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The Hemingway Patrols: Ernest Hemingway and His Hunt for U-Boats

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The Hemingway Patrols: Ernest Hemingway and His Hunt for U-Boats


This is a fascinating book--no need to have a particular interest in either Hemingway or the U-Boat patrols that were conducted off of our shores during WWII to enjoy it. Terry Mort has a way of transporting the reader into the center of the story. I was immediately immersed in Hemingway's huge multi-faceted world from the beginning. I felt as if I were on board the Pilar anticipating a surprise confrontation with the enemy at any moment, or relaxing with "Papa" and friends in his favorite watering holes in Key West and Havana sharing lots of drinks and enjoying his colorful and often grandiose stories, or at home(s) with him and his family. By the end of the book, which came much too quickly, I felt as if I had been given the rarest of intimate and really true glimpses into this brilliant and complex man and his thoughts, feelings, relationships and adventures. I will probably pick this book up again soon as I am already missing my time with him and the huge life that he led.

Every time my grandfather went to Havana's main post office, he took his fourteen-year-old grandson along--Me!

Being in the liquor business, Grandpa invariably stopped at the Restaurant/Bar "El Floridita" on our way over or back. One day, his bartender-friend pointed at a group of men sitting at the bar's farthest corner drinking, talking, and playing "cubilete," a dice game played mostly in Cuban bars.

Gesturing with his hands, a bearded man mesmerized his cronies with a fishing tale. Bigger than life, Ernest Hemingway was narrating his latest expedition aboard the Pilar.

An ardent admirer of his literary genius, Grandpa approached the group and introduced ourselves. Without hesitation he accepted an invitation to share in the conversation.
Totally petrified I didn't say a word. Aware of my silence, the bearded man turns around:
"Son, would you like to hear about my encounter with a German submarine during the war?"
That said, the entire group chuckled at the laughable offer.

One of last century's great story tellers, Hemingway reveled in entertaining his cronies sometimes with far-out tales. He cherished the attention, and rejoiced in the macho deportment he portrayed.

"The Hemingway Patrols: Ernest Hemingway and His Hunt for U-boats" is only the title of a book dedicated to the prolific imagination of one of America's greatest writers.

Andrew J. Rodriguez
Award-winning author of "Adios, Havana," a Memoir

If I hadn't just finished reading Mark Ott's so-called "eco-biography," A Sea of Change: Ernest Hemingway and the Gulf Stream--a Contextual Biography, then possibly I would have given Terry Mort's very similar book a higher review.

It actually has more biographical juice in it than the literary criticism of Ott, but both writers point to a Hemingway strangely similar to the John Steinbeck who was so fascinated with Doc Ricketts and the Sea of Cortez. That two of the great US novelists cared so much about the oceans and about undersea life is an odd coincidence, or maybe not a coincidence, for both men studied Thoreau and the proto-ecological movements of the previous century. Ott makes better use of the log Hemingway kept for the Pilar, showing how their formal qualities--the fragmentary denotation of nouns and adjectives as the watchers spotted a dolphin, for example, or encountered heavy rain--led to later changes in Hemingway's style--not all of them for the better. But here Mort is much mor knowledgeable about German U Boats and the dangers they posed to the Atlantic seaboard and to US naval efforts in general.

Almost as a subplot we have Martha Gellhorn and her bemused attitude towards Hemingway's defense action. She wrote, "Loving is a habit like another and requires something nearby for daily practice." Hemingway would have loved it if Martha had accompanied him on his U Boat expeditions, and maybe their marriage would have lasted longer if she wasn't so skeptical, but as Mort points out, Hemingway expected his disciples to toe the line 100 percent on all points or face his wrath, and Martha Gellhorn just wasn't built that way. Was she a careerist as some have charged? Certainly her alliance with Hemingway raised her profile no end, and she knew it.

