Between 1939 and 1945, more than 36,000 Allied sailors and navy airmen and 36,000 merchant seamen lost their lives in perhaps the least-known major battle of World War II, the Battle of the Atlantic. All the tanks, planes, bombs, and other vital supplies that the U.S. used to fight in Europe -- as well as the American troops themselves -- crossed the Atlantic aboard ship, a journey made perilous by the German U-boats that prowled the seas. In Bitter Ocean author and maritime journalist David Fairbank White gives us a masterful, authoritative account of how these American, Canadian, and British air and sea forces fought the Germans and prevailed -- at a terrible cost.

As dreadful as the loss of life was for the Allies, the Germans fared even worse; more than 80 percent of German U-boat crewmen never made it home. Drawing on a wealth of archival material as well as interviews with veterans on both sides of the ocean campaign, White takes us aboard ship and beneath the waves as he reconstructs this epic battle. Bitter Ocean vividly evokes the grim years when Admiral Karl D nitz's U-boats succeeded in sinking more tonnage than Allied shipyards could replace and shows us the technological breakthroughs that reversed the course of the battle in 1943.

Written with a captivating immediacy, Bitter Ocean is a triumph of scholarship and narrative history.