Roger Morehouse's new book, U-Boats and the Great War, is out now, and it's a must-read for anyone who's ever been on a U-boat. In this episode, he talks to us about how the U-boats were one of the most important naval forces in World War II, and how they changed the course of the war.
00:03:11.000I do, and I make this argument in the book.
00:03:14.000I think when Churchill makes that, or when he's talking about that, obviously he's writing in his memoir, but he's talking about the period, what the Germans used to call the happy time.
00:03:24.000That was their first period of scoring really, really high sinking rates against Allied convoys and so on.
00:03:33.000So it's kind of the second half of 1940 up until maybe early 1942, that sort of period.
00:03:40.000And crucially, it's the period before the Americans come into the war.
00:03:43.000The Americans come into the war in December of 1941, and they really sort of come on stream with Liberty ships and all of that through 1943.
00:03:58.000So in that first happy time, there was a genuine concern in Allied circles that this could strangle Britain.
00:04:07.000And that was the intention was to, you know, essentially knock out Britain's supply lines, take Britain out of the war, at least force London to negotiations.
00:04:18.000And I think there was a genuine fear and there was a concern in that period that if you sink enough ships, then, you know, Britain would be forced to, you know, at least sort of tighten belts that are already tight by that stage and restrict rationing and all that sort of thing.
00:04:33.000So I think there was a concern that was genuine, but it was fairly short lived.
00:04:39.000And by the time the Americans come in, that sort of evaporates.
00:04:42.000And then really from 1943 onwards, you know, the tables turn enormously against the U-boat arm.
00:04:48.000So the U-boats are effectively, you know, sitting ducks really from 1943 onwards.
00:04:53.000And you don't really see that, I think, unless you kind of see it from their perspective, which is what I tried to do with the book, trying to sort of shift that perspective.
00:05:02.000And, you know, that the idea of us being under genuine threat for the full maybe six years, five, six years of the war, I think is overblown.
00:05:13.000There was a small moment when it was a threat.
00:05:16.000And during that period, the Germans didn't have the numbers to make it count.
00:05:20.000By the time they had the numbers, the moment had gone.
00:05:22.000So I think that that quote has been used like way too much.
00:05:26.000I know they use it on the book as well, but it's been used way too much.
00:05:29.000And I think it's kind of nudged the debate in a direction that has become a little bit sort of stereotypical.
00:05:36.000Well, that's interesting. And so you talk about seeing things from from the Germans enemies perspective.
00:05:42.000What was Hitler's thinking about U-boats?
00:05:45.000Was he thinking this is our wonder weapon?
00:05:48.000He had a lot of those. We'll talk about them later on.
00:05:51.000That's going to strangle the Englanders or was it just part of the arsenal?
00:05:58.000Yeah, he doesn't really think about the U-boats much at all, actually, until late 1941 really.
00:06:03.000There's a moment where he sort of realizes the strategic potential of the U-boat much too late.
00:06:10.000Dönitz, who was the head of the U-boat arm, had been arguing for a large U-boat force and for the reallocation of material and resources to the creation of U-boats for years before the war even.
00:06:25.000And had struggled, as everyone else did within the Nazi hierarchy, to get Hitler's ear and to get those raw materials.
00:06:34.000Hitler didn't really have much of an interest in the U-boat arm as a weapon of war.
00:06:41.000He was much more continentally minded. He wanted to build tanks.
00:06:44.000He wanted to build surface ships as well, of course, so lots of money into those.
00:06:49.000Ultimately, it proved to be pretty much a waste of money, but U-boats wasn't really on his agenda.
00:06:54.000Until 1941, when after that period I talked about, you know, the happy time, Churchill...
00:07:09.000Yeah, so Hitler then, you know, suddenly becomes a sort of convert for, you know, for sending all his resources to the U-boat war.
00:07:16.000But by that stage, it's really too late.
00:07:18.000And it's so fascinating you say that because a Russian-Ukrainian historian that I follow, he talks about the fact, obviously, as you know, in the Soviet Union,
00:07:24.000the former Soviet Union, everyone thinks that the Soviet Union won World War II alone.
00:07:28.000British people, as I've discovered, tend to think the same about Britain.
00:07:34.000But one of his counter arguments to that is actually the total tonnage of the U-boats produced during World War II was greater than the total tonnage of the tanks that were produced by Germany in World War II.
00:07:43.000So the resource investment was immense, comparatively speaking.
00:07:53.000So, you know, Dönitz always argued, even pre-war, he argued for a force of 300 U-boats, which meant that he could keep 100 in the field at any one time.
00:08:04.000You know, you'd have 100 refitting or resupplying.
00:08:06.000You'd have 100 basically going to and from, but you could keep 100 in theatre.
00:09:10.000So, those that scored the sort of biggest figures, you know, came back home with their, you know, cheekbones glistening in the sunlight and the victory pennants flying.
00:09:22.000And they were treated as celebrities, absolutely.
00:09:37.000They were printing postcards to be distributed to the Hitler Youth Boys.
00:09:42.000You know, the next generation of U-boat sailors, really.
00:09:45.000And that's the intention, is to, you know, obviously you're lording your own successes in a way, but at the same time you need to get the next generation to sign up for the Navy.
00:09:56.000But that also posed a real challenge for Goebbels and the rest of the propaganda department, because when the war started to turn and a lot of these men were starting to die and the U-boats were being sunk, all of a sudden that presented a real challenge, didn't it?
00:10:16.000So, you've got a generation of boys and, you know, by the middle of the war onwards, it is sort of 18-year-old boys who are going to war.
00:10:24.000The average age of those killed in the U-boat army during World War II is 22, which is quite astonishing.
00:10:31.000Is that different to other services, though?
00:10:34.000I think it's probably pretty similar, given, you know, especially the huge death tolls from the middle of the war onwards.
00:10:40.000And you see the same thing in the land war.
00:10:42.000You know, I remember seeing a stat about, you know, the German losses particularly after the summer of 44, in that last almost year of the war.
00:11:03.000But still, you know, I mean, it's a remarkable, you know, rather hideous fact.
00:11:09.000But yes, you've got a generation of boys who have been fed that propaganda of, you know, this sort of, you know, glorious experience of sinking shipping.
00:11:20.000And they're going out to conditions that are absolutely, you know, unthinkably hideous.
00:11:27.000And the more I sort of researched this and looked into these first-hand accounts, the conditions on a wartime U-boat just have to be, you know, scarcely believed, frankly.
