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Hitler's U-Boat War: The Hunters, 1939-1942
"His monumental work...is the most thorough study of the U-boat campaign available." -- Library Journal
Hitler's U-boat War is an epic sea story about the most arduous and prolonged naval battle in history. For a period of nearly six years, the German U-boat force attempted to blockade and isolate the British Isles in hopes of forcing the British out of the war, thereby thwarting both the Allied strategic air assault on German cities and Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of Occupied France. Fortunately for the Allies, the U-boat force failed to achieve either of these objectives, but in the attempt they sank 2,800 Allied merchant ships, while the Allies sank nearly 800 U-boats. On both sides, tens of thousands of sailors perished.
For decades, an authoritative and definitive history of the Battle of the Atlantic could not be attempted, since London and Washington agreed to withhold all official code-breaking and U-boat records in order to safeguard the secrets of code breaking in the postwar years. The accounts that did appear were incomplete and full of false conclusions and errors of fact, often leaving the entirely wrong impression that the German U-boats came within a whisker of defeating the Allies, a myth that is finally laid to rest in this account.
Clay Blair, acclaimed author of the bestselling naval classic Silent The U.S. Submarine War Against Japan, has drawn from the official records as well as the work of German, British, American, and Canadian naval scholars. Never before has Hitler's U-boat war been chronicled with such authority, fidelity, objectivity, and detail. The result is this magnificent and monumental work, crammed with vivid and dramatic scenes of naval actions and dispassionate but startling new revelations, interpretations, and conclusions about all aspects of the Battle of the Atlantic.
Hitler's U-boat War is an epic sea story about the most arduous and prolonged naval battle in history. For a period of nearly six years, the German U-boat force attempted to blockade and isolate the British Isles in hopes of forcing the British out of the war, thereby thwarting both the Allied strategic air assault on German cities and Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of Occupied France. Fortunately for the Allies, the U-boat force failed to achieve either of these objectives, but in the attempt they sank 2,800 Allied merchant ships, while the Allies sank nearly 800 U-boats. On both sides, tens of thousands of sailors perished.
For decades, an authoritative and definitive history of the Battle of the Atlantic could not be attempted, since London and Washington agreed to withhold all official code-breaking and U-boat records in order to safeguard the secrets of code breaking in the postwar years. The accounts that did appear were incomplete and full of false conclusions and errors of fact, often leaving the entirely wrong impression that the German U-boats came within a whisker of defeating the Allies, a myth that is finally laid to rest in this account.
Clay Blair, acclaimed author of the bestselling naval classic Silent The U.S. Submarine War Against Japan, has drawn from the official records as well as the work of German, British, American, and Canadian naval scholars. Never before has Hitler's U-boat war been chronicled with such authority, fidelity, objectivity, and detail. The result is this magnificent and monumental work, crammed with vivid and dramatic scenes of naval actions and dispassionate but startling new revelations, interpretations, and conclusions about all aspects of the Battle of the Atlantic.
864 pages, Paperback
First published October 22, 1996
77 people are currently reading
857 people want to read
About the author
Clay Blair Jr.
37 books18 followersClay Blair, Jr. was an American historian, best known for his books on military history. Born in Lexington, Virginia, he served on the fleet submarine Guardfish (SS-217) in World War II and later wrote for Time and Life magazines before becoming editor-in-chief of The Saturday Evening Post. He assisted General Omar Bradley in the writing of his autobiography, A General's Life (1983), published after the general's death. Blair wrote two dozen history books and hundreds of magazine articles that reached a popular audience. His last book was Hitler's U-Boat War: The Hunted, 1942–1945 (1998), which followed Hitler's U-Boat War: The Hunters, 1939–1942 (1996).
Blair's history of the Korean War The Forgotten War: America in Korea, 1950–1953 (1987) is considered one of the definitive historical works on the war. His work was notable for his criticism of senior American political and military leaders. Blair criticizes President Harry S. Truman and his Secretary of Defense, Louis A. Johnson, for failing to maintain the military's readiness in the years immediately following World War II. His history, while comprehensive, primarily employs a top-down perspective, with less emphasis on individual soldiers than on larger operational issues and the perspectives of general and field-grade officers. He has also been criticized by some historians for not making sufficient use of Communist sources.
Blair also wrote extensively on the submarine war of World War II, notably in the bestselling Silent Victory: The U.S. Submarine War Against Japan (1975), considered the definitive work on the Pacific submarine war.
Blair was married for many years to Joan Blair, who co-wrote some of his books. Prior to that marriage he was married to Agnes Kemp Devereux Blair, with whom he had seven children: Marie Louise, Clay III, Sibyl, Joseph (deceased), Kemp, Robert and Christopher.
- Wikipedia
Blair's history of the Korean War The Forgotten War: America in Korea, 1950–1953 (1987) is considered one of the definitive historical works on the war. His work was notable for his criticism of senior American political and military leaders. Blair criticizes President Harry S. Truman and his Secretary of Defense, Louis A. Johnson, for failing to maintain the military's readiness in the years immediately following World War II. His history, while comprehensive, primarily employs a top-down perspective, with less emphasis on individual soldiers than on larger operational issues and the perspectives of general and field-grade officers. He has also been criticized by some historians for not making sufficient use of Communist sources.
Blair also wrote extensively on the submarine war of World War II, notably in the bestselling Silent Victory: The U.S. Submarine War Against Japan (1975), considered the definitive work on the Pacific submarine war.
Blair was married for many years to Joan Blair, who co-wrote some of his books. Prior to that marriage he was married to Agnes Kemp Devereux Blair, with whom he had seven children: Marie Louise, Clay III, Sibyl, Joseph (deceased), Kemp, Robert and Christopher.
- Wikipedia
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 54 reviews
April 29, 2021
Of the many battles that made up the Second World War, the Battle of the Atlantic was arguably the most important of them. It was through the clash between German U-boats and Allied convoys that the question was resolved of whether Nazi Germany could defeat Great Britain by strangling her trade and cut off the Allies from access to the vast resources of the United States. Had the Germans triumphed, there would have been no Lend-Lease convoys to Great Britain and Russia and no Allied invasion of continental Europe. Victory might still have come for the Allies in Europe, but it would only have been after a much longer and far more debilitating struggle.
The prominence of the naval war in the Atlantic has ensured that there is no shortage of books available about it. Yet Clay Blair’s two-volume study of the Kriegsmarine’s U-boat campaign ranks among the best of them, for a number of reasons. Foremost among them is the depth of research Blair undertook, as he drew upon the massive amount of both German and Allied archival material to reconstruct the conflict. He also benefited from the revelations about the role Allied codebreaking from the 1970s onward, which was a critically important aspect of the battle excluded from earlier accounts of it. Blair employs all of this with a firsthand understanding of submarine warfare drawn from his experience in the United States Navy during the war, which gives him a perspective too-often missing from other histories.
Blair uses these elements to construct a remarkable account of the fighting. After a prologue describing the rebuilding of Germany’s submarine arm in the interwar period, Blair covers the various campaigns waged by the U-boats during the war. This he does systematically, summarizing the various deployments of each U-boat and their success (or lack thereof) in attacking and sinking Allied shipping. In this process he creates a sense of a naval battle that unfolded much like a ground campaign, with both sides engaging in moves and responding in turn with countermoves in a fluid and ongoing contest for dominance. Blair also places all of this within the context of the larger war underway, showing how leaders on both sides viewed the campaigns in the Atlantic, and how the decisions they made influenced events within it.
Using this approach, Blair challenges many longstanding misconceptions about the war. Foremost among them is the view of that the German campaign ever seriously jeopardized the Allied war effort Throughout the book Blair repeatedly stresses the limited scope of the campaign, with the small number of U-boats facing an enormous task. Even at their peak, the U-boats were nowhere close to cutting off the British, nor were they able to sink Allied shipping faster than the Allies (through confiscation and construction) were able to replace it. Thus, while ships were torpedoed and men died, it was more of a nuisance than a true threat to the Allied military machine, leaving Blair to question Winston Churchill’s pessimism about the U-boat “peril.”
Another one that Blair tackles head-on is the claim that American naval leaders did not take seriously the U-boat attacks on the East Coast during the first half of 1942. Here he stakes himself out as a stout defender of Ernest King, the controversial head of the U.S. Navy during the war. Blair points out that as commander of U.S. naval forces in the Atlantic prior to Pearl Harbor King was already employing the convoy system and was well aware of his benefits. What inhibited him from doing so with coastal shipping once Karl Donitz launched Operation Drumbeat was not any skepticism about the efficacy of convoys but a lack of escorts with which to defend them. As American shipyards rose to the challenge, King implemented them, which went a long way towards ending the second “Happy Time” of U-boat successes.
Blair makes his arguments through a combination of clearheaded analysis and the weight of his evidence. This can make his text a little repetitive at times, yet the sheer amount of detail had its own fascination. It helps that Blair is a skilled writer able to apply his years as a journalist to make his case through clear and unadorned prose. It’s for these reasons that his book, along with its successor volume, Hitler's U-Boat War: The Hunted, 1942-1945, remain the definitive work on the Battle of the Atlantic, one that is unlikely to be bettered thanks to a perspective borne of the author’s combination of assiduous archival labor with his personal experience with commerce warfare during the Second World War.
