As a Cold War U.S. Navy pilot, Jerry Mason chased Russian submarines, which fascinated him. Now retired to Victoria, British Columbia, Mason is translating the logbooks of German U-boats and posting the results at uboatarchive.net. U-boat radio operators strained to hear encoded Morse transmissions from headquarters, transcribing dits and dahs, then feeding their work into Enigma machines that rendered the content into German for entry into the boat's Kriegstagebuch ("war diary.") Entries can be terse to the point of obscurity, or show a skipper's facility with language. At first Mason relied on friends who knew German to handle the translations, but submarine jargon defied their skills. So he works on his own, counting on the fact that most skippers were "trying to say as little as possible," frequently recycling technical terms to fill out the pages. He has translated 200 logs, including the day book from U-96, made famous by the 1981 hit film Das Boot Transmissions sometimes show a human touch. Admiral Karl Dönitz, the subsurface fleet's commander, personally informed skippers of family events on open circuits—only boats' transmissions were secure—so good news like a baby's birth reached all of the tight-knit U-boat fraternity. On occasion skippers broke into verse.
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