Heinz Schaeffer
U-boat 977 is a terrible, heroic record from the other side of the Battle of the Atlantic. It is a tale of Allied ships sunk, of attack, of counterattack, and finally of defeat of the U-boats. It was written by one of the few desperate men who survived that defeat.
Completely authentic, intensely dramatic, it is a personal record of Hitler's most insidious and effective military arm. It begins when the author was a young man starting his training for U-boat service, and carries through the sinkings of Allied ships and the miraculous escapes that brought him his fame. It tells of our growing anti-U-boat war and the horror of the coming of "the worst enemy"—radar. And finally he recounts his last incredible dash across the Atlantic, with its stretch of sixty-six days under the sea, to surrender in the Argentine and face the charge that U-977 had been Hitler's escape ship.
Here, also, both in the words and between the lines is a view of the Nazi military machine as seen by one of its human cogs—a moving, terrible, and valuable picture presented in terms of dramatic action.
U-BOAT 977
by
Heinz Schaeffer
INTRODUCTION BY NICHOLAS MONSARRAT
Ballantine Books • New York
Copyright, 1952, by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
CONTENTS
Introduction by Nicholas Monsarrat
Preface
1. Yesterday
2. White Sails To Grey Wolves
3. The Grey Wolf Shows its Teeth
4. "Go In and Sink"
5. Christmas Eve
6. Underwater Fuelling
7. Gibraltar Was Hell
8. The Worst Enemy
9. Air Attack
10. Neptune Comes Aboard
11. Awaiting New Weapons
12. My Last Command
13. Sixty Days Under Water
14. Southern Cross
15. "You Hid Hitler"
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
HEINZ SCHAEFFER was a teen-ager in Berlin, sailing racing sloops for pleasure, when the Nazis came to power. He joined the Germany Navy in 1938 as an officer-trainee, and in May, 1941, he became a submariner. He spent the next four years in U-boats, fighting the Battle of the Atlantic.
The struggle cost the lives of more than 35,000 British and American seamen. It also brought death to 30,000 Germans—of those who served in U-boats only one in four survived.
By some miracle Schaeffer found himself alive when the war ended; not only alive but in command of a fully armed submarine, U-977, lurking undetected in the North Sea. Other U-boats surfaced and surrendered to Allied warships. But U-977 dived deep, and became a hunted outlaw.