Book Review: Operation Drumbeat by Michael Gannon

[Subnuts]

Hi everyone,
It's time for another installment of Submarine Book Reviews with Daryl Carpenter!

I posted this on Epinions.com the other night, but I'm posting it here because epinions is a "pay-per-hit" website and a lot of sites frown upon linking to it. Besides, I don't have much of an ego to bruise. Again, I'm writing for a general audience, so be ready for some "well, duh!" moments.

If you asked someone what the worst naval defeat in American history was, I guarantee you that 99% of the time that person would respond "Pearl Harbor!" Unknown to many today, German U-boats operating off the Eastern coast of the United States, the Caribbean, and the Gulf of Mexico sank more than 600 merchant ships in a six month period beginning in January 1942. During the first three months of this campaign U-boats ranged along the shoreline with virtual impunity, hiding underwater in the daytime, slipping into the shipping lanes at nighttime. With the coastline brightly illuminated, merchant ships passed by like targets in a shooting gallery.

Format
Operation Drumbeat, billed as "The Dramatic True Story of Germany’s First U-boat Attacks Along The American Coast In World War II," was published by HarperCollins as a hardcover in 1990 and as a trade paperback in 1991. It is 512 pages long, divided into 13 chapters, and has 16 pages of black and white photographs. Several appendixes are provided, along with a lengthy list of notes and citations, a glossary, and bibliography.

About the Author
Michael Gannon was born in 1928 and became a member of the American Field Service during World War II. Later, in 1968, he served as a war correspondent in Vietnam. At the time of this book’s writing he was a professor of history at the University of Florida. His most recent book was Florida: A Short History.

About the Book
This book focuses primarily on the initial deployment of five Type IX* u-boats in what Admiral Karl Donitz, Commander of the German U-boats, called Operation Drumbeat, or if you prefer German, Operation Paukenschlag. These five submarines sank 25 merchants without reprisal from the United States Navy, and event which Gannon calls the "Atlantic Pearl Harbor." Michael Gannon describes the effects of Drumbeat as far worse than Pearl Harbor; Pearl Harbor "merely" crippled a number of obsolete battleships in shallow water, while Drumbeat came close to cutting off the supply of oil between the US and Great Britain.

U-123, commanded by Reinhard Hardegen, serves as the focal point for Gannon’s narrative. In his two Drumbeat patrols, Hardegen sank 19 merchant ships, one of them barely 20 miles from New York City. Gannon recalls 123’s near-sinking at the hands of a Norwegian factory ship, it’s encounter with the Q-Ship (U-boat decoy) Atik, and the infamous torpedoing and shelling of the tanker Gulfamerica just two miles from Jacksonville, Florida.

Operation Drumbeat also takes us inside the offices of the British Operational Intelligence Centre (OIC) and Bletchley Park, where the German Enigma ciphers were decoded. Gannon discusses how the OIC kept track of the five Drumbeat boats with extreme accuracy on a nearly hourly basis and passed the information along to the American Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), who were regardless taken completely by surprise when they finally arrived.

The third major element of Operation Drumbeat centers around the United States Navy’s unpreparedness at the beginning of the war and the perceived dereliction of Admiral Ernest King, Commander-in-Chief of the US Fleet. Admiral King is the target of a number of sharp criticisms by Gannon, who makes Clay Blair’s comments in Silent Victory seem like child’s play in comparison. There were a couple of times where even I recoiled in an "Ouch! Ice burn!" fashion when reading Gannon’s blistering attacks.

The most surprising revelation, or perhaps the most shocking, is that we had accurate intelligence on U-boat positions and 25 of the most modern destroyers at our disposal, and didn’t do a thing to take action against Donitz’s first wave. The U-boat War was at a slump before Drumbeat: the British were routing their convoys around known U-boat positions, their escorts were gradually improving, Hitler had unwisely forced a major submarine redeployment to the Mediterranean, and merchant sinkings were at a six-month low. Why wasn’t the convoy system implemented sooner? Why wasn’t signal intelligence employed more capably? Why did Admiral King throw 27 months of hard-won British (and about eight months American) experience in fighting U-boats out the window?

Not easy questions to answer, and questions that Gannon, perhaps wisely, chooses to avoid answering. When one considers the almost total destruction of the U-boat fleet one year later, it’s hard to believe that a handful of them sank nearly a quarter of the Allied merchants lost during the war in only six months right on our doorstep. Gannon asserts the likeliness that King was an Anglophobe, which perhaps explains some of his decisions in the first few months of the war, but doesn’t explain the fact that he never made any Anglophobic statements.

Commentary and Criticism
Thankfully, Operation Drumbeat is anything but a stodgy, top-heavy academic history book. The Hunt For U-123 title is no joke; you’d almost think this was a Tom Clancy novel that takes place during World War II. Anyone who’s ever read The Hunt for Red October will be experiencing Deja vu. It has the same elements of that novel, forty years earlier: Submarines, espionage, last-second evasions, accurately reproduced radio transcripts, men in tiny offices moving flags around, etc. The major difference being that I didn’t become hopelessly bored 200 pages in (sorry, Clancy fans, but I can’t bear the thought of having to read seven pages of a millisecond-by-millisecond account of a torpedo exploding.)

What sets Gannon apart from other historians is that he actually seems to understand how things work on a submarine. How many books have I read where everything is reduced to a trivial "boat goes up, boat goes down?" We get a real sense of how complex a World War II-era submarine really was, and what it must have been like to live aboard one. It’s no Das Boot, but there’s still a wonderful sense of verisimilitude.

The only problem with Operation Drumbeat lies in Gannon’s occasional, and disconcerting, information overload. The targets of his lengthy dissertations include almost a page comparing German binoculars with their British counterparts, the phosphorescent qualities of the U-boat target optic’s crosshairs, and the inner workings of the G7e torpedo. All fine to know, but it brings the narrative to a crashing halt. Also, some the sentences go on for nearly half a page, which gives the illusion that Gannon is ranting, instead of informing us, about the subject. Richard Rhodes may have gotten away with 200-word sentences in The Making of the Atomic Bomb, but Michael Gannon can’t.

Finally, many people have disagreed with the idea that Admiral King distrusted the British, though many more have agreed that he acted unwisely during Drumbeat. Even Edward Beach, one of the staunchest defenders of Admiral Husband Kimmel (commander of the Pacific Fleet at the time of Pearl Harbor) considered King derelict in his duty. Of course, the final verdict will be the reader’s own. Being a civilian, I can’t throw down the final judgement upon King myself.

Conclusion
If you’re interested in the naval history of World War II, or more specifically the Battle of the Atlantic, you’re doing yourself a disservice by not reading this book at least once. It does have it’s flaws, and some will definitely feel that Gannon has an axe to grind, but it carries a strong message about the danger of failing to take heed accurate intelligence. It’s a lesson that’s true today, and a lesson that is still ignored.


*Note: The Type IX was larger, faster, and carried more torpedoes than the Type VII, the U-boat type most commonly represented in popular media, including the movie Das Boot.