00:12:02.000Plus engines, you know, all the control mechanisms, all of the rest of it.
00:12:07.000And, of course, torpedoes, probably 14 torpedoes.
00:12:10.000So, the ordinary men kind of sleep amongst the torpedoes, you know, in hammocks and bunks and so on.
00:12:15.000So, they're all on top of each other all the time, constantly.
00:12:18.000They're out for a single patrol would be anything up to about eight weeks, usually.
00:12:24.000In that period, they had fresh food for probably about two weeks and they had tinned food, which brought with it challenges, not least scurvy.
00:12:46.000So, this sort of image that we have, this sort of romantic image, which you see in Das Bort, for example, of this sort of luxuriously bearded U-boatman.
00:12:55.000That came with a stink because they basically stank.
00:13:00.000They'd been away for eight weeks, perhaps.
00:13:02.000One change of underwear was permitted.
00:13:05.000So, you could smell them before you saw them, right?
00:13:09.000So, the beard was a sort of a signifier of the fact, basically, they hadn't washed and hadn't shaved, probably for eight weeks.
00:14:42.000But, of course, you've then got a generation of young U-boatmen coming back from patrol with their, you know, wages burning a pocket, a hole in their back pocket.
00:14:52.000Going and visiting, you know, the young ladies of Lorient or Saint-Malo or wherever it would be.
00:14:58.000A result of that, of course, is venereal disease of various sorts.
00:15:03.000And that's something that has to be very strictly controlled, of course, because, you know, as always in a Navy, it's a rather profound problem with morale and everything else and hygiene, you know, to sort of keep everyone safe and well.
00:15:17.000And they have various methods of dealing with very strict punishments, incidentally, for contracting venereal disease in the German Navy.
00:15:25.000And no less strict where they track down the source of the infection.
00:15:29.000So, the ladies themselves would usually be tracked down and punished as well.
00:15:33.000But there's a couple of examples of people being inspected on the U-boats and being discovered to have whatever.
00:15:40.000I mean, even of the most, you know, the benign end of the spectrum, stuff like pubic lice that, you know, if you're found to have pubic lice,
00:15:47.000you could expect to be stuck in a storeroom, you know, for an extended spell just to keep you out of circulation because everyone's hot bunking.
00:15:56.000So, as soon as that gets amongst a crew, you've got a problem.
00:17:49.000But the stress that they're under, I think it's more so than any other branch, really, of the military,
00:17:57.000because of the confined nature of what they're doing.
00:18:00.000So, you can imagine the stress of being an infantryman, for example, must be considerable during those periods when you're under attack or if you're attacking.
00:18:08.000But then you have long periods of essentially doing not very much.
00:18:13.000You know, there's that old line about warfare being 90% boredom, 10% terror.
00:18:17.000You know, in that 90% period, you can kind of, you can relax a bit, you can allow that mental toll to dissipate somewhat.
00:18:26.000I think in the U-boat war, because, and particularly from the middle of the war onwards, when it becomes much more intense,
00:18:32.000and they become very much the hunted rather than the hunters.
00:18:37.000The Allied tactic at that point was what they called hunting them to exhaustion.
00:18:41.000So, you would have a U-boat would try and, perhaps in a wolf pack, would try and attack a convoy.
00:18:47.000Very often, they'd be, you know, pounced on by the escorts.
00:18:51.000And the escorts would not let them escape.
00:18:54.000So, they had Aztec, so they could, you know, basically keep contact with them at all times.
00:19:00.000They would force them down below, below the surface.
00:19:05.000They could be depth charged for 24 hours, at which point the U-boat is at the limits of what it can, of how long it can dive.
00:19:14.000So, it has to surface to, you know, allow some air into the boat for one thing, but also to run the engine so it can charge its own batteries.
00:19:23.000So, if it can't get away, it's going to have to come up and then it's going to be shot to pieces and be forced to scuttle and surrender.
00:19:29.000So, that's the kind of the standard format of it.
00:19:32.000But very often, you know, that 24 hours of being constantly depth charged, perhaps by two or three destroyers, the mental toll of that and the feeling of helplessness that I think they had of being in this steel tube,
00:19:48.000when you know that, you know, any impact closer than perhaps 15, 20 metres from the hull would be sufficient for, you know, catastrophic damage.
00:19:58.000And then there's only one way they're going, they're going down.
00:20:01.000The sort of the horror of that and the protracted nature of those attacks, I think that was enough to trigger, you know, profound psychological damage in a lot of these individuals.
00:20:14.000And actually, in this boat, you see that there is that scene, isn't there, when the captain nearly shoots one of the guys who he thinks is being a mutineer or whatever is failing to obey orders.
00:20:24.000But there's a few examples of, you know, during depth charge attacks, you know, even officers kind of, you know, wide-eyed in terror, kind of running through the boat, you know, and not knowing what to do.
00:20:36.000And that spreads very quickly throughout the crew because the crew naturally looked to the officers for leadership guidance, all of that.
00:20:43.000And if the officers are panicking, then that spreads very quickly.
00:20:47.000So, you know, once you accept, as I did from having read the archival investigations in this, once you accept that PTSD is a thing, then you start to see it in a lot of the memoirs.
00:21:02.000And you can see it, you know, there's cases, you know, radio operator who loses the ability to speak, for example, after a depth charge attack, you know, that there are so many examples where, okay, that's what that is.
00:21:16.000There was one commander, for example, that, you know, used to avoid contact at every opportunity, which is not cowardice because he'd already sort of proven that the fact that he could do the job of a U-boat commander earlier in the war.
00:21:31.000But by that stage, you know, he's avoiding, actively avoiding contact with enemy shipping.
00:21:36.000He's asking to be transferred out of the U-boat arm.
00:21:39.000Eventually, he's shot for his troubles.
00:21:42.000But, you know, it's a clear case of PTSD in retrospect.
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00:24:13.000British Institute convoy operations already at the beginning of the war.
00:24:18.000They had done so at the end of the First World War, so there was nothing necessarily new about that.
00:24:23.000But it didn't really, in terms of the defensive operations, it didn't really get into its swing properly, probably until late 1941 maybe.
00:24:31.000So there was a window when the British are not quite yet up to speed.
00:24:36.000You don't have, for example, the benefit of reading German cipher traffic, which comes in later on as well, after sort of late 40, 41.