Finally, Mort does expand our sense of Hemingway's quarrel with "honor." On the one hand he saw it as an antiquated concept responsible for the worst carnages of World War I; on the other, says Mort, he believed in T E Lawrence's line about "there could be no honor in a sure success, but much might be wrested from a sure defeat."

As much WWII history - some with new information such as the 2002 discovery of the sunken U166 German submarine - as the weaving of literary criticism, the contexts of Hemingway's life and his hunt for U-boats. Was impressed that Scribner is the publisher - and could see why after reading it. As an amateur student of WW II's "Pacific War" and the air wars of Europe, I started to grasp a new understanding of WWII's merchant marine strategy and Atlantic submarine battle. The author's naval and Caribbean narratives were fresh, most readable and understandable. As a reader of Hemingway's novels with modest short story experience, I was fascinated how the author moved through Hemingway's early years, Paris and Spain to the Gulf Stream, Fifth Columns and the author's own takes on Hemingway. Most enjoyable - and informative.

Rather than being a book about Ernest Hemingway's adventures as part of the "Hooligan Navy" of civilian sub-spotters during the U-boat crisis off of U.S. shores in 1942, this book is more about why and how Hemingway came to volunteer for this thankless, dangerous, and yet likely excruciatingly boring task - cruising the Florida Strait in a 38-foot wooden fishing boat, "Pilar", armed only with light weapons and anti-personnel grenades (which were probably more dangerous to have aboard than if they had gone out unarmed) to spot German submarines.

If you get into this book looking for details of the exploits of Hemingway and his crew (friends and local fisherman hired on for the task) while they plied the Gulf Stream on the lookout for tell-tale signs of the German U-boats which were preying nearly unabated on Allied shipping in the area - the faint trace of a periscope's wake, the far-off outline of a surfaced submarine silhouetted against the sky - you will be disappointed. The log Hemingway kept of the "Pilar"'s patrols is, in the author's words, "a mess". Few details survive, and given that they made only one relatively concrete sighting in the many days spent at sea patrolling, there probably isn't much to tell in that regard.

This book's strength lies in the insights it gives into how Hemingway came to be the type of man who would volunteer for duty like this; how his background and his life's experiences (especially the time he spent in Spain during that country's civil war) led him to choose this manner in which to contribute, while a man in his early 40s, to the world-wide fight against Fascism.

So, this slim volume is more appropriate for an English Lit classroom than a History classroom (except as "Additional Reading", perhaps), but it is a worthwhile read for anyone interested in a glimpse of the man behind "The Old Man and the Sea", "Islands in the Stream" (which owes much to the patrols of the "Pilar") and "For Whom The Bell Tolls".

Looking at the cover and reading the Title and Sub Title of this book one would think it was about chasing U -Boats. A good adventure story .... NOT SO ! This book is more about Hem's life in that period, long on relationships, attitudes and personal conflicts but woefully short on adventure and WAAAAAY woefully short on U-Boat chasing. There seemed to be quite a bit of repetitive information included as well. I didn't double check but I'm quite sure I read the same paragraph from time to time in different chapters. It kind of seemed like filler material. If you want to read about Hemingway this may be a fairly good source of information. If you want to read about Hemingway hunting U-Boats, keep hunting. This was a disappointing read for me.

I've become a fan of Hemingway and reading many of his works about Africa, Paris, etc. thought this would be a good insight into his patrols around Cuba, as mentioned in his "Islands in the Stream"...which tells more of his actual patrols than this book does. While this is a great look into WWII developing in the Cuba area, and good background on the UBoats that wandered the Gulf of Mexico and surrounding islands, there is more about everything ELSE than his actual patroling. Looks like Terry Mort easily goes off on tangents, detailing what he "supposes" "might" have been the reasons behind Hemingway's ideas and lifestyle. There are a lot of things that don't sound like FACTS, but things he picked up by reading H.'s novels and drawing his own conclusions. This isn't a bad book to read, just very misleading by the title...you expect the whole book to be about the various patrols from the critic's review, and it just ain't so!

