Seaforth Publishing, Pen & Sword Books, Ltd

Dönitz's Last Gamble, The Inshore U-Boat Campaign 1944-45

by  Lawrence Paterson

Reviewed By  John Ratzenberger, IPMS# 40196

MSRP: £20 ($32.95) ISBN: 978-1-84415-714-3 Web site: www.seaforthpublishing.com or www.pen-and-sword.co.uk Hard bound, 7"x10" format, 208 glossy pages, many b/w photos throughout. One of my favorite study topics is the Battle of the Atlantic -- but I'm a fan of Flower Class Corvettes, not U-Boats. On the other hand, one of my favorite time-wasters is Ubisoft's computer game Silent Hunter III where I play a U-Boat commander -- if they had an equivalent game from the escort perspective, I'd be a lot happier. The Battle of the Atlantic lost in 1943, the continent invaded in 1944, their industry and towns shattered by 'round the clock bombing, the Germans still fought on -- their leaders deluded by visions of wonder weapons that would somehow save the Reich. This book tells of one such campaign, and a little known one at that (at least to me, having quit reading Clay Blair's 2-volume Hitler's U-Boat War well before it reached late 1944 and 1945). The "wonder weapons" were the Type XXI and XXIII U-Boats. The enabling weapons were the older boats based in Germany and Norway, commonly the Type VII, with snorkels. The strategy was an in-shore campaign in the North Sea, the English Channel, and along the coast of the UK designed to slow up the Allied advances by choking off re-supply thereby buying time for the wonder weapons to be deployed. Three things favored the Germans initially. The campaign was a surprise to the Allies, the snorkel, undetectable by radar virtually negated the Allied air threat, and the sea bed and "junk" in shallow waters enabled the boats to hide from sea-borne searches. Germany held the advantage for a while, then Allied numeric and technical superiority simply overwhelmed their efforts. While technologically advanced -- mostly high underwater speed which drastically impacted Allied anti-submarine weapons and tactics -- the boats were too little too late and even if they had come earlier still would not, in the end, have overcome the Allied advantages. The XXIII carried 2 torpedoes, several less than carried by the Type II they started the war with! If I read this right, only one Type XXI got into action and only a few XXIIIs. The Germans were simply unable to properly design and build any of these boats, much less many of them, in the face of the Allied air offensive and so the overall effort and campaign were doomed -- hope is not a course of action. The book is outstanding -- clearly written, properly edited, and very well illustrated with numerous U-Boat and crew photos. The author covers, mostly from the German perspective, the war situation in 1944, the decisions and reasons therefore, the effort to design and build the boats, the Allied reactions to the campaign, and as expected a U-Boat by U-Boat combat log of the campaign. The text flows cleanly, is always informative, and never ponderous -- even while mixing the technical, the tactical, and the operational. I did find one error -- on page 36, " ... U248, U398, and U484 failed to reach their destination ... the latter two boats being sunk ...". In fact, only U484 was sunk. It's not that I intuitively knew that, but the next sentence details the relief of the commander of U398 for lack of aggressiveness, so it just stood out and I checked further. That's the only error of any sort I saw in the book. I didn't go cross-checking facts with other sources although I did do some spot-checking of the text against the tables of missions and losses in Appendix A and found no other discrepancies. What really makes the book interesting is that the Type XXI and XXIII defined submarine warfare of the future -- their influence on US and Russian boats of the Cold War and beyond is obvious. And the inshore campaign, forgotten for decades as the US and Russia "fought it out" in blue waters, is back as a threat today. The US Navy is resurrecting the "brown water" component (AKA littoral combat) and one of the concerns is defense against small diesel subs operating close inshore. Those who fail to learn from history .... There probably isn't much here for the modeler, but I recommend it highly to anyone interested in submarine warfare of WW2, and for anyone interested in understanding how that effected naval warfare into the 21st Century. Seaforth Publishing is an imprint of Pen & Sword Book, Ltd, which in my experience means very high quality history -- it doesn't get much better than this. I'd like to thank Casemate Publishing for providing the review sample and to IPMS/USA for allowing me to review it. Oh, yes, almost forgot -- what's all this have to do with Silent Hunter III ? Well, not that I assume computer games are realistic, but I now see why I keep getting sunk in shallow waters -- no realistic seabed or clutter for my sub to hide in!

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