U-boat's eye witness

Here is a time machine that will fascinate every wreck-diver and enthral U-boat buffs - a 78-minute video of film taken by a German cameraman aboard a U-boat in 1917.
It was shot between March 31 and May 6 from the deck of U-35, during a stop-and-sink mission from her Mediterranean base at Cattaro. Her commander was Kapitanleutnant Lothar von Arnauld de la Perière, holder of Germany's highest decoration, the Blue Max.
De la Perière used up all his nine torpedoes on this mission, during which he sank 20 steamers and three sailing ships - 67,989 tons of shipping. But he preferred to stop a ship, let the crew abandon her, and then sink her with explosives from a boarding party, or hole her below the waterline with gunfire. He also fired 541 10.5cm shells and 29 demolition charges.
We see most of the victims being sunk, as it happened, not through the periscope but from the deck of the surfaced U-35. Steadiness of the camera was essential so it was not panned - instead, the submarine itself turned the camera onto the victim!
Captions detail each ship's name and cargo and you can see the U-boat captain crossing out their names in his copy of Lloyd's Register.
The original film was made with one of those huge wood and metal box cameras, which was hand-cranked and had to be reloaded every five minutes. There were no zoom lenses and no film able to cope with the poor light inside the submarine, so there are no interior shots.
This video, a joint venture between Lloyd's and the Imperial War Museum, holds two versions of the mission. The first, The Enchanted Circle, was released for propaganda purposes by the Germans and has a dreamlike quality - ships are sunk but they go quietly, with no sign of anyone being hurt, or any mention of the 44 seamen killed.
The second version is edited by the British who captured the film and released as The Exploits of a German Submarine. The captions, as you might expect, are slightly different!
The VHS cassettes are boxed as a presentation set with a useful. well-illustrated guidebook to the film and the background to submarine warfare of the time.
Kendall McDonald

"How can someone write an entire book about a single diving incident?" I wondered as I read the introduction. Next evening I decided to read another chapter. It wasn't until 2am that I turned the last page.
This book is a howdunit. We are told in the first few pages that it is about a father and son both dying in a diving accident, but it is not until the end that we find out exactly what happened.
The story is intricately built through recursive levels of flashback, a technique I found frustrating at times - one level of recursion is enough for me. Having begun the last dive of the title, we are taken back through the biography of the family concerned, the author's own life story and numerous diving incidents.
It's all woven together to present a partial history of technical diving, though I am not convinced about some of the author's pet theories on diving physiology.
I was amazed that the victims had been diving for only four years, but then, they had made almost 800 dives in that time. Once you get past the stereotypical American gung-ho approach, the people involved are really not that unlike many divers I know.
The Last Dive could well become a classic of technical wreck-diving, just as The Darkness Beckons has become a classic of cave-diving.
It makes good reading for any diver, and should be compulsory for those enthusiastic newcomers rushing through their technical qualifications.
John Liddiard

I was going to write a one-word review of Kate Thompson's Going Down. No, I thought, let's try to be constructive.
This book seems to have been written by someone who enjoyed a try-dive and thought it would be a good idea to hang a tired storyline around this exotic sport. Within the first couple of short chapters of what is an overlong book, the outcome is already inevitable.
Considering the length of Going Down, the characterisation is woefully inadequate. We are expected to take the word of our "babe" heroine, Ella, that someone is either distasteful in the extreme or a "dive god". Which is what all male instructors become after passing their IDC, don't ya know!
The book's code is easy to decipher: dive god = nice/good/handsome male; babe = nice/good/attractive female; dame = someone Ella dislikes or who is after the man she fancies; nerd = someone Ella dislikes or is who after her job.
The diving sequences are mildly inaccurate, to say the least. We learn that Jamaica provides the pinnacle of tropical diving, that "the deeper you dive, the more you see", that NATO has its own submarines and which sea creatures are sensuous to the touch.
In a book in which Ella gets all "dolled up in a brand-new tight red leather jacket" to perpetuate an image that she is a society "it" girl, some of the language seems misplaced. Leonie, for instance, must be the hippest grandmother in town, her utterings more appropriate for a 15-year-old kid sister. But who knows, strange things happen in broken Irish families, or so this book would have us believe.
Reading it will do you no harm, but its diving inaccuracies and misconceptions will get your goat. If taken on holiday, it will simply encourage you to go for another dive/swim/snorkel/sauna/drink/game of cards/crossword puzzleÉ anything but Going Down.
Tami Levinson

