Where Divers Dare: The Hunt for the Last U-Boat
Randall Peffer. New York: Berkley Caliber, 2016. 310 pp. Illus. Index. $28.
Reviewed by James P. Delgado
From 1939 through 1945, the Battle of the Atlantic raged across the vastness of the ocean and off America’s shores. Decades later, interest remains high in the events, ships, submarines, and men who fought in this—the longest campaign of World War II, on the conflict’s largest battlefield.
Randall Peffer writes compellingly of the 20-year quest by an exceptionally talented group of shipwreck explorers and divers who sought the remains of U-550—the last German U-boat believed to rest in relatively shallow waters off the U.S. coast.
Peffer interweaves the stories of four groups: the captain and crew of the U-boat; the tanker SS Pan Pennsylvania, sunk by the U-boat crew immediately before their own loss; the men on board the ships escorting the convoy U-550 attacked, in particular the USS Joyce (DE-317); and finally, the wreck-seeking deep-sea divers. One might argue that the story of U-550, the Pan Pennsylvania, the Joyce, and their crews is essentially the same as many other stories of the Battle of the Atlantic. That argument misses the point. What Peffer brilliantly reminds us is that history is all about the people.
Through the interwoven stories of those on board the ships and of the divers, the narrative connects the last voyage of both the Pan Pennsylvania and U-550, the sinking of the U-boat and the loss of a number of her crew in the water, and the quest to find the wrecks and learn the stories behind them. The postwar friendship of Joyce commanding officer Robert Wilcox and U-550 Kapitänleutnant Klaus Hänert is one such story, as is the revelation that despite official wartime speculation, more than 40 of the crew died because they remained below when the U-boat sank. The discovery of the wreck prompts some of the surviving Germans to explain that some men were shot by adrenaline-pumped young men in the USS Peterson (DE-152), one of the attacking ships. The German survivors claim she opened up on them with her 20-mm guns, even as the Joyce pulled other Germans from the water.
The divers’ motivation is worth exploring, and Peffer does a solid job of explaining not only who they are, but also why they did what they did. Wreck hunting can be a sport for some, but for many it is seeking resolution to historical questions and pinpointing exactly where a ship now rests. The discovery of a lost ship is powerful for survivors and for families, and the discovery of U-550 was both painful and cathartic. The team did not seek the wrecked U-boat as a literal or figurative trophy. The book makes the case for the nobility of their purpose and how they dealt sensitively with the wreck and the families of those involved. They notified the German government as well as the families of U-550’s crew, and while carefully inspecting the submarine, they left it as found, as the wreck remains the property of Germany.
Deep-wreck diving is hazardous, and wreck divers, especially those who work in the cold, dark waters of the Atlantic seaboard, are the Mount Everest climbers of the dive world. U-550 lies more than 70 miles off Nantucket, far from shore and in 300 feet of water. Diving to her—and into her—is no easy feat. Conquering their own fear, divers like the ones you meet in the pages of Where Divers Dare connect with the past as they work together. Two wrecks are discovered, and while they remain at the bottom of the sea, their survivors have shared their memories. The human stories behind each ship are told. Thanks to the dedication of the divers and the storytelling skill of Randall Peffer, 1 out of 3,500 merchant ships and 25 out of some 36,200 lost merchant mariners, and 1 out of 783 U-boats and some 40 out of 30,000 lost submariners are now more than statistics. The same holds true for all of those who remain undiscovered.
Dr. Delgado, director of Maritime Heritage for the National Marine Sanctuaries Program at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, has participated in shipwreck expeditions around the world. His books include Khubilai Kahn’s Lost Fleet (University of California Press, 2010).
Opposing the Slavers: The Royal Navy’s Campaign Against the Atlantic Slave Trade
Peter Grindal. London: I. B. Tauris, 2016. 896 pp. Illus. Appen. Notes. Biblio. Index. $120.
Reviewed by Commander Benjamin Armstrong, U.S. Navy
The Royal Navy has a long history of what the British call “constabulary operations.” In recent years, Americans have rediscovered these missions under the modern guise of “maritime security operations” and have placed a new significance on them. Commodore Peter Grindal’s book makes an important contribution to the wider study of naval history, beyond the big battles and famous commanders. The author, a retired Royal Navy flag officer, is personally experienced in the constabulary and security operations of the modern world and brings his depth of experience to bear on analyzing the archival research he conducted for the book. That research represents a massive undertaking, covering more than four decades of naval missions in operational- and tactical-level detail while creditably maintaining the context of the diplomatic and strategic concerns of the era.
