Books: Go In & Sink

U-BOAT 977 (260 pp.)—Heinz Schaefter—Norton ($3.50).

"We used to have wooden ships and iron men. Now we've got iron ships and wooden men," said the training officer to a bunch of German naval cadets just after World War II began. Cadet Heinz Schaeffer, 18, soon found that officers and NCOs had ways of putting iron into the German navy's new blood. Each man was handed an electrically charged bar. Movies recorded who screamed and who bit his cheeks in the approved stoic fashion. It was deep winter, but at 6 a.m. reveille the cadets...