U-Boat War: The Greatest Word-And-Picture Record of Submarine Warefare in World War II (1979) By Lothar-Gunther Buchheim
 
Serving as a war correspondent, Lothar-Gunther Buchheim joined the crew of U-96, commanded by Heinrich Lehmann-Willenbrock, for two patrols. Armed with a camera and dozens of rolls of film, he sought out to record the U-boat experience in exhausting detail. As he states in the introduction "every aspect, every detail, counted, bore witness to the reality of war, for unless I captured it on film it was irretrievably gone." U-Boat War was the first of a trilogy of Buchheim photo essays, and the only one which was translated to English. Written in Buchheim's trademark cynical, existentialist style, U-boat War is unique in not having numbered pages, enhancing it's stream-of-consciousness approach, although it makes it a little hard to cross-reference. The first couple chapters set the tone of the book. We see the blasted remains of munition trains, the wreckage of German bombers and patrol boats, the body of a British pilot baking in the Sun, and an angry standoff between a French construction and a member of the Todt organization. And yet, the The Guards Regiment, resplendent in their starched uniforms and polished jackboots, marches to "humiliate the French," while U-boat officers hold a backyard pig roast in St. Nazaire. Few things are more absurd than people trying to carry on normally during war! Although Buchheim took "more than 5,000" photographs during the war, "U-Boat War" distills his output down to 218 photographs. In those 200-odd grainy, high-contrast black and white photographs, Buchheim created an indelible study of life and death in the North Atlantic. The images range from the indelible to the mundane, from two-page spreads of U-96 gripped in a massive Atlantic storm, to intimate details of the crew at rest and work. We see Lehmann-Willenbrock as a craggy old man of 30, the immature baby faces of the control room mate and helmsman, the moment a depth charge explodes alongside the boat, cracked and blurred from the shocked of the detonation, the action inside the diesel room the moment a crash dive is ordered, and salt-stained images taken from the boat's bridge during a storm. 
 
Soft Cover
In Good condition