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Hitler's U-Boat War: The Hunted: 1942-1945

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Near the beginning of the movie "Crimson Tide", there is a debate among crew members as to what is the best submarine movie of all time, "The Enemy Below" or "Das Boot." If you understand that debate, then this two volume definitive history of the Battle of the Atlantic is for you.

Using de-classifed documents previously not available to past historians, such as the documents concerning the breaking of the German Naval Code, and the subsequent use of the code breaking materials in anti-submarine warfare, along with a detailed analysis of the statistical numbers, Clay Blair rewrites the main conclusion of most previous histories of the U-Boats. Simply put, he concludes, with irrefutable logic and detail, that the U-Boats never came close to severing the Atlantic supply lines. They were too few in number, and when their numbers rose, they were technologically inferior to Allied anti- submarine initiatives and weaponry. Even in their best months, the U-Boats never sank more than 5% of Allied merchant shipping, and frequently were well below that figure.

Rather, the U-Boat, he concludes, was more a propaganda menace, misunderstood by the Allied leaders who fought and ultimately conquered the U-Boats.

It is also a tale of courage and fortitude on the high seas. The fact that the U-Boats never came close to their goal does not diminish the ardor and courage displayed on both sides of this cruel war.

Volume 2 is a particularly fascinating study of a proud naval force literally disintegrating under the overwhelming onslaught of Allied anti-submarine warfare. As Blair himself admits, the final year of the U-Boat war is mostly glossed over in the histories, and Blair corrects that injustice.

If you were persevering enough to finish volume one (the hunters) of Clay Blair's great historical account of the German u-boats during World War II, you will be delighted by the reversal of fortunes of the u-boats in this volume. Where once the u-boat was invincible, each run becomes a 50/50 suicide run, worse odds that playing Russian roulette with a pistol.

Blair notes that it took him 11 years to complete his research and write this book, and it shows. You could not ask for a more complete assessment of u-boat activity during the war than Blair provides. However, it's not for the weak reader. Reading this book requires stamina, but the reader is rewarded in the end with getting a very good "feel" for the u-boat situation in general. It's almost as if Blair, by hammering in each individual sailing, sinking, or abort, gets you to see the "big picture."

I like the author's interjection of ancillary material from time to time: the possibility of losing Enigma decrypts; the land invasion of Europe; where the boats went when the end of the war was announced, and so on. I also like Blair's outspoken opinion on various contemporary subjects such as the overbearing Brits, the vote-concerned politicians, the "unfair" war crimes trials, and so on.

Exceptional reading; the author knows his stuff.

Blair writes an intensely detailed operational history of the U-boat arm. He is successful in demonstrating what the U-boats did not do: they never came close to cutting the Atlantic sea lanes. The strength of this book is the tremendous detail on convoys, U-boat patrols and cumulative losses. The weakness of this book (and it's predecessor) is a failure to provide either analysis or in-depth assessments. Blair does not bother to tell us what the U-boats did accomplish (my conclusion based on Blair's facts; for the loss of 30,000 sailors Germany delayed the Anglo-American build-up by months, much precious war cargo was sunk even if it was only 1-2% of the total shipped and most important, huge Allied resources were diverted to anti-submarine warfare that otherwise might have gone to landing craft or armor production). Blair never asks, what alternative did a cornered Germany have to continuing the U-boat war? Blair slams German anti-aircraft tactics and the T-5 anti-destroyer torpedo, but the evidence indicates that both did achieve some success. Blair has an in-built anti-German bias that minimizes their success. There is very good detail on Enigma use here to win the Battle of the Atlantic and it is also amazing to see how many U-boats the Germans lost to non-combat causes (mostly collisions). German naval competence is called into question here but not their dedication or bravery. Blair never really tells us much about how the Kriegsmarine was able to continue building and manning U-boats right up to the end of the war or the effect of strategic bombing on German naval industry. Amazingly, he criticizes the Type XXI submarine as fatally flawed but never describes its development or production history. Maps barely adequate.

Clay Blair's two volume history of the U-Boat war in WWII is truly magisterial in scope, but it has suffered from the absence of a strong editor's hand in its preparation. Consequently it is too long and very hard to read.

As an example, the author's has chosen to include a mass of additional detail by way of footnotes, often as many as six per page. Much of the information in these footnotes should have been in the main text, and the approach taken makes for a very disjointed, and protracted reading experience.

