Battle of the Atlantic (1939–1945)

Battle of the Atlantic Part of World War II Officers on the bridge of an escorting British destroyer keep a sharp look out for enemy submarines, October 1941. Date September 3, 1939 – May 7, 1945 Location Atlantic Ocean, North Sea, Irish Sea, Labrador Sea, Gulf of St. Lawrence, Caribbean Sea, Gulf of Mexico, Outer Banks, Arctic Ocean Result Allied victory Belligerents  United Kingdom Newfoundland  Canada  United States (1941–45)  Norway Poland Free French Forces  Belgium  Brazil (1942–45)  Netherlands  France (1939–40) Germany Italy (1940–43) Empire of Japan (1942–44) Commanders and leaders Sir Percy Noble Sir Max K. Horton Percy W. Nelles Leonard W. Murray Ernest J. King  Erich Raeder  Karl Dönitz Martin Harlinghausen (Fliegerführer Atlantik) Casualties and losses 30,264 merchant sailors 3,500 merchant vessels 175 warships 28,000 sailors 783 submarines

Atlantic Campaign Caribbean – North America – Gibraltar – River Plate – Altmark – Texel – SC 7 – HX 84 – HX 106 – Berlin – Action of 4 April 1941 – Denmark Strait – Bismarck – Channel Dash – Donnerkeil – St. Lawrence – Laconia – PQ 17 – Casablanca – Barents Sea – North Cape – Second Happy Time – Lyme Bay – Operation Teardrop – Action of 13 May 1944 – Point Judith Timeline Canadian military actions in the Second World War Western Europe France, 1940 - Dieppe - Spitzbergen Normandy, 1944 - Juno Beach - Le Mesnil-Patry - Windsor - Charnwood - Atlantic - Verrières Ridge - Spring - Totalize - Tractable - Falaise - Le Havre - Boulogne - Calais, 1944 - Dunkirk, 1944 - Scheldt - Rhineland - Northern Netherlands - Arnhem, 1945 Italy Sicily - Avalanche - Bernhardt Line - Moro River - Monte Cassino - Shingle - Gothic Line Far East/Pacific Hong Kong - Aleutian Islands Other campaigns North America - Atlantic (1939–1945)

The Battle of the Atlantic was the longest continuous military campaign^[1][2] of World War II running from 1939 through to the defeat of Germany in 1945. It was at its height from mid-1940 through to the end of 1943. The Battle of the Atlantic pitted U-boats and other warships of the German Navy (Kriegsmarine) against Allied convoys. The convoys of merchant ships, coming mainly from North America and the South Atlantic and going to the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union, were protected for the most part by the British and Canadian navies and air forces. These forces were aided by ships and aircraft of the United States from September 13, 1941.^[3] The Germans were joined by submarines of the Italian Royal Navy (Regia Marina) after Italy entered the war on June 10, 1940. On occasion Imperial Japanese Navy submarines were dispatched to the Atlantic.

As an island nation, the United Kingdom was highly dependent on imported goods. Britain required more than a million tons of imported material per week in order to be able to survive and fight. In essence, the Battle of the Atlantic was a tonnage war: the Allied struggle to supply Britain, and the Axis struggle to cut off the merchant shipping which enabled Britain to keep fighting. From 1942 onwards, the Germans also sought to prevent the build-up of Allied supplies and equipment in the British Isles in preparation for the invasion of occupied Europe. The defeat of the U-boat threat was a pre-requisite for pushing back the Germans. The outcome of the battle was a strategic victory for the Allies—the German blockade failed—but at great cost: 3500 merchant ships and 175 warships were sunk for the loss of 783 U-boats.

The name "Battle of the Atlantic", coined by Winston Churchill in 1941, covers a campaign that began on the first day of the European war and lasted for six years, involved thousands of ships and stretched over hundreds of miles of the vast ocean and seas in a succession of more than 100 convoy battles and perhaps 1,000 single-ship encounters. Tactical advantage switched back and forth over the six years as new weapons, tactics and counter-measures were developed by both sides. The British and their allies gradually gained the upper hand, driving the German surface raiders from the ocean by the end of 1942 and decisively defeating the U-boats in a series of convoy battles between March and May 1943. New German submarines arrived in 1945, but they were too late to affect the course of the war.

