Knight of the North Atlantic: Baron Siegfried von Forstner and the war patrols of U-402, 1941-3. By Aaron S. Hamilton. Seaforth Publishing, Barnsley: 2022 (ISBN 978 1 3990 9672 0 GBP 25,00).
Reviewed by John Johnston
Herbert Schwuchow, the maternal grandfather of the distinguished military historian and marine archaeologist, Aaron S. Hamilton, served as a cook on U-402 during its first four patrols into the North Atlantic. His grandfather’s stories of the patrols to the Azores and the eastern seaboard of the United States aroused Hamilton’s curiosity about the fate of the boat and its commander, Siegfried Freiherr von Forstner. Satisfying his curiosity led to thirty years of gathering information from official records, private papers, and published works which he has distilled into this book.
Too often, accounts of U-boat voyages are merely listings of courses plotted and ships sunk or myopic tales akin to the claustrophobic horror of Wolfgang Petersen’s Das Boot. Hamilton eschews such approaches and places the patrols of U-420 into the framework of the Battle of the Atlantic. He highlights the importance of U-boat headquarters in directing U-boat operations and shows how the interplay of technology, communications, and cryptography which first enabled the U-boats to attack allied convoys with devastating effect and which ultimately gave the allies control of the North Atlantic. U-402’s part in the battle, however, came to an end on 13 October 1943, when it was struck by an air-launched acoustically guided torpedo and sank with all hands.
The counterpoint to the technical story is the biography of U-402’s commander and the conduct of the eight patrols between May 1941 and October 1943. Siegfried Freiherr von Forstner came from a minor aristocratic family with a long tradition of military service and was the nephew of the World War I U-boat ace, Georg von Forstner. Like many of his milieu, Forstner was a German nationalist who was resentful of the peace settlement which had been imposed on Germany in 1919, but who was not a National Socialist. Like other German officers with service before 1933, he retreated into professionalism as a form of insulation from what was happening around him. That shield was, however, not impenetrable and in his letters and diary, von Forstner expresses frustration at the headstrong indiscipline of recruits who had grown up under National Socialism and disillusionment with the conduct of the war, especially its demoralising effects on the home front.
Von Forstner may have hoped to win the knight’s cross as a lone ace, but U-402 entered service as losses among the aces were compelling U-boat headquarters to exercise command more directly and to control the boats as an organised body against increasingly larger and better protected convoys. When he did win the cross for his part in the attack on convoy SC-118, it was as one of several commanders who received the award for their actions together and not as a lone ace. That attack also illustrates the wolfpack strategy’s effectiveness: in a single night, 7-8 February 1943, U-402 accounted for over two-fifths of the nearly 100,000 tons of shipping it sank or damaged over the course of its eight patrols.
Hamilton’s book is copiously illustrated with photographs which show life aboard U-402 and some of the vessels she sank or damaged: many of them were made by his grandfather’s shipmate, Walter Friebolin, and others are drawn from private and official collections. The accompanying sidebars clearly explain the photographs and, like the charts at the end of the book, elucidate the narrative. Hamilton succeeds in making von Forstner and the crew of U-402 real people with whom we can empathise, and the final section of the book – a dive onto the now peaceful and overgrown remains of one of U-402’s victims – is a fitting conclusion to the story and reminder, if one were needed, of the price of war.