It was the salvage of the century - and that's what Ric Wharton's book is called. It's the fascinating, hair-raising story of recovering more than five tons of gold bullion worth £44 million, which sank in the bomb hold of HMS Edinburgh in 244m of ice-cold sea off Murmansk in 1942.
But this is more than a tale about deep-diving salvage in heroic circumstances.
In his conclusion, Ric Wharton writes: "My final thoughts are for the mean, greedy, venal, jealous and dishonest British Government and Civil Service. Their behaviour is symptomatic of how they have taken the "Great" out of "Great Britain" ".
"I would advise anyone considering a salvage operation to conduct the operation from outside Britain. I would never base a salvage operation here again".
Hard words, but justified. For instance, although the Government was on for more than 18 per cent of whatever was recovered, it tried to claim VAT on the salvor's share. It also withheld what it owed the salvors for some of the bullion, then obliged Wharton's company to forego the debt before it would grant the licence to retrieve what was left of the gold under water.
On top of that, a journalist from The Sunday Times is alleged to have fabricated stories that almost wrote off the whole operation.
Then there was the mysterious disappearance of five gold bars, worth a small fortune, which had been left on the wreck for recovery the following year. They were never seen again.
This is a riveting story of diving derring-do, intrigue, double-dealing, and cheating, but final success for those who it seems deserved it. This is a book not to be missed.
Bernard Eaton

The first thing that struck me about The Shallow Seas of Wales by Paul Kay was the excellent photograph of a pipefish on the front cover. As I turned the pages, I soon discovered many more top-quality photos.
The book can best be described as a review of many shallow-water marine environments on the Welsh coastline, from Anglesey in the north to the Gower in the south.
For each location the typical habitats are described, together with some of the usual and more unusual marine life.
I enjoyed reading it, but couldn't quite work out at whom it was aimed. The photography and style is glossy enough for a coffee-table book, but coffee-table books are usually much larger hardbacks.
It is not a dive guide, there being no diving details in it. It could be a marine-life guide, but covers only a small and well-presented selection of marine life - and there is no index.
It would make a nice companion for a school project, though perhaps some of the text is a bit difficult for young children.
Having said all that, this is a delightful little book. The only changes I would make would be to include a map to show where the locations are, and an index. If I was browsing round a dive shop waiting for cylinders to be filled, this is the sort of book I would buy on impulse.
John Liddiard

As "respect our wrecks" evolves into "adopt our wrecks", and archaeologists encourage us to record rather then pilfer maritime history, this timely boxed set of a BBC2 series sets out to demonstrate that marine archaeology can be fun.
The six programmes that make up Journeys to the Bottom of the Sea were apparently among the most in-demand for video release last year. They tell tales of divers who approach their projects from a variety of motives, from selfless to mercenary, but all of whom become caught up in the thrill of the chase.
On one hand we see the dedication of that nice Colin Martin, who has sunk his own money into excavating the Civil War wreck the Swan off the west coast of Scotland and sharing his findings.
Year after year his saintly family wait patiently on drizzly rocks at one end of an umbilical while he disappears for two hours at a time.
Then there are salvors like Steve Salvison, forced to be philosophical about his ill-fated attempts to retrieve gold bullion from the seas around the Philippines.
Other wreck-hunters such as Barry Clifford seek a lost French fleet off Venezuela and find not treasure but the satisfaction of proving a theory right, while in the case of Phil Masters (nine years seeking Blackbeard's treasure ship in the wrong place) and Peter Gesner (chasing HMS Pandora, the ship which sought to bring the Bounty mutineers home to justice), the pursuit seems to become all-consuming.
Series producer Will Aslett sets out to squeeze each tale into a detective-story mould - it doesn't always come off but I was hooked anyway.
We are repeatedly told that these divers are questing for the truth. The story of the unusually armed submarine M1 conveniently side-steps the truth that another diver had found the wreck shortly before the programme-makers arrived on the scene, and that he pre-empted the theory it took them an hour of TV time to reach. Details, details.
What is true is that there is some splendidly reckless diving in here, from Salvison's 84m air-bounce to Clifford's last-ditch swim across a shallow reef in heavy swells. It's also true that the computerised reconstructions of sinkings are extremely tasty, that most of the programmes could have benefited by being shaved by at least a quarter, and that the relentlessly ominous tones of narrator Ian McShane grate after five and a half hours.
But this captivating series is highly recommended to those who want flesh attached to the dry bones of nautical archaeology.
Steve Weinman