Early skirmishes (September 1939 – May 1940)

In 1939, the Kriegsmarine lacked the strength to challenge the combined British Royal Navy and French Navy (Marine Nationale) for command of the sea. Instead, German naval strategy relied on commerce raiding using capital ships, armed merchant cruisers, submarines and aircraft. Many German warships were already at sea when war was declared, including most of the available U-boats and the 'pocket battleships' (or Panzerschiff) Deutschland and the Admiral Graf Spee which had sailed out into the Atlantic in August. These ships began an immediate assault on British and French shipping. U-30 sank the liner SS Athenia within hours of the declaration of war—in breach of her orders not to sink passenger ships. The U-boat fleet, which was to dominate so much of the Battle of the Atlantic, was small at the beginning of the war, and many of the 57 available U-boats were the small and short-range Type II U-boats which were useful primarily for mine-laying and operations in British coastal waters. Much of the early German anti-shipping activity involved minelaying by destroyers, aircraft and U-boats off British ports.

With the outbreak of war, the British and French immediately began a blockade of Germany, although this had little immediate effect on German industry. The Royal Navy quickly introduced a convoy system for the protection of trade that gradually extended out from the British Isles, eventually reaching as far as Panama, Bombay and Singapore. Convoys allowed the Royal Navy to concentrate its escorts near the one place the U-boats were guaranteed to be found — the convoys.

Some British naval officers, and particularly the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, sought a more 'offensive' strategy. The Royal Navy formed anti-submarine hunting groups based on aircraft carriers to patrol the shipping lanes in the Western Approaches and hunt for German U-boats. But this strategy was deeply flawed because a U-boat, with its tiny silhouette, was always likely to spot the surface warships and submerge long before it was sighted. The carrier aircraft were little help. Although they could spot submarines on the surface, at this stage of the war they had no adequate weapons to attack them. Any submarine found by an aircraft was long gone by the time surface warships arrived. The hunting group strategy proved a disaster within days. On September 14, 1939, Britain's most modern carrier, HMS Ark Royal, narrowly avoided being sunk when three torpedoes from U-39 exploded prematurely. U-39 was promptly sunk by the escorting destroyers, becoming the first U-boat loss of the war. Failing to learn the lesson, another carrier, HMS Courageous, was sunk three days later by U-29.

Escort destroyers hunting for U-boats continued to be a prominent, but misguided, feature of British anti-submarine strategy for the first year of the war. The U-boats nearly always proved elusive, and the convoys, denuded of cover, were put at even greater risk.

German success in sinking the Courageous was surpassed a month later when Günther Prien in U-47 penetrated the British base at Scapa Flow and sank the old battleship HMS Royal Oak at anchor. Prien immediately became a war hero in Germany.

In the South Atlantic, British forces were stretched by the cruise of the "Pocket Battleship" Admiral Graf Spee, which sank nine merchant ships of 50,000 tons in the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans during the first three months of war. The British and French formed a series of hunting groups including 3 battlecruisers, 3 aircraft carriers and 15 cruisers to seek the raider and her sister Deutschland which was operating in the North Atlantic. These hunting groups scoured the oceans for months with no success until the Graf Spee was caught off the mouth of the River Plate by an inferior British force. After suffering damage in the subsequent action, she took shelter in neutral Montevideo harbour and the ship was soon scuttled in December 1939.

After an initial burst of activity, the Atlantic campaign quieted down. Karl Dönitz had planned a maximum submarine effort for the first month of the war, with almost all the available U-boats out on patrol in September. That level of operations could not be sustained because the boats needed to return to harbour to refuel, re-stock and refit. The harsh winter of 1939–40, which froze over many of the Baltic ports, seriously hampered the German offensive by trapping several new U-boats in the ice. Finally, Hitler's plans to invade Norway and Denmark in the spring of 1940 led to the withdrawal of the fleet's surface warships and most of the ocean-going U-boats to prepare for fleet operations in Operation Weserübung.

The resulting Norwegian campaign revealed serious flaws in the magnetic influence pistol of the U-boats' principal weapon, the torpedo. Although the narrow fjords gave U-boats little room for maneuver, the concentration of British warships, troopships and supply ships provided countless opportunities for the U-boats to attack. Time and again, U-boat captains tracked British targets and fired only to watch the ships sail on unharmed as the torpedoes exploded prematurely or not at all, or ran straight underneath the target. Not a single British warship was sunk by a U-boat in more than 20 attacks. As the news spread through the U-boat fleet, it began to undermine morale. The director in charge of torpedo development continued to claim it was the crews' fault. In early 1942 the problems were determined to be magnetic problems from the high latitude and a slow leakage of high-pressure air from the submarine into the torpedo's depth regulation gear. Eventually the Kriegsmarine copied some captured British torpedoes which were much more reliable.