00:24:47.000You start to get German cipher traffic being read by Bletchley Park.
00:24:50.000So you've got that. There is an opportunity. The Americans are not yet in, as I explained earlier on.
00:24:59.000But the Germans don't have the numbers to realize it, to make that work.
00:25:02.000So that's sort of the initial failure.
00:25:05.000So yes, they score high figures, but they're not able to score high enough figures to do what they want to do, which is effectively to knock Britain out of the war.
00:25:14.000So then you get to 1942 onwards, effectively that sort of pivot moment, 1942-43, which is where the Allied game improves drastically.
00:25:25.000So the Americans come in, you've got more in the way of manpower, you've got more in the way of escorts.
00:25:31.000And Enigma traffic is coming on stream much more consistently by that stage.
00:25:36.000And tell us about that, because I didn't know this, but that actually came from a U-boat.
00:25:42.000Tell us about what happened, because most people haven't heard about it.
00:25:45.000Yeah, as I said before, you know, the standard practice, at least in the early phase of the war, was that, you know, a U-boat, if it was discovered by a destroyer, would be, you know, forced below the surface, of course.
00:26:12.000A bit of a suicide mission against the destroyer, but some of them did.
00:26:16.000What was more usual was that you would surface, you'd kind of, you know, white flag and you'd evacuate the crew, and then the ship would, the U-boat would be scuttled.
00:26:24.000So they'd pull the seacocks and the U-boat would be scuttled.
00:26:30.000And you can see that in a lot of the early engagements with the Royal Navy, you can see that from the archival record, was that death tolls are actually pretty minimal.
00:26:39.000But it's always that the, you know, maybe a small proportion of the crew are killed.
00:26:45.000Most of them survive, go into British captivity, and the U-boat is scuttled.
00:26:49.000And it's scuttled to prevent sensitive equipment being captured, the boat being captured, etc.
00:26:56.000The example of U-110 is different in that respect because everything worked the same way, so they were forced to the surface.
00:27:06.000The captain decided to try and scuttle it, got his crew off, but for some reason it didn't work.
00:27:11.000Either the order wasn't carried out to, you know, pull the seacocks or, you know, you had to open various levers to sort of let the seawater in and so on.
00:27:22.000So the crew are all kind of floating away from this U-boat, which he's expecting to see, you know, sink beneath the waves, and it doesn't.
00:27:29.000And then there's a, you know, horror of horrors.
00:27:32.000The British boarding party comes out to U-110 and starts, you know, rifling through everything, pulling out the Enigma machine, pulling out all the code books.
00:28:04.000And they had the whole thing that there's a huge operation on the British side to prevent the Germans from realizing that Enigma was being read all the way through the war and in all theaters.
00:28:15.000So there's an interesting example, I think, in the Mediterranean where Enigma had told them that a certain German ship was, you know, in a certain place in the Eastern Mediterranean.
00:28:31.000And then so as to make sure that the Germans kind of didn't realize that we knew what was going on, where this was going to be, they sent out reconnaissance planes just so that from the German side, the narrative was, okay, it was spotted by the reconnaissance planes.
00:28:45.000So all the way through, there was always this maximum effort given to trying to sort of, you know, shield the reality of ultra, of ultra intelligence.
00:28:57.000And talk to us about the Enigma machine, because people know the term, but might not understand the significance of it.
00:29:04.000Just tell us the story of that from the beginning.
00:29:06.000What is it? What was it used for? Why was the discovery of it so significant and the impact it had?
00:29:11.000Well, the Germans had been experimenting with this. Initially, it was a commercial enterprise.
00:29:16.000They produced this cipher machine. And there are many similar machines going around in the 1920s and 30s.
00:29:23.000The Germans developed one, which was initially on the open market in the 1930s.
00:29:28.000It had been essentially, you know, deconstructed and broken by Polish engineers and mathematicians before the war.
00:29:38.000And in the summer of 1939, so just before the outbreak of war, they handed over everything that they had worked out on the Enigma machine, which by then was the sort of standard encryption machine of the German military.
00:29:50.000This is basically a way of preventing other hostile forces from getting your communications and knowing what's going on.
00:29:57.000So we have now end-to-end encryption. It's kind of a common phrase these days.
00:30:03.000That was a good example of end-to-end encryption. It was considered to be unbreakable.
00:30:08.000So it would encrypt the message that was typed into it. It looked like a typewriter, essentially, with a sort of plug board in the front of it.
00:30:17.000And you had a number of settings and a couple of dials that you had to set. So when you're setting it up for that particular day, you have a number of settings you're supposed to follow.
00:30:27.000Then it broadcasts basically nonsense, what looks like nonsense, but at the other end, with the same settings, you can decrypt it at the other end.
00:30:36.000So all that anyone is intercepting if they're intercepting the message is nonsense, is a series of letters.
00:30:44.000So it was considered unbreakable, and it was absolutely crucial for the British and others to make sure that that assumption was never challenged by the Germans, and it wasn't, crucially.
00:30:56.000Interestingly, Dönitz, in his memoir, which came out in 1957, after he'd spent 10 years in prison, he talks in his memoir about we still don't know if the British broke Enigma.
00:31:10.000So he's still ignorant about it in 1957, which is kind of remarkable. So it was the great secret, even post-war.
00:31:17.000I think the story broke in the 70s in the end, which is remarkable. So the breaking of that, and it wasn't a sort of a one-hit thing where you break Enigma and then you're in forever.
00:31:28.000Because of the different models, so the German Navy, for example, had a four-rotor model, which was another level of encryption, for example.
00:31:39.000Because the codes would change at regular intervals, it was quite possible for Bletchley Park, where all of this was done, to be locked out for a period and have to sort of re-break with the new codes.
00:31:50.000But they were always on top of it. So increasingly, as the war went on, those gaps where they were locked out grew less and less and have less duration.
00:31:59.000So, I mean, crucially for the Allies in the U-Boat War, the knowledge of where the German Wolfpacks were, for example, meant that they could direct convoys around them.
00:32:10.000So initially, in a defensive capacity, you could use Enigma traffic in that way. And then later on, in a much more offensive capacity, you could actually target individual vessels or target individual Wolfpacks.
00:32:24.000And there's a great example of a supply ship. They had these things with Type 14, which was a supply U-Boat, which is much bigger than the Type 7.
