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Title details for Turning the Tide by Ed Offley - Available

Turning the Tide

How a Small Band of Allied Sailors Defeated the U-Boats and Won the Battle of the Atlantic

by Ed Offley
James Adams
Audiobook
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The United States experienced its most harrowing military disaster of World War II not in 1941 at Pearl Harbor, but rather in the period from 1942 to 1943, in the frigid North Atlantic and American coastal waters from Newfoundland to the Caribbean. Nearly seven decades after the event, the Battle of the Atlantic still stands as the longest-running and most lethal clash of arms in naval history. During the entire duration of the conflict, more than 30,264 Allied merchant seamen and hundreds of navy personnel lost their lives.The strategic stakes in the Battle of the Atlantic were immense. If the Axis won, Great Britain could have been starved into submission, the Allies would have been unable to marshal their forces to liberate the Continent, and the Germans likely would have at least engineered a stalemate with the Soviets on the Eastern Front that would have allowed the Nazi regime to remain in power. In Turning the Tide, military reporter and author Ed Offley tells the story of how, during a twelve-week period during the spring of 1943, a handful of battle-hardened British, Canadian and American sailors turned the tide in the Atlantic. Using extensive documents from archives in Germany, Great Britain and the United States, and interviews with key survivors on both sides, Offley puts the reader into the heart of the battle-from the navigation bridges of British and American escort warships, to the main decks and engine rooms of Allied merchant ships in convoy, to the claustrophobic control rooms and wave-swept bridges of the U-boats stalking their prey. He also portrays the vicious bureaucratic struggles that raged behind closed doors at the headquarters of both the Allied and German military services, and the above-Top Secret Allied intelligence campaign to crack the German Naval Enigma codes. A thrilling tale of the decisive naval battle of World War II, Turning the Tide is also a harrowing story of how the Allies nearly lost-and ultimately regained-victory in both the Atlantic and in Europe itself.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    April 26, 2011

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781611743913
      • File size: 498220 KB
      • Duration: 17:17:57

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      British narrator James Adams narrates this meticulously researched account of the struggle for control of Atlantic shipping routes during WWII. Ultimately, it's a narrative of the Allied victory over the German U-boats, and Adams gives it a straightforward rendering. When presented with the occasional quotation, he does not vary his vocal qualities, though that does not detract from the work. A problem is the author's relentless use of military nomenclature referencing ships, aircraft, and convoys, particularly his repetitive use of categorizations and specifications regarding the numerous vessels and weapons in the story. In an audio format the jargon, which will be unknown to many listeners, becomes monotonous and confusing. S.K.G. (c) AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      March 21, 2011
      WWII's Battle of the Atlantic, where Admiral Dönitz's U-boats attempted to starve Great Britain into capitulation, was one of many crucial points in that conflict that were indispensable to Allied victory. If the Germans had succeeded in interdicting its maritime lifeline, Britain would not have become the Allies' "unsinkable aircraft carrier" and staging point for invasion, which in turn meant that there would have been no second front in France, and this in turn could have lead Stalin to make a separate peace with Hitler. By examining two actions against Allied convoys in March and May 1943, Offley (Scorpion Down) demonstrates how the Allies were more responsive to changing technological and tactical conditions, while the Kriegsmarine was hampered by a failure to recognize the same changes and by a culture that encouraged reporting inflated results; curiously, both opponents had cracked the other's codes, but the Allies made better use of the intelligence. The author focuses on individual combatants, from the lowest ranks to the highest, emphasizing the human elements and making for an extremely readable text that should appeal to neophytes as well as professionals.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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