Submarine warfare

Vizeadmiral Karl Dönitz, commander of German U-boats (BdU), 1935–1943; Commander-in-Chief of the German Navy, 1943–1945.

On September 1, 1939, the day Germany attacked Poland, then Commodore Karl Dönitz, Leader U-Boats, submitted to Admiral Erich Raeder a memorandum on his vision of a future war at sea: 300 U-boats could bring Britain to her knees by way of total war against the island nation's vital overseas commerce.^[4]

Dönitz had advocated a system known as the Rudeltaktik or wolf pack, in which groups of U-boats would attack en masse in mid-ocean and overwhelm any defending warships. While the warships engaged in a cat-and-mouse hunt with individual submarines, the rest of the submarines in the wolf pack would be unmolested, and able to attack the merchant shipping with impunity. In order to be effective, Dönitz calculated that he would need 300 of the latest Atlantic Boats (the Type VII), which would create enough havoc among British shipping that Britain would be knocked out of the war.

This was in stark contrast to the traditional view of submarine deployment up until then, in which the submarine was seen as a lone ambusher, waiting outside an enemy port to attack ships entering and leaving. This had been a very successful tactic used by British submarines in the Baltic and Bosporus during World War I, but it could not be successful if port approaches were well patrolled. There had also been naval theorists who held that the submarine should be attached to a main fleet and used in a similar way to a destroyer—this had been tried by the Germans at Jutland with poor results since underwater communications were in their infancy. The Japanese also adhered to the idea of a fleet submarine and never used their submarines either as port blockaders or for convoy interdiction. However, the submarine was still looked upon by much of the naval world as a "dishonorable" weapon, compared to the prestige attached to capital ships. This was true in the Kriegsmarine as well, and the Grand Admiral, Erich Raeder, successfully lobbied for the money to be spent on capital ships instead.

The Royal Navy's main anti-submarine weapon before the war was the inshore patrol craft, armed with hydrophones, a small gun and depth charges. The British Royal Navy, like most navies, had not considered anti-submarine warfare as a tactical subject during the 1920s and 1930s. Unrestricted submarine warfare had been outlawed by the Treaty of Versailles; anti-submarine warfare was seen as 'defensive' rather than dashing; and many naval officers believed that anti-submarine work was drudgery similar to mine-sweeping. Though fast destroyers also carried depth charges, it was expected that these ships would be used in fleet actions rather than coastal patrol, so they were not extensively trained in their use.

'Happy Time' (June 1940 – February 1941)

The German occupation of Norway in April 1940, the rapid conquest of the Low Countries and France in May and June and the Italian entry into the war on the Axis side in June transformed the war at sea in general and the Atlantic campaign in particular in three main ways:

Submarine base in Lorient.

• Britain lost her biggest ally. In 1940, the French Navy was the fourth largest in the world. Only a handful of French ships joined the Free French Forces and fought against Germany, though these were later joined by a few Canadian-built corvettes which played a small but important role in the campaign. With the French fleet removed from the campaign, the Royal Navy was stretched even further. Italy's declaration of war in June meant that Britain also had to reinforce her Mediterranean Fleet and establish a new squadron at Gibraltar, known as Force H, to replace the French fleet in the Western Mediterranean.
• The U-boats gained direct access to the Atlantic. Since the English Channel was relatively shallow and blockaded with minefields by mid-1940, U-boats were ordered not to traverse it and instead travel around the British Isles to reach the most profitable hunting grounds. The French bases at Brest, Lorient, La Pallice and La Rochelle were about 450 miles (720 km) closer to the Atlantic than the German bases on the North Sea. This greatly extended the range of U-boats in the Atlantic, enabling them to attack convoys further west and letting them spend longer time on patrol, doubling the effective size of the U-boat force. The Germans later built huge fortified concrete bunkers for the U-boats known as U-boat pens in the French Atlantic bases, which were impervious to Allied bombing until Barnes Wallis developed his tallboy bomb. From early July, U-boats began returning to the new French bases when they completed their Atlantic patrols.
• British destroyers were diverted from the Atlantic. The Norwegian Campaign and the German invasion of the Low Countries and France imposed a heavy strain on the Royal Navy's destroyer flotillas. The Royal Navy withdrew many of its older destroyers from the convoy routes to support the Norwegian operations in April and May and then diverted them to the English Channel to support the withdrawal from Dunkirk. By the summer of 1940 Britain faced a serious threat of invasion. The destroyers were held in the channel where they would be ready to repel a German invasion fleet. The destroyers suffered heavily in these operations when they were exposed to air attack by the Luftwaffe's Fliegerführer Atlantik. Seven destroyers were lost in the Norwegian campaign, another six at the Battle of Dunkirk and a further 10 in the Channel and North Sea between May and July, many of them to air attack because they lacked an adequate anti-aircraft armament.^[5] Dozens of other destroyers were damaged.

