Books: Ships Going Down

THE BATTLE OF THE ATLANTIC, 1939-1943 (432 pp.)—Samuel Eliot Morison—Little, Brown ($6).

When Harvard Historian Samuel Eliot Morison offered to write the history of the U.S. Navy in World War II, Harvard-man Franklin D. Roosevelt enthusiastically gave him a free hand. Professor Morison was commissioned a lieutenant commander in 1942 and found every Navy office ashore and every hatch afloat open to him. He spyglassed the war from eleven different ships of his own choice. The Battle of the Atlantic, the story of convoys from September 1939 to May 1943, has been checked against German sources, appears now as Volume I of the gigantic job Morison hopes to finish in 1950.*

It documents what was plain even to armchair admirals at the start of the war: that neither Britain nor the U.S. was ready for the U-boats. Readers will feel their hackles rise as Morison shows how close Nazi Admiral Doenitz came to wiping out the supply line from the U.S. to Britain. In the first 6½ months after Pearl Harbor, the U.S. Navy sank just eight subs (the Germans were building that many every ten days); the subs sank 360 merchant ships.

The Blame. Morison makes no bones about fixing the blame: “. . . the United States Navy was woefully unprepared, materially and mentally, for the U-boat blitz on the Atlantic Coast . . . this unpreparedness was largely the Navy’s own fault.” While ships were going to the bottom, the Army & Navy wrangled for 18 months over control of antisub aircraft, never reached a solution. The reason? Says Morison bluntly: “Conflicting personalities and service ambitions.” Meanwhile four Navy destroyer schools were teaching four different methods of coping with U-boats and “the Navy Department laid such stress on the security of communications that they sometimes failed of their essential purpose to communicate.” The Navy’s historian can’t be accused of burnishing braid.

Morison writes of naval action with crisp, unemotional sureness. At other times he is unforgivably slapdash. The Battle of the Atlantic is loaded with information, but stuffed rather than packed.

The Beauty. Occasionally Professor Morison interrupts his hurried pitching of facts to write lovingly of his subject: “A convoy is a beautiful thing. . . . The inner core of stolid merchantmen in column is never equally spaced, for each ship has individuality. . . . Around the column is thrown the screen like a loose-jointed necklace, the beads lunging to port or starboard and then snapping back . . . each destroyer nervous and questing, all eyes topside looking, ears below waterline listening, and radar antennae like cats’ whiskers feeling for the enemy.”

* Volume II of the projected 13-volume history, Operations in North African Waters, October 1942-June 1943, was published first (TIME, Feb. 24).