Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - *PREVIEW* The U352, The Dumbest U-Boat of WWII

Episode Date: September 18, 2024

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Yeah, then we just killed a bunch of merchant mariners over the course of like the next few decades. I should caveat this with, I don't actually believe we should go back to building giant battleships. Someone's going to get really mad. I am not a return tradition when it comes to Navy guy. I don't give a fuck about the Navy in one way or another. I want battleships. I want dazzle camouflage. I do kind of want dazzle camouflage. I want depth charges. I want every ship to be built with the quality of the kuznetsov

Because I have a personal grudge towards naval personnel, I don't care about the nation. I just don't like you. I'm also kidding It's fine. I don't give a fuck anyway These you boats were terrifying if you were in a ship in the 40s Especially the early 40s when they were really kicking off during the Battle of the Atlantic thing, running into wolf packs and things of that nature, which was a string of U-boats in a row. Most U-boats would work on their own,

but occasionally if say a U-boat found a convoy of cargo ships, they would alert all the nearby U-boats, you'd all congregate on that one area and blow them all to shit. That was the very, very short explanation of what a wolf pack tactic was. And it worked incredibly well. And in order to adapt to this new style of warfare, the Germans were vastly expanding their U-boat fleet. I mean, they had 15 different shipyards across Germany

churning out U-boats. And this was a massive uptick of any kind of navy in general in Germany before that point, but specifically submarines. And if there's one thing you know about submarines, they're an incredibly technical beasts. And it's one of those machines that, you know, there's a lot of machines a lot of weapons that you could be

Okay with kind of learning on the job a rifle for instance It'll probably work itself out or you know If you're in a huge battleship crew and there's a few people on board who are kind of green I mean battleships have hundreds or thousands of crew people depending on what kind of battleship it is Right, like there's enough people on there to pick up the slack. Submarines are not that kind of thing. How to learn as you go kind of thing. They have very small crews and only two officers. Everybody involved needs to be pretty on point. It's also a difficult thing when by default, most ships, they're lacking any outside input, they usually float.

With certain notable historical exceptions, many of which are discussed on the show. Yeah. Generally speaking, a boat, no matter how big the crew failure is, will float. Your experience may vary though. Right. Yeah. Versus like the issue with the submarine is, not only is the on-the-job training part difficult and also, you're navigating around a place where occasionally you just find a reef that no one has mapped before, or it turns out to be much

shallower than this chart that you have from the 1800s. Hold that last part for later. You can't, with a boat, you can run into shit. With a submarine, if you run into shit, you're just not found for another five years. To be fair, in a boat, you shouldn't with a boat you can run into shit with the submarine if you run into shit You're just not found and you know about you shouldn't run into things, but it's a little bit more Forgivable, but yeah at least like I'm getting it. I'm getting a message from the captain of the coast at Concordia It's fine to run into things Yeah, you know but yeah, then the other issue of course is with the submarine your default half the time is sink

And so, you know, there's a lot less room for error. Kind of like the reason I've never really trusted helicopters because like... I mean, statistically, helicopters are the least safest way to fly. Yeah. It's like one of those like... Bar none. You're better off flying on a balloon. In fact, I'm going to invent a helicopter, but instead of blades, it's just different hot air balloons and they spin rapidly around one another because, and this is true, I'm inventing an incredibly elaborate way to kill myself. I was going to say, just like, I'm going to call it the turbo Hindenburg. I can't see a single thing wrong with it.

Welcome to the euthanasia copter. It's fine. That's legal in the Netherlands. Turning myself into a giant firework. Be right back. Yeah, you can't you can't set a Napoleon uniform on fire in your backyard. Otherwise, the cops will get called. But however, if you set up an elaborate death trap specifically for yourself, that's perfectly fine. Yeah, just like we're trying to return into tradition, but it's not multiple 9-11s, it's multiple Hindenburgs.

Yeah, Joe out here trying to become Wile E. Coyote. Hey, I only have to be successful once. The safety regulations have to be successful every time. During the expansion of the U-boat fleet, they had to kind of cut down on training for enlisted men as well as officers. Naval officers take a very long time to train. It's years.

It's just like any officer, you go to officer school and it lasts effectively as long as a degree program. Whether it be the cut down two years in some situations. Some people cut it down even more than that. The enlisted men in this case had 12 weeks of training before being kicked over to the boats. Officers, though, like I said, take much, much longer to train. And Germany's like, well, we can't do that.

We'll just take dudes from the surface fleet and make them U-boat captains with no training whatsoever. Uhhh, I mean... It's a boat, it's fine. How much do you gotta know? It's just some guy named Fritz looking at a chart that just says boat goes down, boat goes up. It's like, ah yes, okay, got it. Taking notes. That's the biggest change you have, like okay you got surface boats, boat floats.

Now you got boat go down and boat comes up. Boat kind of float. Boat. Yeah, except you don't have... Your whole navigation thing is a lot more difficult here at this point because it's not like you can just easily look outside and take a sight reading at any given point in the day. Also those whole depth markers become a lot more important because the water under your keel doesn't only have to be 10 feet. It has to be a little more than that.

You're generally working alone as well, so there's no room for fuck-ups. Right. Other ships are going to work in a fleet. Nobody you can ask. You're surrounded by a whole bunch of other guys who all got, as Joe just said, 12 weeks of training. Nobody's a subject matter expert. Just a whole bunch of Nazi morons staring at each other in a fucking metal tube.

And the U-352's crew was dispatched to the boat before is even done being built. They were billeted on the submarine as construction was finished around them. That that happens more often than you might think. See, I learned that while researching this episode is that if you're a sailor and your boat is being worked on, you just live in a construction site, which is wild to me. So the two of the last icebreakers in the Coast Guard that are from the 70s and 80s are the Polar Star and the Polar Sea. And they were both in Washington and Seattle, the shipyard there. And they were both laid up for protracted period. I definitely knew guys who were

stationed aboard them and technically were collecting sea pay and sea time, even though the whole thing was fucking up on blocks the entire three years that they were assigned to the ship. You float your icebreaker into the wrong neighborhood and someone puts that bitch up on blocks. Yeah. No, I mean, you know. Can't let a converter of your U-boat disappears. I mean, you're joking really loud. They had to install rims to steal them.

What the fuck? They were stripping the parts for one to make the other one work. So that's not far off. That's unfortunately also pretty accurate for the Navy. But commanding this U-boat would be 31 year old Helmut Rathke He was a 10 year veteran of the German Navy and had never once stepped on a submarine Never attended any schools for them or had even looked at one up close before

Yes, he but but this boat was being built in Flensburg, Germany, which happened to be where he lived So there's a good chance he got the job just because he lived nearby proximity getting in promotion by proximity that's He was also a hardcore Nazi loyalists, which is unique because Like we kind of laid out in our last episode about U-boats, the U-boat branch was, I won't, I'm not going to say non-political, it's Nazi Germany, everything's political, but it was the least political of all branches of the Navy because they operated completely

independently on their own. Right. It was like the one place that if you didn't like Hitler, you could openly talk about it. Everybody's like, yeah, it's fine. I think it's also because they're like, well, all these guys are going to be dead real soon anyway. So also true. Yeah. What's the worst thing we could do to them? And it's like shoving them in a tube and putting them out,

and they landed to get depth charged is like only a couple steps above like death camp. So- Statistically speaking, most U-boat crews did not survive. If you were a U-boat crewman in 1940 there's a very good chance you did not live to see 1945 and I'm not gonna say these guys weren't Nazis I'm just saying this is the only branch where some form of dissent was generally accepted and that wasn't from a lack of trying in the and the party structure of trying to get more

loyalists in there to stop this from happening because everybody fucking knew this about the U-boat branch. So they tried to inject the dudes like Rathke into the mix to try to fix that. A declassified Office of Naval Intelligence document, which is a lot of the sourcing I'm going to use today, I'll be in the show notes, noted that Rathke professes unqualified admiration for Hitler and National Socialism he considered Hitler knowledgeable in all aspects of life culling the Fuhrer a quote genius of everything not just military matters but a leader who quote united all the German peoples of Europe so Rathke real piece of shit which is

good because we're gonna be laughing at him a lot this episode I like to think that there's like a Ben Garrison cartoon that's hung up in this guy's quarters of like of swole Hitler like like a swole Trump thing but it's like swole Hitler it's stop it stepping on Uncle Sam's neck and just like yes this is I need to post a million times on Facebook and start this guy would have loved AI is what I'm saying.