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U-Boats Destroyed and U-Boat Intelligence, by Robert M Grant
U-Boats Destroyed and U-Boat Intelligence, by Robert M Grant
Those divers who think that Robert M Grant was an American Civil War general can stop reading now. Those who know that he is one of the world's leading authorities on WW1 U-boats should continue and may learn something to their advantage.
Grant, a professor at the University of Chicago, wrote two books about the Allies' struggle against the German U-boats. The first, published in 1964, was called U-Boats Destroyed, and it instantly established Grant as the leading historian of the anti-submarine war of 1914-1918.
His second book, U-Boat Intelligence, was published in 1969 and soon sold out. This book, using other material he had gathered during his research, which he had carried out from 1928 in archives all over the world, showed how the Intelligence Division of the Admiralty played a vital role in the defeat of the U-boat menace.
Naval intelligence came from all sorts of sources - the interrogation of survivors from sunken subs, agents abroad, interception of signals from boats to bases and vice-versa, and the investigation of sunken U-boats. Grant reported it all.
This book, too, became a respected source for those divers researching U-boats lost around Britain.
The snag for researchers was that both books had been out of print for years. Copies in secondhand bookshops fetched high prices, if you could find them.
Now all that hunting is over. Britain's No 1 U-boat buff, diver Innes McCartney, has reprinted both through his own publishing company. Wreck researchers will also be delighted to know that the reprinted U-Boat Intelligence now has a proper full index. No more eye-straining searches through the book are needed to find one particular reference to one particular submarine.
While talking to Robert M Grant about the reprints, McCartney discovered that he actually wrote three books about U-boat operations in WW1.
The third, Searching for U-Boats, was never published. But guess what? Yes, McCartney will be publishing that one this year too.
Kendall McDonald
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U-Boats Destroyed and U-Boat Intelligence, by Robert M Grant (Periscope Publishing, ISBN 1904381006 & 1904381014). Softback, 172pp and 195pp, £14.99 each
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