The prominence of the naval war in the Atlantic has ensured that there is no shortage of books available about it. Yet Clay Blair’s two-volume study of the Kriegsmarine’s U-boat campaign ranks among the best of them, for a number of reasons. Foremost among them is the depth of research Blair undertook, as he drew upon the massive amount of both German and Allied archival material to reconstruct the conflict. He also benefited from the revelations about the role Allied codebreaking from the 1970s onward, which was a critically important aspect of the battle excluded from earlier accounts of it. Blair employs all of this with a firsthand understanding of submarine warfare drawn from his experience in the United States Navy during the war, which gives him a perspective too-often missing from other histories.
Blair uses these elements to construct a remarkable account of the fighting. After a prologue describing the rebuilding of Germany’s submarine arm in the interwar period, Blair covers the various campaigns waged by the U-boats during the war. This he does systematically, summarizing the various deployments of each U-boat and their success (or lack thereof) in attacking and sinking Allied shipping. In this process he creates a sense of a naval battle that unfolded much like a ground campaign, with both sides engaging in moves and responding in turn with countermoves in a fluid and ongoing contest for dominance. Blair also places all of this within the context of the larger war underway, showing how leaders on both sides viewed the campaigns in the Atlantic, and how the decisions they made influenced events within it.
Using this approach, Blair challenges many longstanding misconceptions about the war. Foremost among them is the view of that the German campaign ever seriously jeopardized the Allied war effort Throughout the book Blair repeatedly stresses the limited scope of the campaign, with the small number of U-boats facing an enormous task. Even at their peak, the U-boats were nowhere close to cutting off the British, nor were they able to sink Allied shipping faster than the Allies (through confiscation and construction) were able to replace it. Thus, while ships were torpedoed and men died, it was more of a nuisance than a true threat to the Allied military machine, leaving Blair to question Winston Churchill’s pessimism about the U-boat “peril.”
Another one that Blair tackles head-on is the claim that American naval leaders did not take seriously the U-boat attacks on the East Coast during the first half of 1942. Here he stakes himself out as a stout defender of Ernest King, the controversial head of the U.S. Navy during the war. Blair points out that as commander of U.S. naval forces in the Atlantic prior to Pearl Harbor King was already employing the convoy system and was well aware of his benefits. What inhibited him from doing so with coastal shipping once Karl Donitz launched Operation Drumbeat was not any skepticism about the efficacy of convoys but a lack of escorts with which to defend them. As American shipyards rose to the challenge, King implemented them, which went a long way towards ending the second “Happy Time” of U-boat successes.
Blair makes his arguments through a combination of clearheaded analysis and the weight of his evidence. This can make his text a little repetitive at times, yet the sheer amount of detail had its own fascination. It helps that Blair is a skilled writer able to apply his years as a journalist to make his case through clear and unadorned prose. It’s for these reasons that his book, along with its successor volume, Hitler's U-Boat War: The Hunted, 1942-1945, remain the definitive work on the Battle of the Atlantic, one that is unlikely to be bettered thanks to a perspective borne of the author’s combination of assiduous archival labor with his personal experience with commerce warfare during the Second World War.
December 9, 2024
I was completely and enjoyably absorbed by this meticulous work of deep scholarship, but casual readers should be warned that it is not for the faint hearted. I have played a number of video games in which I have taken the role of a U Boat commander, but I have never done what some players do, which is to play it in “real time” as if you really were on a mission in the Atlantic – possibly lasting weeks on end, and never encountering anything apart from bad weather and discomfort. It takes a particular type of fanaticism to enjoy that experience; some might feel reading this requires something similar. At times it felt like re living each of the many hundreds of U Boat missions which are described in immense detail. When something exciting happens it is often heart stoppingly dramatic: but there is a lot of ennui along the way. And this is only Volume One.
The author was himself a US submariner in the Pacific, and a partisan supporter of the deeply unpopular Anglophobe Admiral King. I was not persuaded by his efforts to gild his hero: I rather agree with Eisenhower, who said “If someone shot King it might help win the war.” King was much criticised for his failure to supply convoy escorts to shipping in US coastal waters in the first part of the war between Germany and the US. However, Blair makes the fair point that King’s priority was the protection of troop transports, and many thousands of US servicemen were transported across the Atlantic in complete safety as a result. The Royal Navy, by contrast, suffered numerous losses of troop transports, some of them with catastrophic loss of life. Of course, you can’t protect everything – but it is only fair that King should get some credit for what he did protect.
Blair is also sometimes rather Anglophobic himself, especially when recounting what he perceives as the selfishness of the British over sharing all their Enigma intelligence, and their arrogant condescension towards the Canadian navy. There is some justice in both criticisms, though the British did correct their attitude in both respects as time went on.
If Blair is Admiral King’s number one fanboy, he hates Roosevelt and pours scorn on everything he did (or didn’t do). The most interesting takeaway, though, was Blair’s argument that the German U Boat campaign never came close to achieving any strategic result. Churchill said the U Boat war was the only thing that really worried him, and Donitz thought that he was close to crippling Britain with his U Boats. But Blair persuades me, with masses of detailed evidence, that the U Boats never even came close, and Churchill needn’t have worried. Not that this was much consolation if you were a merchant seaman tipped into the icy Atlantic from a torpedoed ship, or a submariner trapped in a hail of depth charges.
The author was himself a US submariner in the Pacific, and a partisan supporter of the deeply unpopular Anglophobe Admiral King. I was not persuaded by his efforts to gild his hero: I rather agree with Eisenhower, who said “If someone shot King it might help win the war.” King was much criticised for his failure to supply convoy escorts to shipping in US coastal waters in the first part of the war between Germany and the US. However, Blair makes the fair point that King’s priority was the protection of troop transports, and many thousands of US servicemen were transported across the Atlantic in complete safety as a result. The Royal Navy, by contrast, suffered numerous losses of troop transports, some of them with catastrophic loss of life. Of course, you can’t protect everything – but it is only fair that King should get some credit for what he did protect.
Blair is also sometimes rather Anglophobic himself, especially when recounting what he perceives as the selfishness of the British over sharing all their Enigma intelligence, and their arrogant condescension towards the Canadian navy. There is some justice in both criticisms, though the British did correct their attitude in both respects as time went on.
If Blair is Admiral King’s number one fanboy, he hates Roosevelt and pours scorn on everything he did (or didn’t do). The most interesting takeaway, though, was Blair’s argument that the German U Boat campaign never came close to achieving any strategic result. Churchill said the U Boat war was the only thing that really worried him, and Donitz thought that he was close to crippling Britain with his U Boats. But Blair persuades me, with masses of detailed evidence, that the U Boats never even came close, and Churchill needn’t have worried. Not that this was much consolation if you were a merchant seaman tipped into the icy Atlantic from a torpedoed ship, or a submariner trapped in a hail of depth charges.
August 23, 2015
If this book had been any easier to read I would have given it a five. As it is the word defenitive comes to mind. The author takes great pains to talk about U-boat sailing and their kills, failures and losses. As one person mentioned, he almost takes account of every torpedo fired.
This book covers two parts of the war, in fact this is the first of two books of generally equal size, the first is the U-boat war against England at the beginning of the war while England stood alone. The second part if the initial entry into the War of the United States.
In the first part, the author makes clear mistakes made by both sides. It is a great look at the problems, concerns and reactions of both sides. In some cases it is clear that the Germans had a much more difficult time that is general thought to be the case in regards to the opening of the U-boat campaign. Ignoring the interference of Hitler, which is somewhat rare early on, there is also the fact that there were disagreements of the types of boats to be built, the whole issue of malfunctioning torpedos, and disagreements about deployments. The Germans also seemed to have blinders on about the possibility of their codes being broken, which greatly aided the British.
The British have their own issues. Not enough escort vessals, the lack of coordination between air and naval forces and an early refusal to work the convoy system again, even though it had been the most effective weapon from the last war. However the British do show a more themselves more willing to make the adjustments needed to change their situation.
The second part of the book mostly focuses on the American entry into the war. Here the author takes a different line than most of the popular histories of the War. King, while possibly and Anglophobe, isn't against everything that the British suggest. In fact considering the number of ships he places at the disposal of the British Navy it should be hard to say he wasn't support the British war effort. The author points out there were a number of reasons why the Germans were able to gain so much ground on the American coast early in the war, many of them quite legitimate and more a matter of concern than lack. The US too had its issues of cooperation between services, a lack of ships necessary for the job to be done, as well as commitments that spread what ships were available in a wide range of areas and tasks that were thought to be a priority over convoys on the American coasts, some of these were in support of British Naval operations and some were in regards to the US involvement in the Pacific. This last is something that the author feels of often overlooked in the History's regarding U-boats on the Atlantic coast.
The author doesn't overlook mistakes or miscues on the side of the US in regards to their efforts against U-boats, but he tries to mitigate some of the worst of the charges against Admiral King and the US Naval high command.
A massive tome, with copious footnoting and charts/graphs/documents to support his conclusions, this is a book that digs deep and shows a number of things that generally aren't found in many books involving the Atlantic Campaign. If this part of the War is of an interest than this is a must read book.
This book covers two parts of the war, in fact this is the first of two books of generally equal size, the first is the U-boat war against England at the beginning of the war while England stood alone. The second part if the initial entry into the War of the United States.
In the first part, the author makes clear mistakes made by both sides. It is a great look at the problems, concerns and reactions of both sides. In some cases it is clear that the Germans had a much more difficult time that is general thought to be the case in regards to the opening of the U-boat campaign. Ignoring the interference of Hitler, which is somewhat rare early on, there is also the fact that there were disagreements of the types of boats to be built, the whole issue of malfunctioning torpedos, and disagreements about deployments. The Germans also seemed to have blinders on about the possibility of their codes being broken, which greatly aided the British.
