E-Boat Alert; Defending the Normandy Invasion Fleet

Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1996. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good. xvi, [2], 286, [4] pages. Illustrations. Tables. Notes. Glossary. Selected Bibliography. Index. No DJ present. Minor soiling to the cover. James Foster Tent was a historian who graduated from Dartmouth College in 1966 and received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1973. Education was Jim's passion and profession. Jim became a professor of history at the University of Alabama at Birmingham in 1974 and a University Scholar in 1990. He served as the chair of the UAB History Department from 2002 to 2009 and was appointed a University Scholar Emeritus by the University of Alabama System Board of Trustees in 2010. Jim was an expert in modern German history, military history, and the Cold War. His published numerous books in English and in German over the course of his academic career: Mission on the Rhine: Reeducation and Denazification in American-Occupied Germany (1982); The Free University of Berlin: A Political History (1988); E-Boat Alert: Defending the Normandy Invasion Fleet (1996); Den Deutschen Freund Sein: Das American Friends Service Committee und die humanitäre Hilfe im Deutschland nach 1945 (1998); Academic Proconsul: Harvard Sociologist Edward Y. Hartshorne and the reopening of German Universities 1945-1946: His Personal Account (1998); and In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Nazi Persecution of Jewish-Christian Germans (2003). In 2009, he received the Education Award from the Alabama-Germany Partnership. Combining newly released top-secret Admiralty reports, rare photographic materials, and extensive interviews with eyewitnesses from three nations, James Tent has produced a comprehensive study of a little-known episode of World War II - the campaign to defend the Normandy invasion fleet from Germany's high-performance motor torpedo boats or Schnellboote, known to the Allies as "E-boats." Besides presenting a detailed account of naval operations at a crucial stage of the war in Europe, this history integrates many facets of modern warfare: the development of fast coastal craft; the creation of precision bombing units; the interaction of naval, air, and ground forces among both the Allies and the Germans; the harnessing of science and technology to meet changing military needs; and the use of various forms of intelligence - cryptanalysis, prisoner interrogation, photo reconnaissance, and photo-interpretation. While tracing these important technical considerations, the study also examines the human dimension of the forces arrayed against each other. In addition, it offers historical precedents for weapons and warships in which there is now renewed interest, namely, deep-penetration bombs and high-speed coastal combatants.