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Product Description
"As always with Blair, the work is meticulously reported and smoothly written." ---Los Angeles Times
In The Hunters, 1939-1942, the first volume of Hitler's U-boat War, Clay Blair described the Battle of the Atlantic, waged first against the British Empire and then against the Americas. Now he brings his magisterial, highly praised narrative history to a conclusion by looking at the period when the fortunes of the German Navy were almost completely reversed, and when it suffered perhaps the most devastating defeat of any of the German forces.
In unprecedented detail and drawing on sources never before used, Clay Blair continues the dramatic tale of the failures and fortunes of the German U-boat campaign against the United States and Great Britain. All of the major patrols and sorties made by the Germans are described meticulously and with considerable human interest: the Peleus and Laconia affairs; the capture at sea of U-505; the crisis of German command; the futile operations against the Americas; and the mounting and devastating losses that, in effect, entirely destroyed the German submarine service.
Hitler's U-boat War: The Hunted, 1942-1945 is the brilliant finale to Blair's comprehensive treatment of the rise and fall of German U-boat warfare in World War II.
Amazon.com Review
During the early years of World War II, the German navy's U-boat wolf packs traversed the Atlantic almost unchallenged. They were feared hunters of the deep, although, Clay Blair writes, they were never as effective as some historians have maintained. At the midpoint of the long Battle of the Atlantic, those wolf packs became the hunted, as the Allies developed antisubmarine technologies (including radar, sonar, and long-distance surveillance aircraft) and diligently sought to rid the ocean of the "U-boat peril." Armed with inferior technology but led by brilliant strategists, the Germans fought back ferociously, even as many sailors resisted Adolf Hitler's hated Laconia Order that Allied merchant seamen be gunned down in their lifeboats, in violation of international law.
Blair, who served as a submariner in World War II, knows firsthand the dangers of underwater warfare. "The U-boat war," he writes, "was not a close-run thing, but rather one more suicidal enterprise foisted on the Germans by Adolf Hitler." Blair documents the slow decline of Germany's U-boat forces--the result of a 75 percent rate of battlefield losses, shortages of supplies and equipment, and Hitler's periodic purges of politically suspect commanders--in this volume, which continues his Hitler's U-Boat War: The Hunters, 1939-1942. The two books, which add up to nearly 2,000 pages, are essential reading for anyone with an interest in modern naval history. --Gregory McNamee
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