The British have their own issues. Not enough escort vessals, the lack of coordination between air and naval forces and an early refusal to work the convoy system again, even though it had been the most effective weapon from the last war. However the British do show a more themselves more willing to make the adjustments needed to change their situation.
The second part of the book mostly focuses on the American entry into the war. Here the author takes a different line than most of the popular histories of the War. King, while possibly and Anglophobe, isn't against everything that the British suggest. In fact considering the number of ships he places at the disposal of the British Navy it should be hard to say he wasn't support the British war effort. The author points out there were a number of reasons why the Germans were able to gain so much ground on the American coast early in the war, many of them quite legitimate and more a matter of concern than lack. The US too had its issues of cooperation between services, a lack of ships necessary for the job to be done, as well as commitments that spread what ships were available in a wide range of areas and tasks that were thought to be a priority over convoys on the American coasts, some of these were in support of British Naval operations and some were in regards to the US involvement in the Pacific. This last is something that the author feels of often overlooked in the History's regarding U-boats on the Atlantic coast.
The author doesn't overlook mistakes or miscues on the side of the US in regards to their efforts against U-boats, but he tries to mitigate some of the worst of the charges against Admiral King and the US Naval high command.
A massive tome, with copious footnoting and charts/graphs/documents to support his conclusions, this is a book that digs deep and shows a number of things that generally aren't found in many books involving the Atlantic Campaign. If this part of the War is of an interest than this is a must read book.
April 27, 2014
At long last, I am finished…but this book is only half the story! Seven hundred pages takes you from the first hesitant start of German submarine warfare in WWII to the slaughter off American shores in 1942. This book definitely gets 5 Stars in honor of his superb scholarship in telling the first 3 years of Hitler’s Uboat War. If there was ever a book that can be defined as authoritative, comprehensive and meticulous, Hitler's U-Boat War: the Hunters, 1939-1942 has to be in that category. It is a sortie by sortie, torpedo by mine by shell account of the war at sea. I thought it would be too dry and tedious to keep my interest but that was not so. Here is an account of the
U-30
battle, first against a freighter; then airplanes and then destroyers. We start out with two of the U-boat crew trying to set demolitions on the abandoned freighter. Suddenly aircraft show up:
We have heard about Britain giving the US valuable information on radar and other items in exchange for our support. These were to have a large impact on the Battle of the Atlantic and other areas.
But the Brits didn’t give up all their cool stuff. When it came time to share intelligence, the US gave Britain a fully working “Purple” machine, used to decode Japanese message traffic. But the Brits didn’t reciprocate and give up key technology to the US to use in decoding “Ultra” traffic, the German Enigma coding machine. Blair really goes into depth on how integral and effective “Ultra” was in the battle against the submarine threat. Convoys were routed around the U-boat wolf-packs; German subs and high seas raiders were found and sunk; without “Ultra” the war at sea would have been much worse for the Allies.
Submariner “aces” are a lot like air aces; a few good ones account for outsized share of the combat kills. However, at least in the U-boat community, the standards used to claim a “kill” seem to be a little loose, especially in tonnage claims which drove the combat medal awards:
Things I learned:
-How critical “Ultra” was and how effectively the Allies penetrated it.
-How many ships actually got through: 98% of convoyed ships made it safely to the UK.
-How few U-boats were actually in the fight at any one time.
-How often the Germans acted honorably towards their victims on the high seas
-How many German crews actually survived the sinking of their U-boat, although still pretty low.
-Blair brings context to many episodes and challenges many preconceptions
-How Churchill and Roosevelt meddled in the Atlantic Battle
I can’t imagine reading the second volume in this story anytime soon. I am burned out on the first one. However, any WWII historian has to have this book on the shelf. And it is not hard to read, just extremely thorough. Recommended.
We have heard about Britain giving the US valuable information on radar and other items in exchange for our support. These were to have a large impact on the Battle of the Atlantic and other areas.
But the Brits didn’t give up all their cool stuff. When it came time to share intelligence, the US gave Britain a fully working “Purple” machine, used to decode Japanese message traffic. But the Brits didn’t reciprocate and give up key technology to the US to use in decoding “Ultra” traffic, the German Enigma coding machine. Blair really goes into depth on how integral and effective “Ultra” was in the battle against the submarine threat. Convoys were routed around the U-boat wolf-packs; German subs and high seas raiders were found and sunk; without “Ultra” the war at sea would have been much worse for the Allies.
Submariner “aces” are a lot like air aces; a few good ones account for outsized share of the combat kills. However, at least in the U-boat community, the standards used to claim a “kill” seem to be a little loose, especially in tonnage claims which drove the combat medal awards:
Things I learned:
-How critical “Ultra” was and how effectively the Allies penetrated it.
-How many ships actually got through: 98% of convoyed ships made it safely to the UK.
-How few U-boats were actually in the fight at any one time.
-How often the Germans acted honorably towards their victims on the high seas
-How many German crews actually survived the sinking of their U-boat, although still pretty low.
-Blair brings context to many episodes and challenges many preconceptions
-How Churchill and Roosevelt meddled in the Atlantic Battle
I can’t imagine reading the second volume in this story anytime soon. I am burned out on the first one. However, any WWII historian has to have this book on the shelf. And it is not hard to read, just extremely thorough. Recommended.
April 27, 2012
This book is an excellent history of German U-boat activities during the first part of WWII, but excellent history doesn't always result in enjoyable reading. My lower rating is not due to the historical quality of the book, which I consider to be excellent, but rather to the fact that I didn't particularly enjoy reading it. This deficiency is not the author's fault: it is, I think, an inevitable result of his detailed adherence to the historical record.
For enjoyment of reading I'm giving it a three-star rating, because I think a two-star rating would unfairly infer that the book is of poor quality; for historical value, I'd give it a six-star rating, but only five stars are available. If I were writing a review for war history buffs rather than general readers, I'd give it the highest rating possible.
This book is the first of two volumes by Clay Blair about German submarine history just before and during WWII. This volume covers the years 1939 - 1942 (and the second volume ends in 1945). It contains over 70 pages of highly detailed appendices and is, of course, fully indexed. I read the hardcover version; it is thick enough to perform secondary duty as a doorstop.
I read this book several years ago so hopefully my memory serves well here. Blair's purpose in writing the book, as I recall, was to support his thesis that the nature of the U-boat menace in WWII--particularly the much-vaunted "wolf packs"--were less effective than has been commonly portrayed in histories of the era. Blair amply supports his contention in part with statistical records such as those of British merchant ship loss vs. replacement, cargo shipments into England over time, etc. He has done incredibly detailed research in both German submarine records and records from England.
Blair says that it was in the interests of both Germany and Britain to exaggerate the effectiveness of the U-boats: Germany benefitted by a boost in morale at home and by striking fear into its adversaries. England, as I recall, used the threat of U-boats to beef up Lend-Lease, but also to help prod the US into joining the war effort as a belligerent (and probably to keep a keen edge on the English fighting spirit as well). These wartime expedients for both sides--the exaggeration of the damage inflicted by the U-boats--were later accepted by writers and historians, which resulted in a post-war distortion of history, according to Blair. Hence, he wants to set the record straight.
In addition to the evidence provided by hard data records, Blair also proves his point by taking the reader on what must be every U-boat cruise during this early period of the war. Perhaps my memory exaggerates, but it seems that a significant portion of the book is taken up with these cruises.
For example, here is one of eight bullet-pointed accounts of voyages on page 402:
"Sailing from St. Nazaire December 7, on his second patrol, Heinrich Heinsohn in U-573 was forced to abort with a leaking torpedo tube. Resailing on December 11, U-573 passed through the strait on December 18."
There are, of course, many more exciting and truly tragic accounts, but I choose this passage to show Blair's incredible attention to historic detail that makes this a 700-page book, not including appendices. The cited passage is just one of hundreds of such patrol accounts.
The book doesn't consist entirely of these nutshell patrol accounts. Blair also has lengthy passages of military and political developments that bear upon the story, and I found these very interesting. Sometimes I found myself aching for these passages after a lengthy stretch of patrol accounts, many of which weren't much more exciting than the sample above. The aggregate effect was to convince this reader that Blair has supported his thesis well.
For those of us who are fascinated by this era and the U-boat war, there is plenty of good reading in Blair's book. However, after finishing this book and proudly relegating it to trophy status on my shelf, I didn't really care to read the second volume that runs to 1945. The 1939 - 1942 period is the most interesting era for the reader, taking him up through what U-boat men called the "Happy Time", when the hunting was good. It was during 1942 that the Happy Time ended, and it was all downhill from there.
All armchair submariners have read of how tedious submarine voyages could be, long passages of boredom punctuated by moments of excitement. Blair's book conveys, as well as anything I've read, a vicarious experience of the same.
For enjoyment of reading I'm giving it a three-star rating, because I think a two-star rating would unfairly infer that the book is of poor quality; for historical value, I'd give it a six-star rating, but only five stars are available. If I were writing a review for war history buffs rather than general readers, I'd give it the highest rating possible.
This book is the first of two volumes by Clay Blair about German submarine history just before and during WWII. This volume covers the years 1939 - 1942 (and the second volume ends in 1945). It contains over 70 pages of highly detailed appendices and is, of course, fully indexed. I read the hardcover version; it is thick enough to perform secondary duty as a doorstop.
