| VISIT AMAZON.CO.UK STORE FOR THESE BOOKS |
| As well as music, I’ve been writing books and articles for quite a few years now, several translated into different languages. My 11th book was ‘At The End Of The Day’; the story of the Blaze Bayley band. I updated the original 2009 copy in 2010 and sell it here through this site (the first edition sold out). The new chapters bring the story up to June 2010….a year on from the original ending point. Below are the U-boat books that I have written, and their accompanying |
 |
Formed in 1935, 1st U-Boat Flotilla operated against Hitler’s enemies from the very earliest stage of the War through to September 1944 when disbanded amid the flames of Brest (its operating base) during the US siege. Many of the top German naval figures feature in this authoritative history including Karl Donitz, Reinhard ‘Teddy’ Suhren, Otto Kretschmer, Joachim Schepke and Erich Topp. The Flotilla took part in most major operations; the invasions of Norway, Belgium and France and the all-important Battle of the Atlantic as well as the assault on the USA and Caribbean. Over 75% of operational U-Boats were lost as the Allies’ counter-measures and code-breaking successes took ever greater effect. This fascinating work records the Flotilla’s successes and disasters in detail. |
 |
In 1942 when German U-boats struck with devastating force for the first time against distant targets in the waters of the North and South Atlantic, the large cruiser submarines of the Second U-boat Flotilla at the spearhead of each assault. The Second U-boat Flotilla Saltzwedel was formed in 1936 and survived nine long years to the day of Nazi Germany’s eventual surrender. During the Spanish Civil war it had been a Saltzwedel boat that made the only successful attack on an enemy warship. Three years later Fritz-Julius Lemp’s tragic sinking of the Athenia in another Saltzwedel boat, triggered Germany’s U-boat war against England. The following six years of bitter combat found the flotilla at the forefront of distant operations. Leading the attack legendary commanders such as Albrecht Achilles, Werner Hartenstein and Reinhard Hardegen littered the Atlantic and Indian Oceans with the twisted steel of sunken ships. However, while the Second U-boat Flotilla mounted the most shattering submarine offensives of the Second World War, it was the intact capture of two of its boats, complete with their Enigma code machines, that would ultimately spell doom for Germany’s undersea warriors. Drawn extensively from various War Diaries and veterans’ personal reminiscences, the Second U-boat Flotilla describes the tumultuous fortunes of the most successful unit of Karl Donitz’s Grey Wolves. |
 |
This book is unique in that it charts a complete history of a single patrol and provides a new insight into life aboard through the successes and trials of U-564. Photographed during the summer of 1942 by an onboard war correspondent they show a U-Boat in action in the Atlantic and Caribbean, as the Kriegsmarine teetered on the verge of what turned out to be its ultimate downfall. The crew are shown in virtually every station and several other U-Boats and their commanders feature as they gather to resupply or to attack. The Three Black Cat motif of Reinhard Teddy Suhren’s U-564 is among the most famous in the illustrious history of Germany’s U-Boats of World War II. Suhren himself ranks in the top tier of U-Boat commanders along with the likes of Prien and Kretschmer and his name still raises a smile among veterans of the service for his infamously anti-establishment attitude that saw a meteoric rise to U-Boat command and the receipt of the Knight s Cross with Oak Leaves. The photographs were liberated from U-564′s concrete pen in Brest in 1945. They have lain in a shoebox under a bed for the best part of sixty years and now through the painstaking research of Lawrence Paterson and the Royal Navy Submarine Museum are to be published for the first time. Patterson has pieced together the stories of Teddy Suhren and U-564 and provides detailed accompanying captions explaining many of the photos and a history of both the boat, her crew and their illustrious and much-loved commander. |
 |
This is a history of U505 – one of only four Second World War U-boats still in existence – from its construction in Hamburg in 1941 through its 12 war patrols, capture and final journey and exhibition in Chicago. This book is co-written by a group of U-boat authorities. |
 |
Next to nothing has been written about the U-Boat war in the Indian Ocean. This is the story of a forgotten campaign. The battle began in August 1943, when a German submarine arrived in the Malaysian harbour of Georgetown. In total, nearly 40 U-Boats were assigned to penetrate the Indian Ocean, serving alongside troops of the occupying Imperial Japanese Forces. The Japanese allowed U-Boats to use Malaysia as an operational station. From that base, they mixed with Japanese forces on a hitherto unseen scale: a move which spread the U-Boat War throughout the vast Indian Ocean and into the Pacific. This theatre of war held a real chance to swing the tide of battle in North Africa in favour of Rommel, but the Germans essentially did little too late. The joint action also gave U-Boats the opportunity to penetrate the Pacific Ocean for the first time, attacking shipping off the Australian coast and hunting off New Zealand. Plans were even afoot for an assault on American supply lines. The ‘cooperation’ also brought into stark relief the fundamental differences of German and Japanese war aims. Eventually joined by the crews of Italian supply submarines, relations between the fighting men of the three main Axis powers were often brutal and almost constantly turbulent. Stories of U-Boats laden with gold and treasure stem almost exlusively from boats destined to and from Japanese-controlled Malaysia, laden with material exchanged between the two major partners of the Triple Axis Alliance. |
 |
