European Reading Challenge #3

Sharks and Little Fish: A Novel of German Submarine Warfare - Wolfgang Ott

Based on the author's WWII experience as a young sailor and submariner, Haie und kleine Fische
(S&LF) stands with classic novels of the U-boat genre such as Das Boot by Lothar-Guenther Buchheim and Run Silent, Run Deep by Edward L. Beach.  S&LF gives raw, ferocious accounts of men in dangers posed by the mistakes of crewmates, the incompetence and mania of officers, the relentlessness of weather, water, and salt, and the physical foulness of submarine life.

Wolfgang Ott was almost seventeen when he got called up into the Navy at the beginning of WWII.  As Willi Heinrich fictionalized his experience as a grunt on the Eastern front in the best-selling Cross of Iron, Ott also wrote an autobiographical novel and published it in 1957.

The first half of S&LF finds us with the main character Teichmann, also barely seventeen, on his tour of duty on a mine sweeper. Ott displays control of scene-setting and action, deadpanning his way through brutal, perilous situations but never resorting to a callous or hard-boiled tone.  It’s a rare book whose tone, incident, characters mesh so finely that I, a lover of sleep, stayed up past my bedtime. But I read the first 150 pages or so, enthralled, until my eyes smarted. Such a thing never happens.

With only sometime lapses into overwrought prose, Ott stays matter-of-fact. He implies that the young are too dumb and green to be panicky and that the older, more practiced soldiers and sailors become experienced enough to be scared brickless. Only seventeen as Ott reminds us, Teichmann is too young to recognize as possibilities getting killed and being dead forever. For instance, stuck in a rubber raft and menaced by a half-dozen sharks, Teichmann feels only mild concern till it only gradually dawns on him that he’s really in tight spot. Indeed, the word “sharks” in the title refers not only to the war, which chews almost everybody up, but also to the marine carnivorous fishes with forked tails that will happily munch down a teenage sailor as a quick snack. Mortal danger in this novel takes forms both figurative and literal: on one hand, the caprices of fate and on the other, English bombers and corvettes and destroyers.
 
Against such bad odds – eight of ten U-boats did not return to port – bravery helps only so much. For Heinrich in Cross of Iron, an officer observes why men continue to fight even when the situation looks hopeless, “To fight for a conviction does not require heroism. Heroism begins where the meaninglessness of the sacrifice remains the last, only message the dead can leave behind.”

Ott is more skeptical about heroism. The professional warriors know how and when to fight and they never think of why. They are ironic about their business. When one officer asks another how he spent one of his days on leave, the other replies with a straight face, “Reading Ernst Jünger.” Jünger wrote the solemnly hard-boiled WWI memoir Storm of Steel, which the Nazis kept in print, unlike their banning and burning of All Quiet on the Western Front by anti-war Erich Maria Remarque.

Ringing true is his account of brutal officer training, which came out of the inferiority complex of the German navy of the time. Without being too satirical, Ott exposes the unnecessary and pointless discipline of the naval establishment, who seems to assume mere military formalities will induce esprit de corps and an authentic martial tradition.  Such exalted emotions can’t be imposed, it’s like kidding yourself that something is true because the authorities merely assert that it’s true.

In contrast to Heinrich in Cross of Iron, Ott does not neglect the social and political side of the war. For instance, the midshipmen return to Germany for a couple of Christmases as Germans become poorer and more guarded. Talking about the war and national psychology, the cowed civilians babble ready-made phrases on the order of “If you want to make an omelet, you’ve got to break eggs.” As for the leaders, two sailors dismiss with scorn the “fairy tales” told by the “club-footed Jesuit” of a propaganda minister.

At the time the fictionalized memoir was a best-seller, the heavy-hitting Times Literary Supplement said, "It is as uncompromising, vivid, and unfalsified an account of war-time naval life as has appeared." The book is not a multi-layered classic on the order of James Jones’ The Thin Red Line but it’s better than memoirs of the “I Fought in Okinawa” variety.  Because of the occasional over-writing and melodrama, I’d place it next to Jones’ classic potboiler From Here to Eternity.

Of interest to those into the topic of minesweeper/sub warfare or ambitious fictionalized war memoirs.