SM U-35

One submarine. One commander. A record that has stood unbroken for more than a century.

Between 1915 and 1918, in the warm and crowded waters of the Mediterranean, the German submarine SM U-35 sank nearly two hundred ships under the command of Lothar von Arnauld de la Perière-more than any submarine, in any navy, in any war before or since. The wolf packs of the Atlantic never came close. Neither did the nuclear giants that followed. The record stands today exactly where he left it.

But the truth behind the number overturns everything we expect of the deadliest submariner in history. Arnauld was no butcher firing torpedoes into the dark. He fired only seventy-four torpedoes in his entire career. The overwhelming majority of his sinkings were accomplished on the surface, with the deck gun, by stopping each merchantman, allowing her crew into the lifeboats, and pointing them toward the nearest shore before sending the ship down. The most lethal commerce raider who ever lived was also among the most correct-a gentleman hunter who became the deadliest of all by killing within the rules.

This is the story of how that record was built and why it could never be repeated. It follows the boat from the slipways of Kiel to the hunting grounds of the southern sea, into the cramped and fetid steel where thirty men endured an ordeal the surface navy could scarcely imagine. It traces the cool, methodical economy of destruction that made Arnauld supreme, and the rise of the convoy, the Q-ship, and the depth charge that closed his world forever. And it confronts the dark paradox at its center: that the purest efficiency in the war against commerce belonged to the man who still respected the law-and that the moment the rules were abandoned, the killing grew more savage and less effective at once.

A rigorous, unflinching account of discipline, lethality, and the vanished moment when the two were the same thing.