First hand accounts

[Knipper]

Hi all,

I've been chatting with the wonderful Ms Penelope Grey about books and she suggested I start a thread hereabouts. Basically, I'm trying to find first-hand accounts of the U-Boat war. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Ms G pointed me to 'Hitler's U-Boat War, the Hunters/Hunted (hurry on Amazon) but I'm thinking along the lines of Saburo Sakai's 'Samurai' and Adolf Galland's autobiog. Ok - they were air aces - but you know what I mean.

My interest was sparked many years ago by my father's reminisences of his time at Biggin Hill (1939 - 1944) and it struck me later on that while the historians might make pronoucements about events on the grander scale, the really interesting stuff that is worth preserving is in the minds of the people who were there at the time. (Have you seen the interviews in World at War?) Unfortunately, too few of them survived and even fewer of them were able to record their memories. I guess this is particularly true of the U-Boat crews.

I did meet an elderly lady a few years ago in Hannover who's husband served in the Kriegsmarine and who never returned. She never did get to find out what happened to him. She showed me his picture and I told her about my uncle who went down with his ship off Archangel. "Maybe they met," she said. I thought that kind of summed the whole thing up.

I digress. Any suggestions will be warmly welcomed and immediately translated into searches on Amazon.