Though World War II is part of the Caribbean's popular imaginary and cultural production, World War II scholars have relegated the region to a footnote. It should not be so. As José Bolívar Fresneda shows, “From January 1942 to July 1943, 20 percent of all the allied shipping was sunk as a result of the one-sided naval battles that occurred there” (p. 1). Nazi Germany's aggressiveness in the Caribbean was strategic. In 1942 Aruba, Curaçao, and the Venezuelan oil fields and refineries provided “roughly 95 percent of the oil required to sustain the East Coast of the United States—59 million gallons” a day (p. 7). The supply of bauxite from British Guiana and Surinam was crucial for the war effort. Moreover, control of the Caribbean meant control of the Panama Canal, which since 1914 had allowed the United States Navy to control the eastern Pacific and the western Atlantic.Bolívar Fresneda examines the tense situation in the Caribbean created by the fall of France in 1940, which transformed the French colony of Martinique into a potential hostile power. This represented an early challenge to the United States because it meant that a “significant portion of the French Navy, along with $384 million in gold bullion, a sizeable contingent of marines, and a Vichy governor [Admiral Georges Robert] were inside the Monroe Doctrine boundaries” (p. 3). For those reasons the “Americans went so far as saying that should the French surrender the fleet [to Nazi Germany], it would permanently lose its friendship and goodwill” (p. 3). President Franklin Roosevelt, who used the 1930s to cultivate better relationships and alliances with Latin America, astutely “proposed that any western hemisphere claims of a victorious Germany should be handled in consultation with all the Latin American and Caribbean nations and be based on democratic principles” (pp. 182–83). US willingness to supply food to the French Caribbean colonies avoided a shooting war between the French and the British.Operation Neuland, the first German U-boat campaign after declaring war on the United States, lasted 28 days and resulted in 41 sunk ships with no German losses (they would not lose one ship in the Caribbean until June of that year). The campaign “virtually brought the inter-island trade to a standstill” (p. 36). By the end of 1942, the Germans had sunk “at least 336 ships in the Caribbean,” two-thirds of them in the west Caribbean (p. 37). But this is not the whole story. The decoding of a captured Enigma machine and its codebook, the reinforcement of the Allied antisubmarine force, and the introduction of asdic (sonar) along with more effective depth charges meant that the initially lopsided battle started to change by the summer. By the end of the year, Nazi Germany had lost six U-boats in this theater. By 1943 the U-boat threat remained, but the Allies had the upper hand.Puerto Rico played a crucial role in the US hemispheric defense strategy. Bolívar Fresneda quotes the remarks of Admiral William D. Leahy, then-governor of Puerto Rico, to the New York Times in 1940: “When defense works intended to make Puerto Rico the Gibraltar of the Caribbean are completed, it will be impossible for any overseas power to send an expeditionary force to the southern coast of the United States, Central America, or the northern coast of South America” (p. 25). The United States invested billions of dollars in infrastructure throughout the area even before it entered the war. That included the construction of Roosevelt Roads Naval Base (the Pearl Harbor of the Caribbean), which was considered as a potential provisional home base for the British government and free forces in exile if Germany won the Battle of Britain.Bolívar Fresneda studies the expropriations of lands in Vieques and Aguadilla for the development of army bases and naval and air stations and the effects of the war economy in the Caribbean. These effects included inflation, contraband, the training of civilian personnel for the war effort, racism and Jim Crow laws, and prostitution, with Jamaica becoming “a hotbed for sexual liaisons between soldiers and local women” (p. 165).The Caribbean Defense Command basically operated with Americans (including thousands of Puerto Ricans) garrisoning the British and Dutch Caribbean. The deployment of Puerto Rican soldiers throughout the region had long-term social, cultural, and political effects. Bolívar Fresneda, however, does not cover this topic in depth, perhaps the only shortcoming in this well-written and well-researched historical narrative.The book's epilogue explains the fate of the Caribbean colonial possessions in the postwar era. Once again, the region has been relegated to a backwater or a backyard of the United States. As I finish this review leaving Puerto Rico from Borinquen Airfield, a massive air base built during the World War II era, I don't fail to notice that World War II (and previous interventions) have marked the area's history and its development to this very day, as Bolívar Fresneda clearly shows.