U96 course

[flag4]

have been watching Das Boot (again!)

and i was wondering if anyone has plotted the course of U96 and if so, do they have it to view. i would love to see this and follow it myself and i wonder if they went into so much detail whilst making the film?

cheers

[nikimcbee]

They do mention map coordinates.:hmmm: AK something if I remember correctly.

[CCIP]

It's not really specified anymore, and Buchheim is deliberately vague - especially in the book where the grid coordinates are completely made-up and not historical. However from what you can generally deduce, most of the actual patrol takes place south of Iceland.

[Obltn Strand]

uboat.net should give some information of that patrol.

Sorry. I dont know how to post links

[kapuhy]

Here you go:

http://www.uboat.net/boats/patrols/patrol_4725.html

Note: this is an actual patrol as it happened IRL - of course, being a novelist, Buchheim has made some changes in his telling of the story, so "his" U96's route might be different. As noted above, Buchheim kept details like this deliberately vague, describing how it is to be a part of U-Boat crew rather than writing a war diary.

[CCIP]

Here you go:

http://www.uboat.net/boats/patrols/patrol_4725.html

Note: this is an actual patrol as it happened IRL - of course, being a novelist, Buchheim has made some changes in his telling of the story, so "his" U96's route might be different. As noted above, Buchheim kept details like this deliberately vague, describing how it is to be a part of U-Boat crew rather than writing a war diary.

Yep - and it's also worth noting that the Das Boot patrol was sort of a collage of stories that had occured over several patrols on the actual U-96.

[Sailor Steve]

And remember that in the book no number is ever mentioned. The boat is "U-A".

[Gargamel]

Wasn't U-A an actual boat? Wouldn't that count as it's number then?

[Sailor Steve]

There was a boat in the First World War called U-A. Buchheim used that specifically because he didn't want to use the number of an actual WW2 boat. If I recall correctly Thomsen's boat was U-X.

[CCIP]

No, there was a UA in WWII. It was a boat originally built in Germany for the Turkish navy and seized at the start of the war. It was actually quite successful, even with a much different design from the German U-boats http://uboat.net/boats/foreign_ua.htm

However it's definitely not the boat in Das Boot.

[Gargamel]

Ok, That makes more sense then. I had remembered U-A making some fairly successful trips to the western shores of Africa. The impression I got was it was somewhere between a VII and A IX.

Time to do a little Digging!

[Gargamel]

From http://www.uboat.net/boats/foreign_ua.htm:

http://www.uboat.net/photos/ua.jpg

The boat was almost ready as the Turkish Batiray (the second of 4 ordered from Germaniawerft, the first, Saldiray, had been delivered in June 1939) when the war in Europe broke out and she was not handed to the Turkish but rather commissioned into the German Navy.
The remaining two boats, Atilay and Yildiray, were laid down in Turkish yards under German supervision. Altiray was commissioned in 1940 but with the German engineers and designers gone due to the war Yildiray was much delayed and was not commissioned until Jan, 1946. Altiray was lost with all hands to a moored mine on 14 July, 1942.
She was briefly named Optimist by the Germans but given her UA name on 21 Sept, 1939. She was the most successful foreign U-boat (http://www.uboat.net/boats/index_foreign.html) in German service by far, credited with 7 of the 9 ships sunk by those boats. Cohausz sank all those 7 ships and Eckermann sank one.



So has anybody modeled this boat in a mod yet? It looks kinda cool.

[Sailor Steve]

No, there was a UA in WWII.
:damn:

I thought there was, but I searched the site thoroughly (or so I thought) and couldn't find it. I didn't think to look at the captured boats section. :oops:

[flag4]

thanks everyone. thanks for the links. i did find U96 sinkings on google maps with flags and names for each ship sunk, but dont know how to post the link?
the other map from from uboat.net is interesting coz it zigzags everywhere. i didnt know Bucheim compiled many patrols to use for one in the film. i'll just head up to AK then and see how long i last!

cheers!