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| The Hemingway Patrols: Ernest Hemingway and His Hunt for U-Boats |  | Author: Terry Mort
Publisher: Scribner
Category: Book
List Price: $26.00
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Seller: best_bargain_books3
Rating:  7 reviews
Sales Rank: 83,727
Media: Hardcover
Edition: annotated edition
Pages: 272
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 5.8 x 1
ISBN: 1416597867
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.52
EAN: 9781416597865
ASIN: 1416597867
Publication Date: August 18, 2009
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Amazon.com Review
Amazon Best of the Month, August 2009: The plan was as reckless as it was implausible: lure a German U-Boat to the surface, lob grenades into opened hatches, and speed away into a hero's sunset. Most men would be mocked for such a scheme, but in the hands of Ernest Hemingway, it was just crazy enough to work. In The Hemingway Patrols, Terry Mort explores the motivation behind this fascinating chapter in Hemingway's life. Proudly manning the helm of his beloved yacht, El Pilar, the legendary writer stalked the waters off Cuba during the early 1940s in search of enemy submarines. To the casual observer, it would seem that the line between the real and fictionalized worlds of Ernest Hemingway had become blurry (one can easily imagine Robert Jordan or Harry Morgan in the same role). Yet according to Mort, long-shot odds are precisely what fueled these missions. "Maybe the patrols were quixotic," he explains, "but that was part of their appeal--that and the sense of doing something useful and of being in command." The inherent dangers in hunting U-boats with a forty-foot yacht were inconsequential--what truly mattered was the adventure at hand. -- Dave Callanan
Product Description
A fascinating account of a dramatic, untold chapter in Ernest Hemingway's life -- his passionate pursuit of German U-boats during World War II From the summer of 1942 until the end of 1943, Ernest Hemingway actively patrolled the Gulf Stream and the waters off Cuba's north shore in his wooden fishing boat, Pilar, looking for German submarines. His patrols were supervised by the U.S. Navy and served as a part of antisubmarine warfare at a time when U-boat attacks were decimating Allied merchant shipping in the region. The huge, long-distance subs ultimately sank hundreds of ships in the Atlantic theater, killing thousands of seamen. They were deadly and efficient, and to confront them in a small wooden fishing vessel was to court instant annihilation. Yet Hemingway and his crew of friends were prepared to do just that. Armed with only grenades and submachine guns, they planned to attack any U-boat they encountered. While almost no attention has been paid to these patrols, other than casual mentions in standard biographies, they became the foundation of some of Hemingway's future work, especially The Old Man and the Sea and Islands in the Stream. Onshore, the patrols were a source of mounting friction between Hemingway and his wife, the writer Martha Gellhorn, who was brilliant, difficult, and skeptical of Hemingway's pursuit. Martha was not particularly beautiful but possessed that certain something that drove men -- Hemingway included -- to distraction. He had divorced his second wife to marry Martha, and yet by the time he began patrolling in Pilar, the love affair was doomed, perhaps pushing him more intently toward a confrontation with the U-boats. Terry Mort's incisive portrait of Hemingway is a combination of biography, military history, and literary commentary that draws not only from his work, letters, and wartime documents, but the unofficial yet highly revealing log of the Pilar, a calendar that Hemingway annotated with observations of tides, fishing successes, supply purchases, target practice, ship movements, and most crucially, his pursuit of what he suspected was a German U-boat secretly rendezvousing with a Spanish passenger ship. Hemingway's patrols gave him the opportunity to exercise his well-known taste for bravado, tall tales, and male camaraderie. But he was at the top of his professional game when World War II began, a novelist with wealth, international acclaim, and many works ahead of him. Mort's provocative portrait of one of America's greatest writers reveals why he went to sea and courted death in the high season of his most remarkable life.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 7
 Good reading --- for the English major November 9, 2009
Lance B. Hillsinger (San Luis Obispo)
Terry Mort, in "the Hemingway Patrols" gives us the historical background as why Hemingway, and other private boat owners, put to sea in a desperate attempt to hunt for, and even possibly engage, German U-boats.
However, there was simply too little drama about the "hunt" itself for the author to fill an entire book. To fill this void, Terry Mort does a good job of describing the military situation Hemingway found himself, but even with this background information, there was not enough material to fill a book.
To merit an entire book, Mort, by necessity, gives us Hemingway the man, his failed marriages, his adventures in the Spanish Civil War, and of course, Hemingway, the author.
If enjoy reading Hemingway, you will appreiciate Mort's literary references. However, this reviewer's experience with Hemingway consists of having read The Old Man and the Sea in high school. The author's literary references and quotes from Hemingway's writings, and especially his references to Hemingway's contemporaries in the literary world, were, to this reviewer, so much wasted effort. Former English majors might find such literary comparasions enjoyable reading, but this former Political Science major, like in high school years before, was left with the feeling of, "so what?"
Mort's reporting of Hemingway's failed marriages was interesting, if "gossipy." The recounting of the adventures in the Civil War was moderately interesting, but only tangentially related to the hunt for U-boats.
Mort deserves five stars for trying to get this reviewer to "appreciate literature" and Hemingway the man, but for this student of history, we are still left with a three star book.
 Incredible Research Slightly Marred By Intense Hero Worship November 1, 2009
Lily Bart (The House of Mirth)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Terry Mort's research into German U-Boats, the Nazi spy situation in Cuba, the atrocities of the Spanish Civil War, and the life and career of Ernest Hemingway's third wife Martha Gellhorn, all make this book incredibly fascinating. He really fills in the background on so many fascinating issues Hemingway only briefly touches on in his writing.