The completion of Hitler's campaign in Western Europe meant that the U-boats that had been withdrawn for the Norwegian campaign were now released from fleet operations and returned to the war on trade. So at the very time that the number of U-boats on patrol in the Atlantic began to increase, the number of escorts available for the convoys, which consisted of between 30 and 70 mostly unarmed merchant ships, ^[6] was greatly reduced. The only consolation for the British was that the large merchant fleets of occupied countries like Norway and the Netherlands were under British control. Britain occupied Iceland and the Faeroe Islands to gain bases for themselves and prevent the countries from falling into enemy hands following the German occupation of Denmark and Norway.

It was in these circumstances that Winston Churchill, who had become Prime Minister on May 10, 1940, first wrote to the U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt to request the loan of 50 obsolete U.S. destroyers. This eventually led to the loan (effectively a sale but painted as a loan for political reasons) of the 50 old destroyers under the Destroyers for Bases Agreement in exchange for 99-year leases on certain British bases in Newfoundland, Bermuda and the West Indies, a financially advantageous bargain for the United States, whose population was opposed to entering the war and whose politicians considered that Britain and her allies might actually lose. But the first of these destroyers was only taken over by their British and Canadian crews in September and all needed to be rearmed and fitted with ASDIC (i.e. active sonar). It was to be many months before the relatively obsolete destroyers began to contribute to the campaign.

A U-boat shells a merchant ship which has remained afloat after being torpedoed.

The early U-boat operations from the French bases were spectacularly successful. This was the heyday of the great U-boat aces like Günther Prien of U-47, Otto Kretschmer of U-99, Joachim Schepke of U-100, Engelbert Endrass of U-46, Viktor Oehrn of U-37 and Heinrich Bleichrodt of U-48. The U-boat crews became heroes at home in Germany. From June until October 1940, over 270 Allied ships were sunk: this period was referred to by U-boat crews as "Die Glückliche Zeit", the Happy Time^[7].

The biggest challenge for the U-boats was to find the convoys in the vastness of the ocean. The Germans had a handful of very long-range Focke-Wulf 200 Condor aircraft based at Bordeaux and Stavanger which were used for reconnaissance, but being essentially a converted civilian airliner, this was a stop-gap solution. Due to ongoing friction between the Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine, the primary source of convoy sightings was the U-boats themselves. Since a submarine's bridge is very close to the water, their range of visual detection was quite limited.

In response to this the British applied the techniques of Operational Research to the problem and came up with series of counter-intuitive solutions to the problem of convoy engagements. It was realised that the area of a convoy increased by the square of its perimeter and that in terms of location a large convoy was as difficult to locate as a small one.

Large convoys with a weak escort (in terms of being more difficult to find) were thus safer than small convoys with a strong escort.

Instead of attacking the Allied convoys singly, the German U-boats were encouraged to work in packs (Rudels) coordinated centrally by radio. German codebreaking efforts at B-Dienst had succeeded in decyphering the British Naval Cypher No. 3, allowing the Germans to estimate where and when convoys could be expected. The boats spread out into a long patrol line that bisected the path of the Allied convoy routes. Once in position, the crew scanned the horizon with binoculars looking for ship's masts or smoke, or used hydrophones to pick up the propeller noises of the convoys. When one boat sighted a convoy, it would report the sighting to U-boat headquarters before tracking it and waiting for other boats to come up, typically at night. Instead of being faced by single submarines, the convoy escorts then had to cope with groups of up to half a dozen U-boats attacking simultaneously. The most daring commanders, like Otto Kretschmer, penetrated the convoy's escort screen and attacked from within the columns of merchantmen in the convoy. The escort vessels, which were too few in number and often lacking in endurance, had no answer to multiple submarines attacking on the surface at night as their ASDIC detection apparatus only worked well against underwater targets. Early British marine radar, working in the metric bands, lacked target discrimination and range.

