Wolfpack: U-boats at War, 1939-45

Wolfpack is the first major colour-illustrated book to capture life on board a U-boat. The text, drawing on letters, diaries, journals, memoirs, prose, poetry and proverb, relates the mundane and the routine, the dramatic and the heroic, fear and resilience as experienced by every man from Kapitanleutnant to Mechaniker. Bringing these words brilliantly to life are 130 black and white and 115 colour photographs, elegant paintings, drawings and line art, including: several colour photographs of the U-995, the only surviving example of the commonly deployed VIIC U-boat; portraits of the ace U-boat commanders; crew members at work, at ease, on shore leave and, in some very powerful photographs, as prisoners of the US Coast Guard; U-boat pens at Bordeaux, La Pallice, Saint Nazaire, Lorient and Brest; Allied airmen and aerial bombardments and Allied convoys under attack; Donitz himself, his uniform, his headquarters and the ornate blue and gold baton taken from him upon his surrender in May 1945; U-boat weapons; propaganda art from both world wars; memorabilia and ephemera, including a German advertisement in the New York Times warning passengers against travelling on the Lusitania and the medals of Commander Gunther Prien, who sank the British battleship Royal Oak in October 1939; and a graphic map of the Atlantic region showing the devastating losses in ships and men, wrought by and on the U-boats in one short period of the war. Wolfpack is a vivid and brutally realistic portrait of the lives of the men who fought and died beneath the surface of the Atlantic in what was, perhaps, the most crucial battle of World War II.