Its been a while, I am not going to get into it. I just finished The War For England's Shores: S-Boats and Fight against British Coastal Convoys by G.H. Bennett and I want to write about it. Unlike a lot of the other books I have talked about I have not owned this book for a while. Instead I picked it up fairly recently on a sale from the Naval Institute Press, and I want to thank the guys at the YouTube channel Military Aviation History for getting those sales codes. Those codes go a long way to making higher quality and more specialized history books accessible.
This book explores a little studied aspect of the Second World War, the attack of Nazi Schnell-Boats on the British convoys carrying goods from one part of Britain to another. It gives a strong overall coverage of the war, looking at how the campaign developed over time, and devoting an entire chapter to the human dimension of the conflict. The narrative is well written, and had a good pace to it, and I am glad it addressed the human dimension. However I feel the book would have been well served by further examination of the technical dimension. If a chapter was set out to go over how S-Boats and their British enemies were equipped that would help give a clear understanding of what conditions these peoples were operating on. The narrative goes over encounters between the superior S-Boats and the plucky and aggressive British MTB, but I could never internalize what that looks like. One of my favorite books is Black May by Michael Gannon about the convoy battles in May 1943, and that book details the tactics and equipment of escorts and U-boats alike early in the book so that when the convoy battles are detailed latter in the book you have internalized the details. It makes it easier to understand what is happening. When the narrative gets more details towards the end of the book as the S-boats try to interrupt the Normandy invasion it is misses that deeper understanding that would make it truly clear.
The book is still a good read just because so little is talked about this fighting. Every few years I would be reminded that S-Boats are a thing, or hear about British MTB, and do a little mental "huh, so like PT boats, I should learn more about," then not being able to find out anything about it. It is good to finally have a greater understanding of it. I don't think I would recommend it to a person reading about World War 2 naval history for the first time, but I would recommend someone look up the Naval Institute Press and take a look at their catalog. It has a lot of interesting books covering a variety of subjects.
