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Stories concerning ships that were sunk were omnipresent not only among submarine crews, but navy men in general. The strategy of German naval command against Great Britain was one of tonnage: the German navy aimed to sink more ships than Allied dockyards could replace. So the criterion for success was size.¹²⁸ That was true as well for the crews of armed German merchant marine vessels. Evidence of this is a dialogue between crew members of the raider MS Penguin and its supply ship MS Atlantis:

HAHNER*: What do you mean?

KOPP: We can’t be beaten for tonnage. She (another raider) had 129 (000) tons or so. We had 136 (000) tons, there were two or three others to be added.

HAHNER: We sank the biggest Egyptian passenger steamer and then two English steamers sailing to AFRICA with aircraft, ammunition and everything.¹²⁹

Games of verbal one-upmanship are common in the surveillance protocols. That’s partly because bragging is a frequent element of everyday conversations, in which the person talking tries to outdo his interlocutor with a better story or a superior achievement.

The sailors’ stories revolve around the sinking of ships regardless of what type they were. Even navy men taken prisoner early on in World War II think in terms of this paradigm:

HUTTEL: No, always the tonnage space first; as that will be England’s destruction. The “Kommandant” always has to report at the B.D.U. (Befehlshaber der U-Boote—Commander in Chief U-boats) as soon as we return. We sink everything without previous warning, but they (the English) must not know that.¹³⁰

The excerpt was recorded on February 10, 1940, when the war was only a few months old. As of January 6 of that year, German naval command had allowed U-boat commanders in the North Sea to sink merchant vessels from neutral countries without warning,¹³¹ a move intended to disrupt supplies traveling between Scandinavia and Great Britain. At the same time, submarine crews were to avoid attracting too much attention in order to head off international protests.

Of the six ships sunk by U-55 on its maiden patrol in January 1940, two were Norwegian and one was Swedish. U-boat crews didn’t care whom they sent to a watery grave. On the contrary, they spoke enthusiastically about new technological possibilities that would allow them to sink more ships. There was little room in their heads for thoughts about the fates of the crews on enemy ships. Saving enemies was only infrequently an option, and efforts to do so were correspondingly rare:

HUTTEL: We always allow the crew to drown: what else can you do?¹³²