Sound of Hunger

Sound of Hunger is a true story that centres on two German brothers, Erich and Georg Gerth, u-boat commanders, and the First Word War and its aftermath. The Gerths’ lives and careers as navy officers are set against the military, political and social environment of their times. Carefully-nurtured myths of national innocence and guilt are uncovered; discrediting truths and war crimes of both the Allies and Germany are brought into the limelight. This is not conventional history, but a personal view of the events that were integral to the Gerth brothers, to see how they were changed by what they heard, were taught and experienced. Sound of Hunger is unashamedly intimate in selection, perhaps eccentric in places; a personal journey that explains what was newly-found, how it was investigated and understood. Whatever you think you know about this war, be prepared to challenge your beliefs.

The book takes its title from the thrust of the war, not in the trenches, but in the deliberate attempts by both sides to starve each other’s civilian populations. The damage to Germany’s children was generational as food shortages were deliberately extended by the Allies to force Germany to a debilitating peace.

The brothers were born in booming Berlin in the 1880s, their father dying when they were young. Their mother sacrificed to see them through one of Berlin’s most prestigious secondary schools and paid their considerable fees as cadets. In the burgeoning naval fleet, they were of the lowest social class allowed into this elite new force. Their careers were exciting, extracted from German archives: spying in South America, bombardment of the English coast, sea battles, torpedoed and mined ships, and desperate survivals. One, as a French prisoner of war for over two years, made daring escape attempts, the other scuttling his boat in the Mediterranean amid collapsing Austrian armies. Remarkable contacts tumble from the pages, villains and heroes, the Kaiser, Alfred von Tirpitz, family-friend Wilhelm Canaris, Karl Dönitz, the Red Baron, Adolf Hitler.

The Gerths’ personal decisions are interwoven with Germany’s bid for world power, naval training, the founding of the Flanders u-boat bases, the importance of the Baltic and the Mediterranean, the economic blockade of Germany and its devastating effects on European neutral countries, unfettered submarine warfare,...read more...