Clay Blair (1925–1998)

This memoir is pretty long at just over 400 pages, and is extremely detailed, so you may not be super interested if you aren't really into experimental research flight, aviation, or the X-15.

To put this book into context, it wraps up in early 1960. That's about a year before Yuri Gagarin becomes the first human in space, and consequently a year before the Mercury program starts its first piloted flights. Dwight Eisenhower is still president. North American thinks the B-70 won't be cancelled. NASA has only been NASA for just about two years. (And the author, Scott Crossfield, is still ~65 years away from killing himself by failing to flying out of a thunderstorm.)

So it's still really early in the space business. In some ways things are both prescient and also naive. Aerodynamic space vehicles are being explored, even though they ultimately won't be used to travel to space until the STS program kicks off in 1977, and then will be virtually abandoned again after the program ends in 2011. Lots of aerospace firms are alive and kicking with buckets of defense or NASA funding before merging or shutting down in the 80s and 90s after the cold war ends and the federal government decides not to give NASA money for cool projects anymore. There is a little discussion about the nascent (at the time) conflict between piloted flight and autonomous missiles.

In that context, the book is pretty fascinating. Where did one of the top test pilots and engineers see the future of aviation and space research? It also highlights years that are often not covered that much in many other books about space, who usually just gloss over the 1950s to get right to the Mercury program.

That said, the book was REALLY LONG and started out REALLY SLOW. I felt like it took 100 pages for me to feel good and interested. I've been zipping through books lately, and this one took me quite a while to get through. So it's not amazing, but it was solidly good.

If you've read The Right Stuff and you kind of want to know more, especially about the aviators who didn't become astronauts, this book is for you.

One more note. This book was written in 1960. This means that every pilot, engineer, and human worth writing about (according to this book) is a man. (Except for the exceptional single "lady engineer.") The author uses exclusively male pronouns. The author annoyingly says "space man" instead of astronaut. I found it to be grating, jarring, and obnoxious. I know the book is a product of its time, but I wish people could have been a little less awfully sexist a little earlier in our history.… (more)

Of the many battles that made up the Second World War, the Battle of the Atlantic was arguably the most important of them. It was through the clash between German U-boats and Allied convoys that the question was resolved of whether Nazi Germany could defeat Great Britain by strangling her trade and cut off the Allies from access to the vast resources of the United States. Had the Germans triumphed, there would have been no Lend-Lease convoys to Great Britain and Russia and no Allied invasion of continental Europe. Victory might still have come for the Allies in Europe, but it would only have been after a much longer and far more debilitating struggle.

The prominence of the naval war in the Atlantic has ensured that there is no shortage of books available about it. Yet Clay Blair’s two-volume study of the Kriegsmarine’s U-boat campaign ranks among the best of them, for a number of reasons. Foremost among them is the depth of research Blair undertook, as he drew upon the massive amount of both German and Allied archival material to reconstruct the conflict. He also benefited from the revelations about the role Allied codebreaking from the 1970s onward, which was a critically important aspect of the battle excluded from earlier accounts of it. Blair employs all of this with a firsthand understanding of submarine warfare drawn from his experience in the United States Navy during the war, which gives him a perspective too-often missing from other histories.

Blair uses these elements to construct a remarkable account of the fighting. After a prologue describing the rebuilding of Germany’s submarine arm in the interwar period, Blair covers the various campaigns waged by the U-boats during the war. This he does systematically, summarizing the various deployments of each U-boat and their success (or lack thereof) in attacking and sinking Allied shipping. In this process he creates a sense of a naval battle that unfolded much like a ground campaign, with both sides engaging in moves and responding in turn with countermoves in a fluid and ongoing contest for dominance. Blair also places all of this within the context of the larger war underway, showing how leaders on both sides viewed the campaigns in the Atlantic, and how the decisions they made influenced events within it.

Using this approach, Blair challenges many longstanding misconceptions about the war. Foremost among them is the view of that the German campaign ever seriously jeopardized the Allied war effort Throughout the book Blair repeatedly stresses the limited scope of the campaign, with the small number of U-boats facing an enormous task. Even at their peak, the U-boats were nowhere close to cutting off the British, nor were they able to sink Allied shipping faster than the Allies (through confiscation and construction) were able to replace it. Thus, while ships were torpedoed and men died, it was more of a nuisance than a true threat to the Allied military machine, leaving Blair to question Winston Churchill’s pessimism about the U-boat “peril.”

Another one that Blair tackles head-on is the claim that American naval leaders did not take seriously the U-boat attacks on the East Coast during the first half of 1942. Here he stakes himself out as a stout defender of Ernest King, the controversial head of the U.S. Navy during the war. Blair points out that as commander of U.S. naval forces in the Atlantic prior to Pearl Harbor King was already employing the convoy system and was well aware of his benefits. What inhibited him from doing so with coastal shipping once Karl Donitz launched Operation Drumbeat was not any skepticism about the efficacy of convoys but a lack of escorts with which to defend them. As American shipyards rose to the challenge, King implemented them, which went a long way towards ending the second “Happy Time” of U-boat successes.

Blair makes his arguments through a combination of clearheaded analysis and the weight of his evidence. This can make his text a little repetitive at times, yet the sheer amount of detail had its own fascination. It helps that Blair is a skilled writer able to apply his years as a journalist to make his case through clear and unadorned prose. It’s for these reasons that his book, along with its successor volume, Hitler's U-Boat War: The Hunted, 1942-1945, remain the definitive work on the Battle of the Atlantic, one that is unlikely to be bettered thanks to a perspective borne of the author’s combination of assiduous archival labor with his personal experience with commerce warfare during the Second World War.… (more)

Excellent book that's a must-have for anyone with a serious interest in the U-boat war, naval history or WWII really.

However I have to say that from a British perspective the author's more and more strident pro-US, pro-Canadian and anti-British text became more and more grating over this second 700-pages of the 2-part book. He may be correct in his analysis, who am I to say, but it seemed that 2/3rds of the North Atlantic alliance were always right and the other third continually erroneous, even when doing the same thing (the RAF v. USAAF bomber campaigns being perhaps the most egregious example, although "horrendous" losses of personnel in US ships seems somehow less worthy of comment when it was the Royal Navy on the receiving end, which jarred somewhat).

However, the scholarship, depth of research and the sheer volume of well presented facts means that one must overlook the author's peccadillos and revere the holistic achievement.… (more)