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)