Lone Wolf; The Life and Death of U-Boat Ace Werner Henke

Westport, Connecticut: Praeger Publishers, 1993. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. 247 pages. Includes 1 figure and 8 tables. Also includes Illustrations, Acknowledgments, A Note on Terms and Abbreviations, Table of Comparative Ranks (World War II); Introduction, Prologue, Seventeen numbered chapters, Conclusion, Appendix 1--The Place of Henke in the U-Boat War, Appendix 2--Sinkings by U-515, Selected Bibliography, and Index. 12 black and white photographs follow page 125. Timothy P. Mulligan was an archivist at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., specializing in captured German and World War II era U.S. military and naval records. He received his Ph.D. in diplomatic history from the University of Maryland in 1985. During his 34-year tenure as an archivist with the National Archives and Records Administration, he also compiled the two-volume finding aid World War II: Guide to Records Relating to U.S. Military Participation. This guide describes approximately 200,000 cubic feet of records in National Archives custody, and received the Society of American Archivists' C.F.W. Coker award in 2009. This book presents the story of World War II U-Boat ace Werner Henke, whose U-15 sank more ships (24 merchant vessels and 2 warships) than any other German submarine commander after September 1942. A fiercely independent individual, Henke was nearly cashiered from the service before he became one of its greatest heroes. Two weeks after Hitler awarded him one of Germany's highest decorations, he battled the Gestapo to protect his friends. How and why he met his end on the barbed wire fence of a POW camp outside Washington, D.C.--the only U-Boat commander shot while attempting to escape in the United States--forms the core of this book. Derived from a Kirkus review: The riveting, resonant tale of an outsider who achieved success as a U-boat skipper in WW II Germany's Kriegsmarine-and met a unique fate on dry land far from home. Drawing on contemporary documents and interviews with his subject's surviving shipmates, naval archivist Mulligan offers a vividly detailed account of a renegade whose career belied the stereotypically barbaric image of unterseeboote commanders. Born in 1909, Werner Henke moved west in 1920 to a suburb of Hamburg when the Versailles Treaty ceded Poland a corridor to the Baltic, expropriating his family's property. Having joined the merchant marine in 1925, he switched to the regular navy ten years later in the wake of Hitler's decision to rearm the Third Reich. Though frequently at loggerheads with superiors and Gestapo officials, Henke was named master of U-515 early in 1942-and proved a happy choice for the Nazi war machine. On six patrols, his sub sank two dozen Allied vessels, ranking Henke 14th on the list of U-boat aces and top among those who operated after Allied hunter-killer teams began to turn the tide in the Battle of the Atlantic. With an assist from Ultra intelligence intercepts, a US task force sent U- 515 to the bottom offshore Spain on Easter Sunday 1944, taking its captain and most of the crew prisoner. Under interrogation, Henke was led to believe that he would be returned to England for trial on trumped-up atrocity charges. Apparently determined to stay out of British hands, he made a suicidal escape attempt and was gunned down on the wire at Fort Hunt, a secret POW center near Washington, D.C. In recounting the twisty path taken by one casualty of a global conflict, Mulligan sheds considerable light on the tactics and technology employed by a loathsome regime's silent service. Military history of a high order.