich through to early 1946 by which time the vast majority of the captured boats had been sunk as targets, scuttled or otherwise disposed of.
The book is well illustrated and many of the photos will probably be new including KK Adelbert Schnee's U-2511 with its white conning tower nesting beside some other Type XXI's and a shot of a nameless U-Boat matlot sporting both his U-Boat badge and the Army's coveted tank killing badge, awarded for singlehandedly destroying an enemy tank. The relevance of the latter is that there are some all too brief descriptions of U-Boat crews in ground fighting in North Germany and those French ports (Lorient in particualr) that had remained in German hands until the Nazi surrender.
Black Flag is well annotated, an easy read and its appendicies basically detail the fate of every boat that surrendered as well as her last captain. Some of this material is out there elsewhere but this 2009 volume deserves a place in the library of anybody with more than a casual interest in U-Boats.
|