Customer Reviews

Hitler's U-Boat War: Vol 2

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This second volume of this definitive work is also the second installment of the work that is the intellectual monument to Clay Blair.

People have accused Mr. Blair of lacking a human face, yet the sparse prose describing life and death battles between grim, determined men is eloquent in its terse and relentless depiction of the brutality, courage and fear of war. Anyone who has been down to sea in ships needs no more stimulating of the imagination that Mr. Blair provides to understand and wonder at the courage of the men in the U-Boats and men who defeated them.

The only failing in the book is a strangely discordant and increasingly strident reactionary and anti-British tone that creeps into his work. Since I do not know of the personal details of Mr. Blair's life it is only speculation, but I do feel I detect failing health in his later pages of this volume.

It is a pity that while Mr. Blair was so generous of his praise of Britain in Volume 1 he suddenly loses empathy with his British allies and fails to understand the British psyche and the multitudinous problems faced by the war-weary British as they struggled with lack of resources, over worked ships and under trained crews and all the time against a backdrop of fading strength and dying empire. This failure, most manifest in the latter half of volume two, is jarring. At the same time as his anti-British sentiments become more and more unreasonable, so does his extreme support of a pro-US Navy establishment view on the actions of Admiral King in 1942 and 1943.

But this two-volume work is the stuff that us mere consumers of naval history can only gawp at admiration. The reader has a brain and is capable of agreeing or disagreeing with the tone of a volume and to adjudge if the author has or has not been unduly harsh. The breadth of knowledge, the grasp of Naval warfare, the obvious majesty of these two volumes means you just have to unreservedly recommend them as the best general history on the subject available.