00:32:33.000And it would patrol the Atlantic, basically, and liaison with its attack U-Boats, and they would get fuel, they would get torpedoes, they'd get food, and then they'd go for another two, three weeks.
00:32:49.000So actually, meaning that they didn't have to cross back across the Atlantic back to France to be resupplied.
00:32:55.000So, brilliant piece of logistics and brilliant piece of technology.
00:33:00.000When the British realized that that's what the Germans were doing with these Type 14s, they started targeting the Type 14s.
00:33:07.000And there's one example, I think it was the U-489, on its maiden voyage, comes out of port, goes through the North Sea, down through the mid-Atlantic.
00:33:16.000It's being watched all the way via Enigma.
00:33:19.000And it's destroyed within a couple of weeks of leaving port, never has a rendezvous with any of its attack U-Boats. It's on its maiden voyage.
00:33:27.000It's maiden voyage. This is kind of, this is indicative of how the war had turned, was that in some instances like that, we could literally know where it was at all times and attack it accordingly and destroy it.
00:33:52.000And it is sometimes halting and sometimes you get locked out. But yeah, absolutely, you have access to their communications, quite right.
00:34:00.000And it also had a devastating effect on German and U-boat morale, didn't it?
00:34:04.000It did. And that, I mean, that, I mean, more so actually, you know, in that respect, you know, the Germans never knew that Enigma had been broken, as I said before.
00:34:13.000But the fact that they're being destroyed in such numbers and kind of inexplicably as well.
00:34:18.000It's probably even worse for morale because you don't know why, but you're suddenly getting your ass handed.
00:34:22.000So, you get all of these, you know, sort of conspiracy theories going around. One interesting example in this…
00:34:32.000So, you don't have the machine? Oh, nein!
00:34:36.000No, there's an interesting story of, you know, one of the other innovations that really changed the game is the advent of airborne radar for the British.
00:34:47.000So that, you know, you know, bombing vessels, bombers, for example, armed with aerial radar, you can read where a U-boat is from about sort of, you know, five, six miles out.
00:34:59.000You could be on top of it and bombing it within, you know, but they will spot you, they've got 30 seconds to dive.
00:35:05.000You know, a good U-boat crew can dive in 25 seconds, so it's touch and go.
00:35:09.000That's much more effective than, you know, trying to track them and attack them via a destroyer, right?
00:35:15.000Because you can see them on the horizon, you can travel pretty much as fast as they can in a U-boat, so that's, you know, it's quite easy to get away.
00:35:23.000You can't escape, you know, attacking aircraft.
00:35:26.000So they had these radar detectors on the U-boats, which would sort of ping when they'd been spotted on radar, they would ping.
00:35:35.000But then when the radar set was updated by the British and changed to a different frequency, then it stopped pinging.
00:35:42.000So then they're going, well, how are we still being detected and this isn't working?
00:35:47.000So then they come to the conclusion that their machine must be actually betraying their presence to the British, right?
00:35:55.000So this becomes the narrative for the U-boat crew.
00:35:58.000So they start switching them off entirely, which is kind of suicidal because then, you know, they don't know when they're being read at all.
00:36:06.000So it's really, you know, again, as a conspiracy theory, it's really kind of catastrophic for the U-boat crews.
00:36:11.000And that's one of the ways that, you know, the stress of that situation, how it manifests itself in irrational decision making.
00:36:18.000So you've got individual commanders going, so you turn the bloody thing off, it's betraying our position.
00:37:39.000By the time they're killed off, and like Gunter Prien is killed in March of 1941, by the time they're killed off, you've got their deputies and their sort of officer corps become the next commanders.
00:37:53.000And they're reasonably competent, but they don't have the same degree of experience, nowhere near.
00:37:57.000So already in that, already in about 1941, a lot of the interrogation reports from the British, and the British, as I said before, when they capture these crews, really extensive interrogation procedure that they go through.
00:38:12.000And they're saying in many cases already in 1941 and beyond that, you know, they're astonishingly inexperienced.
00:38:19.000Some of them had only been in the U-boat force, you know, for a couple of months.
00:38:26.000You know, their morale was really low.
00:38:28.000This is only in 1941, like really early, when you'd think that, you know, Germany is still in the phase of, you know, sweeping all before it, certainly in the land war.
00:38:37.000But morale is really fragile in the U-boat arm, and it's partly because of that inexperience.
00:38:43.000It's partly because these young men, you know, have not got that long tail of experience.
00:38:50.000By the time you get to the end phase of the war, you've got commanders who are, you know, 22, 23 years old, commanding a U-boat, who weren't even in the Navy at the beginning of the war, right?
00:39:02.000Who have had a really shortened, of necessity, a shortened training regimen for themselves and their crews.
00:39:10.000And essentially, the question is, do they actually know what they're doing?
00:39:14.000And the figures for that period, I mean, it's obviously, this is one factor among many, but the figures in terms of sinkings for the second half of the war are catastrophic for the Germans.
00:39:24.000From 1943 onwards, of the 400 vessels launched from 1943 to the end of the war, only 16% of them actually succeed in sinking anything at all.
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00:41:05.000So, you know, one in three torpedo firings fail.
00:41:08.000Uh, which means, you know, you might hit the target, but you'll just hear this sort of clunk as it hits the hull of the, of the target, target ship when it actually explode.
00:41:16.000Um, and it actually took, that was only solved by, you know, capturing a British submarine and then retroengineering the, the detonators on the, on the British, uh, torpedoes and then refitting those to, to German torpedoes.
00:41:31.000But yeah, they had, the technology is really quite primitive.
00:41:34.000The type seven, as I said, the backbone of the fleet is essentially an updated version of the U-boat from the end of the first world war, which is called the UB3, right?
00:41:43.000Various technological advances have been made, but it's essentially the same thing.
00:41:47.000So really quite primitive, mass produced, did the job.
00:41:51.000It's a submersible rather than a submarine.
00:41:53.000It spends most of its time on the surface, you know, only release, only dives to, to either attack or, or to avoid attack.
00:41:59.000Um, so it's a, it's a, it's a very primitive vessel.
00:42:02.000And again, the, the, the example of the, um, the torpedoes is, is a good one that, that shows as well how, how primitive they were and how, how, um, fallible they were as well.
00:42:13.000Because especially towards the end of the war, Hitler in particular is staking a lot of, of his resources on super weapons.
00:42:22.000The idea that we're going to build something that's going to fundamentally shift the course of the war, which we're clearly at this point losing.
