Hunt and Kill: U-505 and the U-boat War in the Atlantic (review)

Contrary to the assertion in the introduction to this edited volume, the essays are uneven. This characteristic and a general weakness of editorship distract from the persuasiveness of the volume as a whole. Yet some essays have considerable strength.

Eric Rust's careful contribution on the genesis, concept, and operations of Type IX U-boats, including the U-505, is a case in point. His work has all the earmarks of good historical scholarship. Lucidly written and thoroughly researched, this early chapter sets high scholarly standards for those to follow.

Timothy Mulligan easily meets these high standards in "A Community Bound by Fate: The Crew of U-505." His masterful essay focuses on the sailors who sailed in U-505, for example on their personalities, morale, and living conditions during long combat patrols. This reviewer, a veteran of U.S. Navy diesel-electric submarines, can attest to Mulligan's unusual sensitivity to and understanding of the perils of the submariner before the world's first nuclear-powered warship, the attack submarine USS Nautilus (SSN-571), was completed in April 1955. Closely related to Mulligan's essay is Lawrence Paterson's work on U-505's combat patrols before the boat's final journey. The essay is a straightforward narrative from the boat's launching in May 1941 to March 1944.

Mark Wise and Jak Mallmann write about the role of intelligence in the capture of U-505. Based on a good balance of secondary literature and archival resources, the authors convincingly demonstrate that intelligence was pivotal in the capture, yet some analytical dimensions of their essay are not very far-reaching.

Somewhat shorter essays follow. Notable are Paterson on the U.S. Navy's hunt for U-505 and Jordan Vause on "The German Loss of U-505." These pieces contribute small but significant parts of the overall U-505 story, especially the Vause essay with its rich analysis.

The final essay, probably the least known part of the U-505 story, is written by Keith Gill, who has worked in the U-505 restoration project at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago since 1988. While informative, Gill's essay lacks significant analytical content, and numerous endnotes are too long and contain much needless information. A considerable amount of redundancy also exists in this essay; indeed redundancy exists throughout this volume. This is a problem the editor should have resolved before publication. Moreover, specific sources for the volume's numerous pictures are not cited. In general, the considerable scholarly worth of some individual essays far exceeds that achieved by the volume as a whole.