Phantom fleet The hunt for Nazi submarine U-505 and World War II's most daring heist

In this rousing account, historian Rose (The Lion and the Fox) recaps the Battle of the Atlantic with a focus on the USS Guadalcanal's June 1944 capture of German submarine U-505. The American boarding party recovered a German Enigma machine that helped the Allies decipher coded German messages faster. Their triumph makes a riveting frame for Rose's chronicle of the yearslong struggle between the predatory German submarines and the Allied "hunter-killers" stalking them. The stealthy U-boats ran amok early in the war, but steady improvements in code breaking, radar, and sonar gave the Allies the tools to track the subs; better depth charges, artillery, and acoustic homing torpedoes, and a rising number of Allied warplanes, gave the Allies the tools to destroy them. Rose's narrative foregrounds the battle of wits between German Adm. Karl Dönitz and his opponents, British Cmdr. Rodger Winn and American Cmdr. Kenneth Knowles, as each side tried to divine where enemy ships would go next. (Winn's unit compiled extensive dossiers on U-boat crews, including their preferred rum and favorite prostitutes.) Rose also spotlights the extreme psychological pressure faced by submariners--one U-505 commander shot himself during a depth-charge attack--which he renders with evocative prose (the U-505 crew "would hear the creepy tick-tick of fingernails being run over a comb" when American sonar was tracking them). Readers will relish Rose's blend of fascinating naval lore and nerve-wracking drama. (May)

On June 4, 1944, American sailors captured Nazi submarine U-505 and its invaluable Enigma coding machine and code books. Successful small-unit World War II operations were much less common than portrayed by Hollywood, but this was one, writes journalist and bestselling historian Rose, author ofEmpires of the Sky: Zeppelins, Airplanes, and Two Men's Epic Duel To Rule the World. Taking advantage of massive archives and memoirs and with an admirable absence of purple prose, he tells a gripping story. Saving the fireworks for the final 60 pages, Rose delivers an expert account of the U.S. Navy's anti-submarine campaign. During the months after Pearl Harbor, U-boats sank hundreds of ships off the U.S. coast until the Navy got its act together to organize convoys and protection. Rose builds his story around three men, Commander Kenneth Knowles, the brilliant head of the intelligence division of the Tenth Fleet, which possessed no ships. Formed in May 1943, its function was to locate U-boats and pass the information to anti-submarine forces. Mentored by his equally brilliant British counterpart, Rodger Winn, he analyzed data pouring in from a high-tech intelligence-gathering operation that included the famous Enigma code breakers. Leading the attack was Capt. Daniel Gallery, the commander of the escorts who had long yearned to capture a submarine and had trained his men on how to do it. Leading up to that day, the author mines his sources to deliver detailed biographies of his main characters and the painfully bumpy three-year campaign to track down U-505 and its crew. Its capture was a major, if not world-shaking, achievement. British seamen had seized Enigmas from U-boats in 1941 and 1942, when it really mattered. By 1944 the U-boat threat was minimal, but access to the latest secrets made allied code-breakers' job easier. World War II submarine derring-do, a well-worn subject but worth a reader's time. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.