The Hemingway Patrols: Ernest Hemingway and His Hunt for U-Boats by Terry Mort

The Hemingway Patrols: Ernest Hemingway and His Hunt for U-Boats Reviews

• 
  Bob Mustin

  The missus, ever on the lookout for books about Papa for me, found this one and surprised me with it. It shouldn’t surprise readers of my posts that Hemingway has influenced me as both a reader and a writer. He lived a legendary life that’s still full of bullshit stories, mischaracterizations, and false claims, and books such as this one work to sort truth from, well, fiction, where Hemingway is concerned.
  
  The book was published by Scribner, and I suspect they either recruited Mort to write this book, or they were excited that he wanted to and no doubt gave him access to people and papers that only Scribner would have. But to the book.
  
  Hemingway was part of a civilian volunteer force in the early 1940s that patrolled for German submarines. There’s very little information available about his tours; he kept a poor ship’s log, and he saw no subs, and the FBI was keeping a watchful eye on him because of his anti-fascist stance (which the little creep, J. Edgar Hoover, interpreted as pro-communist). So the approach Mort took here was to delve into Hemingway’s personal life and his writing during these years.
  
  Hemingway was married to the attractive and combustible Martha Gellhorn then, but their marriage was less than ideal - they were both strong personalities and competed as writers. Mort, a former Navy man, gives a lot of details about German subs operating in the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico - how dangerous they were, how difficult to detect and attack. And, of course, these futile sub-chasing experiences of Hemingway’s found their way into his books. Hemingway did search faithfully, did receive Navy help, and made much literary hay of these failed searches in Islands in the Stream and The Old Man and the Sea.
  
  It’s a fine, well researched book, the prose a bit uneven at times, but if you’re interested in the Hemingway era at all, you’ll find that Mort has done yeoman’s work in sifting intimate facts from Papa-induced legends regarding the WWII years of Hemingway’s life.
  
  My rating: 16 of 20 stars
  
  
  
• 
  Chris

  A real gem of a book about something that never really happened. This fascinating book pursue's Hemingway quixotic quest for U boats off Cuba during WW II. He actually performed these duties at much expense to his pocket as well as to the detriment of his third marriage. Book delves into naval warfare and profiles the U boats that were in the area at the time as well as Hemingway's life as a whole. An English student would find some superb analysis here of Hemingway's various works as well as his life. Hemingway had a big ego and could be his own worst enemy but he didn't have to do what he did; cruising the seas in a wooden boat hunting steel U boats-- at considerable risk to himself. Even though nothing happened it was still worthwhile and worthy of being brought to the public's attention. I'll be reading more of Terry Mort't books on Mark Twain and Jack London now.
• 
  John Nelson

  This book covers one of the more embarrassing parts of Hemingway's life - the year or so he spent playing war by claiming to patrol for German submarines in his fishing boat, while the real thing raged away on both fronts. To make things worse, the author appears not to have had enough material to fill more than a medium-length article. He filled the space by digressing into a number of other subjects, including but not limited to Hemingway's relationships with his wives, his time in Spain reporting on the Spanish Civil War, and the writing of For Whom the Bell Tolls. These detours give the book a jumpy, inconsistent quality. Almost any book about Hemingway will include at least some interesting material simply because of its subject, but this book falls far short of many others that are available. Two stars.
• 
  Michael Alligood

  Admittedly, I almost put this book down. I felt like I was sold a Spanish Civil War/U-boat history book instead of what the title insinuated, “The Hemingway Patrol.” However, after finish the book and reflecting back on the experience, Terry Mort wrote what needed to be read—providing a backdrop of Martha and Ernest’s relationship, the theater of wars transpiring in Spain (and subsequently in the Atlantic,) and Hemingway’s response to the events transpiring. Mort also preformed a yeoman’s job in explaining Hemingway’s insight to all the events through his later (posthumously released) work, i.e. Islands in the Stream.
• 
  Jeff Wilson

  I nice period-biography of Hemingway. It attempts to portray the reasons why Hemingway decided to engage in the hunting for U-Boats. I didn't know much about this time of his life and I'm happy to learn some of the details. The book is average in it's delivery I think because ultimately nothing exciting resulted from his patrols.
• 
  Alan Teder

  Considering that Hemingway and his Crook Factory cronies (I guess technically the term is for the land-based part of the operation, but I rather like it as an all-encompassing title) never actually encountered any U-Boats, Nazis, Falangists or Fifth-Columnists you might expect this to be a pretty thin volume with a lot of "fishfighting, fish slinging and fishshitting" to paraphrase Zelda Fitzgerald's famous summary of
  The Sun Also Rises. Hemingway's third wife Martha Gellhorn would definitely have had a few choice words of a similar nature and probably expressed quite a few of them at the time.
  
