Undersea Warriors

August 12, 2019
Ballantyne (The Deadly Deep), a naval historian and the editor of Warships magazine, draws on his numerous contacts in the Royal Navy and his deep technical and historical knowledge of the service and its equipment to construct this extremely detailed history of the submarine. Ballantyne begins by laying out a general history of the development of attack submarines and ballistic missile submarines and their use in the Royal Navy leading up to WWII. Ballantyne is particularly illuminating on the development of the capability of submarines to operate under the polar ice cap and the psychological and physical challenges of long underwater deployments. But the heart of the book is submarine missions during the Cold War; the general goal during the period was to stalk Soviet submarines, observe surface vessels, and gather general intelligence on the Soviet Navy. This could be extremely dangerous work that, on several occasions, resulted in underwater collisions. Submarine training and tactics are also covered in great detail, including the grueling command qualification course for future submarine commanders known as the Perisher. This book is heavy on historical and technical detail, without much character development of the submarine commanders whose careers structure the Cold War section. Lay readers might lose interest, but Cold War and naval history aficionados will find this a treasure trove.

Starred review from August 1, 2019
Submarines have been a part of Her Majesty's Navy for a brief portion of its existence but Ballantyne argues that these boats and their crews played a disproportionate role in preventing Armageddon during the Cold War. Continuing the history of military submarines he began in Deadly Deep (2018), he focuses on the British submariners' journey from mad pirates risking death with every dive in the early twentieth century to manning state-of-the-art nuclear-powered capital ships on the front lines, facing down the Soviet Navy. Drawing from a huge bibliography of scholarly literature, personal accounts, memoirs, and even novels and films, Ballantyne builds a mosaic of all things submarine. He follows several sailors through their careers in a grand tour of service beneath the waves and seamlessly interjects the geopolitical tension of Cold War politics and intrigue. Readers will be thrilled by the exploits of the submariners as they venture into Soviet waters and under arctic ice. Ballantyne reveals previously unknown incidents of collisions and catastrophic accidents which barely escaped being tragedies due to the superior training and experience of British sailors and officers, including the esteemed Perisher command course for prospective submarine captains. Richly informative and captivating.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)