Shadow Voyage: The Extraordinary Wartime Escape of the Legendary SS Bremen

The retired naval captain who wrote K-19 and Hostile Waters now offers another fine sea story. One of the crack German liners of the interwar period, Bremen was in New York as war loomed, and American Customs was unable to find a legal case for holding her until the British could block her path. Escaping to sea, she took refuge in Murmansk, a Russian Arctic port then friendly thanks to the Russo-German treaty. Three months later, with a skeleton crew, she steamed for home. On the way, the British submarine Salmon intercepted her, but the submarine's captain refused to fire on a liner that was apparently unarmed and not escorted. Her triumph was short-lived, however, because an arsonist destroyed her at pierside in 1941. One suspects Huchthausen of some reconstructed dialogue, but the thoroughness of his research is above reproach; it even includes many German sources not commonly studied and interviews with surviving Bremen crew and their descendants. A combination of espionage and sea story that reads like a thriller, the book will also throw new light on a good many aspects of WW II, such as the day-to-day operations of the German merchant marine (and Nazi efforts to infiltrate it) and the workings of the Russo-German rapprochement in 1939-40. This is the kind of book the author's readers have come to expect-and receive again.