Couple of Das Boot questions...
 

So while on vacation last month I picked up Das Boot when I visited the USS Pampanito (Btw if you find yourself in San Francisco and haven't yet seen her, do it!), and I found it to be so good that I'm reading it again :smug:

2 questions though:
A) Partway through the book the Old Man mentions homing torpedoes and the subsequent British countermeasure, however, the book takes place in late 1941, and according to every source/article/etc I've read it wasn't until mid-1943 that the first homing torpedoes were deployed, along with the decoy Foxer. Was this just a slip-up by the author, or were there really early homing torpedoes that I haven't heard of?

B) For the first 1/3 of the book all the various UA/UX/UF/etc acronyms confused me, before I realized they referred to various U-boats. Were these codenames assigned to U-boats, a naming system, or just something Buchheim came up with for the book?

(Btw, sorry if this is in the wrong section, but as Das Boot is about U-boats I figured the SHIII section might be better than the general 'Submarine books' section)

Buchheim stretched things a little, combining and adding where he thought it would add to the story.

No, they were not real names or code names. He wanted his story to be as generic as possible. In the movie they restored the name of the boat he actually travelled on, U-96. Then they followed the book and had the boat sunk at the end of that patrol. The real U-96 was indeed sunk during an air raid while docked, but not until the very end of the war.
http://www.uboat.net/boats/u96.htm

Either one is okay on a subject like this. There have been many threads about the book and the movie in both sections (and a few others besides).

Ah, thanks. The codenames didn't bother me all that much, but when I read about the torpedoes I literally spent 10 minutes trying to figure out how Buchheim might've slipped up when everything else seemed to be match up with what I know on U-boats. (Not that I would know much about the technical details of a U-boat :shucks:)

It's well-known that Buchheim had a low opinion of the movie, but I've heard that some u-boatmen said the same thing about the book.

I take both for what they are: perhaps not historically perfect, but the best available representation of what life was like for those particular warriors.

To echo what Sailor Steve said - IIRC it's generally acknowledged that Buccheim combined experiences and impressions from more than one u-boat patrol into a book that fictionalizes just one...which did lead to some anachronisms, since he's drawing on events that took place over the entire course of the war and not just late 1941.

I've also read that the designations given to the u-boats in the book were to keep people from thinking that he was talking about a specific known boat and its commander and crew, especially since much of the book is drawn from real-life experiences but some is fictional. If he had used the numerical designations it might give away exactly who he was talking about (if he was relating a real event) or make people think that something fictional or partly so was a real event involving a known boat and crew when it might not be.

Given the reaction that the book got from some of the surviving u-boat men when it was published, it's probably a good thing that he didn't use the real designations/names of boats and their commanders, lol.

lol, I figured that might be the case. Still a good read, anachronisms and all :smug:

Yeah, I enjoyed it. I would love to read some of his other books, but IIRC none of them have been translated into English. And what German I know is only good for the barest essentials of polite conversation and barking orders at a u-boat crew. :)

P.S. And cursing.

:damn: I forgot all about that part. He did indeed go on (I think) three patrols with two different boats. Your points about not using real numbers are great as well.:rock:

I understand that he wrote two more novels about the same characters, and no, neither one has been translated.

His real book, U-Boat War, which chronicles real events and is full of pictures, is indeed available in English, and quite good.
http://www.amazon.com/U-Boat-War-Lot...0339744&sr=1-1

The other two books are more of a biographic style. "Die Festung" starts with the ending of his second war patrol on U 96 in early '43, sees him in Berlin and his atellier in southern Bavaria, gets him back to France in mid '44, to Brest a bit after D-Day with the almost last sub out of Brest and down the coast, then to Paris and ends in late '44 near the Belgian border.
"Der Abschied" simply ties up some loose knots during a documentary cruise on the Otto Hahn.
If your German is good enough i can heartly recommend "Die Festung". "Der Abschied" is more like a doorstopper.

Thanks. Also IIRC, the second part of the fictional designations he uses for the u-boats in the book (i.e., the "M" in "UM") is the first letter of the last name he gives to the commander of each craft. I think U-96 (the boat he is on) is referred to as "UA," the "A" being for "Alte" because its commander is simply referred to as Der Alte and no name for him is ever given.

That one, I got. Picked up a former library copy on the cheap via one of Amazon's third party sellers. It's fairly light on text but the pictures are stunning - and it is mostly a "picture book" anyway. For those that haven't seen it, it include pics taken of the real event described in the book and featured in the movie where they unexpectedly encounter that other u-boat in very heavy seas and come alongside her. It's not even apparent in the movie just how close they got to "Thomsen" in the real encounter, but from the pictures it's unbelievable. Also amazing that he got any pictures at all given the situation and the weather.

Interesting, although Thomsen's boat is designated UF. :hmmm: Could be the exception, though.

And I'll definitely have to look up U-boat War.

I don't know if I read that somewhere, or just made the (perhaps mistaken) connection as I was reading. Seemed like U-96 was referred to as "UA" and "UM" was mentioned as "Merkel's boat" or some such so it made sense at the time. It's possible I didn't pay any attention to it after that, lol, and missed references that didn't fit.

I got my new sig from the last part of the book. :smug: