Edgehill Publications - The Grey Wolves Echoes from WWII (2007) Part 1 The Killing Begins

This is the tragic story of the U-boats at war. Brave men fighting a losing battle against odds they could never hope to overcome. Out-numbered, out-gunned and out-thought, the U-boats were justifiably known to their crews as 'iron coffins'. Somehow the U-boat fleet rose to the challenge and even managed a brief flicker of success before their inevitable fate enveloped them. The U-boat war encompassed a campaign that began on the first day of the European war and lasted for six years, involved thousands of ships and stretched over thousands of square miles of ocean, in more than 100 convoy battles and perhaps 1,000 single-ship encounters. In the 68 months of World War II, 2,775 Allied merchant ships were sunk for the loss of 781 U-boats. This is the story of that massive encounter from the German perspective. Grey Wolves captures life on board a U-boat, first hand accounts in text, letters, diaries, journals, memoirs, relaying tales of the mundane and the routine, dramatic and heroic; the fear and resilience of every crew member, from Kapitainleutnant to Mechaniker. It is a vivid, brutally realistic portrait of the men who fought and died beneath the surface of the Atlantic in what was, perhaps, the most critical battle of the war.

Written by Michael Leighton; Produced and Directed by Paul Dunn; Edgehill/Storm Bird Production

Part 1 The Killing Begins

Kaiser Wilhelm the 2nd of Germany had long desired to rule an empire. He thought that Germany needed a powerful Navy to protect it - especially against Britain. The German Navy was set to the ultimate test - war against Great Britain, putting their mighty fleet to good use. They began a naval blockade of Germany during the first days of the war and deployed their naval units. At the outset of World War I, German U-boats, though numbering only 38, achieved notable successes against British warships. By the end of the war Germany had built 334 U-boats and had 226 under construction. The Armistice terms of 1918 required Germany to surrender all its U-boats, and the Treaty of Versailles forbade it to possess them in the future. In 1935, however, rising from the ashes of defeat in WWI, by the eve of the Second World War the German Navy, “The Kriegsmarine”, had once again grown into a global sea power thanks to the terrifying weapon -The U-Boat! The success of German submarines during the First World War in almost cutting off Britain's vital imports had not been forgotten by Adolf Hitler and when, in March 1935, he repudiated the Treaty of Versailles, Britain signed up to an Anglo-German Naval Agreement. This allowed the Germans to build their submarine strength up to one third of the British Royal Navy's tonnage. In the early years of the Second World War, the elite force of German submariners known as the Ubootwaffe came perilously close to perfecting the underwater tactics of the First World War and successfully cutting Britain's transatlantic lifeline. In 1940, the U-boats started to take a real toll against merchant shipping, credited with sinking 2,606,000 tons of shipping.

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