What Everyone Should Know about the German U-boat

[derstosstrupp]

Hi All,

Thought this may be of some interest, and so I translated it from German. It is a pamphlet called "What Everyone Should Know about the German U-boat", and it appears to have been published early in WW2. It is available on Internet Archives.

I have linked my English translation as well as the German original in my sig below. Please advise if a different forum would be appropriate - otherwise I will post here and in SH5 as it is relevant to U-boats.

The intent was clearly to recruit for the U-boat arm, as the document takes the form of a conversation between two high-school-aged boys, one of whose teacher explained to his class how a U-boat works, and he teaches his friend what he learned.

A few interesting things will likely strike those here with some knowledge - it is clearly a Type II that is depicted and described, and some of the procedures and specifications about U-boats in general are misleading in the way they are described, which very likely was the intent of the author for reasons of secrecy. For example, the quote that U-boats shouldn't go deeper than 50 meters, or that a U-boat must point in the direction it wants to shoot implying torpedoes cannot turn onto a gyro angle. The part about the U-boats "having guardian angels that make the depth charges fall everywhere else but on the U-boat" makes the hair on the back of your neck stand on end considering the abysmal losses the U-boats experienced later in the war.

A shameless plug for my tutorial in my sig - the document also mentions what I suspected in my tutorial was the foundation of U-boat target data gathering - the "0-AOB" method, waiting til exactly in front of the target to determine course, is exactly described in this document. It says speed was simply "estimated", but this we know from the tutorial isn't necessarily true (again, the author likely was keeping his cards close to his chest and not revealing some specifics), and estimating isn't necessary when you have exact course and knowledge of own position.

Please enjoy - and I am not a professional translator although I do speak fluent German. Please let me know if anything isn't clear!

[Leoz]

Very interesting !

Thanks for taking the time to do this and for sharing.