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This is a rather different story to that of the familiar battle of the Atlantic, with its large convoy battles and wolf packs. That battle was largely fought by the British and Canadians, while the US Navy concentrated on the South Atlantic, US East Coast and the routes to the Mediterranean. The wolf packs are replaced with lone U-boats, and the convoy escorts mainly with hunter killer groups, built around an escort carrier.
As with all of these books, I find the order of chapters a little odd. We start with a look at the design and development of the warships and their weapons, looking at the US pre-war and wartime destroyers and the destroyer escorts that largely replaced them in the Atlantic in 1944-45, then the U-boats and their torpedoes. We then switch to the strategic situation, with a look at the development of the battle of the Atlantic, the German aims and the American plans to counter them. We then switch back to the warships, with a look at their technical specifications. This is followed by a look at the sailors of the US Navy and the German submarine service. These are all good chapters, with plenty of interesting information, but it would have flowed better if the Strategic Situation section had come after the section on the sailors, rather than in the middle of the technical chapters.
These chapters fill the first half of the book. We then move on to a look at four examples of combat between US destroyers and destroyer escorts and the U-boats. We get one each from 1941, 1942, 1944 and 1945, two involving destroyers and two involving destroyer escorts. We start with the Kearny incident, the first time a U-boat torpedoed a US Destroyer, coming before the US entry into the war. Next comes the clash between USS Roper and U-85, an example of a clash between a lone destroyer and a U-boat operating off the US East Coast.
By 1944 the US Navy has moved to using destroyer escorts in the Atlantic, but has also greatly improved its anti-submarine warfare, with better weapons, sensors and tactics. The clash between USS Eugene E. Elmore (DE-686) and U-549 demonstrates this. Although the U-boat was able to fatally damage the escort carrier Block Island (CVE-21) and the went deep, the Eugene E. Elmore was able to use its new sonar and Hedgehog anti-submarine sensors to sink her remarkably easily. This attack demonstrated the integration between sonar and the hedgehog, which greatly improved its success rate. We finish with the clash between USS Farquhar (DE-139) and U-881, which came after the U-boats had been ordered to cease hostilities, an order the U-boat ignored.
This is an excellent examination of this aspect of the battle of the Atlantic, in particular because of the examination of how US tactics and weaponry improved during the years the US Navy was involved in the battle of the Atlantic.
Chapters
Chronology
Design and Development
The Strategic Situation
Technical Specifications
The Combatants
Combat
Analysis
Aftermath
Further Reading
Author: Mark Lardas
Edition: Paperback
Pages: 80
Publisher: Osprey
Year: 2023