Couple of Das Boot questions...

[Sailor Steve]

Originally Posted by Weiss Pinguin

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?

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

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?

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

(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)

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).