Pack tactics were first used successfully in September and October 1940, to devastating effect in a series of convoy battles. On September 21, Convoy HX 72 of 42 merchantmen was attacked by a pack of four U-boats, losing eleven ships sunk and two damaged over two nights. In October, the slow convoy SC 7, with a weak escort of two sloops and two corvettes, was overwhelmed, losing 59% of its ships. The battle for HX 79 in the following days was in many ways worse for the escorts than that for SC 7. The loss of a quarter of the convoy without any loss to the U-boats despite a strong escort of two destroyers, four corvettes, three trawlers and a minesweeper demonstrated the effectiveness of the German tactics against the inadequate British anti-submarine technology of the time. Finally on December 1, seven German U-boats and three Italian submarines caught Convoy HX 90, sinking 10 ships and damaging three others. The success of pack tactics against these convoys encouraged Admiral Dönitz to adopt the wolf pack as his primary tactic.

Nor were the U-boats the only threat to the convoys. Following some early experience in support of the war at sea during Operation Weserübung, the Luftwaffe contributed small numbers of aircraft to the Battle of the Atlantic from 1940 onwards. These were primarily long-range reconnaissance planes, first with Focke-Wulf 200, and later Junkers 290 maritime patrol aircraft. At first, the Focke-Wulf aircraft were very successful, claiming 365,000 tons of shipping in early 1941. These planes were few in number, however, and were also directly under Luftwaffe control; the pilots had little specialized training for anti-shipping warfare.

Italian submarines in the Atlantic

The Germans too received help from their allies. From August 1940, a flotilla of 27 Italian submarines was based at the BETASOM base in Bordeaux to attack Allied shipping in the Atlantic. The submarines of the Italian Royal Navy (Regia Marina), designed for fleet operations in the Mediterranean, were less well suited to Atlantic convoy operations than the smaller German U-boats. Even so, over the next few years, the 32 Italian submarines that operated in the Atlantic sank 109 ships of 593,864 tons.^[8] The Italians were also successful with their use of 'human torpedo' miniature underwater chariots, which disabled several British ships at Gibraltar.

Despite these successes, the Italian intervention was not favourably regarded by Dönitz, who characterised them as "inadequately disciplined" and "unable to remain calm in the face of the enemy". They were unable to cooperate in wolf pack tactics or even reliably to report contacts or weather conditions and their area of operation was moved away from those of the Germans.^[9]

ASDIC

The development of ASDIC, now known as active sonar, was as crucial to the Battle of the Atlantic as the development of radar was to the Battle of Britain, and in both cases it was the British who made the crucial breakthroughs. The fact that sound is transmitted effectively by water was well known during the First World War, and microphones placed in water (hydrophones) had been used to listen for submarines at that time. Natural noises and echoes had also been detected using this technique, but the British were the first to develop a working directional 'sound searchlight'. A crucial development was the integration of the ASDIC with a plotting table and weapon into a complete anti-submarine warfare system.

The acronym ASDIC is often thought to derive from the initials of the British Allied Submarine Detection Investigation Committee; this was given as the official explanation when the system became public knowledge, but it now appears that this was an explanation constructed after the event—no trace of this committee has ever been found. Instead the explanation seems to be that during the secret development of this weapon scientists were encouraged to speak in coded form to avoid spies gleaning the least bit of knowledge. Thus work on sound propagation (ultrasonics) became ASD-ics (anti-submarine detection-ics)

ASDIC comprised a transducer housed in a dome beneath the ship that sent out a narrow beam of sound in a series of pulses that would reflect back from a submerged object within a maximum range of about 3,000 yards (2,700 m). The dome was open to the sea and was to ensure the water around the transducer was relatively still as fast moving water would destroy any signal. The echo produced an accurate range and bearing to the target. But differences in the temperatures at different depths could create false echoes, as could currents, eddies and schools of fish, so ASDIC needed experienced operators to be effective. ASDIC was only effective at low speeds. Above 15 knots (28 km/h) or so, the noise of the ship going through the water drowned out the echoes.

