"Hamilton's book is copiously illustrated with photographs which show life aboard U-402 and some of the vessels she sank or damaged: many of them were made by his grandfather's shipmate, Walter Friebolin, and others are drawn from private and official collections. The accompanying sidebars clearly explain the photographs and, like the charts at the end of the book, elucidate the narrative. Hamilton succeeds in making von Forstner and the crew of U-402 real people with whom we can empathise, and the final section of the book - a dive onto the now peaceful and overgrown remains of one of U-402's victims - is a fitting conclusion to the story and reminder, if one were needed, of the price of war." -- Australian Naval Institute " One of the most notable features [of this book] is the humanizing of the U-boat crewmen, a group normally demonized, and the perhaps obvious but never mentioned importance of individual competence as well as teamwork. We learn of clever improvisations by engineers changing and refitting engine parts, of signalmen misreading or mis-transcribing signals which then put the boat out of position, of newly trained sonar operators failing to recognize sounds, of sunbathing on deck in quiet periods of the patrol, of meetings with other boats to exchange spare parts and a host of fascinating day to day trivia which offers a wholly different perspective on the lives of U-boat crew. This then is a quite excellent book, with good maps, an extensive bibliography and unusual images and it is very well produced. But above all it explores the day-to-day experience of life for the U-boat crewmen and as a result is much more than a dry account of patrols, attacks and sinkings." -- The Mariner's Mirror.