Phantom Fleet
The Hunt for Nazi Submarine U-505 and World War II's Most Daring Heist
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- 11,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
From the New York Times bestselling author of Washington's Spies, "a page-turning thriller" (James M. Scott) about one of the greatest heists in history: the U.S. Navy’s clandestine capture of a Nazi U-boat at the climax of World War II.
Shortly before noon on June 4, 1944, the sonar operator on a destroyer prowling off the coast of West Africa heard a sharp, metallic ping. The sound could mean only one thing: The German submarine that their hunter-killer group had been tracking, U-505, was lurking somewhere below. The ensuing struggle between exhausted hunter and venomous prey would make history when American sailors boarded an enemy warship at sea for the first time since the War of 1812.
That day’s victory was the culmination of an unrelenting campaign against the Nazi submarine threat by the U.S. Navy’s “Tenth Fleet”—a mysterious unit that could predict the locations and movement of Hitler’s U-boats. Run by Commander Kenneth Knowles, Tenth Fleet had guided Captain Dan Gallery to U-505; to repay the favor, Gallery was going to steal an Enigma machine for him.
Now all they had to do was to make an entire U-boat, its crew, and its secrets vanish into thin air . . .
In this swashbuckling adventure story, bestselling historian Alexander Rose draws on long-classified encrypted documents and intercepted German transmissions to reveal in full, for the first time, how an owlish egghead and a glory-seeking buccaneer teamed up to score the richest prize on the high seas.
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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.