I read this book several years ago so hopefully my memory serves well here. Blair's purpose in writing the book, as I recall, was to support his thesis that the nature of the U-boat menace in WWII--particularly the much-vaunted "wolf packs"--were less effective than has been commonly portrayed in histories of the era. Blair amply supports his contention in part with statistical records such as those of British merchant ship loss vs. replacement, cargo shipments into England over time, etc. He has done incredibly detailed research in both German submarine records and records from England.
Blair says that it was in the interests of both Germany and Britain to exaggerate the effectiveness of the U-boats: Germany benefitted by a boost in morale at home and by striking fear into its adversaries. England, as I recall, used the threat of U-boats to beef up Lend-Lease, but also to help prod the US into joining the war effort as a belligerent (and probably to keep a keen edge on the English fighting spirit as well). These wartime expedients for both sides--the exaggeration of the damage inflicted by the U-boats--were later accepted by writers and historians, which resulted in a post-war distortion of history, according to Blair. Hence, he wants to set the record straight.
In addition to the evidence provided by hard data records, Blair also proves his point by taking the reader on what must be every U-boat cruise during this early period of the war. Perhaps my memory exaggerates, but it seems that a significant portion of the book is taken up with these cruises.
For example, here is one of eight bullet-pointed accounts of voyages on page 402:
"Sailing from St. Nazaire December 7, on his second patrol, Heinrich Heinsohn in U-573 was forced to abort with a leaking torpedo tube. Resailing on December 11, U-573 passed through the strait on December 18."
There are, of course, many more exciting and truly tragic accounts, but I choose this passage to show Blair's incredible attention to historic detail that makes this a 700-page book, not including appendices. The cited passage is just one of hundreds of such patrol accounts.
The book doesn't consist entirely of these nutshell patrol accounts. Blair also has lengthy passages of military and political developments that bear upon the story, and I found these very interesting. Sometimes I found myself aching for these passages after a lengthy stretch of patrol accounts, many of which weren't much more exciting than the sample above. The aggregate effect was to convince this reader that Blair has supported his thesis well.
For those of us who are fascinated by this era and the U-boat war, there is plenty of good reading in Blair's book. However, after finishing this book and proudly relegating it to trophy status on my shelf, I didn't really care to read the second volume that runs to 1945. The 1939 - 1942 period is the most interesting era for the reader, taking him up through what U-boat men called the "Happy Time", when the hunting was good. It was during 1942 that the Happy Time ended, and it was all downhill from there.
All armchair submariners have read of how tedious submarine voyages could be, long passages of boredom punctuated by moments of excitement. Blair's book conveys, as well as anything I've read, a vicarious experience of the same.
October 11, 2019
After reading "Silent Victory" by Clay Blair, I was interested in seeing what his take on the war against the German U-Boats would be. Well, he didn't disappoint. Based on exhaustive research, he's woven together American, British, German, Canadian and Italian records (probably a few others as well) to form a fascinating chronicle of this pivotal World War II campaign. While he downplays assertions about the U-Boats almost bringing Britain to her knees, he does provide the reader with lots of information showing the battle could have gone Germany's way. Too few U-Boats, too much interference in how the boats were deployed, an almost criminal denial of Allied technological breakthroughs, and a constant battle with faulty torpedoes are just some of the issues which handicapped the Germans. The details of submarine patrols and results are incredible, especially when intermixed with the details of those who were trying to sink them.
A battle of this magnitude has plenty of mistakes and Blair is not shy about pointing the finger at those who he thinks made some big ones. Churchill, Roosevelt, King, Raeder, Donitz, Hitler and a varied cast of admirals and generals are heavily scrutinized over conduct which shaped the battle, both good and bad. Many of the U-Boat skippers and Allied escort commanders are shown to be lacking as well, but there is a tremendous amount of information on the good ones on both sides.
Blair might come across as biased when it comes to earlier published works, and he's definitely not shy about saying someone was wrong. So if you've read previous histories of the U-Boat campaign, especially some of the German ones, be prepared to be told they were flawed! Be that as it may, this is a great book on the first half of the U-Boat war and I look forward to reading the second part soon.
A battle of this magnitude has plenty of mistakes and Blair is not shy about pointing the finger at those who he thinks made some big ones. Churchill, Roosevelt, King, Raeder, Donitz, Hitler and a varied cast of admirals and generals are heavily scrutinized over conduct which shaped the battle, both good and bad. Many of the U-Boat skippers and Allied escort commanders are shown to be lacking as well, but there is a tremendous amount of information on the good ones on both sides.
Blair might come across as biased when it comes to earlier published works, and he's definitely not shy about saying someone was wrong. So if you've read previous histories of the U-Boat campaign, especially some of the German ones, be prepared to be told they were flawed! Be that as it may, this is a great book on the first half of the U-Boat war and I look forward to reading the second part soon.
September 1, 2022
Lots of data...fascinating history
I must admit that I knew nothing about the submarine war. I thought I did, but I was wrong. This book is a slog...so lot of data, the author goes almost boat by boat and sinking by sinking. I learned a lot about the entire first three years and how chaotic it was on both sides. A great book for someone who really likes the details.
I must admit that I knew nothing about the submarine war. I thought I did, but I was wrong. This book is a slog...so lot of data, the author goes almost boat by boat and sinking by sinking. I learned a lot about the entire first three years and how chaotic it was on both sides. A great book for someone who really likes the details.
December 21, 2023
As a long-time WWII amateur historian, I’ve had a deep interest in understanding the course of the war militarily. One of the critical campaigns in the war was the Battle of the Atlantic. A key question about that campaign has been whether the Germans could have cut off British merchant shipping and, in doing so, forced the United Kingdom into starvation and surrender. Clay Blair’s answer is a firm no; the Germans never even came close.
He provides this answer in a 1400-page two volume account, the first of which I’m reviewing here. I managed to complete it, but doing so took an effort that few, if any books, have ever required. My first 200-page attempt stalled. I restarted and managed to complete 600 pages, took a break, and then completed the last 100.
I had once thought that a book like this would be everything I ever wanted. Unfortunately, the promise of Blair’s book is undercut by his execution. (This review is of the 1996 hardcover first edition).
This volume covers just about every U-boat mission from the start of the war through August 1942. Blair intersperses the German side of things with Allied strategic discussions and technological developments. The problem is that Blair never really sets out the terms of his review: why cover every U-boat mission? What sort of narrative do these individual sailings form, and what type of composite picture do they present?
While Blair doesn’t overtly do so, it becomes clear that anecdotes about the ace submariners is a key part of the myth that surrounds the U-boat effort, including much of its post-war historical writing. For every ace, there seems to be some commander who sailed and -- whether due to bad luck, inexperience, lack of aggression, or all of these things -- failed to locate or sink any merchant ships. While much of U-boat historical writing seems to focus on the all-stars like Prien, Kretchmer, and their kin, it's hard to ignore that some sub commanders were simply unlucky or bad. Lemp, for example, was arguably catastrophic, sinking the Athenia on the first day of the war (which could have been the Lusitania all over again), and then surrendering his boat to an airplane and failing to destroy both his sub or the Enigma machine.
Throughout, Blair relentlessly counters U-boat commanders’ claims vs their actual ships sunk. It seems that Doenitz was all too ready to accept these claims from his submariners. As one example, Blair shows that some commanders in the Mediterranean who were only marginally successful received Knight’s Crosses anyway as a propaganda effort designed to promote German naval success in that theater, corresponding with Rommel’s efforts. Peter Cremer, the famous memoirist, earned his Knight’s Cross, but he also sank a German blockade runner, which led to a court martial hearing. Several other commanders, we learn, sank neutral ships.
So, despite the fascination with U-boat aces, even their records can be called into question, as Blair does. At best, the U-boat arm was perhaps like many other modern organizations, with a few savants producing the majority of results, with many others simply showing up to work. Even so, the high-performing aces ended up either killed, captured, or reassigned to shore duty. The absurdity of the German position in this vein is that they risked a U-boat to rescue ace commanders from Canadian POW camps (notably Kretschmer; this attempt failed). As a result of this attrition and the expansion of the German U-boat fleet in 1942, we start to see at the end of this volume many U-boats sailing with inexperienced captains and crews, a good number of whom died on their maiden voyages.
This alternate picture of the U-boat force, proven again and again through Blair's anecdotes, is important because it supports Blair's statistical analysis of the Battle of the Atlantic. By looking at hard numbers, Blair shows that the U-boats simply never came close to cutting off Britain’s supplies. This is even true during the critical period before US involvement through 1941.
The critical realization is that British-controlled shipping actually increased by the end of 1942. Britain was producing its own merchant shipping, of course (a fact that often gets overshadowed for some reason by American production), as well as incorporating ships from Hitler's European victims into its own convoy streams. As a result, by December 1941, Great Britain had 617 more ships, or 2.9 million more tons in shipping capacity, than when it started the war in September 1939. Part of the reason is that the U-boats (and other weapons) were able to make only a small dent in shipping by destroying them. Through December 1941, the British lost only 291 of the 12,057 of ships reaching Great Britain in convoy via the North Atlantic routes. This amounts to 2% of the total for the period.
It is perhaps useful to step back and consider that much of the history (books, magazine articles, documentaries) on the battle have tended to focus on German operational successes – PQ17 or Operation Drumbeat come to mind.
