JUST TELL THE STORY. The first rule of military writing ought to be, wherever possible, to let the action reports do the talking, and the second rule, if there is call for a second rule, is to keep the prose spare. In Bitter Ocean, author David Fairbank White disregards these rules in such a way as to render Book Review No. 44 not particularly favorable. The book tackles, in approximately 300 pages, the Battle of the Atlantic. The topic is one that easily requires two volumes, Hitler's U-Boat War: The Hunters, 1939-1942, Hitler's U-Boat War: The Hunted, 1942-1945, to describe in some depth. There is also a book-length treatment of the turning point of the battle in Black May : The Epic Story of the Allies' Defeat of the German U-Boats in May 1943. The narrative in Bitter Ocean will be of necessity less detailed, but I wish the author had toned down the elegant variation or hired a Scathing Online Schoolmarm to do some editing. Consider this passage from page 102.

Night had fallen. The black shroud of evening had slipped over the ships and as dark had settled, they had plodded along like a caravan of camels, one shuffling beast following the one before it. Now they lumbered along, hulking giants, hooded in the night, rolling slowly east.

Plodding, shuffling, lumbering, rolling: we're not in the sixth grade writing picturesque sentences for Miss Weidemann. Convoy SC-26 is about to get clobbered. What happens to the submariners, sailors, and merchant mariners, and what the survivors recall, is more important than the fog of elegant variation.

It's no less painful when Convoy SC-100 gets clobbered, at page 171.

Elsewhere, eight other ships not with the main body of the convoy were scattered like hay, blown across a vast area of the sea. Some ships were out ahead, far in front of SC 100; some were behind, straggling, dispersed by the three day blow to a flurry of points on the field.

A submarine attack and a North Atlantic storm foul up the station keeping and there are going to be plenty of stragglers for the follow-on submarines. Let the participants tell the story. It requires no embellishment.

Several times, for reasons not always evident, the author sees fit to mention a sunken ship's radio call signal being permanently silenced. But (see p. 106) in the Battle of the Atlantic, it was not OSCAR NOVEMBER JULIET ALPHA, it was OBOE NAN JIG ABLE. Do the research.

The trials of the crew of San Demetrio in an early convoy qualify as a classic sea story, as in "no s***, this really happened," without need for embellishment, and German submarine ace Otto Kretschmer carried out his responsibilities as a prisoner of war to attempt escape almost as well as he carried out his duties as submariner. He also served ably in the German Navy in NATO, retiring as an admiral.

Mr White suggests that the convoy escorts, which he refers to as corvettes, have been neglected in the construction of World War II monuments. Perhaps the confusing nomenclature for escort ships, including destroyer escorts and frigates (not here referring to a ship of war with three masts) impedes the effort to get such a memorial together.

In the absence of a formal monument, consider renting The Enemy Below or watching for its rebroadcast on one of the cable channels. The plot, a destroyer escort (U.S. Navy terminology) tangling with a U-boat, is true to several of the battle reports noted in Bitter Ocean and the other sources I've referenced. The Battle of the Atlantic was about submarines and escorts, particularly after Germany converted its capital ships into floating forts.