New Book Review: Playing With the Enemy

[Onkel Neal]

Born and raised in the Depression-era small town of Sesser, Illinois, Gene Moore knows one thing for certain: he was born to play baseball. When WWII breaks out, the Brooklyn Dodgers arrange for Gene to play exhibition baseball in the Navy.

Far from Gene’s world of line drives and fly balls, a US naval task force relentlessly hunts a German U-boat in the Atlantic. Led by Captain Dan Gallery, “a seasoned hunter of German U-boats”, they are determined to capture a U-boat and seize the codebooks and Enigma encryption machine. Gallery’s task force locates the U-505, a boat with a tainted history of disaster and tragedy. After a ferocious succession of depth charges, U-505 is plunged into darkness accompanied by the unnerving sound of water flooding into the fractured hull.

It was easy to imagine the seawater filling up beneath the deck plates, adding tons of weight that would soon make it impossible to bring the boat to the surface. And the ocean floor was a mile below them....

Full review here

To be published Sept. 2006


cheers,
Neal