Drumbeat was no doubt a success. Blair notes that the U-boats sank about 25% of all Allied tonnage off the Americas. As he says, it is "the high-water mark of the U-boat war." A major reason for this is that the US Navy was slow to adopt merchant convoying. One major reason for this is that the Americans lacked the escorts to conduct convoying. Blair notes that such escorts may have been available but for the fact that the Americans had loaned about 60 destroyers to the Canadians and British. (Blair makes this assertion without really going into figures, which is suspicious because it is otherwise so uncharacteristic of his entire approach; also, note how in making this assertion he neatly points a finger of blame at Roosevelt and the British at the same time. Blair defends King a lot and blames Roosevelt and his administration for just about every pre-war naval decision, and Blair also spends much prose defending the US Navy against British historians).
Moreover, the Americans had one simple doctrinal reason not convoying merchants: King prioritized his available blue-water Atlantic escorts on defending troop transports, an effort that Blair notes was almost completely successful and for which King gets little credit. In any case, a consequence of the lack of convoying, the Drumbeaters were able to devastate shipping in the Americas for several months. That said, the problem with focusing on this clearly successful effort is that it provides an incomplete and inaccurate picture of the entire U-boat effort.
The same can be said for individual convoy battles. If one reads or watches an account of a single, dramatic convoy battle where U-boats were involved, one can come away with the impression that many such Atlantic convoys were equally savaged by the U-boats. However, focusing on the many, many convoys where little or even nothing of consequence happened simply makes for boring reading or viewing, even though boredom is often war's handmaiden.
Yet, this is what Blair's figures illustrate. Through December 1941, 19 Allied convoys lost six or more ships. (This six threshold seems to be Blair's criterion of measuring whether a convoy took serious losses, although admittedly this does not take into account the percentage lost in each convoy based on the overall ships in each one). These 19 convoys may seem like a lot, except that a total of about 900 convoys sailed the Atlantic in that same period. This means that only 2% of these 900 convoys had losses of 6 or more ships, a number that aligns with the the total tonnage lost with the period, mentioned earlier. While a convoy battle in which the U-boats sank 6 or more merchants makes for exciting reading, the reality is that most convoyed merchant ships sailed the Atlantic without serious interference from the U-boats, and that the Germans were -- despite some tactical successes -- never close to cutting Britain's supply lines at the operational or strategic level. Although PQ-17 was an unmitigated disaster for the Allies, and it figures prominently in WWII naval lore, it's important to remember that this happened in the Arctic, and while tonnage was lost, the convoy was headed to the USSR, not Great Britain.
Furthermore, focusing on isolated German successes ignores German mistakes in other areas. For example, the Germans continually diverted submarines to Norway and the Mediterranean, which dispersed their concentration of force in a constant hunt for "weak links" that certainly led to individual sinkings, but only for a time. The aces, too, may have achieved a lot on their own, but looking at them in isolation provides a misleading picture of the entire campaign.
What also goes acknowledged in many accounts, including this one, is basic flaws in German strategy. For one thing, by declaring war on the USA, Germany exponentially expanded the pool of Allied shipping that it had to destroy. For another thing, by primarily focusing on merchant shipping, the German U-boats would, as a consequence, not be making any substantial dent into Allied warships. Presumably, and as events were to prove, both Allied merchant ships and warships would increase further through production, and the Germans could never sink enough Allied ships, or build enough U-boats, to keep up.
And yet another point becomes clear from this account: the Allies were able to bring diverse assets to the battle area in a better combined arms effort (namely, aircraft and ships, but also intelligence and search technology). The Germans were largely fighting with just one weapon system, the U-boat. While much is made of Allied material superiority, not enough credit is given to Allies to successfully coordinate all of this wealth into a winning military campaign. By contrast, the Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine couldn't even work together in the Atlantic, and the German surface fleet spent most of the war in port.
At best, the U-boat menace may have slowed Allied delivery of materials due to convoying restrictions, and forced them to divert resources into convoy protection and sub hunting. Blair makes these points somewhat loosely and without providing figures. Even if they're true, the net effect was minimal, as the Allies were able to ground down the German U-boats in what amounted for Germany to be a lost campaign in a lost war. All of this becomes plain by the end of this volume (August 1942), and thus well before Doenitz pulled the U-boats out of the Atlantic in the "Black May" of 1943. If the Germans were fighting the U-boat war to delay or inconvenience the Western Allies, it's hard to see what they actually gained by the attempt, as events through May 1945 prove. The German U-boat war thus seems to be a shining example of the absurdity and futility of the Third Reich's entire war effort, which was painfully drawn out at the cost of human lives on both sides, civilian and military, for nearly six years.
Much of this overarching narrative I have had to overlay onto Blair’s text, because his own is haphazardly constructed. For example, I found his two-part structure confusing. He divides the U-boat campaign into a first effort against Great Britain, and then the second effort against the Americas.
I’m not sure that this makes complete sense; one could argue that all of the U-boat operations were directed against Britain for most, if not all, of the war, regardless of where the U-boats operated; the tonnage war wasn’t really aimed at starving the USA. Then, too, why are U-boat operations in the Mediterranean, the Arctic, and West Africa included in the Americas section? It would have been better to segregate all of these theaters and provide them their own separate narratives. Including them amid operations on the American East Coast and the Caribbean interrupts the narrative for that section, and so his framework for analyzing events becomes, as a result, somewhat disjointed by these excursions.
Without a smooth-flowing narrative to bind it all together, it’s easy to get lost in the Blair’s weeds detailing every U-boat operation. It’s also questionable how much Blair’s work is a resource for historians. He does not footnote his work. This is somewhat ironic, because not including footnotes is sometimes acceptable in a popular history to improve readability; here, the lack of footnotes doesn’t add anything to readability. The volume also does not include a topical index. While I can find every U-boat and Allied ship named in indexes, it’s almost impossible to find his discussions of general topics like Allied intelligence breakthroughs or convoying decisions on the American East Coast. The lack of such an index makes his book even harder to read, revisit, and study.
Thus, while Blair offers a few insights and conclusions from his study, and he breaks the mythology surrounding the Battle of the Atlantic, those takeaways are undermined by his lack of memorable narrative and other guides to the reader. It's a classic case of an author that focuses on research and dumping facts onto the page without considering the reader. Every U-boat cruise is covered, and while I may have wanted this when I set out, all of this detail comes at the price of readability, understanding, and enjoyment.
While I found it on balance "just OK," I'm left wondering if his attempt to sink the myths surrounding the Battle of the Atlantic in the popular mind has backfired, simply because this first volume is so difficult for even a dedicated reader like myself to complete.
He provides this answer in a 1400-page two volume account, the first of which I’m reviewing here. I managed to complete it, but doing so took an effort that few, if any books, have ever required. My first 200-page attempt stalled. I restarted and managed to complete 600 pages, took a break, and then completed the last 100.
I had once thought that a book like this would be everything I ever wanted. Unfortunately, the promise of Blair’s book is undercut by his execution. (This review is of the 1996 hardcover first edition).
This volume covers just about every U-boat mission from the start of the war through August 1942. Blair intersperses the German side of things with Allied strategic discussions and technological developments. The problem is that Blair never really sets out the terms of his review: why cover every U-boat mission? What sort of narrative do these individual sailings form, and what type of composite picture do they present?
While Blair doesn’t overtly do so, it becomes clear that anecdotes about the ace submariners is a key part of the myth that surrounds the U-boat effort, including much of its post-war historical writing. For every ace, there seems to be some commander who sailed and -- whether due to bad luck, inexperience, lack of aggression, or all of these things -- failed to locate or sink any merchant ships. While much of U-boat historical writing seems to focus on the all-stars like Prien, Kretchmer, and their kin, it's hard to ignore that some sub commanders were simply unlucky or bad. Lemp, for example, was arguably catastrophic, sinking the Athenia on the first day of the war (which could have been the Lusitania all over again), and then surrendering his boat to an airplane and failing to destroy both his sub or the Enigma machine.
Throughout, Blair relentlessly counters U-boat commanders’ claims vs their actual ships sunk. It seems that Doenitz was all too ready to accept these claims from his submariners. As one example, Blair shows that some commanders in the Mediterranean who were only marginally successful received Knight’s Crosses anyway as a propaganda effort designed to promote German naval success in that theater, corresponding with Rommel’s efforts. Peter Cremer, the famous memoirist, earned his Knight’s Cross, but he also sank a German blockade runner, which led to a court martial hearing. Several other commanders, we learn, sank neutral ships.
So, despite the fascination with U-boat aces, even their records can be called into question, as Blair does. At best, the U-boat arm was perhaps like many other modern organizations, with a few savants producing the majority of results, with many others simply showing up to work. Even so, the high-performing aces ended up either killed, captured, or reassigned to shore duty. The absurdity of the German position in this vein is that they risked a U-boat to rescue ace commanders from Canadian POW camps (notably Kretschmer; this attempt failed). As a result of this attrition and the expansion of the German U-boat fleet in 1942, we start to see at the end of this volume many U-boats sailing with inexperienced captains and crews, a good number of whom died on their maiden voyages.
This alternate picture of the U-boat force, proven again and again through Blair's anecdotes, is important because it supports Blair's statistical analysis of the Battle of the Atlantic. By looking at hard numbers, Blair shows that the U-boats simply never came close to cutting off Britain’s supplies. This is even true during the critical period before US involvement through 1941.