Previous historians have tackled portions of Royal Navy efforts against slavers, but most have focused on small sections, for example, diplomatic and political aspects of the national laws and international treaties that slowly made illegal the trade from Africa. Some have scrutinized a specific series of operations bounded by certain years or geography, or examined the changes in tactics or ships used for the campaign. Grindal does all of the above.
From diplomatic efforts, as a sequence of British foreign ministers worked to negotiate treaties, to detailed narratives of sailors and marines conducting intercepts and boardings, the book has a vast scope. The geography covered introduces a global outlook that has been missing from much of the scholarship of counter-slavery efforts. Studies have tended to focus on the operations of ships off the African coast. These missions make up the bulk of Grindal’s history; however, he also includes significant discussion of efforts on the coast of South America and in the Caribbean, resulting in the history of the source of the slaves and operations in the waters around their destination as well.
In tackling this great undertaking the author has produced a book that will become the standard historical work on the Royal Navy’s efforts against Atlantic slavery. There are a few shortfalls, including the maddening lack of citations to support the incredible amount of research that the author clearly accomplished but didn’t document. However, putting the interests of scholars aside, Grindal writes of swashbuckling battles and boardings, diplomatic insights, and operational analyses that would greatly benefit today’s sailors and naval thinkers. The conduct of maritime security operations has a long and international history. This comprehensive yet readable book has a great deal to offer present-day readers.
Commander Armstrong is an assistant professor of war studies in the History Department at the U.S. Naval Academy. He is the series editor of the 21st Century Foundations book series of the Naval Institute Press.
Ice Ghosts: The Epic Hunt for the Lost Franklin Expedition
Paul Watson. New York: W. W. Norton, 2017. 383 pp. Illus. Maps. Notes. Biblio. Index. $27.95.
Reviewed by Andrew C. A. Jampoler
The official search for the remains of Malaysia Air Flight 370 was suspended on 17 January 2017. But it is still possible that wreckage of the Boeing 777 that went down in March 2014 eventually will be found and yield an answer to the great mystery about what really happened.
Amelia Earhart’s Lockheed Electra 10E Special, NR16020, vanished in July 1937 over the South Pacific with her and her navigator, Fred Noonan, on board. It is also possible, at least in theory, that enough of the plane’s remains eventually will be found to answer that enduring mystery’s great question.
These two disappearances at sea, one recent and one some 80 years ago, share a 19th-century rival for pride of place as the oceans’ greatest vanishing act: the disappearance in the mid-1840s of two specially configured Royal Navy bomb ketches, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror. The two ships and every member of their crews—129 officers, seamen, and marines under the command of the Admiralty’s third choice for the job, Rear Admiral Sir John Franklin—were lost somewhere in Arctic Canada. The ships and all hands disappeared while searching for the several hundred miles of the central Northwest Passage, the shortest route between Europe and China. The Passage’s eastern and western ends had been discovered earlier.
Marvelously, after dozens of bold, expensive, failed search-and-rescue attempts, both ships have recently been found, separated by some 40 miles and positively identified. The Erebus, the expedition’s flagship, was located in 2014 off the west coast of the Adelaide Peninsula, and the Terror—remarkably intact—was discovered late last year near the southwestern corner of King William Island. Mysteries still remain, among them: How did the ships, beset in the ice at the northern end of Victoria Strait in September 1846 and abandoned in October 1848, arrive at their final resting places? Did any from among the crews return on board to travel those last dreadful miles before starting out on a desperate overland march toward civilization?
In Ice Ghosts, Canadian journalist, author (Where War Lives, 2007), and Pulitzer Prize–winning photographer Paul Watson tells the stories of the Franklin expedition’s disappearance, the many contemporaneous searches for the missing vessels and crews, and the searches since, which led to the triumphant discoveries of 2014–16.
What’s new and interesting in Watson’s telling is that he properly credits the home team—Canadian scientists, mariners, and especially the Inuit, with the exciting discoveries after roughly 50 years of sporadic effort. A climactic push for resolution began in 2008 with the Ottawa government’s decision to fund what began as a three-year hunt, which, in its sixth year, finally succeeded. Watson’s special contribution to the complete story is his persuasive demonstration that during the decades since the Erebus and Terror were first immobilized in ice, Canada’s Inuit held information in their collective memory and oral history about the wrecks and the terrible fate of their crews in sufficiently accurate detail to shorten the search by many years.
Ice Ghosts is a good read and is made especially valuable by its timely, accurate reporting and insights into domestic and international Canadian Arctic politics.