BOOK REVIEW : Facts Surface About U-Boat Threat to U.S.

OPERATION DRUMBEAT The Dramatic True Story of Germany’s First U-Boat Attacks Along the American Coast in World War II by Michael Gannon Harper & Row $24.95, 490 pages

“Men, I have opened our Operation Order,” says the intrepid young submarine commander to his eager crew in Michael Gannon’s “Operation Drumbeat.” “We are going against America. Our first destination is New York.”

At such moments, “Operation Drumbeat” presents itself as a kind of retro-techno-thriller, a World War II version of “The Hunt for Red October.” Like that best-selling novel, “Operation Drumbeat” is a ripping good yarn of submarine warfare, espionage and geopolitics. The difference is that “Operation Drumbeat” is not a novel--it is a work of revisionist history that strips away nearly 50 years of official propaganda and popular misconception about the strategy and tactics of Nazi submarine warfare in World War II.

Michael Gannon reveals the truth about Nazi Germany’s first submarine campaign against the United States in the days and weeks after America finally entered the war--”a series of U-boat attacks on the United States so severe and extensive, and so appallingly undefended,” the author writes, “that . . . they constituted an ‘Atlantic Pearl Harbor.’ ” Five U-boats penetrated American waters, sank 25 ships and sailed in triumph back to their bases in occupied Europe.

Gannon tells the larger story of “Operation Drumbeat” by focusing on the exploits of a single German submarine, the U-123, and its 28-year-old captain, Reinhard Hardegen, on the first patrol by a Nazi submarine flotilla in the coastal waters of North America. Supplied only with tourist brochures hastily obtained from local libraries, the five U-boats in “Operation Drumbeat” managed to reach within a few hundred yards of the American coast--Hardegen gazed at the Ferris wheel at Coney Island from the tower of his submarine while his crew was treated to the local broadcast of an episode of “The Goldbergs.”

According to Gannon, the scandal behind Operation Drumbeat is that British intelligence, which had broken the German naval codes, was tracking the progress of U-123 and the other submarines across the Atlantic: “Perhaps more no more telling attack warning, in unmistakable language and numbers, had ever come to the military forces of the United States,” Gannon writes. But the U.S. Navy did not manage to do anything about it. And, in any event, the author suggests that the “dented shields and virgin swords” of American coastal defense were unequal to the task of defending against Hardegen and what Gannon is moved to call “a proud and daring war machine.”

Gannon is a professor of history at the University of Florida--and, more important, a war buff--and he has clearly engaged in long, meticulous and fruitful research into original (and, in some cases, unexamined) sources. He demonstrates a mastery of obscure points of military history and technology; for instance, he writes with expertise and enthusiasm on the superiority of Captain Hardegen’s M IV/1T Carl Zeiss 7x50 binoculars over equivalent equipment supplied to Allied naval officers.

Indeed, “Operation Drumbeat” is packed tight with facts that will come as a surprise to most readers. Despite what we’ve seen in countless war movies, for example, World War II-era submarines did not spend much time under water: The U-boats ran and fought on the surface, where their diesel engines were able to operate and their deck guns could be brought to bear, saving the battery-driven electric motors for the rare occasions when they were forced to dive to avoid attack.

Best of all is Gannon’s narrative of submarine warfare as it was experienced by the men of U-123 and the sailors who were their victims. Gannon is a high-spirited story teller who is not afraid to make noises in print: “ Dacca-dacca-dacca-dacca “ is how he renders the sound of a machine gun. And he has a love of language that sometimes overwhelms his careful scholarship--for example, at the opening of Chapter 7, the author succumbs to a persistent lyrical impulse in a paragraph so ornate I had to stop to read it twice.

More troubling is the fact that Gannon is so smitten by his subject that he cannot resist lionizing Hardegen and the crew of the U-123. The author concedes, rather too delicately, that the German Navy was “an armed force in service to objective evil”--but he insists that it is wrong “to paint a swath of guilt across the name of every German who went to sea.” Gannon concludes: “It would miss the truth that most officers and ratings went to sea for Navy, not for Nazi, reasons.”

I am afraid this distinction is too subtle for me, and I found myself a little horrified at how the author urges us, almost subliminally, to cheer the successes of U-123 against Allied merchant ships and their crews. But it is proof of Gannon’s power as a writer that I came so close to joining him in these unwholesome cheers.