Hist U.S. Naval Ops Vol 10 Pb: 010 (History of United States Naval Operations in World War II) Book

Allied shipping was in a desperate situation in 1942, as the Germans were building U-boats faster than the British and the Americans could sink them. By summer of 1943, however, the tide had turned, and Germany had lost the strategic initiative in the Atlantic. This is the story of the great offensive that allowed the Western Allies to gain the upper hand in the Atlantic war. In Volume 10 of his expansive history, Samuel Eliot Morison focuses on the war on enemy submarines--a war fought up and down the Atlantic coast from Nova Scotia to Brazil. Morison describes the development of new weapons on both sides that revolutionized the art of antisubmarine warfare: acoustic torpedoes, guided missiles, the hedgehog, the snorkel, the airborne microwave radar, the sonobuoy, and the "huff-duff" or high-frequency direction-finder. With thrilling immediacy, he chronicles air attacks on U-boats in the Bay of Biscay, hunter-killer groups that protected escort carriers by hunting down wolf-packs of German submarines, skirmishes conducted by radar under cover of darkness and heavy fog, and the dramatic sinking of the Scharnhorst in the North Atlantic. Bristling with action as well as fascinating technical detail, Morison's account of this "war of groping and drowning, of ambuscade and stratagem, of science and seamanship" brilliantly conveys the interplay of suspense and surprise as first one side, then the other gained the advantage.Read More