The author also has a strange obsession with the ages of U-Boat captains. These are endlessly reported, whilst the ages of Allied personnel are almost never mentioned. I suspect this is because he had access to a single Kreigsmarine archive on U-Boat personnel, and included the age information solely because he could, and not because it adds to the prose in any way. Quite the reverse, and if he wanted to make a point about the relative youthfulness of U-Boat skippers he would've been better advised to do so by way of a couple of paragraphs, or another column in one of the multitude of statistical appendices.

These books are probably required reading for any student of the U-Boat war, but would benefit greatly from a savage revision, to improve readability and cut down on useless minutiae.

Clay Blair has alredady established himself as an authority on submarine warfare, and as a former American submariner he knows of that which he writes. His two volume work "Hitler's U-Boat War" is in many ways his best work to date and must certainly be considered as one (if not the) definitives works on German u-boat warfare. Divided into two volumes, Blair gives a complete picture of the development, crest and ultimate demise of the German attempt to fight a war, actually two wars, at sea with limited resources. Vol. I, "The Hunters" details the development and crest of these efforts when the Nazi U-boats became the infamous hunters of allied shipping, while Vol. II, "The Hunted, 1942-1944" relates the dramatic counter measures used by the British, the Canadians and the Americans to combat and ultimately defeat the u-boat. There are other fine works on this subject, but what sets Blair's efforts apart is the overwhelming abundance of data included in his two volumes, and his conclusions that are well supported by that data. He concludes that the overall effect of German submarine warfare has been overrated, and emphasizes that this point is easily seen in the data. He also makes a case that Hitler's use of u-boats was a cheap consession to a German navy that he had little use for. Accordingly, very limited resources were committed to submarines or the navy in general. Throughout these volumes are a number of sub-plots and stories including the grand tale of allied efforts to get hold of vital German code devices. This is an interesting saga that remains engaging even with all of Blair's attention to detail. In Vol. I we identify with the u-boat commanders and crews, and lament the allied casualties. In Vol. II, the tables are turned and one cannot help but sympathize with the crews of the u-boats as they suffered defeat and near annihilation, and glory in the final allied victory. Each volume is presented in a manner that makes them a complete work, but the full achievement here can only be appreciated by reading the two volumes in succession.

As someone who has studied The Second World War for 3 decades I found Blair's two volume set about as good as it gets in factual recording of the U Boat War. As with all good historians, he deals with the facts and literally hammers home his case with a barrage of appendices ,which by themselves would constitute a fair sized book. However his American origins show through in his dealings with the "Atlantic Pearl Harbour" and particularly, his over- zealous defence of Admiral Ernest J King's comotose reponse to the Paukenschlag operation. His arguement that King "had other, more important,things to do with his destroyers" when a merciless slaughter was taking place within sight of the American coast, sits uneasily in the un biased context of these volumes.

I would also disagree with his premise that the Allies HAD to sink U Boats to win the Battle of the Atlantic. The prime directive of the convoy commander was "The safe & timely arrival of the convoy" and as long as the Allies could guarantee that (and after 1943 they 99% could) then sinking U Boats was not necessary for victory. A bonus yes,but in a tonnage war, not absolutely vital to ultimate success. Overall, as good a treatment of the Atlantic campaign as Blair's "Silent Victory" was for the Pacific submarine war.

Clay Blair has completed his masterful account of the German submarine war in WWII. While it is extremely thorough, the level of detail can become cumbersome to the amateur historian. Mr. Blair outlines every mission undertaken by a German submarine during the entire war; a blessing for other researchers in naval history but a curse to the lay reader. The author does a commendable job outlining the major campaigns and summarizing the effects of the submarine war. While the first volume covers the early, successful years of the German effort, the second details how superior allied technology and tactics decimated the German submarine fleet and removed it as a factor in the war. This account rounds out his conclusion that the feared "wolf packs" and the submarine war in general never posed the serious threat that the Allies believed it did. Perhaps the most interesting portion of the book is the chapters devoted to describing the development of submarine/ASW technology and the encryption/decoding efforts of both sides. The author does an average job as far as the "characters" are concerned. For most people he simply describes their military careers and follows their progression through various commands and notes the awards they receive. Very few players get the background coverage that makes them come alive and seem like real people.

I highly recommend this book for any reader of history interested the German submarine war. However, the casual or amateur reader will do well to skim through the endless details.