The early wartime Royal Navy procedure was to sweep the ASDIC in an arc from one side of the ship's course to the other, stopping the transducer every few degrees to send out a signal. Several ships searching together would be used in a line, a mile or a mile and a half apart. If an echo was detected, and if the operator identified it as a submarine, the ship would be pointed towards the target and would close at a moderate speed, the submarine's range and bearing would be plotted over time to determine course and speed as the ship closed to within 1,000 yards (910 m). Once it was decided to attack the ship would close more rapidly, using the target's course and speed data to adjust the course. The intention was for the ship to pass a little way ahead of the submarine, then depth charges would be rolled from chutes in the stern at even intervals and depth-charge throwers would fire further charges some forty meters out on either side. The intention was to lay a depth charge 'pattern' like an elongated diamond, hopefully with the submarine somewhere inside the pattern. But to effectively disable a submarine a depth charge would have to explode within about six meters, in depth as well as in plane. Since early ASDIC equipment was poor on determining depth it was usual to vary the depth settings on part of the pattern.

There were disadvantages to the early versions of this system. Exercises in anti-submarine warfare had been restricted to one or two destroyers hunting a single submarine whose starting position was known in daylight and calm weather, rather than stormy conditions. German U-boats could dive far deeper than British or American submarines, to well below the deepest setting on the British depth charges (A dive depth of over 700 feet (210 m) against a maximum depth charge setting of 350 feet). More importantly, early ASDIC sets could not look directly down, so the operator lost 'sight' of the U-Boat during the final stages of the attack, a time when the submarine would certainly be manoeuvring rapidly. The explosion of a depth-charge also disturbed the water so that ASDIC contact was very difficult to regain if the first attack had failed.

The belief that ASDIC had solved the submarine problem, the acute budgetary pressures of the Great Depression and the pressing demands for many other types of re-armament meant that little was spent on anti-submarine ships or weapons. Most British naval spending, and many of the best officers, went into the battlefleet. And critically, the British expected that, like the First World War, German submarines would be coastal craft, and only threaten harbour approaches. As a result, the Royal Navy entered the Second World War in 1939 without enough long-distance escorts to protect ocean shipping, and there were no officers with experience of long-range anti-submarine warfare. The situation in the Royal Air Force's Coastal Command was even more dire, where patrol aircraft could typically only machine-gun the spot where they saw a submarine dive.

Great surface raiders

HMS Hood steaming into battle against the German battleship Bismarck in 1941

Despite these successes, the U-boat was still not recognized as the primary threat to the North Atlantic convoys. With the exception of men like Dönitz, most naval officers on both sides regarded surface warships as the ultimate commerce destroyers.

For the first half of 1940, there were no German surface raiders in the Atlantic because the German Fleet had been concentrated for the invasion of Norway, and the sole pocket battleship raider, the Admiral Graf Spee, had been stopped at the Battle of the River Plate by an inferior and outgunned British squadron. But from the summer of 1940 a small steady stream of warships and armed merchant raiders set sail from Germany for the Atlantic.

The power of a raider against a convoy was demonstrated by the fate of Convoy HX 84 which was found by the German pocket battleship Admiral Scheer on November 5, 1940. Scheer quickly sank five ships and damaged several others as the convoy scattered. Only the sacrifice of the escorting Armed Merchant Cruiser HMS Jervis Bay and failing light allowed the rest of the convoy to escape. The British now suspended the North Atlantic convoys and the Home Fleet put to sea to try to intercept Scheer. The search failed and Scheer disappeared into the South Atlantic. She reappeared in the Indian Ocean the following month.

Other German surface raiders now began to make their presence felt. On Christmas Day, 1940, the cruiser Admiral Hipper attacked the troop convoy WS 5A, but was driven off by the escorting cruisers.^[10] Hipper had more success two months later, on February 12, 1941, when she found the unescorted Convoy SLS 64 of 19 ships and sank seven of them.^[11] In January, 1941, the formidable (and fast) German battlecruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, which outgunned any Allied ship that could catch them, had put to sea from Germany to raid the shipping lanes in Operation Berlin. With so many German raiders at large in the Atlantic, the British were forced to provide battleship escorts to as many convoys as possible. This twice saved convoys from slaughter by the German battlecruisers. In February, the presence of the old battleship HMS Ramillies deterred an attack on Convoy HX 106. A month later, Convoy SL 67 was saved by the presence of the WW1 battleship HMS Malaya.

