Designed for visual impact, this album combines photographs, paintings, and propaganda posters to illustrate a German crewman's life in submarine combat. For narration and interpretation of the Battle of the Atlantic, frankly better sources exist, but sometimes a lavish pictorial excites more readership interest. Full-page spreads abound, sorted among return-to-port receptions, interiors of U-boats, combat, sinkings, and death or rescue at sea, or relics like the sub pens in French ports or the U-505 in Chicago. Nazi naval insignia are represented through such items as Dx9a netz's baton and uniform and ace captain Gunther Prien's decorations, evidently left ashore before he was sunk. The damp grimness of the U-boat experience, conveyed in stills from
Das Boot and in sidebar quotations from the most famous U-boat book,
Iron Coffins by Herbert Werner (1969, o.p.), is evident throughout, lending readers a tactile first acquaintance with this critical phase of the war.
Gilbert Taylor
