The Battle of Britain Five Months That Changed History, May—October 1940 by James Holland (z-lib.org).epub

calm, but the haze meant visibility was limited. He had continued hunting,
changing course from time to time, but was on the point of giving up when
at last the flare had been spotted.
The airmen were lifted on to the deck and then taken down below, and
Günther followed soon after. When he reached the cramped ward-room he
found his off-watch men gathered round the airmen, plying them with
sausage and drink. Crouching down by Stöckinger, Günther examined his
wounds. ‘One through the calf and a flesh wound in the shoulder,’ he said.
‘Nothing too serious.’ That was good, for there was no way of getting the
wounded man off again until the patrol’s end – and that would not be for
another month.
The crew had hoped that finding the airmen had been a good omen, but
a whole week passed before they found any shipping. Crew morale quickly
dipped in such circumstances. The Mk VIIB U-boat might look large
enough from the outside, but, inside, the cigar-shaped pressure hull was
only 142 feet long and ten feet wide, which for forty crew – five officers
and thirty-five ratings – was claustrophobic to say the least. The men
literally lived on top of each other since the boat sailed round the clock
whilst on patrol, and crews would take turns to be on watch. Thus they
shared what few facilities there were, side by side with the fourteen
torpedoes, 220 88 mm deck-gun rounds, and the stores for four or five
weeks of patrol; every nook and cranny was filled with nets of potatoes, tins
of fruit, meat and condensed milk, coffee, sugar, cheese and hard-crusted
black bread. From the innumerable pipes that ran along the boat, there hung
vast numbers of sausages and sides of cured meat. By the end of a patrol,
vegetables and cheese left over had often become mouldy, adding to the
already foul stench on board, a stench of sweat, diesel oil, brine and food.
There was only one toilet, for which there would often be a long queue and
which smelled particularly repugnant. There was little spare water so the
men hardly washed, and certainly never changed their clothes. Beards were
the norm because shaving was a waste of water. Hair quickly became
matted and greasy with oil and sweat. The heating rarely worked properly –
it was always either too hot or too cold on board, but the fetid air nearly
always clammy. And while on the surface, which U-boats were for most of
the time because they could travel so much faster than when submerged, the
boat would pitch, plunge and roll with the swell of the ocean. The men who