Wolfpack

From a top scholar of World War II, the definitive history of Germany’s U-boat campaign that challenged British naval supremacy and brought international trade to its knees

Winston Churchill once remarked that the only threat to truly frighten him was the peril of Nazi U-boats. Over the course of World War II, Germany’s submariners sank over three thousand Allied ships, nearly three-quarters of Allied shipping losses in all theaters of the war. In the process the submariners endured horrific conditions and suffered a 75 percent death rate, the highest of any arm of service in the conflict. Yet their story has never been told in full. 

In Wolfpack, historian Roger Moorhouse tells the story of the Battle of the Atlantic from the point of view of the German submariners. He tracks these men from the enthusiasm of the war’s early days, buoyed with optimism about their cause, through the challenges of the Allied counterthreat, to the final horrors of enemy capture and death in the depths. It is a story of courage, certainly, but also of fear, privation, and—ultimately—failure.   

Drawing extensively on war diaries, archival records, and the voices of the German submariners themselves, Wolfpack is a story of technological brilliance, dramatic naval engagements, and extraordinary human endurance.