Chapter 264: The Strange and Peculiar Training Schools

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The various military academies that Führer Akado had begun to prepare and successfully build as early as 1923 were responsible for preparing all sorts of war talents for Germany. If one were to analyze this dark history of the German Wehrmacht with the experience of a normal person, one would certainly be deeply impressed by the foresight of Führer Akado Rudolph.

The Greater German Panzer Command Academy was the highest-level NCO training academy established by the army. Countless command elites of the German armored forces had graduated from there. And it had once been ordered to train demons who killed without batting an eye. Although that training program, called the “Wolf Riders,” was eventually terminated for various reasons, it cannot be denied that the German armored forces, through this training and exploration, had still become the most combat-effective troops in the world.

The air force had learned to fly on the outskirts of cold Moscow. They had practiced strange tactics in obsolete aircraft in groups, and were laughed at by their Soviet counterparts every time. They had persisted in using all sorts of crude tactics, stubbornly climbing and diving to attack their targets in old-fashioned planes. In every assessment, they were completely wiped out by the Soviet pilots.

However, these pilots still persisted and completed their training, and brought these suicidal air combat methods back to Germany. They trained more cadets in glider schools, and these cadets also clumsily piloted gliders to learn to dive and pull up.

All of this became different after the Me-109 and Fw-190D fighters entered service. The German pilots finally understood why they had been required to learn suicidal air combat methods, because this dance of death could indeed ensure that their opponents would die.

The academy established by the navy was a hodgepodge of training for all sorts of new things. The carrier pilots practiced takeoffs and landings all day on a runway of fixed length and width, becoming so familiar with that runway to an incredible degree. Some pilots even closed their eyes and relied on ground instructions to land, to prove that they were fully competent for any takeoff and landing difficulty.

The secretly established training classes were so strange that it was impossible to tell what was real and what was fake. The naval radar units were even testing a new type of radar that was small enough to be mounted on a destroyer and could detect enemy targets 35 kilometers away.

However, after entering the Naval Submarine NCO Training School, everyone would express that the various schools mentioned above were nothing special. All the students who could come to this school were elites who had completed the basic naval training with excellent results. Here, they were to undergo even more rigorous and various special training.

Here, they had to learn joint operations, special skills, and how to survive when surrounded by strong enemies. These contents were all crucial for attacking the enemy and preserving oneself in the future. The instructors sought out and discovered these qualities in the students, and then carefully cultivated and consolidated them. Those unqualified soldiers, about 90% of the trainees, would be eliminated. They would be expelled and then return to the navy to continue their service.

In the first stage of the school’s training, all the new recruits had to spend twelve hours a day focusing on physical training and learning the basic knowledge of submarine internal operations.

These students had to concentrate on looking at a multimeter. In the submarine school, they learned the basic course on using the electric motors on their submarines. They would connect one end of a wire to a battery and the other end to the multimeter. When the switch on the wire was closed, the current would flow from the battery to the meter, and the needle would show the strength of the current. When the batteries in the submarine were depleted, the current would decrease, and the indicator needle would move closer to the zero position. By interpreting this change, these submarine operators could judge when their crucial batteries needed to be recharged.

For a submarine commander, how to judge the distance and bow angle of an enemy ship on a submarine with a not-so-good field of view, and to quickly determine whether the ship was moving forward or backward, were all very important skills. In this school, there was also special equipment to train them.

In a dedicated classroom, the course exercises were very close to actual combat. The officers were ordered to stand on a high platform arranged like a submarine’s conning tower and to observe the target with the periscopes on it. These periscopes were all high-performance, custom-made binoculars, identical to the ones they would use in actual combat.

And the target was a ship model that could have any of its sailing parameters changed by someone operating it from backstage. The backstage operator would put on an intercom and headset, and the examiner would randomly set the parameters of the model ship, and require the submarine commanders being tested to use the periscopes to estimate the angle and to judge the distance of the enemy ship based on how much of the hull could be seen on the horizon.

In fact, the project that these trainees hated the most was far from these. The calculation courses and the tedious data summarization here were the most fatally boring subjects. The teacher would talk on and on and then record it on the blackboard with chalk. This knowledge was related to hydraulic pressure calculations, the pressure of the nozzles, the flow speed of the liquid in the pipes, and related data on fuel injection, temperature, and so on. At sea, the submarine officers and men had to record this data every day on the relevant documents. It was tedious and uninteresting, but it was one of the most important jobs.

