Convoy; The Greatest U-Boat Battle of the War

London: Cassell, 2003. Cassell Military Paperback Edition [stated]. Presumed first printing thus. Trade paperback. Very good. The format is approximately 5 inches by 7.875 inches. x, 378, [12] pages. Footnotes. Illustrations. Maps. Tabular data. Appendix 1-6. Bibliography. Index. Decorative front cover. Martin Middlebrook FRHistS (24 January 1932 - 19 January 2024) was an English military historian and author. Middlebrook was educated at various schools, including Ratcliffe College, Leicester. He entered National Service in 1950, was commissioned in the Royal Army Service Corps (RASC), and served as a Motor Transport Officer in the Suez Canal Zone and Aqaba, Jordan. Middlebrook subsequently spent three years in Territorial Army service. Middlebrook wrote his first book The First Day on the Somme (1971) following a visit to the First World War battlefields of France and Belgium in 1967. The book is a detailed study of the single worst day for the British Army. Middlebrook gave the same single-day treatment to 21 March 1918, the opening of the German spring offensive, in The Kaiser's Battle. Middlebrook's Second World War books concentrate on the air war. A number of them again deal with a single day of action (The Nuremberg Raid, The Schweinfurt-Regensburg Mission and The Peenemünde Raid) while others cover longer air battles (The Battle of Hamburg and The Berlin Raids). Middlebrook also wrote two books on the Falklands War, one from the British and Falkland Islanders' perspective and one from the Argentinian perspective. Martin Middlebrook has written some of the greatest classics in military history, covering major turning points in the two World Wars. Here, using extensive primary research, he follows the Battle of the Atlantic from the perspective of two convoys eastbound from the U.S. in 1942. A detailed blow-by-blow record of the perilous crossing captures the danger as the vital convoys face U-Boat wolf packs. On-board accounts reveal what it was like as torpedoes hit, boats sank, men were rescued, and submarines went on the hunt. Winston Churchill wrote, "The only thing that ever really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril." Had the convoy link between North America and Britain been broken, the course of World War II would have been different. In March 1943, the Germans were coming close to doing just that - sinking ninety-seven Allied merchant ships in twenty days, twice the rate of replacement, while losing seven U-boats and putting fourteen more into service. At this time, two convoys sailed from New York harbor for England. Admiral Dönitz deployed forty-two U-boats to trap them. Convoy is a powerful narrative of the ensuing engagement, which became a major turning point in the Battle of the Atlantic. It documents every maneuver of the more than eighty merchant ships and escort vessels, the long-range air cover, and the attacking U-boats. In recounting how the crews of the ships and U-boats were recruited, worked, fought, and died, Convoy tells the story of the hundreds of convoys that sailed the ocean during the war. It also throws new light on three controversies : why there was an "air gap" long after full air cover could have been provided, why convoys had to sail with dangerously weak naval escorts, and how the Allies outwitted the Germans in the radio decoding war. This dramatic and authoritative book provides a valuable contribution to the naval history of World War II.