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(More customer reviews)Operation Drumbeat is far, far from a dry history text. Though skilled writers can most the seemingly most arcane and esoteric aspects of history interesting, Gannon has written a riveting account of the first U-boat attacks along the US coast in World War II. Reading ever bit like a great Tom Clancy novel (or something similiar), Gannon puts you in the action as if you were on a U-boat, or the merchant ships that were hunted, or in Bletchley Park trying to figure out U-boat actions and intentions and warn the slumbering American merchant ships and port cities.
Much of the work focuses on the actions of a representative U-boat from this operation, U-123 commanded by Captain Reinhard Hardegen. You follow him, his officers, and crew from their U-boat pens in occupied France as they sortie out into the stormy North Atlantic and engage in operations up and down the American coast, attacking merchant ships that were not prepared for a sudden Nazi assault, backlight by cities that were not apparently aware that a war was going on. Often in full view of major cities and beachgoers on vaction, Hardegen and other U-boat commanders sunk merchant craft in a period of extraordinary success for the German Navy.
Gannon also chronciles the efforts to find and track the U-boats, both in war-weary and desperate British circles and in somewhat naive and arrogant American circles. Gannon paints an interesting contrast between the highly effective and dedicated British Naval Intelligence, working around the clock to amass as much information on each U-boat, right down to personal details on the commanders, and their American counterparts under Admiral King, who were unprepared and were slow to see the need to take countermeasures against the sudden attacks, at some points unsure of what to do, and slow to implement them. Gannon describes King as a man unconcerned and ill-prepared to deal with the Battle of the Atlantic. For all his heroics in the Pacific, King, accoring to Gannon, costs lives and equipment again and again in the war versus Hitler's submarines through inaction and poor action.
A great book, highly recommended.
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