The riveting, resonant tale of an outsider who achieved success as
a U-boat skipper in WW II Germany's Kriegsmarine - and met a unique
fate on dry land far from home. Drawing on contemporary documents
and interviews with his subject's surviving shipmates, naval
archivist Mulligan offers a vividly detailed account of a renegade
whose career belied the stereotypically barbaric image of
unterseeboote commanders. Born in 1909, Werner Henke moved west in
1920 to a suburb of Hamburg when the Versailles Treaty ceded Poland
a corridor to the Baltic, expropriating his family's property.
Having joined the merchant marine in 1925, he switched to the
regular navy ten years later in the wake of Hitler's decision to
rearm the Third Reich. Though frequently at loggerheads with
superiors and Gestapo officials, Henke was named master of U-515
early in 1942 - and proved a happy choice for the Nazi war machine.
On six patrols, his sub sank two dozen Allied vessels, ranking
Henke 14th among U-boat aces and top among those who operated after
Allied hunter-killer teams turned the tide in the Battle of the
Atlantic. With an assist from Ultra intelligence intercepts, a US
task force sent U-515 to the bottom offshore Spain on Faster Sunday
1944, taking its captain and most of the crew prisoner. Under
interrogation, Henke was led to believe that he'd be returned to
England for trial on trumped-up atrocity charges. Apparently
determined to stay out of British hands, he made a suicidal escape
attempt and was gunned down on the wire at Fort Hunt, a secret POW
center near D.C. In recounting the twisty path taken by one
casualty of a global conflict, Mulligan sheds considerable light on
the tactics and technology employed by a loathsome regime's silent
service. Military history, then, of a high - if circumscribed -
order. (Kirkus Reviews)
This book relates the life - and death - of the rebel German seaman
who became one of the most successful U-Boat commanders of World
War II. The story of Werner Henke - and a narrative outlining the
history of his boat, U-515, and its crew - forms the basis for a
biography of a man who defies the stereotypes of German character,
who never fit in as a career officer in the German Navy, but who
chose a suicidal death in acceptance of the code of the military
service whose rules he continually bent and broke. Though the story
Mulligan relates is engrossing and action-packed, it is also a
carefully documented study that breaks new ground in uncovering the
sociological background of Henke and his crew; in short, it is a
study in German history as well as a biography of a U-Boat
commander. Examining the backgrounds and attitudes of the crew -
including their views on Hitler and the treatment of the Jews -
Mulligan sheds new light on the men who constituted an elite in
Hitler's Wehrmacht. The story of U-515 is also closely correlated
to the overall conduct of the U-Boat war, including assessments of
Karl Donitz's strategy, the influence of technological innovations,
and the contributions of Allied signal intelligence. Henke's
confrontation with the Gestapo and a detailed account of the
sinking of the passenger liner Ceramic further add to the story,
revealing the complex reality behind an image too long dominated by
propaganda stereotypes.
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