Another Place, Another Time: A U-Boat Officer's Wartime Album

Gordon Turner is the author of Empress of Britain: Canadian Pacific’s
Greatest Ship and the editor of SeaFare, a quarterly newsletter on sea
travel.

Books about World War II continue to roll off the presses, and
inevitably their quality varies. To this reviewer, one of the best in
recent years is this book, an engaging and enlightening volume by a
U-boat officer who emigrated to Canada after the war.

Werner Hirschmann grew up in Germany with an abiding interest in ships;
shortly after war broke out in 1939, he applied to join the Kriegsmarine
(Germany’s “War Navy”). The following year, he was selected as an
officer cadet and began the lengthy and rigorous training that
eventually led to his becoming a chief engineer aboard U-boats, a career
with a very low survival rate in the latter years of the war. But
survive he did—and so did the photographs he took and the diaries he
kept, both contrary to regulations.

Another Place, Another Time is a war memoir, but it is also an
intensely human document. The author writes about his teenage years as a
member of Hitler Youth and about the naval training he received, whose
twofold objective was to make him a proficient officer and an expert
engineer. He recalls the brief periods when he returned home on leave,
the camaraderie that bound U-boat crews together, the frequently
malfunctioning equipment that he had to deal with, and the patrols when
long days of monotonous routine were interrupted by depth charges from
an Allied ship that brought a sharp reminder that death was never far
away. In May 1945, when Germany surrendered, Hirschmann’s U-boat was
off the coast of Newfoundland. This led to his internment in a
prisoner-of-war camp in Gravenhurst, Ontario, for the next two and a
half years.

Hirschmann tells his story in a straightforward manner, and his book
held this reviewer’s interest from the first page to the last. The
numerous photos add considerably to its significance. An appendix
provides technical details and photos of the types of U-boats in which
he served.