00:42:41.000Um, so the, you know, the, the core of the U-Boat fleet, which is these type sevens, about 70%, and then type nines is a, was a larger vessel, which also pretty primitive, but worked very well.
00:42:52.000Um, so they did from, uh, 43 onwards, there's this very, very analogous actually to the wonder weapons that you just mentioned.
00:42:59.000You know, the V1s, V2s, and everything else.
00:43:01.000They started looking at the next generation of submarines of U-Boats.
00:43:10.000What propulsion systems, for example, should it have that would enable it to stay beneath the surface either for longer periods or even indefinitely?
00:43:18.000Um, and the conventional form of having diesel engines, you know, and electric batteries and so on, you know, that was considered old hat.
00:43:24.000Let's not do that because that means we have to surface, which means we're vulnerable.
00:43:28.000So they start looking at various propulsion systems.
00:43:31.000There's a German, um, engineer called Walther, who, who was like the, um, not really a charlatan because he was a bit brilliant, but, you know, he, he led them down a number of dead ends in terms of things like, you know, the propulsion systems that were, um, independent of air, essentially.
00:43:48.000So, you know, creating propulsion systems that would work perpetually underwater.
00:43:53.000Um, so they put an awful lot of money into that.
00:43:55.000And then there's, there's, there's two, two generations of U-Boats at the end.
00:43:58.000This is, um, electrically, electrically powered.
00:44:24.000And that's very, they, they're radically different, particularly the type 21s, which is the, you know, the ocean going version.
00:44:31.000It points in many respects, it points to a lot of the technology and the technological developments that you'll see in the Cold War.
00:44:38.000Um, so a really, you know, fascinating vessel, but it consumed huge amounts of manpower, man hours, raw materials, steel, all the rest of it.
00:44:49.000Um, they had more than a hundred of these built at the end of the war.
00:44:55.000Because they're constantly, you know, fighting teething troubles and difficulties to actually get them, you know, up to speed.
00:45:01.000Um, so for the second half of the war, you've got the same thing.
00:45:04.000You've got these sort of wonder weapons and all of the faith being put in the wonder weapons.
00:45:08.000And there's a, um, Goebbels diary entry, which I quote, where he talks about, you know, if we can get these on stream, you know, by June 1945, he's talking about June 45, you know, this is going to change the war.
00:45:20.000It's a very similar story to the V2s, except the V2s actually were used in anger.
00:45:27.000Um, but in a sense, you know, it's difficult with a counterfactual, but you almost sense, had they put all of that effort into just producing more Type 7s or more Type 9s that, you know, the tried and tested vessels that they had, um, they might have, uh, done better, should we say, in the latter half of the war.
00:45:47.000Well, I was going to ask you about the done better thing is a really interesting point because, uh, I mean, Churchill talks about this as well.
00:45:54.000Look, everybody makes mistakes, especially in, you know, in that sort of situation, particularly when you look back at it with full knowledge of everything.
00:46:01.000But do you think that if the Germans hadn't obsessed about making these, it's interesting.
00:46:06.000I mean, I am, I think, confessing to being both a nerd and autistic in this conversation, but, you know, I watch like people restoring World War II weapons on YouTube.
00:46:14.000There's some channels that do way bigger numbers than us, by the way, mate.
00:46:17.000But, uh, a lot of them talk about the fact, you know, this is a German submachine gun and it's like way more complicated than a Russian one or an American one or a British one.
00:46:27.000Do you think if the Germans had focused more on mass production?
00:46:41.000Because of what you're facing, certainly after 41, you're facing the industrial might, not only the United States.
00:46:47.000And the best example there is Liberty ships in this context.
00:46:50.000You know, they're producing Liberty ships, you know, almost by the week in US shipyards.
00:46:54.000So they're more than replacing what's being lost in the Battle of the Atlantic.
00:46:58.000And on the other side, you've got the Soviet Union, which is very good at this stuff and actually no mass production.
00:47:03.000You know, look at the T-34, they concentrate on one model of tank effectively for most of the war until the end of the war when you've got some others, JS-1, for example, JS-2s.
00:47:12.000But most of the war, they're producing T-34s and they, and it's pretty primitive.
00:47:17.000It's very effective, but pretty primitive in its, if you ever, if you want nerdery, you know, go to Bovington, uh,
00:47:24.000Oh, I've been to the T-34, it's not comfortable.
00:47:59.000I think that, that, you know, that could have maybe prolonged the war from a German perspective.
00:48:04.000Um, I don't think it would have changed the result because of the, you know, the sheer difference.
00:48:07.000The, you know, the sheer disparity in the economic potential of the, of the, of the two partners.
00:48:12.000But it was when you were talking about towards the end of the war, where they were still building U-boats and the Nazi leaders were going, look, well, we can't just focus this on one factory because we're getting, we're getting killed out here.
00:48:25.000So we've got to do it in two or three factories.
00:48:27.000So then what would happen is then you stuck it all together.
00:48:32.000I mean, that's the story of the type 21 effectively.
00:48:34.000That's why the type 21 spent, you know, the first type 21 is actually launched in the summer of 1944.
00:48:40.000So it could have potentially made a difference.
00:48:43.000Um, but it spent so long in, in sort of troubleshooting and, and, you know, trying to find out why it leaks and why it does this and the other.
00:48:51.000And it's exactly what you said is because of the aerial campaign against Germany, against German factories, they had basically kind of dissipated production and said, okay, well, you know, this factory over here is going to do the tail sections.
00:49:03.000There's eight sections, I think, to a type 21.
00:49:05.000So, you know, each section was going to be built at a different place.
00:49:08.000And then they pull them all together and they, and they essentially assemble the finished article.
00:49:13.000Um, and the intention obviously is that, you know, with the bombing campaign, if, if one of those, you know, gets temporarily knocked out, it doesn't knock out the whole thing.
00:49:21.000So you can kind of work around the bombing campaign.
00:49:24.000Um, but the end result, and of course you're using slave labor, using concentration camp labor.
00:49:29.000So, you know, they're not bothered what the tolerances are.
00:49:32.000Um, they're too busy, you know, worrying about where the next meal is coming from and they're not going to get beaten to death by God.
00:49:45.000Um, so the sections that are built are very often built not to tolerances and they don't find out until, you know, they try and put them back, put them all together.
00:49:51.000And they actually try and go and float it in the Baltic and it doesn't work.