  I did actually enjoy Terry Mort's book quite a bit though due to his overall research on U-Boats and the Gulf and Caribbean theatres of World War II and on Hemingway's and Gellhorn's lives before and after their 1940-45 marriage. There were all kinds of tidbits and trivia that were interesting and Mort's description of sea-borne navigation by the stars was very evocative.
  
  The logs of Hemingway's boat Pilar were quite sloppily kept and no great revelations come from there. The single longest entry of a possible distant U-boat sighting is quoted and is quite matter-of-fact. Whether Hemingway was just getting rare war-time fuel for his pleasure boat, gathering research for a future book (which somewhat materialized in the final section of
  Islands in the Stream) or occasionally just creating a Boy's Own Adventure for his sons, his joy of the sea comes through in Terry Mort's book.
  
  So along with
  Erika Robuck's
  Hemingway's Girl,
  Paul Hendrickson's
  Hemingway's Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934-1961 and, as Norman Mailer said when introducing Ernest Hemingway's youngest son Gregory's
  Papa: A Personal Memoir, this is another book you can put in the column of "finally a book about Hemingway where you don't have to decide he is a son-of-a-bitch."
  
  p.s. If you do want some Hemingway vs. Nazi spies there is always the fictional
  The Crook Factory
  
  
  
• 
  Andy

  Ernest Hemingway was a drunk and a womanizer and a blowhard, and during WWII, his government-supported hunt for U-boats off the north coast of Cuba might have been the perfect opportunity to take a holiday from his crumbling marriage while hunting for prized marlin and carousing on the taxpayers’ dollar. But perhaps, just this once, Hemingway’s critics were wrong about him.
  
  Mort’s close examination of Hemingway’s letters and journals shows that Hemingway took the planning and execution of his mission very seriously, and he carried out his patrol at probably great expense to his beloved boat Pilar and to his personal pocketbook. As Hemingway clearly understood, should he have actually encountered a U-boat in his small wooden fishing boat, his and his crew’s lives would have been in certain danger. At the time, U-boat attacks in the Gulf Stream had become increasingly vicious and commonplace, a fact known to Hemingway but vigorously hushed-up by the U.S. government. And Hemingway’s plan to attack a U-boat, to attempt to pull alongside and toss grenades down the sub’s conning town, was positively suicidal.
  
  The book contains a photo of Hemingway with his young son Jack seated next to him in the boat. Hemingway has apparently dozed off. In one hand he holds an empty cocktail glass, and in the other arm, a few inches from his son, he cradles a Thompson submachine gun. Hemingway was still Hemingway, of course, but Mort’s book certainly made me wonder if, under several layers of fabrication perhaps, Hemingway might have actually resembled some elements of his public self-image.
  
• 
  Bert

  I have no idea why this book didn't snag better critical reviews, or sell in greater numbers. I liked "The Monet Murders," and so a Google search pointed me to this nonfiction selection. Hemingway was a complicated man, not just a writer. One chapter of his life is obscured by his literary successes. For a year and a half in 1942 and 1943 he left the comfortable lifestyle of his home in Cuba to search for German U-Boats in his 38' wooden fishing boat. The story is reminiscent of the theme in "The Old Man and the Sea," except here Hemingway shares no mutual respect for his prey. My rating: ☆☆☆☆☆
• 
  Tom Oscanyan

  I'm struggling with this one. On one hand, I enjoy the parallels to Hemingway's work and learning more about his life. On the other, I'm annoyed to no end that Hemingway essentially accomplished nothing in his "hunt" and I'm trying to figure out how someone can write 250 pages about something that didn't really happen.
  
  I could write a book about how I almost joined the Coast Guard, or nearly became a pilot - but I assume that I'll be remembered for what I actually accomplished, not my intentions.
  
  Not done with it yet; perhaps the last chapters offer more....
• 
  bibliotekker Holman

  During a roughly one year period from 1942-43 Hemingway used his famous fishing boat Pilar for anti-submarine patrols along the northern coast of Cuba. While this in itself is interesting , the author goes deeper by delving into Hemingway's motivations by examining clues in his literature and literary characters.
• 
  Stephen

  A curious book which combines information about World War 2 in the Caribbean and Gulf with biographical-literary musing. The author explores Hemingway's motive for ostensibly risking his life to trawl for U-boats, using his turbulent relationships and his fictional characters. This is mainly of interest to those who can't get enough of Hemingway.