The only problem is that the research Mort does really works against his hero. Once the real U-Boat menace is described, both the deadly attacks and the dangers faced by the U-Boats themselves, Papa and his drinking buddies on the little fishing boat just look like amateurs playing at war. Terry Mort takes just about everything Hemingway ever did and said at face value -- even when the man was plainly drunk and making up excuses not to write. Make no mistake, however. When he did write to the best of his abilities, Hemingway was as good as the best. Just read a five page story like "A Clean Well Lighted Place" and you'll see what I mean.
But by the time this story begins, Hemingway had already begun the long, slow slide into alcoholism and suicidal despair. There's a rot, a softness in later books like FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS that Terry Mort either misses or chooses to ignore. He writes so well about subjects like navigation, the sea, and sailing basics, but when the subject is Hemingway's writing he sees nothing but good, better, best.
The real tragedy of Hemingway's life is that he became an alcoholic. And the truth Terry Mort avoids throughout the book is that in the end an alcoholic's first loyalty is to his disease. Hemingway had the raw materials of greatness in many fields. Early in his life he made successful gestures as a husband, a father, a literary man, and a military man, but by the time of this book his gestures were secondary to his main occupation, drinking.
My personal theory is that Hemingway was making semi-conscious attempts to commit suicide going back at least as far as the Twenties. And that his U-Boat patrols were a sort of half-hearted attempt to opt out of life by getting wiped out in "heroic" fashion. Mort admits his attack plan was "suicidal" but doesn't see the real meaning of that description. I'm not saying any of this to bring anybody down, and certainly not to demean Hemingway's greatest work. And I'm very well aware that it was only after all this was over that he wrote his final masterpiece, THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA, a book I really love. That book could certainly not have been written without the thousands of hours Hemingway spent in the Gulf. But the tragic side of his life, which only makes his literary achievements more admirable, is rigorously excluded from this book.
Naked on an Open Sea October 10, 2009
Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
If I hadn't just finished reading Mark Ott's so-called "eco-biography," A Sea of Change: Ernest Hemingway and the Gulf Stream--a Contextual Biography, then possibly I would have given Terry Mort's very similar book a higher review.
It actually has more biographical juice in it than the literary criticism of Ott, but both writers point to a Hemingway strangely similar to the John Steinbeck who was so fascinated with Doc Ricketts and the Sea of Cortez. That two of the great US novelists cared so much about the oceans and about undersea life is an odd coincidence, or maybe not a coincidence, for both men studied Thoreau and the proto-ecological movements of the previous century. Ott makes better use of the log Hemingway kept for the Pilar, showing how their formal qualities--the fragmentary denotation of nouns and adjectives as the watchers spotted a dolphin, for example, or encountered heavy rain--led to later changes in Hemingway's style--not all of them for the better. But here Mort is much mor knowledgeable about German U Boats and the dangers they posed to the Atlantic seaboard and to US naval efforts in general.
Almost as a subplot we have Martha Gellhorn and her bemused attitude towards Hemingway's defense action. She wrote, "Loving is a habit like another and requires something nearby for daily practice." Hemingway would have loved it if Martha had accompanied him on his U Boat expeditions, and maybe their marriage would have lasted longer if she wasn't so skeptical, but as Mort points out, Hemingway expected his disciples to toe the line 100 percent on all points or face his wrath, and Martha Gellhorn just wasn't built that way. Was she a careerist as some have charged? Certainly her alliance with Hemingway raised her profile no end, and she knew it.
Finally, Mort does expand our sense of Hemingway's quarrel with "honor." On the one hand he saw it as an antiquated concept responsible for the worst carnages of World War I; on the other, says Mort, he believed in T E Lawrence's line about "there could be no honor in a sure success, but much might be wrested from a sure defeat."
Great Read ! September 14, 2009
Richard Davis (San Diego, CA USA)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
As much WWII history - some with new information such as the 2002 discovery of the sunken U166 German submarine - as the weaving of literary criticism, the contexts of Hemingway's life and his hunt for U-boats. Was impressed that Scribner is the publisher - and could see why after reading it. As an amateur student of WW II's "Pacific War" and the air wars of Europe, I started to grasp a new understanding of WWII's merchant marine strategy and Atlantic submarine battle. The author's naval and Caribbean narratives were fresh, most readable and understandable. As a reader of Hemingway's novels with modest short story experience, I was fascinated how the author moved through Hemingway's early years, Paris and Spain to the Gulf Stream, Fifth Columns and the author's own takes on Hemingway. Most enjoyable - and informative.
Read It! September 6, 2009
A. Crawford
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
The Hemingway Patrols: Ernest Hemingway and His Hunt for U-Boats
This is a fascinating book--no need to have a particular interest in either Hemingway or the U-Boat patrols that were conducted off of our shores during WWII to enjoy it. Terry Mort has a way of transporting the reader into the center of the story. I was immediately immersed in Hemingway's huge multi-faceted world from the beginning. I felt as if I were on board the Pilar anticipating a surprise confrontation with the enemy at any moment, or relaxing with "Papa" and friends in his favorite watering holes in Key West and Havana sharing lots of drinks and enjoying his colorful and often grandiose stories, or at home(s) with him and his family. By the end of the book, which came much too quickly, I felt as if I had been given the rarest of intimate and really true glimpses into this brilliant and complex man and his thoughts, feelings, relationships and adventures. I will probably pick this book up again soon as I am already missing my time with him and the huge life that he led.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 7
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