Hitler's Grey Wolves: U-boats in the Indian Ocean (review)

U-boat operations in the Indian Ocean during the Second World War deserve far more published attention than the subject has received to date, and that reason alone makes Hitler's Grey Wolves a worthwhile addition to the literature, but one must note that it is not a scholarly work. It is, however, a well-written, straightforward narrative with numerous original photographs.

With the backdrop of the German war in Europe and the Japanese war in the Pacific, the Axis submarine navies, including limited Italian participation, met in the Indian Ocean in an effort to bring additional destruction to western Allied forces. Problems were often overwhelming, especially after 1943. Author Lawrence Paterson sometimes tracks the transient east-west German and Japanese submarines and admirably describes, for instance, the cramped quarters inside the submarines and how the boats rendezvoused in isolated parts of the Indian Ocean to exchange goods, information, and personnel between the two navies. The author correctly points out how Ultra, the cover name for Anglo-American solutions of Axis coded and enciphered messages, helped to bridge the vastness of the Indian Ocean and in time pinpointed individual enemy submarine movements.

Although six pages of appendixes are helpful, documentation is generally thin for a volume dealing with such complexities. The bibliography is a mere three pages, and it fails to include several standard publications. Notes at the end of each chapter are fairly sparse and in cases where items of some significance are noted, such as information about later rank or awards achieved by a sailor, often no source is given.

In spite of a general lack of analytical content, the author clearly shows an awareness of some of the complexities of German-Japanese relations as wartime allies, but provocative matters are not pursued with vigor. For example, he merely concludes that "the experience of German submariners in the East rather reflects the inevitable result of two alien cultures thrust together unexpectedly, neither fully comprehending the attitudes and beliefs of the other. This is an attitude still prevalent in most societies 60 years after the end of the Second World War" (p. 141).

Paterson identifies other complex conditions, such as differences between Japanese and German concepts of submarine warfare and the conflict between the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy and the resulting ripple effect in German-Japanese naval relations in East Asian spheres. These are samples of subjects that had direct bearing on U-boat operations in the Indian Ocean—in a full-blown scholarly study they would have been thoroughly delineated.

It is perhaps telling that the author of this multicultural work demonstrates such limited knowledge of things Japanese, including the language. In his "Table of Ranks" (pp. 17–18) in German, Japanese, and English, errors abound in the Japanese terms as they do also in the rendering of Japanese proper names into English throughout this volume. The general reading public and the university community alike deserve a complete accounting, not only a lucidly written account that flirts with scholarship.