Terry Mort's research into German U-Boats, the Nazi spy situation in Cuba, the atrocities of the Spanish Civil War, and the life and career of Ernest Hemingway's third wife Martha Gellhorn, all make this book incredibly fascinating. He really fills in the background on so many fascinating issues Hemingway only briefly touches on in his writing.

The only problem is that the research Mort does really works against his hero. Once the real U-Boat menace is described, both the deadly attacks and the dangers faced by the U-Boats themselves, Papa and his drinking buddies on the little fishing boat just look like amateurs playing at war. Terry Mort takes just about everything Hemingway ever did and said at face value -- even when the man was plainly drunk and making up excuses not to write. Make no mistake, however. When he did write to the best of his abilities, Hemingway was as good as the best. Just read a five page story like "A Clean Well Lighted Place" and you'll see what I mean.

But by the time this story begins, Hemingway had already begun the long, slow slide into alcoholism and suicidal despair. There's a rot, a softness in later books like FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS that Terry Mort either misses or chooses to ignore. He writes so well about subjects like navigation, the sea, and sailing basics, but when the subject is Hemingway's writing he sees nothing but good, better, best.

The real tragedy of Hemingway's life is that he became an alcoholic. And the truth Terry Mort avoids throughout the book is that in the end an alcoholic's first loyalty is to his disease. Hemingway had the raw materials of greatness in many fields. Early in his life he made successful gestures as a husband, a father, a literary man, and a military man, but by the time of this book his gestures were secondary to his main occupation, drinking.

My personal theory is that Hemingway was making semi-conscious attempts to commit suicide going back at least as far as the Twenties. And that his U-Boat patrols were a sort of half-hearted attempt to opt out of life by getting wiped out in "heroic" fashion. Mort admits his attack plan was "suicidal" but doesn't see the real meaning of that description. I'm not saying any of this to bring anybody down, and certainly not to demean Hemingway's greatest work. And I'm very well aware that it was only after all this was over that he wrote his final masterpiece, THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA, a book I really love. That book could certainly not have been written without the thousands of hours Hemingway spent in the Gulf. But the tragic side of his life, which only makes his literary achievements more admirable, is rigorously excluded from this book.

Terry Mort, in "the Hemingway Patrols" gives us the historical background as why Hemingway, and other private boat owners, put to sea in a desperate attempt to hunt for, and even possibly engage, German U-boats.

However, there was simply too little drama about the "hunt" itself for the author to fill an entire book. To fill this void, Terry Mort does a good job of describing the military situation Hemingway found himself, but even with this background information, there was not enough material to fill a book.

To merit an entire book, Mort, by necessity, gives us Hemingway the man, his failed marriages, his adventures in the Spanish Civil War, and of course, Hemingway, the author.

If enjoy reading Hemingway, you will appreiciate Mort's literary references. However, this reviewer's experience with Hemingway consists of having read The Old Man and the Sea in high school. The author's literary references and quotes from Hemingway's writings, and especially his references to Hemingway's contemporaries in the literary world, were, to this reviewer, so much wasted effort. Former English majors might find such literary comparasions enjoyable reading, but this former Political Science major, like in high school years before, was left with the feeling of, "so what?"

Mort's reporting of Hemingway's failed marriages was interesting, if "gossipy." The recounting of the adventures in the Civil War was moderately interesting, but only tangentially related to the hunt for U-boats.

Mort deserves five stars for trying to get this reviewer to "appreciate literature" and Hemingway the man, but for this student of history, we are still left with a three star book.

I looked forward to this book but was disappointed. I didn't find anything new in it. Everything Mort says about Hemingway and his silly U boat expeditions (and attendant drinking) is in Baker's 1969 biography, more compactly. There is a lot of filler, opinionizing, and a few side shows about Martha Gellhorn, but this is a superfluous book.