^{The film actor Leslie Howard (1893–1943) played Ashley Wilkes in Gone With the Wind. He was killed on June 1, 1943, while on board KLM Flight 777 from Lisbon to Bristol, which was shot down over the Bay of Biscay by a Junkers 88 fighter plane. (Photographer unknown; Ullstein Bilderdienst)}

A conversation between bomber pilot Wille* and submarine corporal Solm provides an especially drastic example of what conscious attacks on nonmilitary targets meant:

WILLE: You or PRIEN?

SOLM: We did it.

WILLE: Were they drowned?

SOLM: Yes, all are dead.

WILLE: How big was she?

SOLM: 6,000 (??) tons.

WILLE: How did you know that?

SOLM: Through W/T; the B.D.U. (U-Boat commander) sent through “there is a convoy at such and such a place, so and so many ships with supplies, so and so many ships with this or that cargo, a children’s transport, etc., etc. The children’s transport is so big, and the other is so big.” Whereupon we attacked it. Then came the question “Did you attack the convoy?” We replied “Yes.”

WILLE: How did you know that just this ship out of the 50 had the children on board?

SOLM: Because we have a big book. This book contains all the ships of the English and Canadian steamship lines. We look them up in that.

WILLE: That doesn’t have the name of the ship, does it?

SOLM: We have that.

WILLE: Are the names of the ships in it?

SOLM: It has them all in by name.

SOLM: Children’s transport… which gave us great pleasure.¹²²

Solm was likely referring to the sinking of the British passenger ship City of Benares on September 18, 1940, in which seventy-seven children died.

It is irrelevant in this context that Solm’s account deviates from the historic record in a number of respects: German U-boat commanders, for instance, did not know that there were children aboard the Benares. What is important is that Solm thinks he can impress his interlocutor with a story about how he sank a ship transporting children.

SINKING SHIPS

Otherwise, the stories told by German navy men and army soldiers starkly differed from those related by Luftwaffe members. For starters, hunting tropes played far less of a role. For purely technical reasons, ships’ crews had few opportunities to act individually. Unlike fighter pilots, navy men could not brag about how perfectly they could handle their equipment, since in general they were more dependent on whole crews working as one. The word “fun” hardly occurs in their conversations.

Astonishingly, German infantry soldiers, too, rarely tell of killing others in battle. Franz Kneipp, an SS Untersturmführer in the “Hitler Youth” Division who was captured in Normandy, is one of the few who did. On July 9, 1944, he recalled: