Books: The Naked & the Drowned

SHARKS AND LITTLE FISH (432 pp.)—Wolfgang Ott—Pantheon ($4.95).

There is an outguessing game, called "Who gets it next?", which authors of combat novels play with their readers. Will it be the tough sergeant or the hero's buddy who doesn't make it back from his 23rd mission? No such game is played in Wolfgang Ott's grim first novel about the frightful death by bleeding of the German navy during World War II. There is no question of what will happen to his characters; they are all doomed, and who gets it next makes no difference.

There...

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