The campaign waged by German U-boats in the Mediterranean in the Second World War was one of the hardest-fought of the war at sea. In confined waters, facing often overwhelming Allied naval and air superiority, a relatively small number of submarines caused considerable losses to the Royal Navy and its allies. In this new book, Lawrence Paterson puts the U-boat campaign in the Mediterranean into its strategic context, showing how it both affected and was affected by the fortunes of Rommel’s Afrika Korps in the Western Desert and the U-boat battle in the Atlantic, as well as describing the unique difficulties faced by the U-boats operating in the clear, shallow waters of the Mediterranean and how they tried to overcome them with new weapons and new tactics, and how increasing Allied dominance of the air further restricted their operations as the war went on. The U-boats’ successes are described in detail, such as the sinking of HMS Ark Royal, and the torpedoing of the battleship HMS Barham, which provided one of the best-known images of the Second World War at sea. Full use has been made of first-hand accounts by veterans, official German records and Allied archives to present the most comprehensive account of U-boats in the Mediterranean yet published. A unique account of a unique campaign, this book sheds new light on a neglected aspect of the U-boat war, and shows the courage and fortitude of the men on both sides of this savage conflict. |
 |
This is the first fully illustrated book about U-boats to combine first-class commissioned photographs and artwork with narrative eyewitness accounts by crewman so enabling the reader to acquire as accurate and redolent a picture of life in the U-boat arm as is possible within the covers of a book. The author, a well-known U-boat historian, has pieced together the technical details of the roles of individual crew members with extensive first-hand reports, many drawn from previously unpublished oral histories. These experiences – from cooks to engineers and from young recruits to battle-hardened commanders – build up into a powerful picture of life undersea. But the book is not just about the experience on the front line; U-boat men had a reputation for making the most of time spent ashore, between missions, and a vivid portrayal of life back at the home bases is also drawn. The book breaks new ground not just for the inclusion of new oral histories, but also for the presentation of the equipment and interiors of the U-boats using specially-commissioned new photography. There are an ever-increasing number of websites and forums dedicated to the U-boat war that are testament to the continuing fascination with this subject and this book is sure to satisfy a new generation of enthusiast looking for the very best in archival research and presentation. |
 |
As the Third Reich headed for its inevitable destruction, German ingenuity in the naval field turned to unconventional weapons midget submarines, radio-controlled explosive boats, and various forms of underwater sabotage. Inspired by Italian, and later British successes with human torpedoes and X-Craft, the Germans set up an organisation called Kleinkampfverbände ( Small Battle Units ). Utilising an unusual range of devices, some barely beyond the experimental stage, this formation was unique in drawing its personnel from the Navy, regular Army and Waffen SS. Originally envisaged as an all-volunteer elite unit of special forces, it was increasingly diluted by draftees and even military defaulters posted to the K-verbände as punishment. Nevertheless, there was no collapse of morale, even as conditions in both the Mediterranean and northern European theatres became increasingly adverse. By the end, facing overwhelming odds, even their senior commanders regarded some of the attacks as little better than suicide missions. Judged by their effect on the Allied advance, their successes were slight, but the indomitable bravery of those involved makes riveting reading. Pieced together from fragmentary sources, it is a largely untold story, chronicling some of the most desperate operations of the war. |
 |
After the June 1944 D-Day landings Doenitz withdrew his U-boat wolf-packs from the Atlantic convoy war and sent them into coastal waters, where they could harass the massive shipping movements necessary to supply the Allied armies advancing across Europe. Caught unawares by this change of strategy, the Allied anti-submarine forces were ill-prepared for the novel challenges of inshore warfare. It proved surprisingly difficult to locate U-boats that could lie silently on the seabed, and the shallow waters meant less than ideal conditions for sonar propagation. Furthermore, because the battle was nearer home, the U-boats wasted less time on transit, so at any one time there were more of them in combat. In the final months of the war there was also the threat of far more advanced and potent submarine types entering German service, but thanks largely to overwhelming numbers of escorts this last gamble by Doenitz was defeated. In fact, the Allied navies had never really established superiority, and this was to have enormous significance later during the Cold War, when the same tactics were planned by the Soviets. Since it had such a major impact on post-war naval thinking, it is a story of the utmost importance told by an accomplished U-boat author. |
 |
On the eve of Germany’s surrender in May 1945, Grossadmiral Karl Dönitz commanded thousands of loyal and active men of the U-boat service. Still fully armed and unbroken in morale, enclaves of these men occupied bases stretching from Norway to France, where cadres of U-boat men fought on in ports that defied besieging Allied troops to the last. At sea U-boats still operated on a war footing around Britain, the coasts of the United States and as far as Malaya. Following the agreement to surrender, these large formations needed to be disarmed – often by markedly inferior forces – and the boats at sea located and escorted into the harbours of their erstwhile enemies. Neither side knew entirely what to expect, and many of the encounters were tense; in some cases there were unsavoury incidents, and stories of worse. For many Allied personnel it was their first glimpse of the dreaded U-boat menace and both sides were forced to exercise considerable restraint to avoid compromising the terms of Germany’s surrender. One of the last but most dramatic acts of the naval war, the story of how the surrender was handled has never been treated at length before. This book uncovers much new material about the process itself and the ruthless aftermath for both the crews and their boats. |
VISIT AMAZON.CO.UK STORE FOR THESE BOOKS
I was also lucky enough to translate Christian Prag’s excellent book about U604 from German into English. I met Christian years ago at Herr Georg Seitz’s house and his book is excellent. Totally recommend you check it out.
