By 1941, the Germans had achieved an extraordinary military feat: operating with virtual impunity, their U-boats had converted the western Atlantic and Caribbean into cemeteries of Allied shipping. During the most active phase, February 1942 to August 1943, Admiral Dönitz’s “wolf packs” had sunk half the 5,600 merchant ships existent in 1939, and were keeping 800,000 Allied sailors and airmen tied up. The Allies had to commit 30 warships to each of Dönitz’s U-boats. Incredibly, the Germans had done this without a single base west of France’s Bay of Biscay. Logistical difficulties meant that there were at most five U-boats operating at any one time in Caribbean waters, yet by 1942, the so-called “Battle of the Caribbean” was in full force. With vital materials such as petroleum and bauxite transported from the Caribbean on slow-moving bottoms, areas such as those around Trinidad represented easy hunting grounds for the increasingly daring submariners. The Germans had given the lie to the supposed geopolitical hegemony implied by the unilateral Monroe Doctrine, possession of the Panama Canal, and a string of bases running from Key West, Florida through Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
How the United States finally established its military dominance in the area is the story of this beautifully documented book. While certainly not scintillating reading, it is a gold mine of new facts, interpretations, and insights about an era of Caribbean history—indeed, a watershed era—too long ignored.
Baptiste is especially good in weaving the various strands of political, economic, psychological, and geopolitical interests of the United States, the European colonial empires (Holland, Britain, and France), and strategically located Latin American countries such as Brazil and Venezuela into a complex web of open diplomacy and subterfuge. Particularly interesting and revealing about what was and what might have been, had the Axis won, are his three chapters on the diplomatic battle over the French West Indies. While to the United States they were merely stepping stones toward the goals of operation “Torch” (the conquest of North Africa), to the Antilleans it was a matter of liberty vs. a new form of twentieth-century slavery. This was indeed a just war, and Baptiste has given us an admirable account of one of its important battles.
