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Blair, Clay. Hitler's U boat War: The Hunters, 1939-1942. New York: Random House, 1996. 809pp. $40
Blair, Clay. Hitler's U boat War: The Hunted, 1942-1945. New York: Random House, 1998. 909pp. $45
The late Clay Blair, author of more than a dozen books, including Silent Victory: The U.S. Submarine Campaign against Japan (1975), has produced an encyclopedic, two-volume history of the German submarine campaign during World War II. The first volume covers the "happy time" from August 1939 to August 1942; the second covers the denouement of the "gray sharks" from the fall and winter of 1942 down to the bitter end in 1945. Indeed, not since the German scholar Jurgen Rohwer produced his magisterial trilogy (Chronology of the War at Sea [1974], The Critical Convoy Battles of March 1943 [1977], and Axis Submarine Successes, 19391945 [1983]) has any historian labored so long and so hard on this subject. Blair's opus will be the yardstick by which all future accounts of the German U-boats in particular, and of the Battle of the Atlantic in general, will be measured.
The sheer bulk of the work is daunting. There are almost two thousand pages augmented by fourteen maps and thirty-eight appendices (each with its own set of notes). Blair details the sorties of more than a thousand U-boats as well as the Allied convoys against which they sailed, the Allied ships they sunk or were destroyed by, and the ever-increasing interaction between the U-boats and Allied aircraft. The wartime activities of Karl...