U-455: 51 men on the bottom

September 2005. Off the coast of Portofino, at a depth of 110 meters, lies the wreck of U-455, an iron tube where fifty-one men have been waiting since 1944. Embedded in the seabed, protected by a leather pouch, the soul of the submarine resurfaces: the diaries of Chief Engineer Werner Buhlau and that of Hans-Martin Scheibe, twenty-nine years old, Kapitänleutnant of the Kriegsmarine, Together, their diaries cover all their years at sea, from training in the Baltic to the North Atlantic routes, from the depths beneath enemy convoys to the enclosed waters of the Mediterranean, from the Strait of Gibraltar crossed in absolute silence, to the final mission the tenth-from which U-455 would never return. It is the story of what is left unsaid when there are no words and of what is written when there is no one left to tell. Buhlau and Scheibe never returned from their tenth mission. But their notebooks did, bearing witness to all that remains when everything else has vanished to the bottom of the sea. U-455 is a novel about war seen from the inside, not from the lofty heights of victory proclamations nor from the depths of the rhetoric of sacrifice, but from the only place where war is real: in the bodies of those who fight it, in the silence that settles in when an enemy destroyer passes overhead at two hundred meters and fifty-one men hold their breath together. Buhlau wanted to return to Bremen. Scheibe wanted to reach the other side. Neither of them made it. But their diaries do!

By Luca Stefano Cristini, 210 pages
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