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
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)