00:49:54.000So this is why they spent, you know, more than a year very often in, in troubleshooting, never saw action.
00:50:00.000Was there ever a conversation, you talked about the stats, 16%, never, never sank anything.
00:50:06.000Um, was there ever a conversation of like, boys, this isn't working.
00:50:14.000Let's put this steel into anti-aircraft guns so that our cities don't get flattened.
00:50:18.000Let's actually redistribute these resources to something that's going to defend our country as opposed to like trying to win the war that's no longer winnable.
00:50:27.000Was there ever, or was Hitler just too deranged by this point?
00:50:30.000And he was like, you know, we're going to win.
00:50:32.000Yeah, I think, well, 43 is a, is a, you know, the more you look at the progress of the war, 43 is the sort of tipping years, the tipping point of the war.
00:50:42.000Uh, the summer of 43, essentially Germany comes to the same position that it was at the end of the First World War, which is that, you know, sane heads would have told them that we could, we may not yet have lost, but we can't win.
00:50:56.000So you've got, you know, the Battle of the Atlantic is effectively lost May 43.
00:51:34.000But, but my, my point is at the end of the First World War, they got to an analogous situation where they realized, haven't yet been defeated, but they can no longer win.
00:51:41.000And that's when they sued for peace at the end of the First World War.
00:51:44.000Um, the difference in the Second World War is that you, you have an ideology which is kind of, you know, fundamentally kind of millenarian.
00:51:51.000And it's, you know, it's, um, the, the added element of, you know, the, the, the racial element, the ideological element, particularly on the Eastern Front that you can, you can never make terms with the Soviets.
00:52:03.000That means effectively they're going to fight for another two years.
00:52:06.000So by that, you know, essentially by 43, the war's kind of, it's more or less done.
00:52:12.000Um, but the, but because of that ideological elements that the derangement, as you put it, I mean, Hitler, you know, he's not technically deranged as in insane, but he's.
00:52:22.000But well, ideologically off with the pixels.
00:52:26.000Because when you're making decisions that are not in the interest of your country and your people, by that point, or even tact strategically correct, right?
00:52:35.000Because if, if say you are the leader of a country and you, if you look at objectively the situation, you know that the war can't be won.
00:52:44.000And let's say you want to continue fighting, you would at least do everything you possibly can to throw those resources into protecting your country, your people, your cities from being wiped off the map.
00:52:57.000And instead, what he's doing is telling everyone to stand to the last man and miles away and doing all these crazy things.
00:53:07.000I just mean someone is making very, very bad decisions.
00:53:10.000Yes, absolutely. And you can, and you can see that where there is a shift after 43, it's too, it's not in terms of, you know, protecting the homeland at all.
00:53:19.000It's towards what we said before about, you know, wonder weapons.
00:53:22.000And that's becomes the focus, which is, okay, we can't win in the conventional form.
00:53:27.000So we're going to, we're going to try these, you know, novel weapons, whether it be V1s, V2s, or these type 21s, whatever it is.
00:53:34.000And there are some innovations that you can see in that period, particularly, you know, in the U-boat war as well, which are of note.
00:53:41.000You know, there's this stuff, Alberich, this sort of covering, this rubber covering that they put on U-boats.
00:53:47.000So they couldn't, they were effectively immune to, to Aztec and sonar detection, which is kind of, kind of fascinating.
00:53:53.000And as I said, it, it, it, it, it presages a lot of the developments of the later cold war.
00:53:59.000So stuff like that is really fascinating.
00:54:01.000But there's no, it's much more offensive in nature.
00:54:05.000And I think that comes down to the ideology, that they're still ideologically addled and that you can't possibly, you know, just sort of focus in and protect the people.
00:54:13.000It's, it has to be offensive all the time.
00:54:18.000I mean, obviously there's a more modern context in which sort of someone has been in charge for a very long time, can't get the feedback, et cetera.
00:54:25.000Is that part, by this point, has Hitler cleaned house of anyone who would tell him, you know, Mein Fuhrer, this might not be a good idea?
00:54:38.000So there's certainly, you know, any of those, you know, dissenting voices or potentially dissenting voices within the high command and the upper echelons of politics have been effectively removed or moved to safety, as it were.
00:54:51.000And also even those that, you know, there are numerous accounts of generals, for example, who in the field will see a particular scenario, a particular catastrophe, and will say, right, I'm going to go and confront the Fuhrer and tell him,
00:55:19.000And there are very few people within the upper echelons of the Third Reich that are immune to it.
00:55:24.000One of them being Klaus von Stauffenberg, for example, who, you know, he talks about, I think in one of his letters, he talked about going to see the Fuhrer and being mindful that this was the narrative,
00:55:36.000was that he had these sort of piercing blue eyes and all of this stuff.
00:55:40.000And he was a very, very, you know, extremely persuasive character, very difficult to contradict.
00:55:45.000And he said, after that first meeting, he said, you know, I looked into his eyes, I shook his hand.
01:06:33.000You can see it, you know, much more brutal.
01:06:35.000And Dönitz, to his credit, as I said, you know, he doesn't deserve much credit.
01:06:39.000But in this occasion, to his credit, he pushes back and says, no, we're not going to do that.
01:06:43.000Because that's not the way naval operations work.
01:06:46.000The end result is what's called the Laconia order, where Dönitz orders that German crews from then on are not to assist shipwrecked sailors.
01:06:56.000I'm really glad that you brought up Dönitz because he strikes me as this fascinating character.
01:07:02.000On the one hand, completely ideologically possessed and artsy.
01:07:05.000On the other hand, you go, you look at the way he's behaved and he comes across as a man of integrity.
01:07:34.000He thought Hitler was the best thing since whatever the last best thing was.
01:07:41.000But at the same time, he's a man from that naval tradition.
01:07:45.000So in moments like when he issues the Laconia order and he has that argument with Hitler, he's trying to sort of combine those two worldviews in a satisfactory manner to himself and to his traditions.
01:08:00.000And the Laconia order is an interesting one.
01:08:03.000You know, as I said, from then on, the German Navy essentially had an order not to assist those that they'd sunk.
01:09:55.000Um, no, he's an old naval, a naval, former naval judge, um, stood as his lawyer.
01:10:00.000And actually quite effectively argued that the war that Dönitz had been conducting was very, very similar in its nature and its conduct, uh, to the naval war that the Allies had been conducting as well.
