Grant, Fulton "Above the Convoy"

This longish World War 2 story has all the elements of pulp fiction: a dastardly Nazi saboteur posing as an American naval officer, a flawed-but-courageous American naval officer (he drinks too much) redeemed by sisterly love, whizbang technology employed by both American forces (a forerunner to radar is posited) and by the Nazis (Grant imagines an immense pontoon island in mid-Atlantic that serves as an underwater port for German U-boats and – above the waves – as a military airport for Luftwaffe bombers) and even strange medical experimentation (ever hear of “Formula K-11"? Well, our hero gets a shot of it!). All these plot devices converge on Grant’s main interest: the North Atlantic convoy system, and how German wolf packs and Luftwaffe bombers were coming close in early 1941 to putting the convoys out of business. The story comes to a climax in mid-Atlantic when our hero, in an all-plastic(!) U.S. Navy PBY seaplane, utilizes his version of radar to locate a lurking Nazi wolf pack and then alert the convoy that the U-boats are tracking, thus saving the day. What’s of interest to the modern day reader are Grant’s unabashed pro-British sentiments and his portrayal of Germans as standard issue traitors, murderers and louts. The United States may not have been in the War in early 1941, but stories such as “Above the Convoy” dramatized the Battle of the Atlantic t and pointed the way to later American involvement in the conflict.