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The Osprey and the Sea Wolf: The Battle of the Atlantic 1942

By Mark Scott Smith ’67. Rolling Wave Books, May 2018. Available on Amazon. In 1942 a German U-Boat campaign in the Western Atlantic (Operation Drumbeat) came close to severing the vital artery of war supplies between America and Great Britain. Unprepared and ill-equipped, America struggled to counter this skilled offensive as U-Boats sent nearly 300 ships and 5000 men to the bottom off the East Coast, Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean. This history-inspired novel is told from the points of view of two protagonists: Rainer, a 32 year-old career Naval officer and highly successful U-Boat commander from the lovely Hanseatic city of Lübeck Germany, and Ramón, a 24 year-old Mexican-American B-25 pilot, who, through academic and athletic prowess, has successfully navigated the racism of his SW Texas home.  The story follows these two warriors through the deadly dance of submarine warfare off the east coast of America, the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea.