U-Boats Offshore

The closest actual combat came to the continental United States in World War II was when German submarines stationed themselves off the East Coast and turned major shipping lanes into "Happy Hunting Grounds" for Hitler's torpedoes. Edwin P. Hoyt's 1978 history tells how this happened, and how it began to be reversed after more than a year of painful adjustment. Hoyt has ransacked the public libraries of the East Coast cities from Long Island to Florida, the Washington Naval Archives, Samuel Eliot Morison's WW II naval histories, Admiral Doenitz' biography, etc., and produced a chock-a-block history of U-boat action off the coast during 1942 and 1943 and American unpreparedness.