Friday, June 21, 2002
I know this isn't the book listed in the column to the right, but Embracing Defeat has turned out to be something of a slog. It is fascinating -- it is all about how Japanese society changed after its defeat by the Americans in 1945. Bu I remember being well over 200 pages into it, reading something about short-lived Japanese periodical publications, then looking at the bulk of the book and realizing that I wasn't yet half-way through it. I'll come back to it, but I needed to look at something else...
The "something else" was this book, picked up for a few dollars at one of those remaindered book sales they often have at Union Station. I must be on a war kick at the moment, looking at some of the recent titles I've picked up, but I've always meant to get some further reading into the naval aspect of WWII ever since hearing my Uncle John's stories about serving aboard the HMS Narcissus.
In Great Waters is a survey of the Battle for the Atlantic, essentially convoys and corvettes against U-boats. The author is Canadian, so the book includes quite a bit more information about the Royal Canadian Navy as well as its airborne coastal defenses than you are likely to find in other such books. There may be a reason for this however -- Canada was pretty much always the last to get good equipment (after this Brits and Americans) and often lost out catching U-boats due to poor communications (the travesty of U-boats sailing the St. Lawrence seaway with virtual impunity helps underline this point).
The book covers the conflict from beginning to end – it even covers Donitz' drive to build up the German sub force prior to the war, and other naval decisions made prior to the war that had far-reaching consequences. Perhaps the most interesting part of this book was that it covered the conflict from both sides: both the Allied and Axis sides are well-represented. Being a survey-type of book, the author has the advantage of drawing upon the latest-available historical sources. As a result I learned a number of things that were never mentioned or glossed over in earlier histories, including:
- the assertion that the Altmark incident helped persuade Hitler that the invasion of Norway and Denmark was necessary to ensure safe passage of vital iron ore supplies from Sweden
- I hadn't realized that Allied forces took control and occupied Iceland, leading directly to its independence later during the war
- much is often made about the breaking of the German Enigma code (of which my Aunt Wylda played a small part, as she worked at Bletchley Park, passing along the raw code signals to the code-breakers), but little is ever said of the fact that the British Royal Naval codes were also broken, often leading to significant U-boat successes
- despite the importance placed on ensuring the safety of conveys, bureaucratic squabbling between the Allied forces -- as much as a lack of good equipment -- led to crushing delays that led to ship sinkings that could have been prevented
- the importance of air cover in ensuring Allied success in the Battle of the Atlantic (planes scored far more U-boat sinkings than the corvettes or other ship-based sub-hunters did)
I’m a history dweeb, so I found all of this sort of stuff fascinating. ;-)
Like I mentioned earlier, this book is more a survey of major events that occurred during the Battle for the Atlantic, but it is occasionally punctuated with specific personal events recalled later by veterans (or in many U-boat cases, by comments made in the log books of commanders prior to their final, fatal -- and necessarily unrecorded -- mission). The book not only covers the U-boat vs Convoy battle, but also looks at the role the various battleships played during the battle, neatly outlining why they became largely irrelevant as time wore on, succeeded by convoy aircraft carriers (another trivia tidbit I hadn’t known about before).
A few chapters are devoted to a particularly ruinous convoy, and the circumstances that led up to it. I couldn’t help but think about The Cruel Sea while reading it -- there are incidents that seem to have been dropped directly into that book.
As for In Great Waters, I found it a good read -- well paced, certainly engrossing at times, and covers the political and military history well. I found myself wanting something a bit "meatier" though -- I could have easily swallowed another couple of hundred pages on the topic. After the chapters on the convoy-that-went-wrong, I think the author began to run out of steam for the book concludes almost abruptly after that section. The appendix that outlines in chronological order the numbers of ships and U-boats sunk during the war only seemed to emphasize that point. Still, it was a fascinating read, and I’d recommend it for anyone interested in that part of WWII.
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