The critical realization is that British-controlled shipping actually increased by the end of 1942. Britain was producing its own merchant shipping, of course (a fact that often gets overshadowed for some reason by American production), as well as incorporating ships from Hitler's European victims into its own convoy streams. As a result, by December 1941, Great Britain had 617 more ships, or 2.9 million more tons in shipping capacity, than when it started the war in September 1939. Part of the reason is that the U-boats (and other weapons) were able to make only a small dent in shipping by destroying them. Through December 1941, the British lost only 291 of the 12,057 of ships reaching Great Britain in convoy via the North Atlantic routes. This amounts to 2% of the total for the period.
It is perhaps useful to step back and consider that much of the history (books, magazine articles, documentaries) on the battle have tended to focus on German operational successes – PQ17 or Operation Drumbeat come to mind.
Drumbeat was no doubt a success. Blair notes that the U-boats sank about 25% of all Allied tonnage off the Americas. As he says, it is "the high-water mark of the U-boat war." A major reason for this is that the US Navy was slow to adopt merchant convoying. One major reason for this is that the Americans lacked the escorts to conduct convoying. Blair notes that such escorts may have been available but for the fact that the Americans had loaned about 60 destroyers to the Canadians and British. (Blair makes this assertion without really going into figures, which is suspicious because it is otherwise so uncharacteristic of his entire approach; also, note how in making this assertion he neatly points a finger of blame at Roosevelt and the British at the same time. Blair defends King a lot and blames Roosevelt and his administration for just about every pre-war naval decision, and Blair also spends much prose defending the US Navy against British historians).
Moreover, the Americans had one simple doctrinal reason not convoying merchants: King prioritized his available blue-water Atlantic escorts on defending troop transports, an effort that Blair notes was almost completely successful and for which King gets little credit. In any case, a consequence of the lack of convoying, the Drumbeaters were able to devastate shipping in the Americas for several months. That said, the problem with focusing on this clearly successful effort is that it provides an incomplete and inaccurate picture of the entire U-boat effort.
The same can be said for individual convoy battles. If one reads or watches an account of a single, dramatic convoy battle where U-boats were involved, one can come away with the impression that many such Atlantic convoys were equally savaged by the U-boats. However, focusing on the many, many convoys where little or even nothing of consequence happened simply makes for boring reading or viewing, even though boredom is often war's handmaiden.
Yet, this is what Blair's figures illustrate. Through December 1941, 19 Allied convoys lost six or more ships. (This six threshold seems to be Blair's criterion of measuring whether a convoy took serious losses, although admittedly this does not take into account the percentage lost in each convoy based on the overall ships in each one). These 19 convoys may seem like a lot, except that a total of about 900 convoys sailed the Atlantic in that same period. This means that only 2% of these 900 convoys had losses of 6 or more ships, a number that aligns with the the total tonnage lost with the period, mentioned earlier. While a convoy battle in which the U-boats sank 6 or more merchants makes for exciting reading, the reality is that most convoyed merchant ships sailed the Atlantic without serious interference from the U-boats, and that the Germans were -- despite some tactical successes -- never close to cutting Britain's supply lines at the operational or strategic level. Although PQ-17 was an unmitigated disaster for the Allies, and it figures prominently in WWII naval lore, it's important to remember that this happened in the Arctic, and while tonnage was lost, the convoy was headed to the USSR, not Great Britain.
Furthermore, focusing on isolated German successes ignores German mistakes in other areas. For example, the Germans continually diverted submarines to Norway and the Mediterranean, which dispersed their concentration of force in a constant hunt for "weak links" that certainly led to individual sinkings, but only for a time. The aces, too, may have achieved a lot on their own, but looking at them in isolation provides a misleading picture of the entire campaign.
What also goes acknowledged in many accounts, including this one, is basic flaws in German strategy. For one thing, by declaring war on the USA, Germany exponentially expanded the pool of Allied shipping that it had to destroy. For another thing, by primarily focusing on merchant shipping, the German U-boats would, as a consequence, not be making any substantial dent into Allied warships. Presumably, and as events were to prove, both Allied merchant ships and warships would increase further through production, and the Germans could never sink enough Allied ships, or build enough U-boats, to keep up.
And yet another point becomes clear from this account: the Allies were able to bring diverse assets to the battle area in a better combined arms effort (namely, aircraft and ships, but also intelligence and search technology). The Germans were largely fighting with just one weapon system, the U-boat. While much is made of Allied material superiority, not enough credit is given to Allies to successfully coordinate all of this wealth into a winning military campaign. By contrast, the Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine couldn't even work together in the Atlantic, and the German surface fleet spent most of the war in port.
At best, the U-boat menace may have slowed Allied delivery of materials due to convoying restrictions, and forced them to divert resources into convoy protection and sub hunting. Blair makes these points somewhat loosely and without providing figures. Even if they're true, the net effect was minimal, as the Allies were able to ground down the German U-boats in what amounted for Germany to be a lost campaign in a lost war. All of this becomes plain by the end of this volume (August 1942), and thus well before Doenitz pulled the U-boats out of the Atlantic in the "Black May" of 1943. If the Germans were fighting the U-boat war to delay or inconvenience the Western Allies, it's hard to see what they actually gained by the attempt, as events through May 1945 prove. The German U-boat war thus seems to be a shining example of the absurdity and futility of the Third Reich's entire war effort, which was painfully drawn out at the cost of human lives on both sides, civilian and military, for nearly six years.
Much of this overarching narrative I have had to overlay onto Blair’s text, because his own is haphazardly constructed. For example, I found his two-part structure confusing. He divides the U-boat campaign into a first effort against Great Britain, and then the second effort against the Americas.
I’m not sure that this makes complete sense; one could argue that all of the U-boat operations were directed against Britain for most, if not all, of the war, regardless of where the U-boats operated; the tonnage war wasn’t really aimed at starving the USA. Then, too, why are U-boat operations in the Mediterranean, the Arctic, and West Africa included in the Americas section? It would have been better to segregate all of these theaters and provide them their own separate narratives. Including them amid operations on the American East Coast and the Caribbean interrupts the narrative for that section, and so his framework for analyzing events becomes, as a result, somewhat disjointed by these excursions.
Without a smooth-flowing narrative to bind it all together, it’s easy to get lost in the Blair’s weeds detailing every U-boat operation. It’s also questionable how much Blair’s work is a resource for historians. He does not footnote his work. This is somewhat ironic, because not including footnotes is sometimes acceptable in a popular history to improve readability; here, the lack of footnotes doesn’t add anything to readability. The volume also does not include a topical index. While I can find every U-boat and Allied ship named in indexes, it’s almost impossible to find his discussions of general topics like Allied intelligence breakthroughs or convoying decisions on the American East Coast. The lack of such an index makes his book even harder to read, revisit, and study.
Thus, while Blair offers a few insights and conclusions from his study, and he breaks the mythology surrounding the Battle of the Atlantic, those takeaways are undermined by his lack of memorable narrative and other guides to the reader. It's a classic case of an author that focuses on research and dumping facts onto the page without considering the reader. Every U-boat cruise is covered, and while I may have wanted this when I set out, all of this detail comes at the price of readability, understanding, and enjoyment.
While I found it on balance "just OK," I'm left wondering if his attempt to sink the myths surrounding the Battle of the Atlantic in the popular mind has backfired, simply because this first volume is so difficult for even a dedicated reader like myself to complete.
November 11, 2023
I decided to try and read this book after playing the excellent solo wargame based on the book called aptly "The Hunted" by GMT games and designed by Gregory Smith. Mr Smith was able to develop a simple, playable and historical accurate game by knowing when to limit the detail and know what was important, and leave out the rest. Unfortunately Clay Blair didn't do the same. It hard to overstate how bad this book is. it is basically a massive excel file of data converted into sentences and paragraphs. If it wasn't written in 1990s, I would of said it was a creation of AI, or one of paper writing software available.. No attempt was made to make it the least bit interesting or to leave anything out for sake of brevity and readability. 1,400 odd pages. i gave up with 150 pages to go. I was finished all right.
October 11, 2021
If you are looking for a very detailed account of the boats, captains, and skirmishes of German U Boats during the first half of World War II, this the book for you! If you are a casual history buff who just wants to learn more about the U Boats of WWII, you may want to save yourself some time and find another book. This has so much detail about what seems like every battle it starts to become monotonous. It would be a great reference if you were writing a paper about a related topic. As a reference book, it’s 5 stars, but for me, looking for a casual read, too much.
June 7, 2023
I love historical events like this.
Boats and historical events are what make me love reading. Could you please share the sequel books of your series?
In fact, even though I started reading very late, I'm getting more and more immersed every day.
It is a great chance to read the books of important authors. I know that. I'm looking forward to your new books.
I am writing the importance of reading a book here for friends who want to read this book. I hope it will benefit sellers and customers...
Are the top 10 benefits of reading for all ages:
1. Reading Exercises the Brain
While reading, we have to remember different characters and settings that belong to a given story. Even if you enjoy reading a book in one sitting, you have to remember the details throughout the time you take to read the book. Therefore, reading is a workout for your brain that improves memory function.
2. Reading is a Form of (free) Entertainment
Did you know that most of the popular TV shows and movies are based on books? So why not indulge in the original form of entertainment by immersing yourself in reading. Most importantly, it’s free with your Markham Public Library card.
3. Reading Improves Concentration and the Ability to Focus
We can all agree that reading cannot happen without focus and in order to fully understand the story, we have to concentrate on each page that we read. In a world where gadgets are only getting faster and shortening our attention span, we need to constantly practice concentration and focus. Reading is one of the few activities that requires your undivided attention, therefore, improving your ability to concentrate.
