This country is at war with Germany. We shall go on to the end. I remember the sheets of

plane that came up and almost blinded us for my guns.

Hello and welcome to another episode of the World War Two podcast. I'm

amongst Wallace. The usual historical narrative of the U-Boats during World

War Two revolves around the battle of the Atlantic and the struggle of the

convoy's bringing vital supplies to Britain. But the story of the U-Boar

war is much more complex. They went into action on the first day of hostilities

with Britain and France and operated in nearly every theater of operation in

which the Vermac served and within all the Southern Ocean. To discuss the global

U-Boar war, I'm joined by Lawrence Paterson. Lawrence is the author of the U-Boar

War, a global history, 1939-45. Lawrence, thanks for joining me. As ever with the

Second World War, it's interesting to start with World War One. I think I'm

right in saying that the Germans were bad from having U-Boats after the

First World War. So did they carry on developing them in secret?

Well, it was a legal under the Versailles Treaty to have any U-Boats or

work on U-Boats. They had a very limited Navy, no aircraft. Yeah, there was a

lot of covert development between the wars, but particularly from sort of the

late 20s and so on. The Reichmarine at the time, they formed this little sort of

cover company, by this guy who invested a black fund of sort of hidden

money in this that and the other, and they started developing U-Boats essentially

for other nations, you know, in other nations, Finland and Sweden and so on.

I actually knew one of the guys, Buckley Hans, Rudolf Rosen, who was involved in

...