num_pages: 864
description: "His monumental work...is the most thorough study of the U-boat campaign available."    -- Library JournalHitler's U-boat War is an epic sea story about the most arduous and prolonged naval battle in history. For a period of nearly six years, the German U-boat force attempted to blockade and isolate the British Isles in hopes of forcing the British out of the war, thereby thwarting both the Allied strategic air assault on German cities and Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of Occupied France. Fortunately for the Allies, the U-boat force failed to achieve either of these objectives, but in the attempt they sank 2,800 Allied merchant ships, while the Allies sank nearly 800 U-boats. On both sides, tens of thousands of sailors perished.    For decades, an authoritative and definitive history of the Battle of the Atlantic could not be attempted, since London and Washington agreed to withhold all official code-breaking and U-boat records in order to safeguard the secrets of code breaking in the postwar years. The accounts that did appear were incomplete and full of false conclusions and errors of fact, often leaving the entirely wrong impression that the German U-boats came within a whisker of defeating the Allies, a myth that is finally laid to rest in this account.    Clay Blair, acclaimed author of the bestselling naval classic Silent The U.S. Submarine War Against Japan, has drawn from the official records as well as the work of German, British, American, and Canadian naval scholars. Never before has Hitler's U-boat war been chronicled with such authority, fidelity, objectivity, and detail. The result is this magnificent and monumental work, crammed with vivid and dramatic scenes of naval actions and dispassionate but startling new revelations, interpretations, and conclusions about all aspects of the Battle of the Atlantic.  
language: English
title: Hitler's U-Boat War: The Hunters, 1939-1942
titlecomplete: Hitler's U-Boat War: The Hunters, 1939-1942 (Modern Library War)
characters: Ernest King, Dudley Pound, Erich Topp, Heinrich Bleichrodt, Joachim Schepke, Günther Prien, Herbert Sohler, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Adolphus Andrews, Rolf Mützelburg, Viktor Schütze, Fritz-Julius Lemp, Engelbert Endrass, Karl Dönitz, Rodger Winn, Robert-Richard Zapp, Günther Hessler, Werner Hartmann, Reinhard Suhren, Adolf Hitler, Erwin Rommel, Reinhard Hardegen, Wilhelm Rollmann, Erich Raeder, Winston Churchill, Otto Kretschmer, Heinrich Lehmann-Willenbrock, Adalbert Schnee, Wolfgang Lüth, Heinrich Liebe
genres: British Literature, History, World War II, Maritime, War, Germany, Military History, Naval History, Nonfiction, Military Fiction
ratings_count: 466
publisher: Modern Library