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Extraordinary Stories of Wreck, Terror and Triumph on the Sea
| plaque at Moltenort , Kiel |
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| The crew of Hartenstein's U156 |
This plaque is part of the U-boat
memorial at Moltenort, near Kiel, Germany. There is one for every U-boat that lost a crew member. Many list the names of every
member of the crew. The crew of U-156, especially their captain, Werner Hartenstein, were special. Having done their duty
and sunk a ship - the Laconia - on 12 August 1942 they discovered that, among the survivors, were hundreds of Italian
POWs. Hartenstein initiated a rescue that took no account of of nationality or allegiance. Women and children and the wounded
were taken aboard U-156 and treated with kindness. With the help of two other U-boats and one Italian submarine with its own
record of rescuing survivors, more than 1100 were saved, most of them transferred to ships of the Vichy Navy in a pre-arranged
rendezvous. During the rescue mission, with his boat crowded both inside and on deck, with several lifeboats in tow,
and with a home-made red cross displayed on the deck aft of the conning tower, the submarine was attacked by a US Liberator
bomber with specific orders to sink it regardless. U-156 survived, unlike many of those in the boats or obliged to leave her
shelter. But although she lived to hunt again, U-156 was sunk with all hands on the 8th March 1943.
The story of U-156
and the Laconia is one of 17 dramas featured in my book WRECK.
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It was supposed to
be a book of shipwrecks, but I preferred to choose a selection of “maritime dramas” because that covered
a much wider field. Given how many thousands have occurred, choosing them should have been an
impossible task, but it was amazing how many of the seventeen chose themselves. The first on my list was
the Rothsay Castle, a ship I had come across in my days at Lloyd’s Register, but not in any detail; the second
had to be the attack by Italian special forces on Alexandria Harbour, and I was determined to write about another East Indiaman
– so I ended up with two. I wanted the book to have an international flavour, and I can read several languages -
with various degrees of incompetence – and that opened the way for, among others, the Sirio
and the Méduse. And so on, until I ended up with seventeen – all very different, yet with intertwining
themes of leadership (or the lack of it) , endurance, courage and cowardice, humanity and cruelty. So many of those themes
came together in the Laconia story. Who is it written for? Anyone who
enjoys a good story of adventure on the high seas and who does not mind a large dose of grim reality. Two of the chapters
actually had me in tears as I was writing certain parts of them, though, embarrassingly, on one of those occasions the tears
were for the ship. I have tried to vary the style of the chapters, from
full dramatisation to very spare narratives, and I freely admit to some scene-setting with invented dialogue. This occurs
at the start and end of “Taken by Storm, and the starts of “Maiden Voyage”, “Worse
Things Happen at Sea”, “Death Sentence” and “The Brotherhood of the Sea”. Elsewhere in those
chapters and throughout the rest of the book, any dialogue is reproduced verbatim or reconstructed from reported speech. The
list of primary sources will allow historians to follow my research, and I am more than happy to clarify points. Errata: Laconia: Natal is (in this case) in Brazil Sirio - silly typo: Italy became a a political entity in 1861, not
1871. To be precise, it wasn't the Italy we know today as, for one thing, Rome and the Veneto were not part of it.
List of main ships: Chapter | Ship Name | Date of Incident
| Links
to additional data
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| Chapter | Ship Name
| Date of Incident
| Links to additional data
| 1 | Prince
(Compagnie des Indes) | 1752 | | | 2 | HEICS Doddingtonor Dodington
| 1752 | | 3 | HMS Centaur & HMS Ramillies | 1782 | | | 4 | Albion (timber carrier)
| 1810 | | 5 | Méduse (French frigate)
| 1816 | | | 6 | Rothsay Castle
| 1831 | Passenger List
| 7 | Amphitrite (convict ship) | 1833 | | | 8 | San Francisco (US
paddle steamer)
| 1853 | | 9 | HMS Victoria & HMS Camperdown | 1893 | | | 10 | Sirio (Italian emigrant ship)
| 1906 | | | 11 | Titanic | 1912 | | | 12 | USS Squalus (submarine)
| 1939 | | | 13 | R/smg Scirè, HMS Queen Elizabeth,HMS Valiant | 1941 | | | 14 | RMS Laconia and
U-156 | 1942
| | | 15 | Flying Enterprise and Turmoil | 1951/52
| | | 16
| Kursk and AS-28 (Russian Submarines)
| 2000/2005
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Hardback
published 2006 by Conway 400 pages
ISBN 978144860340
US edition
published 2007 by Burford Books
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UK paperback edition published
2008 as "Wreck"
Pages
408 ISBN: 978-1844860616
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Awaiting re-print; currently unavailable via publisher
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Limited special offer - £9 including UK postage direct from author - use "contact me"on home
page
Reviews: ‘Reads like
the best fiction, yet they are all true stories. Packed with all the elements of a cracking good fireside read, this is well
worth a look.’ - Warships
International Fleet Review ‘A wonderful gift to anyone having an interest in maritime history...the academic
quality of Jean Hood's work elevates her book to an entirely different plane. Her attention to detail, which she presents
in clear lucid language, is very impressive indeed….But the book’s academic strengths never get in the way of
her skill as a story-teller. She writes beautiful flowing English, with some wonderful turns of phrase…enjoy this cracking
good read.’ - The Review,
quarterly journal of the Naval Historical Collectors & Research Association wonderful material and obvious
writing talent…a relentlessly fascinating series of horrific sea disasters.’ - Publisher’s Weekly ‘A positively brilliant addition to popular
maritime history….’ -
Booklist
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