The 1981 film Das Boot cemented an image of the U-boat war as doomed, claustrophobic tragedy, ending with a crew wiped out in an air raid the moment they reach port. The real submarine that inspired it, U-96, tells a different story: across its active combat patrols it never lost a single crew member while sinking 27 ships. This episode traces the life cycle of a Type VIIC U-boat commissioned at Kiel in September 1940, from its lethal early patrols under Heinrich Lehmann-Willenbrock to its retirement as a training vessel at Königsberg and its inglorious end under American bombs in a Wilhelmshaven basin in March 1945.

Along the way, the episode digs into the messy mechanics of 1940s submarine warfare: temperamental magnetic torpedo detonators, a Dutch freighter that survived two torpedoes and had to be finished with the deck gun, an attack a ...