A friend was in Merchant Marine in WWII, on some of the convoy runs. When he would (almost never) talk about it in the 70's, he would turn dead white.
Burning/sinking ships on all sides, doomed sailors in the water, no stopping to pick them up, or even avoid running them down.
An uncle by marriage was in the second boarding party of the U-boat captured in the N. Atlantic during WWII. He was fine with that - the first party had to safety the scuttling charges. That boat is in a US museum (Chicago? Smithsonian?), and he told me his pic(with his party) is included in the display. I did see his copy of the pic, but never the dispay itself.
The U-505 at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry. I have been to that exhibit on a few occasions - the first time on a school trip in the seventh grade. It is both educational and captivating. Even in the seventh grade I thought hard about the "pucker factor" overload the boarding parties must have felt when they heard the command "boarders away".