4. Reading Improves Literacy
Have you ever read a book where you came across an unfamiliar word? Books have the power to improve your vocabulary by introducing you to new words. The more you read, the more your vocabulary grows, along with your ability to effectively communicate. Additionally, reading improves writing skills by helping the reader understand and learn different writing styles.
5. Reading Improves Sleep
By creating a bedtime routine that includes reading, you can signal to your body that it is time to sleep. Now, more than ever, we rely on increased screen time to get through the day. Therefore, by setting your phone aside and picking up a book, you are telling your brain that it is time to quiet down. Moreover, since reading helps you de-stress, doing so right before bed helps calm your mind and anxiety and improve the quality of sleep.
6. Reading Increases General Knowledge
Books are always filled with fun and interesting facts. Whether you read fiction or non-fictions, books have the ability to provide us with information we would’ve otherwise not known. Reading a variety of topics can make you a more knowledgeable person, in turn improving your conversation skills.
7. Reading is Motivational
By reading books about protagonists who have overcome challenges, we are oftentimes encouraged to do the same. The right book can motivate you to never give up and stay positive, regardless of whether it’s a romance novel or a self-help book.
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https://theboatyacht.com/
https://theboatyacht.com/sardine-carr...
https://numberoneboats.com/sardine-ca...
https://theboatyacht.com/pontoon-boat...
https://numberoneboats.com/jeanneau-6...
Boats and historical events are what make me love reading. Could you please share the sequel books of your series?
In fact, even though I started reading very late, I'm getting more and more immersed every day.
It is a great chance to read the books of important authors. I know that. I'm looking forward to your new books.
I am writing the importance of reading a book here for friends who want to read this book. I hope it will benefit sellers and customers...
Are the top 10 benefits of reading for all ages:
1. Reading Exercises the Brain
While reading, we have to remember different characters and settings that belong to a given story. Even if you enjoy reading a book in one sitting, you have to remember the details throughout the time you take to read the book. Therefore, reading is a workout for your brain that improves memory function.
2. Reading is a Form of (free) Entertainment
Did you know that most of the popular TV shows and movies are based on books? So why not indulge in the original form of entertainment by immersing yourself in reading. Most importantly, it’s free with your Markham Public Library card.
3. Reading Improves Concentration and the Ability to Focus
We can all agree that reading cannot happen without focus and in order to fully understand the story, we have to concentrate on each page that we read. In a world where gadgets are only getting faster and shortening our attention span, we need to constantly practice concentration and focus. Reading is one of the few activities that requires your undivided attention, therefore, improving your ability to concentrate.
4. Reading Improves Literacy
Have you ever read a book where you came across an unfamiliar word? Books have the power to improve your vocabulary by introducing you to new words. The more you read, the more your vocabulary grows, along with your ability to effectively communicate. Additionally, reading improves writing skills by helping the reader understand and learn different writing styles.
5. Reading Improves Sleep
By creating a bedtime routine that includes reading, you can signal to your body that it is time to sleep. Now, more than ever, we rely on increased screen time to get through the day. Therefore, by setting your phone aside and picking up a book, you are telling your brain that it is time to quiet down. Moreover, since reading helps you de-stress, doing so right before bed helps calm your mind and anxiety and improve the quality of sleep.
6. Reading Increases General Knowledge
Books are always filled with fun and interesting facts. Whether you read fiction or non-fictions, books have the ability to provide us with information we would’ve otherwise not known. Reading a variety of topics can make you a more knowledgeable person, in turn improving your conversation skills.
7. Reading is Motivational
By reading books about protagonists who have overcome challenges, we are oftentimes encouraged to do the same. The right book can motivate you to never give up and stay positive, regardless of whether it’s a romance novel or a self-help book.
https://numberoneboats.com/
https://theboatyacht.com/
https://theboatyacht.com/sardine-carr...
https://numberoneboats.com/sardine-ca...
https://theboatyacht.com/pontoon-boat...
https://numberoneboats.com/jeanneau-6...
August 20, 2024
This is not a book that is wonder of story telling, but rather a summary of archival information. That makes it more of a reference work than anything else so I'm treating it as such.
The topic of the book (actually two thirds of a book since it was too much for one volume), is that sumarine warfare in World War 2 seen from the U-Boats' perspective. It starts with a bit of history of the submarine and submarine warfare leading up to WW2 but that is just a thin layer of background information.
The book is almost a mix of narrative and statistical tables. The author, or some of the author’s sources have done a lot of research and a lot of numbers are presented to the reader.
For someone that has mostly heard about the "Battle of the Atlantic" from the Allied point of view, this adds another dimension. For the Allied the submarines was a constant threat, but if you look at it from the German point of view, they struggled a lot and failed a lot. The submarines did not have adequate range, and numbers, and torpedoes, at least not initially.
There were periods when Germany failed to have a single submarine on patrol near the convoy routes which made it perfectly safe. Not that the Allied knew that.
After Bletchley Park gets a firm grip on the encrypted radio traffic between submarines and their base, of which there was a lot, many German submarines only find empty ocean, but one thing that strikes the reader, is how well the Allied kept the secrets of high resolution radar, radio direction findings and broken cryptos.
The German U-Boat arm is micromanaged from the Dönitz staff and the German high command, and that takes a lot of radio traffic, which makes it easy for convoy escorts to prepare and even hunt down submarines before they get close.
The author's premise is that the German submarines never were a real threat to the allied, but I’m not convinced just because Germany was not all successful. The author points out things like "95% of the ships made it through", but seems to fail to realize that merchant ships do many trips. If the chance to survive one trip is 95%, then the chance to survive ten is 60% and that is a scary prospect.
I did notice how many sunk ships were Swedish. I did know that shipping has been a big thing for Sweden, but as they were not in the war, and even sold goods to the Nazis, I didn’t expect so many of them to be sunk. Otherwise most of the sunk ships are British, Norwegian and American.
Another point of concern is that the author enters some kind of full defense mode when the US navy is concerned. He seems to feel a need to defend and deflect blame on to politicians or the British. Particularly the British. That makes his analysis less reliable. Still, I am sure a lot of what he says is well considered. As long as it's not about external criticism of the US Navy.
The topic of the book (actually two thirds of a book since it was too much for one volume), is that sumarine warfare in World War 2 seen from the U-Boats' perspective. It starts with a bit of history of the submarine and submarine warfare leading up to WW2 but that is just a thin layer of background information.
The book is almost a mix of narrative and statistical tables. The author, or some of the author’s sources have done a lot of research and a lot of numbers are presented to the reader.
For someone that has mostly heard about the "Battle of the Atlantic" from the Allied point of view, this adds another dimension. For the Allied the submarines was a constant threat, but if you look at it from the German point of view, they struggled a lot and failed a lot. The submarines did not have adequate range, and numbers, and torpedoes, at least not initially.
There were periods when Germany failed to have a single submarine on patrol near the convoy routes which made it perfectly safe. Not that the Allied knew that.
After Bletchley Park gets a firm grip on the encrypted radio traffic between submarines and their base, of which there was a lot, many German submarines only find empty ocean, but one thing that strikes the reader, is how well the Allied kept the secrets of high resolution radar, radio direction findings and broken cryptos.
The German U-Boat arm is micromanaged from the Dönitz staff and the German high command, and that takes a lot of radio traffic, which makes it easy for convoy escorts to prepare and even hunt down submarines before they get close.
The author's premise is that the German submarines never were a real threat to the allied, but I’m not convinced just because Germany was not all successful. The author points out things like "95% of the ships made it through", but seems to fail to realize that merchant ships do many trips. If the chance to survive one trip is 95%, then the chance to survive ten is 60% and that is a scary prospect.
I did notice how many sunk ships were Swedish. I did know that shipping has been a big thing for Sweden, but as they were not in the war, and even sold goods to the Nazis, I didn’t expect so many of them to be sunk. Otherwise most of the sunk ships are British, Norwegian and American.
Another point of concern is that the author enters some kind of full defense mode when the US navy is concerned. He seems to feel a need to defend and deflect blame on to politicians or the British. Particularly the British. That makes his analysis less reliable. Still, I am sure a lot of what he says is well considered. As long as it's not about external criticism of the US Navy.
April 25, 2020
I suppose I need to reserve final judgment on Clay Blair’s masterwork on the Battle of the Atlantic until I’ve finished the second volume. However, at this point I’m pleased with what I’m reading. The history – divided into the early campaign against Great Britain and then the shift in focus to the coasts of the Americas – appears to be well-researched and reasonably comprehensive. It’s also nice to see a historian stick up for the American Navy, which according to Blair did a much better job of defending against the U-boat threat than many English writers give it credit for (though of course Blair also notes that some mistakes were made). On the other hand, the author sometimes devotes too much effort to refuting specific criticisms by other writers (particularly Michael Gannon), occasionally descending to academic nit-picking about trivial statistical flaws. And I confess that I prefer detailed accounts of the experiences of the men who fought the war to the vague overviews that Blair frequently uses to recount convoy battles. When all one has to go by are the names of ships and tonnages sunk, one battle sounds pretty much the same as the next. Those two minor complaints aside, this is a fascinating history of one of the most important chapters in modern warfare.
August 1, 2019
This massive volume covers the German U Boat war through 9-1-1942. It is meticulously researched, brimming with data on the U Boats, allied AWS capabilities and efforts, the code-breaking efforts of both sides, etc. Furthermore the author periodically summarizes and evaluates both the German and Allied efforts at various stages of the U Boat war and also ties in decisions by both sides with the larger military situation of the global conflict. Most of the narrative recounts the patrols of individual U Boats — where they went, who commanded them, what they did or didn’t sink, and ultimately if they in turn were sunk, captured, damaged, or returned unscathed.
