Knight's Cross holder Jost Metzler was the commander of U 69 from 1940 to 1941. With this submarine, he undertook several highly successful combat missions in the North Sea and the Atlantic. However, the pinnacle of his career was the so-called Third Combat Mission in early summer 1941, which took the submarine and its crew a remarkable 12,000 nautical miles to Africa, the Cape Verde Islands, and the Canary Islands, an unprecedented undertaking for a submarine at that time. During the eight-week voyage, several ports were mined and seven freighters were sunk. This book, in its 1943 edition, recounts the journey and its hardships in an astonishingly unpretentious manner, accompanied by many images. U 69 was later sunk in the North Atlantic under another commander, resulting in the loss of the entire crew.