Hunter Killer - William T. Y'Blood

I'm visiting my dad, which of course means more books. Hunter Killer is focused on the deployment of escort carriers (aka CVEs, aka "jeeps") in the Battle of the Atlantic against U-boats. For a time, there were those gaps in the center of the Atlantic, where no land-based attack planes could reach. The answer was the get planes out there on top of carriers. Little carriers, relatively speaking, but capable of carrying a dozen each of fighters and torpedo bombers. Combined with the 3-5 destroyers escorting the carrier, that would hopefully be enough.

There was, naturally, some disagreement between the British and the Americans about how to use them. The British tended to favor keeping the CVEs close to convoys, perhaps because their captains were so used to relying on precise orders from land they weren't worth shit at independently seeing out the enemy and destroying it (this lack of initiative and free handedness was something I've seen discussed with regards to generals of the British Army as well). The Americans, naturally, decided to go on the offensive, and send the CVEs to locations they had reason to believe (thanks to the decoded German transmissions) contained U-Boats. That was the Admirality's biggest beef, that by always having carriers waiting where the U-Boats were going to mass or refuel, the Americans would give away the fact the Nazi's Enigma machine wasn't working. It wound up being a false hope, as Doenitz apparently would raise the possibility, but always dismissed it.

Y'Blood proceeds more or less in chronological order, moving from ship to ship as one returns to port of refuel, and another heads out. The book doesn't go into a lot of technical detail, so it will mention that the Avenger torpedo bombers began to be equipped with sonobuoys to help track subs if they were able to dive, but he doesn't spend any time detailing the history of the device's development, or if there was any determination as to why so many of them didn't seem to work. Ditto with the homing torpedo, dubbed "Fido". Considering how lousy U.S. torpedoes were early in the war, the fact they have one for these details that isn't completely useless seemed worth exploring. You do get a general idea of the shift in strategy as the crews gain more experience hunting subs. The Fido gets added in, then rockets. The fighters and bombers get smarter about working together to sink a sub, then gradually the fighters are deemphasized, since there isn't much airborne threat to the CVEs.

The book is confined fairly strictly to the missions the ships were on, and mostly to the parts where the ships are actively engaged with a submarine. There isn't much time spent on biographies of any of the officers, pilots, or U-Boat captains, as you see in some history books. All of which combines to make the book feel a bit thin at 290 pages (not counting the notes and bibliography). The inclusion of maps outlining typical search patterns, or the actual movements of the involved vessels during actual battles was a good touch.