I was surprised at the amount of wood work there was inside the sub.
Well, wood is a very versatile material that can be turned into any shape. We mainly use plastics for that now, but plastics technology was not as advanced then. Plus many plastics are of petrochemical origin and oil was a valuable and scarce commodity in WWII Germany.
In a computer version of Larry Bond's modern naval wargame,
Harpoon, Tom Clancy wrote a short essay about a tour he had taken of a Soviet warship. Please note that Clancy had met and worked with Bond when writing his breakthrough novel, "The Hunt for Red October", using Bond's wargame to testplay the novel's action scenes as well as tapping Bond's familiarity with Jane's Books (which were in turn created starting around 1906 to support Fred T. Jane's own naval wargame). In his piece, Clancy noted the wood paneling in the captain's stateroom (where he would receive visitors) and all he could think of was all that wood turning into "secondary missiles" during combat inflicting grave physical harm to any occupants of that room.
In WWII, my father was a SeaBee (Naval Construction Batallion -> CB -> Sea Bee). They trained at Camp Peary which was located in a government reservation in Virginia which, rumor has, is where the CIA's training facility, "The Farm", is located.
That same reservation also housed a very special POW camp. ADM Dönitz was a WWI veteran, from which he learned the vital importance of cryptography and the need to keep your communications absolutely secure. Army and Luftwaffe use of Enigma was often slack which made breaking their comms easier. But Dönitz ran a much tighter ship! Not only did Kriegsmarine comms run much tighter protocols, but even the Navy Enigma machines were more complex. And hence far more highly prized for the Allies.
The mortality rate of U-Booten (dative plural) was high enough already (as cited in the beginning of the movie,
Das Boot), though greatly worsened by the accomplishments of the
Western Approaches Tactical Unit (WATU), a unit manned primarily by rather young women (WRENs) which analyzed wolf pack attacks against our convoys and wargamed highly effective countermeasures which led the CO of U-Boot operations to mount a photo of the WATU CO on the wall and identify him as their primary enemy (post-war, he saw that himself).
Every one of those sunken U-Booten (dat.pl.) carried a Navy Enigma device and code books. If that U-Boot actually sank, then that classified material was lost, no security problem. But if the U-Boot had been captured, then that classified could have been captured as well. In the classified bizz, that's called a
compromise (I'm drawing here on 35 years of training in military service plus some civilian experience). The Kriegsmarine's response would have been the same as our own response to a compromise: issue new codes and other stuff (if even I were to learn of them they'd have to kill me).
So, when we were able to capture a German U-Boot and its Enigma and codebooks, we had a vested interest to not advertise that fact. There was a scene in
The Imitation Game where the British having cracked Enigma traffic revealed a wolf pack attack on a convoy where a character's brother was serving. They couldn't warn that convoy since that would tell the enemy that we had cracked their codes, so they couldn't do anything to warn the convoy of the attack. There was supposed to have been a similar situation with the British knowing of a bombing attack on Coventry that they couldn't do anything about without informing the enemy that they had inside information about the attack.
As I understand the Geneva Conventions (I could be mistaken), when you take a prisoner of war you are supposed to report it. But if you were to report having captured a member of a U-Boot crew, then you are also reporting the potential of having also captured that U-Boot and all its classified. So those captured U-Boot crews were not reported at the time, but rather were taken to highly secure POW camps, their survival kept a close secret until the end of the war.
One of those POW camps was supposed to have been in that government reservation housing Camp Peary and The Farm (albeit in different time periods).
Are you a Marvel fan? Do you really want to know what Hydra was up to during WWII? It's an absolutely true story!
No duff!* (as the Canadians say)
Camp X
Hydra
X Company, a Canadian/Hungarian spy thriller television series depicting a team of agents out of Camp X operating in France and communicating through Hydra. I had watched it on Amazon Prime, but it's apparently no longer available.
* FOOTNOTE:
One of my friend's favorite TV shows was
Air Disasters, which is a USA rebranding of a Canadian show,
Mayday. That show cured her of her fear of flying, because each investigation into what had gone wrong led to corrective actions to keep that from ever happening again.
One show depicted a crash in the far north of Canada. Basically in such cases, any survivors of a crash would eventually die from exposure. Not so here.
At the time of the crash, Canadian defense forces were conducting an emergency exercise for such an incident. When the actual crash occurred in the middle of the exercise, the radioman reported the crash as "No duff! This is
no duff!" Those two words are now burned into my memory.
The warming of the planet has raised a few questions.
As the "Northern Passage" across North America opens up due to warming, what's to keep cruise liners from booking such passages?
And when those cruise ships encounter emergencies, who's there to bail them out?
Case in point. On a cruise along the south coast of Spain, we heard on the 1MC the call to the crew to clear the forward deck/helipad for the evacuation of a passenger for a medical emergency.
In the Northern Passage, what emergency facilities even exist?