Not quite silent victory... The second volume of Clair Blair's comprehensive work on U-Boats is very good, but slightly flawed. Due in part I suspect to the comparative lack of survivors and records, it lacks some of the small details that are present in his other works. Many U-Boats are reported with the discussion that So and So left on his cruise on ______ and was apparently sunk in the Bay of ______ on ______. While this is certainly all of the records that may exist for this patrol, it does result in parts of the book reading like a casualty list.

(In contrast, the patrols of many US Submarines in Silent Victory, even given secrecy problems in place at the time that that book was written, recieve far more detailed coverage...)

A must own book if you are interested in the subject... but be aware of the small weaknesses.

I have no doubt that this two volume set will remain as the definitive work that chronicles the U-Boat war. For the recreational reader (myself included) the comprehensiveness comes at a cost in readability. Generally, the author does two things extremely well. First, he amasses a huge amount of evidence for his view that the U-Boat campaign came nowhere near as close to choking off the supply of men, material and munitions to the UK as contemporary accounts gave credit for. Second, he sets events at sea against a background of the progress of the war in a manner that gives context to the struggle. What the author did less well was capture some of the tension or drama of the events that comes accross in some non-fiction or the best fictional account, Nicholas Montserrat's "The Cruel Sea." (Montserrat served in an escort vessel in the North Atlantic). Often, the text contains fairly tedious accounts of the patrols of a large number of U-Boats without coordinating them to show what happened in an entire engagement involving the same convoy. If you compare the account of the largest convoy engagement (Convoy ONS-5) in Blair's book with the one in Michael Gannon's "Black May," you will see the difference. Gannon often paraphrases log entries in a less than readable fashion, but his account captures something about the desparation of the struggle that Blair's account misses entirely. If you are a serious student of the U-Boat war, by all means read this. If you are a reader with a more casual interest, I would recommend one of the other books mentioned above. Of the two volumes, the second is by far the less readable.

Clay Blair's two-volume history "Hitler's U-Boat War: The Hunters, 1939-1942" and "Hitler's U-Boat War: The Hunted, 1942-1945" is probably the definitive history of the German U-Boat war during World War II. These books are an excellent resource on this campaign, but are extremely long and detailed--and at 700+ pages of tiny text (for each volume), much too long and detailed for anyone except hard-core readers interested in this campaign.

Blair's style is simple, straight-forward, and repetitive: the books recount nearly every single U-Boat patrol, every single U-Boat sinking, every single convoy attack, and every single U-Boat success. The chapters are organized logically with sections on patrols in the North Atlantic, patrols to the Americas, patrols to the Arctic, patrols to the Mediterranean, and patrols to far-flung theaters (the South Atlantic, Indian Ocean, and Asia). Blair also does a very good job placing the U-Boat battle into proper context of the larger naval war and overall war by giving brief synopses of the bigger picture of the fighting in Europe and, where appropriate, the U-Boat reactions to the campaigns.

Blair also gives detailed accounts of the "cipher war," describing in technical detail how the Ultra machines worked to decode Enigma transmissions and how the Germans were ignorant that their transmissions were being read by the Allies. He also fills each book with charts, appendices, and copious amounts of raw data detailing every U-Boat loss, monthly shipping losses, and many other illuminating aspects of the campaign.

Although primarily a narrative, Blair does include some analysis. Most interestingly, Blair argues that most historians of World War II greatly overstate the threat that the U-Boats posed and concludes that at no point during the war did the U-Boats come close to being the decisive weapon many claim. Blair also defends Admiral King's decisions and the overall U.S. effort early in the war against many who argue that the U.S. was caught flat-footed and unprepared and failed to take simple measures such as convoying or blacking out the East Coast, resulting in huge shipping losses off the East Coast in 1942.

Also, while writing two volumes that cover every almost every aspect of the U-Boat war, Blair does not do a very good job describing the tactics and capabilities of the U-Boats and the escorts. While describing the campaign at the operational level, he never gives the reader a good picture of the tactical capabilities of the U-Boats or their equipment and weapons, or of the men who crewed them on the almost-suicide missions.

Blair has written an incredibly detailed and well-researched account of the U-Boat war. These books would serve anyone interested in a detailed, blow-by-blow, patrol-by-patrol account of the U-Boat war, and they would serve well as a resource for someone studying this campaign. However, these books are too detailed for most readers.