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Friday, June 17, 2011

Book on the North Atlantic Corridor of the Second World War

An interesting read - for me at least - is How a Small Band of Allied Sailors Defeated the U-boats and Won the Battle of the Atlantic By Ed Offley as it deals with the Second World War a pet subject.

It is amazing how the Second World War which has a lot of significance for Indians - my uncle died in the South-East-Asian corridor (he was secretly in Subhash Chandra Bose's INA) - is ignored by us all. We all are to blame.What happened to the many Indians who died fighting for the British Empire. What happened to the Indian National Army (INA). We are a people without a curiosity and obsession with the past.

At least, the above account by Ed Offley is worth looking forward to:

By the war's end, Germany had sent 830 U-boats into the battle, 2,653 Allied merchant vessels and 175 warships had been sunk, and more than 71,000 civilian crewmen and naval gunners had been killed, most of these losses coming in the North Atlantic. The German submariners fared much worse, with 717 of the U-boats sunk or wrecked, a 70 percent fatality rate, and almost half the 11,510 surviving crewmen in Allied prison camps.

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