In May, the Germans mounted the most ambitious raid of all: Operation Rheinübung. The new battleship Bismarck and the cruiser Prinz Eugen put to sea to attack the convoys. Forewarned by intelligence, a British squadron intercepted the raiders off Iceland. The resulting Battle of the Denmark Strait was a propaganda disaster for the British, with the loss of the battlecruiser HMS Hood. Of the 1,418 crew, only three men survived.^[12] However, Bismarck suffered damage to her bow that reduced her fuel supply and forced her to abort the operation. She was close to escaping back to France, but thanks to a disabling torpedo hit on her rudders from a Fairey Swordfish torpedo bomber from the carrier Ark Royal, after being found by an American-built and flown Catalina Flying boat. The Bismarck was caught and sunk by the Home Fleet three days later, with the loss of all but 110 of her crew of some 2,300 men.^[13] Her sinking marked the end of the warship raids. The advent of long-range search aircraft, notably the unglamorous but versatile PBY Catalinas, almost immediately neutralized surface raiders, and eventually do the same to the U-boats as radar and more aircraft entered the battle.

The Channel Dash, the return of the Scharnhorst, Gneisenau and Prinz Eugen to Germany in February 1942, although an embarrassment for the British, marked the end of the German surface threat in the Atlantic. The loss of the Bismarck, Arctic convoys and the perceived invasion threat to Norway had persuaded Hitler to withdraw.

War had come too early for the German Plan Z naval expansion plan to be close to completion. The concept of battleships powerful enough to destroy any convoy escort, with accompanying ships able to annihilate the convoy, was never achieved. Though the number of ships the warship raiders sank was relatively small when compared with the losses to U-boats, mines and aircraft, their raids severely disrupted the Allied convoy system and reduced the supplies that the British imported.

Escorts strike back (March 1941 – May 1941)

Historical plaque at the Bedford Basin in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, a major convoy collection area.

The disastrous convoy battles of October 1940 forced a change in British tactics. The most important of these was the introduction of permanent escort groups to improve the co-ordination and effectiveness of ships and men in battle. British efforts were helped by a gradual increase in the number of escort vessels available as the old ex-American destroyers and the new British- and Canadian-built Flower class corvettes were now coming into service in numbers. Many of these ships became part of the huge expansion of the Royal Canadian Navy, which grew from a handful of destroyers at the outbreak of war to take an increasing share of convoy escort duty. Others of the new ships were manned by Free French, Norwegian and Dutch crews, but these were a tiny minority of the total number, and directly under British command. By 1941 American public opinion had begun to swing against Germany, but the war was still essentially Great Britain and the Empire against Germany.

Initially, the new escort groups consisted of two or three destroyers and half a dozen corvettes. Since two or three of the group would usually be in dock repairing weather or battle damage, the groups typically sailed with about six ships. The training of the escorts also improved as the realities of the battle became obvious. A new base was set up at Tobermory in the Hebrides to prepare the new escort ships and their crews for the demands of battle under the strict regime of Vice Admiral Gilbert O. Stephenson.^[14]

In February 1941, the Admiralty moved the headquarters of Western Approaches Command from Plymouth to Liverpool, where much closer contact with, and control of, the Atlantic convoys was possible. Greater co-operation with supporting aircraft was also achieved. In April, the Admiralty took over operational control of Coastal Command aircraft. At a tactical level, new short-wave radar sets that could detect surfaced U-boats and were suitable for both small ships and aircraft began to arrive during 1941.

The impact of these changes first began to be felt in the convoy battles during the spring of 1941. In early March, Prien in U-47 failed to return from patrol. Two weeks later, in the battle of Convoy HX 112, the newly formed 3rd Escort Group of five destroyers and two corvettes held off the U-boat pack. U-100 was detected by the primitive radar on the destroyer Vanoc, rammed and sunk. Shortly afterwards the U-99 was also caught and sunk, its crew captured. Dönitz had lost his three leading aces: Kretschmer, Prien and Schepke.

Dönitz now moved his wolf packs further west, in order to catch the convoys before the anti-submarine escort joined. This new strategy was rewarded at the beginning of April when the pack found Convoy SC 26 before its anti-submarine escort had joined. Ten ships were sunk, but another U-boat was lost.