01:10:11.000So, you know, and he had testimony, for example, from the US, um, uh, Admiral Chester Nimitz, uh, essentially saying the same thing.
01:10:20.000That it wasn't possible to take, you know, shipwreck sailors on board.
01:10:25.000Um, you know, the best you could do was sort of point them in the, in the direction of land and say, good luck.
01:10:30.000Um, and unrestricted, you know, submarine warfare was kind of the norm.
01:10:34.000Um, so he's basically forcing the prosecutors at Nuremberg to say, well, if you're going to, you know, if you're going to damn Dönitz, you have to damn the Americans as well.
01:10:50.000I mean, he's, he's not someone that deserves sympathy at all because of his political convictions.
01:10:56.000But I think, as you said before, there's a, there's a degree of integrity as a sort of, as a naval man that, that, that we should probably bear in mind when we, when we make these judgments about Dönitz.
01:11:06.000And, and one thing I, this is going off script a little bit, but I think it's a fascinating question to ask a historian who's as well informed about that conflict as you are.
01:11:16.000And a big question to ask too, what do you make of Nuremberg?
01:11:22.000I think Nuremberg, you know, there's a lot, a lot of complaints made about it being sort of victors justice and so on.
01:11:27.000Um, there's a, there is a legitimate complaint, um, to be made about the Soviet sort of presence at Nuremberg.
01:11:35.000Because the Soviets had done a lot of the same things, um, as the Nazis were being, you know, accused of and convicted of.
01:11:42.000And for them to then be on the, uh, on the, uh, in the ranks of the accusers is, you know, sometimes a little bit hard to swallow.
01:11:50.000Um, and of course they, they even tried to get, you know, for example, the Katyn massacres onto the German charge sheet, which was a massacre they'd committed against the Polish office class in 1940.
01:12:02.000Thankfully that, you know, was, was blocked by the, by the, by the allies, but that shows you the kind of the cynicism and the hypocrisy that is going on at some level, um, in Nuremberg.
01:12:14.000Um, I guess the counter, not that I would defend, I mean, the Soviet atrocities, if you actually read about them.
01:12:41.000And having, you know, the attempt to put the Katyn massacres on the German charge sheet is pretty astonishing cynicism.
01:12:46.000Yeah. Um, so that's, that's an angle that perhaps we should, we should bear in mind.
01:12:51.000Um, this aspect, the wider aspect of sort of Victor's justice, I think you see in Nuremberg the first real, uh, widespread realization of the true horror of Nazism, which for most people wasn't entirely clear before.
01:13:06.000Um, you know, you had sort of isolated incidents that they knew about, you know, they knew about the, um, the Holocaust, for example, from really late 41 onwards.
01:13:14.000Um, but very often in, in sort of piecemeal examples.
01:13:20.000Um, and the same thing with the horrors of the concentration camps, which is largely a separate issue to the Holocaust.
01:13:26.000I mean, they're linked, but they're, they're kind of separate.
01:13:28.000So by the time you get to 45, 46, with the, the Nuremberg trials, people are beginning to put together the, the mass of evidence that has been piecemeal evidence that has been, you know, gathered in the meantime,
01:13:42.000and put it together into a coherent whole, arguably for the first time.
01:13:47.000So that realization of the true horror of Nazism, um, is something I think that colors a lot of the decision making.
01:13:55.000Um, and there's a growing assumption, I think, and on the, on behalf of the, um, you know, the Western, uh, judges and prosecutors as well.
01:14:04.000Um, that, that just sees, you know, German and Nazi as synonymous as, you know, they're, they're all equally guilted or equally, you know, barbarian.
01:14:15.000There's a real, um, uh, I say hatred even that, that, that comes into the proceedings at that point.
01:14:23.000So that's an element of, of Nuremberg that I think is, is, is, is interesting.
01:14:29.000It's noticeable when, you know, you had what we might call the lesser Nurembergs, you know, the other trials that go on, you know, the Krupp trial, the, you know, the, the foreign office trial and so on that go, go on into the 1950s.
01:14:40.000The desire to execute those found guilty diminishes as time goes on.
01:14:46.000And yet, as we know, you know, you know, the vast majority of those, the defendants at Nuremberg were executed.
01:14:51.000Um, so I think that's testament to that, you know, uh, realization of that, that horror in 1945, 46, which then sort of dissipates and, and other factors kick in, you know, the, the, the need to sort of rebuild Germany, the need to create, you know, a stable Germany in the heart of Europe.
01:15:11.000Um, the desire for revenge dissipates as, as time goes on.
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01:15:48.000So let's look at the end of the war, because the way you talk about it in the book is Hitler's suicide was incredibly sudden and people were taken aback, particularly U-boat commanders.
01:16:00.000Yeah, it did. I mean, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a fascinating moment.
01:16:04.000Um, the U-boats themselves had been, as I said, up against it really since 43.
01:16:10.000So they'd seen, interestingly, sort of seen their horizons shrink, you know, from the point at which, you know, 42, they were going right across the Atlantic.
01:16:17.000They were attacking the American Eastern seaboard, for example.
01:16:20.000There were U-boats that, that went to, um, raid Allied vessels in, you know, the Indian Ocean.
01:16:27.000Um, so they were really, it's a global operation in the middle of the war.
01:16:31.000And then by the end, you're, you're sort of shrunk back to the point at which, you know, German U-boats can barely exit the North Sea.
01:16:51.000Um, so yeah, Hitler's suicide when it's announced, um, is a shock.
01:16:55.000And a lot, a lot of those crews, you know, for, for a lot of them, it's, it's a relief because they think, okay, well, this, this will hasten the end and we might get home.
01:17:02.000Um, for a lot of them, if they're more ideological, it would, it would be considered tragic, you know, that, that your great leader had died or a disillusion.
01:17:11.000There's a couple of accounts in there with people saying, well, you know, here's this man that led us up the mountain and he's abandoned us.
01:17:19.000He's shown himself to not be the heroic figure that we thought he was.
01:17:22.000So you've got a complete spectrum of opinion and in that moment.
01:17:26.000But what follows is interesting because the, you know, you've got, Dönitz actually succeeds Hitler as head of state, um, in a sort of, you know, rump Nazi administration.
01:17:37.000Um, and he gives an order for the U-boat force to, to essentially surrender, um, which to most of those commanders is, is seen as, you know, a sort of dishonorable end.
01:17:49.000Uh, they don't want to give away their, you know, valuable weapon of the U-boat itself.
