Originally Posted by CCIP
Returning to the original topic, because this was at one point about SH3, and SH3 vs. SH4, let me try to break it down for you...
What I see in that perspective is a lot of mythology that surrounds uboats, and I'm sad to see it drive away players, because SH3 is a wonderful game and the Atlantic campaign is so worth playing and experiencing. And I say that as someone who is predominantly an SH4 player. The problems I see with that view of U-boats is that I think it comes with a misunderstanding of what the experience was actually about.
Over the years since WWII, the subject of U-boats has grown over with various myths. Perhaps the first of these were promoted by, ironically, Doenitz and Churchill in equal measure. The view of U-boats as "greatest peril" and "grey wolves" and a sort of scary opponent that was oh-so-close to succeeding comes largely from people like them, because their historical legacy stood to gain from that. The truth is that the U-boats weren't close, and they were beaten decisively far earlier than most would think. As a campaign, the U-boat war was effectively lost by early-mid 1941, much in the same way the war on land was lost by mid-late 1941 when Barbarossa failed to get to its intended objectives.
If SH3 was a competitive game where you played as the leader of Germany, yeah, it'd get pretty frustrating because the other players would have you beaten by that point and it's not a great sport after that. But SH3 is not a sport, and you're not playing Germany - you're playing an individual U-boat commander, and in that role, I'd argue that you have no less to experience than in a game that's about commanding troops on a tactical battlefield after Barbarossa, or about flying an airplane after the Battle of Britain. It's VERY worth playing and you can achieve some outstanding success on your own personal scale.
The second set of myths is that "Iron Coffins" view you mentioned, of U-boats as death-traps full of doomed men who are hopeless and painfully aware of their coming demise, but stuck and unable to do anything amid crumbling morale. But that, too, isn't really the truth, especially as applies to U-boat commanders - and Werner and to a lesser extent Buchheim had their own agendas when presenting that view. Werner in particular had been heavily criticized, by both historians and other U-boat men, for distorting facts to create that narrative of doom and victimhood. Yes, it's true that most U-boats were sunk, and that the costs were heavy. However there is little evidence that any of the gloom suggested by these heavily anti-war works actually existed in the Kriegsmarine. What's more, the deaths in the U-boat force disproportionately affected the ratings, while many more officers and the vast majority of U-boat commanders actually survived the war, including most of the successful ones. And again, I remind that your role in SH3 is not the role of a low-ranking sailor or of an anthromorphized submarine - you play as the commander of a boat, and as such, the truth beyond the myths is that at any point in the war, your chances of surviving a career are not actually that bad. And to the end, you would have a crew who were ready and willing to go to sea, contrary to what some of the myths say.
Finally, the third problematic perspective is that promoted by historians such as Clay Blair. Blair is an excellent researcher and his work presented some really important archival evidence - but Blair was also an American navy officer and a man with an agenda. His agenda came from the fact that he was bitter to see the U-boats getting so much post-war attention, while for quite some time, the US submarine effort was forgotten. He wasted no opportunity to impose his own interpretation on the U-boat war, looking for the smallest bits of evidence that the U-boat force was ineffective, unprepared, corrupted by Nazism, and otherwise not nearly as good as his contemporaries might've thought. He wanted to portray U-boat officers as, in effect, liars and braggarts - while taking a very generous perspective on US submariners in equivalent positions in his other work. In breaking down - quite justly - some of the original U-boat myths, he'd also helped build his own, which I think is very unfair and in many cases absolutely forced. The U-boat story is one that absolutely is significant and deserves to be heard - and experienced, through games such as SH3. It is not one bit tainted by "losing", and the actual history of the U-boat war shows that there are some very significant things worth knowing and understanding about it, at any time in the war.
So in the original post, I see elements of all three mythologized perspectives - the "greatest peril" of Churchill, the "iron coffins" of Werner, and the "no-good lying Nazis" of Blair. All three of them are highly inaccurate and I fear they've distorted the views of a lot of people. I recommend learning more about history while letting go of those preconceived notions - and, I absolutely recommend playing SH3!
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