If this “your thing”, you will love this book. If the details overwhelm you, then this book is a reference more than an enjoyable read.
If this “your thing”, you will love this book. If the details overwhelm you, then this book is a reference more than an enjoyable read.
January 9, 2021
Atlantikoko guduaren lehen erdiaren analisi sakona kronologikoki egiten duen liburua, maila politiko eta estrategikotik hasita, zehaztasun guztietaraino: patruila, itsaspeko... guztiak gainbegiratzen ditu. Nahi besteko informazioa ematen du, eta nahiz eta batzuetan dauden patruila, ontzi eta kapitainen jarraipena egitea zaila den arren, gustura irakurri dudan liburua da.
Egia da Blair nahiko lerratuta dagoela AEBetarantz, eta berak ateratzen dituen ondorio batzuekin ez nago guztiz ados, baina irakurketa modura oso ona iruditu zait, eta lan historiografiko bikaina egin duela ezin da ukatu. Atlantikoko guduari buruzko liburu osatuenetakoa da, eta gaia interesekoa izanez gero, irakurri beharrekoa.
Hori esanda, ez dut oraindik erabaki ea bigarren zatia (1943-1945 artekoa) irakurriko dudan edo ez, bigarren zatia jada ez baita horren interesgarria niretzat.
Egia da Blair nahiko lerratuta dagoela AEBetarantz, eta berak ateratzen dituen ondorio batzuekin ez nago guztiz ados, baina irakurketa modura oso ona iruditu zait, eta lan historiografiko bikaina egin duela ezin da ukatu. Atlantikoko guduari buruzko liburu osatuenetakoa da, eta gaia interesekoa izanez gero, irakurri beharrekoa.
Hori esanda, ez dut oraindik erabaki ea bigarren zatia (1943-1945 artekoa) irakurriko dudan edo ez, bigarren zatia jada ez baita horren interesgarria niretzat.
November 1, 2020
A very detailed account of German U-boat missions in the 1939-1942 period, starting with the Baltic and North sea, branching out to the Atlantic, Mediterranean, Arctic and - ultimately - US coastal waters.
The author keeps the book interesting and varying, for it could easily have become a very dry iteration of facts and numbers.
The book goes back and forth in chronological fashion, between the German missions, successes and failures, and the Allies trying to break the enigma codes and develop better and better ASW (Anti-Submarine Warfare) measures (and trying to get the US pulled into the war).
I had no idea the U-boat captains were plagued with so many torpedo-issues and were so often side-tracked to less "productive" missions. Maybe it's a good thing they were ...
The author keeps the book interesting and varying, for it could easily have become a very dry iteration of facts and numbers.
The book goes back and forth in chronological fashion, between the German missions, successes and failures, and the Allies trying to break the enigma codes and develop better and better ASW (Anti-Submarine Warfare) measures (and trying to get the US pulled into the war).
I had no idea the U-boat captains were plagued with so many torpedo-issues and were so often side-tracked to less "productive" missions. Maybe it's a good thing they were ...
May 20, 2021
This has got to be the best book about U-boats that I've read so far. I am looking forward to part 2! If you want to read about U-boats and you want as much detail as possible per boat, then this is the book for you. I have learned so many interesting facts about many of the skippers and their missions. It was a very long book with over 1500 pages which did take me a long time to read but totally worth it. I would recommend this book to anybody that wants to know the FULL history about German U-boats, down to each boat.
September 11, 2018
This is a huge and meticulously researched book about the U-Boats and their patrols during the first part of WWII. It took me forever to read, but I have always been fascinated by submarines since growing up not far from the base near New London, Connecticut. This book is called "The Hunters" and the sequel is called "The Hunted" and I bet is equally detailed. Not an easy book to read, but very interesting if you like submarine lore. I plan to read the sequel.
January 11, 2022
If you want the most comprehensive book explaining the German uboat war strategy this is the book for you. It literally documents the war at the torpedo/depth charge level... The amount of research the author did to gain this level of detail deserves an extra star but for me this book was just too detailed that 3 times reading this book i had to take a break and read another book. Also its not short as my kobo stated 25 hours long.
November 30, 2017
If you like historical material about WWII era U-boats, and I do, this is a terrific book. I'll also mention the companion volume Hitler's U-Boat War: The Hunted, 1942-1945. It's comprehensive and compiles the available documentation on the subject into a cohesive narrative that draws the reader along through the conflict in the Atlantic. It's one of the most educational things I've read.
December 24, 2025
a must read for submarine history buffs!!!
Most excellent book. Very detailed and informative. Considering the vast number of U-boat torpedo misses I’d like to know crew and boat firing procedures. Why so many misses? A tragic time for crews of both surface ships and submarines. If your ship or submarine was sunk, what were your survival chances? Not high!!
Most excellent book. Very detailed and informative. Considering the vast number of U-boat torpedo misses I’d like to know crew and boat firing procedures. Why so many misses? A tragic time for crews of both surface ships and submarines. If your ship or submarine was sunk, what were your survival chances? Not high!!
August 30, 2024
Not an easy to book to read. Endless paragraphs listing U boat captains and ships and tonnage sunk. But it is an exceptional piece of detailed research, and amongst the historical detail a good analysis of Allied and Axis strengths and weaknesses throughout the campaign.
January 3, 2018
A comprehensive book on the first half of the Battle of the Atlantic.
September 26, 2018
Monumental massively thorough work. Only for those who are serious about history but if you are, it is so well worth it.
December 8, 2021
Too many facts and figures, but very informative.
December 7, 2022
Would love to give this a better review but as a documentabook, it was a good read, but very repetitive
February 12, 2021
Great book
Well written and very interesting hope now on volume 2,the information researched was amazing to read along with informative tables
Well written and very interesting hope now on volume 2,the information researched was amazing to read along with informative tables
July 26, 2018
"His monumental work...is the most thorough study of the U-boat campaign available." --"Library Journal" Hitler's U-boat War is an epic sea story about the most arduous and prolonged naval battle in history. For a period of nearly six years, the German U-boat force attempted to blockade and isolate the British Isles in hopes of forcing the British out of the war, thereby thwarting both the Allied strategic air assault on German cities and Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of Occupied France. Fortunately for the Allies, the U-boat force failed to achieve either of these objectives, but in the attempt they sank 2,800 Allied merchant ships, while the Allies sank nearly 800 U-boats. On both sides, tens of thousands of sailors perished. For decades, an authoritative and definitive history of the Battle of the Atlantic could not be attempted, since London and Washington agreed to withhold all official code-breaking and U-boat records in order to safeguard the secrets of code breaking in the postwar years. The accounts that did appear were incomplete and full of false conclusions and errors of fact, often leaving the entirely wrong impression that the German U-boats came within a whisker of defeating the Allies, a myth that is finally laid to rest in this account. Clay Blair, acclaimed author of the bestselling naval classic Silent Victory: The U.S. Submarine War Against Japan, has drawn from the official records as well as the work of German, British, American, and Canadian naval scholars. Never before has Hitler's U-boat war been chronicled with such authority, fidelity, objectivity, and detail. The result is this magnificent and monumental work, crammed with vivid and dramatic scenes of naval actions and dispassionate but startling new revelations, interpretations, and conclusions about all aspects of the Battle of the Atlantic.
September 27, 2011
Twenty one years after publishing Silent Victory, his history of US submarine warfare against Japan, Clay Blair published this first volume of his history of German submarine warfare against the Allies.
Like his earlier work, this is a comprehensive history of the conflict, written in such a way as to remain engaging despite largely being a repetitive listing of the records of various u-boat voyages. Unlike his earlier work, he was able to call on extensive records from both sides of the conflict, which largely accounts for the greater length of the work, and its division into two volumes.
The first part of the book is a fairly straightforward description of the submarine war against Great Britain prior to 1942. Besides descriptions of u-boat activities, there's also a great deal of discussion of British code breaking activities, and German military politics. The latter appears to have greatly shaped the course of the war in the Atlantic.
The second part covers the war after the US entered the conflict directly. This leads the author to spend some time defending the records of the US and Canadian Navies, both of which have been maligned in previous histories, particularly those written by British historians.
Realizing that the author was himself a member of the US Navy in WWII, and thus has a certain prejudice, his arguments still seem very solid.
Overall, another excellent history. While I plan to wait a bit before starting the second volume, I look forward to doing so.
Like his earlier work, this is a comprehensive history of the conflict, written in such a way as to remain engaging despite largely being a repetitive listing of the records of various u-boat voyages. Unlike his earlier work, he was able to call on extensive records from both sides of the conflict, which largely accounts for the greater length of the work, and its division into two volumes.
The first part of the book is a fairly straightforward description of the submarine war against Great Britain prior to 1942. Besides descriptions of u-boat activities, there's also a great deal of discussion of British code breaking activities, and German military politics. The latter appears to have greatly shaped the course of the war in the Atlantic.
The second part covers the war after the US entered the conflict directly. This leads the author to spend some time defending the records of the US and Canadian Navies, both of which have been maligned in previous histories, particularly those written by British historians.
Realizing that the author was himself a member of the US Navy in WWII, and thus has a certain prejudice, his arguments still seem very solid.
Overall, another excellent history. While I plan to wait a bit before starting the second volume, I look forward to doing so.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 54 reviews