In a one-to-one, full-scale simulation environment, the trainees were required to practice operating the control panel and the more than 210 valve switches on the submarine. At the same time, the noisy internal working environment of the submarine, as well as the stuffy and hot temperature inside the boat, were also simulated.

Akado had personally visited this classroom and had asked Dönitz, who was accompanying him, with great curiosity, “General, after this complex operational training is over, how can you be sure that the trainees have mastered it?”

“It’s very simple, my Führer,” Dönitz said, walking to one end of the narrow corridor. He then reached out and turned off the light switch on the wall, and the entire room was plunged into darkness. “If they can still find and operate all the switches and panels like this, then they have graduated.”

“If I had come to learn this, I would have been eliminated on the third day.” This was the Führer’s comment to Dönitz before leaving the school. Dönitz’s reply made the Führer very satisfied: “These trainees are willing to die for you, my Führer! So I must do everything I can to keep them alive.”

Another relatively novel training course was diving training. In a special water tank, the trainees had to practice and learn to use an artificial lung to breathe underwater. This device was far from being as advanced as modern oxygen tanks or artificial lungs; it was a vest-like device. To get the oxygen from the oxygen cylinder stored in the vest, the trainee had to quickly open and close the side valve, and inhale and exhale through the outlet on the mask. There was also an emergency valve on the vest to release carbon dioxide, located in a relatively handy position on the chest.

Before learning the diving course, the instructors had to repeatedly demonstrate to the students how to use the underwater equipment and how to correctly wear the breathing mask. Then, these students, accompanied by their teachers, would put on the artificial lung vest and, wearing heavy lead shoes, would sink to the bottom of a 21-foot-deep glass tank.

Here they would practice how to open and close the conning tower hatch underwater, the watertight doors in the compartments, and to repair various valves and the hull—the complexity even surpassed that of modern astronauts repairing their space shuttles.

Of course, while learning these things, they also had to come into contact with many other things. For example, they would learn shooting and aiming techniques, navigation knowledge, how to read sea charts and shipping lanes, torpedo ignition and weapon principles, and learn how to operate the radio, diesel engines, electric motors, and air compressors. Of course, there was also a most important training—that is, how to quickly open and close the hatches in an emergency.

In the second stage, these soldiers underwent specialized training. This second stage of training was generally not completed in the school but was learned in the submarine units. They were assigned as watch observers and intern NCOs to the submarine units and boarded submarines on patrol missions or participating in exercises to learn.

Then they would return to the school again to learn, to make the final preparations for boarding their own submarines. And at this time, they had to challenge every post, to be a torpedoman, an engineer, and a radio operator, until they were competent for almost every position on the submarine.

The new commander and his crew would be given a short vacation after graduation. Of course, this vacation was not free and easy. They would be sent to the submarine manufacturing plant in Kiel to watch their warship being built, to cultivate their feelings for their own submarine’s equipment.

When the submarine was completed, it would become their exclusive weapon. In the following two months, they would complete the learning of various tactics on this warship, personally explained by the supreme commander of the submarines, Dönitz, to deepen their understanding of the performance of the submarine and wolfpack tactics.

Then this submarine would go out to sea and, as part of a wolfpack, would begin its combat career. They would simulate various combat situations on the calm sea of the Baltic, dealing with various failures, including jammed rudders, compressed air leaks, broken pump valves, leaks, and hull damage.

“For a moment, you feel that you might be the most perfect warrior in the world. You are almost omnipotent, feel that you can complete any mission, and face all enemies without fear…” one submarine commander wrote in his diary.

But a few days later, he corrected his view. When his submarine was ordered to go to the stormy North Atlantic to carry out a mission, he realized that he had been completely wrong. He recorded in his diary: “A few days ago, I felt that I could do almost anything. But these past few days, I have been completely confused by the real combat environment. The wind and waves here are five times worse than in the Baltic. We also have to fight against loneliness and boredom. The whole place smells of oil and foul sweat. It’s ten degrees below zero outside, but we have to work naked inside. This place is no different from hell.”