posted by author Charles McCain
Home Page of Author Charles McCain"It stinks in here!"
There were no showers, bathing tubs even galvanized tubs for U-Boat men to utilize to cleanse themselves. This was not an oversight by the designers. The boats were not originally designed to operate for long periods at sea which is how they eventually came to be used.
Because they were unable to bathe, most U-Boat crewmen developed skin rashes, boils, and all other manner of skin diseases. The UBootwaffe had a special medical department which did nothing but study the skin diseases of Uboot crewmen. (Tuberculosis was also a major problem due to the constant damp.)
Also contributing to skin diseases among the men was the sickening miasma of air inside the uboat which clung to their skin and often infected their lungs. When boats returned from patrol and the flotilla engineers went aboard to make an inspection, they usually vomited because of the horrible smell.
U-boats were not well ventilated so when they were on the surface, the only way to get fresh air into the boat was to keep the bridge hatches open, close the outboard air intakes to the diesels, open the e-motor interior hatch and interior engine room hatch. This allowed the diesel engines to draw air from the outside through the open hatchways.
This arrangement didn't help as much as one might think since there was no way to vent the bad air except by opening the engine room deck hatch or the forward hatch to the deck in the crew compartment. This was never, ever done at sea except in an emergency.
So the fresh air coming in helped but it did not expel the bad air. The author of every U-Boat memoir I have ever read remarks on the horrible fugue of noxious air and the the disgusting smell which no one ever completely adjusted to.
This smell was a combination of the body odor of 45 or more unwashed men, their exhalations, rotting food, diesel oil, cooking odors, and worst of all, the smell of urine and excrement in the bilges.
While the most common types of uboat, the type VII and type IX had two toilets or water closets, one was always used for storage and wasn't available. So one toilet had to suffice for more than 45 men. The controls were so difficult to operate that each boat had one man especially trained in how to work the controls and he was known as "the toilet fuhrer").
Below 25 meters the toilet did not work because the water pressure was such that one could not open the outboard toilet valve to discharge the contents of the toilet.
Even if you could manage to open it, doing so was forbidden since it would create a weak spot and comprise the water-tight integrity of the boat. So the men used cans or buckets to urinate or defecate. As you might imagine, in the heat of action or action drills, these containers were often kicked over or in an emergency dive tipped over, spilling their contents. In a severe depth-charge attack, the porcelain toilet bowl was often shattered.
Being in a Uboat was like serving time in a public latrine that was never sanitized in spite of constant efforts by the crew to keep the interior of the boat clean.
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As an aside, the founder of the U-Boot Archiv in Cuxhaven, the late Horst Bredow, an officer in the UBootwaffe, had made one war patrol in the last months of World War Two. He had to be hospitalized upon returning to port because he had developed a skin rash covering his entire body. Another officer replaced him on his Uboat. The boat was sunk with all hands on her next war patrol.
The Archiv has changed its name from "U-Boot Archiv" to Deutsches U-Boot Museum.
The link to their site is here: http://www.dubm.de/home.html
Author Bio: My first novel, An Honorable German, about a heroic and conflicted German U-Boat Commander, was published in May 2009 right after I survived a bout with lymphoma. Through the Grace of God and the brilliance of Dr. Wydham Wilson, PhD, MD and his deputy genius, Kieron Dunleavy, MD, of the lymphoma team of the National Cancer Institute, I was cured and have spent the time since recovering and working on both my blog and future works.
