I am pleased to have received this book so fast, as it was a gift for my father. I would use this vendor again.

U-Boats vs. Destroyer Escorts: the Battle of the Atlantic, volume number 3 in Osprey's new Duel series, is an interesting read but ultimately it is undermined by lack of specific focus. Author Gordon Williamson provides a great deal of information on the Battle of Atlantic - some tidbits were quite good - but attempts to cover too broad a canvas with too small a sheet of paper. As author of Panther vs T-34, Duel No. 4, I had the same requirements to meet, and it is quickly apparent that you must scope your topic carefully to fit an 80-page format. Rather than trying to cover all U-Boat classes and most escort classes in the entire period 1939-45, the author would have been better served by focusing on one type of escort and one type of German submarine in a distinct phase of the war (Black Swan sloop vs. Type VII U-Boat in 1942-43 would have been a handsome fit for this format). Instead, trying to cover too much leads to a very diffuse narrative. Furthermore, the author does not seem to have a good handle on the `duel' concept underlying this new series - it is supposed to be one weapons system against another, but this is confused when he compares U-Boat performance against merchant ships. Even the periscope view on page 66-67 shows a U-Boat attacking an Allied tanker - not an escort. Overall, I liked this volume - it is an attractive, smartly-written and interesting - but it could have been much better with a tighter focus.

Picking up the volume, readers may notice that the U.S. destroyer on the bottom half is DD445, USS Fletcher. This destroyer served in the Pacific, not the Battle of the Atlantic and the Fletcher-class ships were rarely used as convoy escorts. The first section covers the strategic situation, but also spends a great deal of space detailing the career of Karl Donitz and Germany's pre-war efforts to re-build its U-Boat fleet. Actually, this section was only supposed to discuss the wartime strategic situation - i.e. the wartime objectives for the U-Boat fleet and how the Allies intended to defeat their opponents - but this only creeps in toward the end of this section. The next 12-page section covers `Design and Development,' with two-thirds on the Allied escorts. This section is good, although war economics and technology development are soft-pedaled. The next 19 pages covers technical specifications and has some interesting sections on weaponry and radar/countermeasures, but simply tries to pack in too much information about too many different ship classes. The section on U-Boat and escort crews provides some information on training and demographics but it is rather broad-brush. A better approach would have been to pick one U-Boat and one DE and examine crew functions in greater depth and discuss where the crews came from (i.e. how many veterans from other vessels?) and how long it took to train them before the vessel was operational.

The 16-page section on combat arrives almost as an afterthought, with too much space traded in this vital section for use in earlier introductory sections. After all, isn't "Duel" supposed to be about focusing on how the weapons were used in combat? The author attempts to give a run-down of some of the major convoy battles in 1939-45, but there is only one first-person account used in this section and no diagrams or depictions of any specific combat actions. Although this overview is interesting to read, it really doesn't say much about how escorts performed in the `duel' with U-Boats. The final section, "Analysis," is very confusing because little of the data supports a conclusion about how each side performed in the "Duel." The first chart showing the most successful U-Boats by listing gross tonnage sunk - says nothing about how U-Boats performed against escorts. Chart No. 2 showing U-boat losses in 1939-45 only shows gross number of losses by year, with no break-down by cause (i.e. sunk by mines, aircraft, escorts, accidents, etc). Chart No. 3, on merchant ship losses, is irrelevant to the U-Boat vs escort duel argument. Chart No. 4, showing escort losses by year is interesting, but is not fully explained. The author's conclusion appears to be the Allied code-breaking efforts (Enigma), along with better use of ASDIC and Radar won the battle for the escorts, along with the USA's vast production resources, which enabled the Allies to make good their losses.

The author mentions the late-war German Type XXI and XXIII submarines several times and suggests that these improved boats might have reversed Germany's declining fortunes in the Atlantic. Unfortunately, he never mentions that the Type XXI only made its first cruise in the last week of the war and sank nothing, while the six operational Type XXIII boats made only six patrols and hit only 5 ships. Although many historians like to point to last-minute German technologies that might have `changed everything,' the fact is that the U-Boat war was lost in 1943. It would have been better discussing the introduction of the Schnorkel and homing torpedoes, which were far more germane to the U-Boat vs. escort duel. One item that surprised me, was that the author never addressed how long a U-Boat could remain submerged while being pounded by escort depth-charging (what was the record?) or how long a DE could stay on station with a convoy before it needed refueling. Ultimately, while it is clear that the Allies won the Battle of the Atlantic in 1943, the actually exchange rate between U-Boats sunk by escorts and escorts sunk by U-Boats never favored the Germans. The `kill ratio'hovered around 1-1 in 1939-42 and then ratcheted up to 2-1 in 1943-44 and 3-1 in 1945. If the Germans wanted to really demolish convoys, they needed to do a lot better than trade one submarine for one escort and the `duel' was more one-sided than it may appear at first glance(particularly after reading Clay Blair's excellent two-volume history).