01:17:54.000They don't want to surrender that to the enemy.
01:17:59.000Um, a lot of, you know, there's examples of, of, um, naval recruits, for example, um, you know, running away from training, uh, in that period because, you know, the war's over.
01:18:28.000I mean, there's a few of these examples, which is interesting because they, you know, this idea of them surrendering, surrendering to the allies sticks in the craw of a lot of commanders.
01:18:36.000You know, this isn't how it should be done.
01:18:38.000Um, so they, a lot of them in a curious twist, actually, that they, they actually consult their crews so that it becomes a kind of democratic exercise, which you wouldn't imagine in a dictatorship.
01:18:48.000Um, but the commanders sort of say, well, you know, what do you want to do?
01:19:02.000We might be able to escape the worst effects of, of, um, you know, imprisonment and interrogation or the rest of it.
01:19:08.000So some of them go to Sweden, some, some try to go to Portugal, for example.
01:19:12.000Um, and a couple of them, as you say, end up getting to Argentina in the erroneous assumption that they're going to get a favorable reception.
01:19:20.000Of course, Argentina had declared war on Germany, I think in February of 45, belatedly.
01:19:26.000So that particular piece of news had not reached them.
01:19:28.000They thought they were going to a neutral country.
01:19:30.000Um, and those two, one of them being, I think, U-977 was the last one.
01:19:39.000Um, and it's a remarkable voyage, you know, so they sort of set off and I think they're still in the North Atlantic when they're told to surrender.
01:19:46.000And they basically say, we're not doing that.
01:19:50.000So against orders, they basically sail south.
01:19:52.000No plans, no maps, you know, to, to go for where they would need to get to.
01:20:18.000Um, if you're submerged, you can't get rid of feces.
01:20:25.000So a lot of that is just kind of stored in the boat.
01:20:28.000So that's an added element to the U-boat stink.
01:20:31.000So that's a particularly horrific voyage.
01:20:34.000And when they actually get to Argentina, um, and they are duly, you know, taken into custody by the Argentine authorities, as they should be,
01:20:42.000the commander sort of says to his crew, you know, now we have, we have to surrender, but you know, just, just pat yourselves on the back effectively for the, for what you've done that you've got here.
01:20:52.000We, he says we had another three months of freedom.
01:20:54.000Um, and, and in terms of seamanship, what you've done is astonishing.
01:20:58.000You know, that's the, I'm paraphrasing, but that's what he says to them.
01:21:18.000I mean, I'm quite aware of what the Soviets would, uh, you know, have in store for them if they surrendered to the Soviets.
01:21:23.000So they turned around, went the other way.
01:21:25.000Um, entirely, entirely logical, you know, if you know what the Soviets were going to do to you.
01:21:30.000Um, and conditions actually for, you know, the British, the Americans were, were pretty good.
01:21:35.000I mean, the Germans themselves were very worried.
01:21:37.000A lot of the crews were worried about, you know, what surrender would mean, um, that, you know, they could be, uh, you know, deported to, you know, to, uh, an uncertain fate.
01:21:50.000I mean, most, most of the crews were, um, you know, went through interrogation, went through, you know, whatever processes were deemed necessary by the Allies.
01:22:00.000Um, so, you know, it was actually not a terribly onerous fate for most of them.
01:22:05.000And then of course, bear in mind on the converse that the prisoners that the Soviets had, most of those either died in captivity or that, you know, eventually returned in the 1950s.
01:22:40.000I mean, obviously it's hard to read that from a video interview, but I've always enjoyed all the books of yours that I've read and really, really fascinating stuff.
01:22:47.000Uh, we can ask you some questions from our supporters in a moment.
01:22:51.000Uh, before we do, as you know, we always end with the last question, which is what's the one thing we're not talking about that we should be.
01:22:56.000Before Roger answers a final question at the end of the interview, make sure to head over to our substack.
01:23:02.000The link is in the description where you'll be able to see this.
01:23:05.000For what reason did the German high command never realise that the Enigma code had been cracked?
01:23:11.000Can you explain the economic relationship between Germany and the Soviet Union?
01:23:16.000Was being assigned to a U-boat seen as high status or a death sentence?
01:23:21.000Yeah, I've thought about this for a little bit the last few days, and it's, um, it's a difficult one because I think, you know, you are doing a great job of airing a lot of these issues that, you know, as you say, should be talked about and are not.
01:23:34.000Um, the one that sort of struck me, and it struck me just actually driving over here today, seeing how many of the Union Jacks and, and, uh, crosses of St. George are still flying.
01:23:46.000Now, weeks after that, what was it called? Raise the Colors or whatever that operation was called.
01:23:51.000Um, and I was speaking recently with a friend of mine who I hadn't seen for a few months.
01:23:56.000And he said, and he was a, he's a sort of standard.
01:24:08.000He, his, his words, I've been radicalized.
01:24:10.000Um, so what I just would mention in this context of the thing we're not talking about is the radicalization of the center or the, or the mobilization of the center.
01:24:18.000You know, I think the British mass of the British people is a bit like a sort of a large cow.
01:25:23.000Approaching 20 years at this point, I'd say.
01:25:24.000I think there's a degree to which, you know, ordinary people are beginning to think, well, hang on, you know, this narrative of anyone that sort of raises their concern about the nation being bigoted, you know, neo-Nazi or whatever it might be.
01:25:40.000You know, they're suddenly going, what, you're talking about us?
01:25:50.000But I think politics, it feels like politics a little bit in the last year has shifted almost onto the streets in a way that it wasn't before.
01:26:34.000Because one of the things it does is it makes you immune to all the stupidity.
01:26:37.000If you've just listened to a historian talk for an hour about Nazi U-boats,
01:26:43.000it becomes quite difficult to call a Gary the white van man who just thinks maybe illegal immigration shouldn't be happening a Nazi or far right.
01:26:53.000Because you go, what are you talking about?
01:27:25.000But it just strikes me that, you know, particularly with that element of, you know, increasingly seeing politics playing out on the streets.
01:27:31.000And we saw that, you know, with the Palestinian protests as well.
01:27:34.000And then more recently with Epping and stuff that it just strikes me that that is an interesting shift that, you know, just it seems to me like uncharted territory.
01:27:59.000I heard that a German U-boat got discovered as the captain flushed a loo roll, causing sewage to return inside and force the crew to the surface near the British coast.