Hitler's U-Boat War: The Hunted, 1942-1945 (Modern Library War)

Rating:
Summary: Lies, calumnies and more
Review: A massively researched book, packed full of details yet drawing all the wrong conclusions. If the Kriegsmarine was a bumbling bunch of cheats who vastly overclaimed their meagre successes, you would have thought that the war at sea will be over in 1941.

Rating:
Summary: Hitlers U Boat War
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Much worse than the first volume due to fixation with sinkings
Review: Authors fetish about describing each and every U-boat sinking in the second half of the war dooms this half of the two part series to a near waste of typeface. If you devide the number of U boats sunk by the number of interesting new ways to sink them the problem is obvious. Till 1942 few U-boat sinkings lots of interesting ideas. After 1942 500 sinkings from about three new ideas.

A much smaller work would have covered the really important points of both books. Where was the editor.

Rating:
Summary: Superb research, but often laborious reading.
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: The Definitive Work on U-Boat Warfare
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: great war document on the uboats
Review: Having read dozens of world war era books, I would rate this an
easy 5 star and a tribute to the author who has written honest
unbiased detailed books on the submarine wars. For anyone who
picks up these volumes the dedication is obvious. I would also recommend
his book on the pacific submarine war and the earlier book the hunters.

Rating:
Summary: Mr. Blair was a bitter man
Review: I would only recommend the 2 volumes of "Hitler's U-boat War" to those interested in knowing about numbers and statistics of the naval military operations in the the Atlantic.(U-boats commissioned throughout the war -with precise dates-,
U-boats sunk or lost without a trace, U-boat torpedoes and weaponry, names of each U-boat skipper, tonnage sunk, allied shipyard construction programs, convoys, etc.)

Now if we cast aside the statistical scope of these 2 volumes, something must be said:
When a work is so heavily tainted with bias (it seems like Mr. Blair was a German hater) the final product of the author lacks the necessary objectiveness to render an accurate assessment of what happened in the Atlantic theather in World War II.

Mr. Blair goes way overboard when he refers to the German skippers "as civilian volunteers...manning cheap mass produced submarines". (Maybe Mr. Blair was a "natural born submarine crewmen" who had no necessity to volunteer for the navy.)

Well, not bad for a bunch of "civilian volunteers" manning such "inferior" submarines.

More than 5,000 merchant vessels sank, destroyed or crippled beyond repair. A few hundreds of warships (including 2 battleships, 3 aircraft carriers, several cruisers, and surely hundreds of escort warships including destroyers, frigates, corvettes, ASW trawlers, minesweepers, etc.) and a few hundreds of allied aircraft shot down.

Never before i had the opportunity of reading a book where thousands of "(insert word)"'s are used.

Mr. Blair's "assessments" and arguments are weak "in extremis" in most cases. He says only half the truth on many things.

Mr. Blair surely was a devoted researcher (in order to create such a cumbersome work), but that did not make him an accurate historian, since most of his arguments seem devoted to ridiculize the German naval officers and seamen. (For example, there is an episode of some U-boat which was depth charged by an allied war vessel, the U-boat skipper ordered the crew to abandon and scuttle; the submarine popped up to the surface and the Germans began to abandon their ship, while the allied ship was still conducting the attack firing her guns..then Mr. Blair says how the allied seamen on the victorious vessel "heard the Germans shouting, "begging" and "crying" to be saved"...I would have asked Mr. "Mtyh Destroyer" Blair: Is it possible to hear the shouting or screaming of men from the sea surface while the warship is still firing her guns at the crippled U-boat (not to forget the engine noise of the allied warship conducting the attack)? Were the German survivors "crying" in german or english? Did every allied war vessel had bilingual personnel on board?

Maybe the author believed allied seamen adrift in the ocean once
their ship -whether merchant or military- had been sunk, would "boldly", "bravely" and "gallantly" face death at sea.

I ignore the age of the author while he was serving on U.S.S. Guardfish in the pacific theather, but maybe he was somewhat bitter to know the very young seamen (such as Otto Ites) were INDEED bravely hunting and killing allied shipping in the Atltantic Ocean.

However, Mr. Blair's "myht destroying" entreprise can be of service for those WWII lovers.

Rating:
Summary: GREAT COMPREHENSIVE HISTORY, HARD ON THE READER
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Definitive Work On The U-Boats
Review: It's hard to imagine how anyone could surpass this volume, and its 1939-41 companion. Blair knows his subject firsthand as a submariner, and has brought a huge amount of data to play in his account. It's the definitive work on U-boats, and the various campaigns waged with them.

Blair's contention is that the U-boats never stood much of a chance to win the war, even in the darkest days of the Atlantic convoys, and were greatly assisted by inept A/S efforts by the Allies. Technologically outmoded, and not updated quickly enough, the German U-boats weren't produced in sufficient volume to ever achieve 'critical mass.' And money and efforts spent on pointless Kriegsmarine surface ships -- think of the Bismark and Tirpitz -- detracted from what good the U-boats did the German cause. The sophisticated types produced in 1944 and 1945 were too late, and too few in number, to make any difference.

To his credit, Blair tells of much more than the Atlantic war, and anyone who wondered about the Mediterranean theater, the Norwegian Sea, and Far Eastern 'runs' will find it all here, in great detail.

If anything, I wish he'd made the books longer! Quite often you get only a vignette about rather interesting developments or incidents. But, we should be grateful for what we have. His book on US subs in the Pacific --written before these -- is also quite remarkable.

Rating:
Summary: Hitlers U Boat War
Review: This book is an absolute must for anyone with a serious interest in the Battle of the Atlantic of the Second World War. Clay Blair, a former submariner in the US Navy, has spent many years both researching and collating information from the belligerents with a unique and fascinating conclusion - that at no time during the Second World War was Britain at serious risk from starvation or defeat - contrary to established beliefs. This book, along with its predecessor 'Hitlers U-Boat War: The Hunters 1939-42', is completely invaluable for both scholars and naval historians. I have referred to it continuously for purposes of my own research.