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

During the early years of World War II, the German navy's U-boat wolf packs traversed the Atlantic almost unchallenged. They were feared hunters of the deep, although, Clay Blair writes, they were never as effective as some historians have maintained. At the midpoint of the long Battle of the Atlantic, those wolf packs became the hunted, as the Allies developed antisubmarine technologies (including radar, sonar, and long-distance surveillance aircraft) and diligently sought to rid the ocean of the "U-boat peril." Armed with inferior technology but led by brilliant strategists, the Germans fought back ferociously, even as many sailors resisted Adolf Hitler's hated Laconia Order that Allied merchant seamen be gunned down in their lifeboats, in violation of international law.

Blair, who served as a submariner in World War II, knows firsthand the dangers of underwater warfare. "The U-boat war," he writes, "was not a close-run thing, but rather one more suicidal enterprise foisted on the Germans by Adolf Hitler." Blair documents the slow decline of Germany's U-boat forces--the result of a 75 percent rate of battlefield losses, shortages of supplies and equipment, and Hitler's periodic purges of politically suspect commanders--in this volume, which continues his Hitler's U-Boat War: The Hunters, 1939-1942. The two books, which add up to nearly 2,000 pages, are essential reading for anyone with an interest in modern naval history. --Gregory McNamee