Captain’s Log of Kptlt. Otto Hersing
Uploaded by AlPhA on Feb 21, 2002
Captain’s Recovery
Captain’s Log is about a Captain commanding a German submarine in World War I. He commands one of the most important and renowned naval vessels in the German fleet. Receiving a medal for two years in the sea, he became famous and hated by the allies. I received this amount as a combination of a Social Studies and English project. I had to write about something in World War I so I chose a naval vessel in the German Imperial Navy.
The way I came up with this topic was that I liked naval vessels so I knew it would include a ship. Then because I knew a lot about the U-boats and since this was a few months after I saw the movie U-571, it came up in my mind numerous amounts of time as I was writing it thus I came up with the idea of using a U-boat. I soon did some research and found the submarine with the most experience and most honored of the Imperial Navy.
The most difficult part in the writing of this was the format I was going to use and including enough historic events without compromising the fiction of it. Another dilemma I had in the construction of this writing assignment was adding emotions, which my writing has little of. When I revised this assignment, I added more emotions and the impact of the war on the crew. The day before the first version of the assignment was due, I spent a lot of time adding critical details about the vessels journeys, but skipped out on the most important facts of all, Kptlt. Otto Hersing. I was making this more of a Social Studies project by including the historic events, but skipping out on the important story of the captain who is the core of the journal.
This writing assignment was fairly fun for a school project. The reason for that was that there were few given parameters. Usually in English projects, you are not allowed to express yourself and test yourself to your limits because of the numerous amounts of rules. I think my finest log was the September 5th, 1914. I conclude with a quote from General George Patton (1885-1945), “The object of war is not to die for your country, but to make the other bastard die for his.” The SM U-21 destroyed vessels to save the lives of their...