On May 9, the British destroyer HMS Bulldog captured U-110 and recovered a complete, intact Enigma Machine. Combined with a couple of other captures, this was a vital breakthrough for the Allied code-breaking efforts. The machine was taken to Bletchley Park, where it was used to help break the German codes. This, and the work of men like Flowers and Turing would give Britain the ability to read German naval signals for much of the remainder of the campaign, and, incidentally, provide the impetus for the development of the first programmable electronic device, the Colossus computer.

Field of battle widens (June 1941 – December 1941)

Growing American activity

In June 1941, the British decided to provide convoy escort for the full length of the North Atlantic crossing. To this end, the Admiralty on May 23 asked the Royal Canadian Navy to assume the responsibility for protecting convoys in the western zone and to establish the base for its escort force at St. John's, Newfoundland. On June 13, 1941 Commodore L.W. Murray, Royal Canadian Navy, assumed his post as Commodore Commanding Newfoundland Escort Force, under the overall authority of the Commander in Chief, Western Approaches, at Liverpool. Six Canadian destroyers and 17 corvettes, reinforced by seven destroyers, three sloops and five corvettes of the Royal Navy, were assembled for duty in the force, which escorted the convoys from Canadian ports to Newfoundland and then on to a meeting point south of Iceland, where the British escort groups took over.

A SB2U Vindicator scout bomber from USS Ranger (CV-4) flies anti-submarine patrol over Convoy WS-12, en route to Cape Town, November 27, 1941. The convoy was one of many escorted by the US Navy before the US entered the war

By 1941 the United States was taking an increasing part in the war, despite its nominal neutrality. In April 1941 President Roosevelt extended the Pan-American Security Zone east almost as far as Iceland. British forces had occupied Iceland when Denmark fell to the Germans in 1940; the US was persuaded to provide forces to relieve British troops on the island. American warships began escorting Allied convoys in the western Atlantic as far as Iceland, and had several hostile encounters with U-boats. A Mid-Ocean Escort Force of American, British and Canadian destroyers and corvettes was organized following declaration of war by the United States.

In June 1941 the US realized that the tropical Atlantic became dangerous for unescorted American merchant vessels as well. On May 21, the SS Robin Moor, an American vessel carrying no military supplies, had been stopped by U-69 750 miles (1,210 km) west of Freetown, Sierra Leone. After its passengers and crew were allowed thirty minutes to board lifeboats, U-69 torpedoed, shelled and sank the ship. The survivors then drifted without rescue or detection for up to eighteen days. When news of the sinking reached the US, few shipping companies felt truly safe anywhere. As Time magazine noted in June 1941, "if such sinkings continue, U.S. ships bound for other places remote from fighting fronts, will be in danger. Henceforth the U.S. would either have to recall its ships from the ocean or enforce its right to the free use of the seas."^[15]

At the same time, the British were working on a number of technical developments which would address the German submarine superiority. It is interesting to note that, though these were British inventions, the critical technology was provided freely to the US, which then re-named and manufactured them. In many cases this has resulted in the misconception that these were American developments. Likewise, the US provided the British with innovative technology, e.g., the Catalina flying boats and Liberator bombers, that were important but unheralded contributions to the war effort.

Firstly, new depth charges were developed that fired to the side of the destroyers rather than simply dropping them over the stern as the destroyer passed over. The ASDIC contact was lost directly underneath the boat, and the U-boats often used this to escape. In addition, depth charges were fired in patterns, to "box" the enemy in with explosions. The shock waves would then destroy the U-boat by crushing it in the middle of these explosions.

Catapult Aircraft Merchantmen

Aircraft ranges were also improving all the time, but the Atlantic was far too large to be covered completely at the time. A stop-gap measure was instituted by fitting ramps to the front of some of the cargo ships known as Catapult Aircraft Merchantmen (CAM ships), armed with a lone expendable Hurricane fighter aircraft. When a German plane approached, the fighter was fired off the end of the ramp with a large rocket to shoot down or drive off the German aircraft, the pilot ditching in the water and being picked up by one of the escort ships if land was too far away. Nine combat launches were made, resulting in the destruction of eight Axis aircraft for the loss of one Allied pilot.

German aircraft had been gradually driven out of the campaign by the growing strength of RAF Coastal Command and the introduction of first CAM ships.

High-Frequency Direction-Finding

One of the most important developments was that of ship-borne direction-finding radio equipment, known as HF/DF (High-Frequency Direction-Finding) or Huff-Duff, which was gradually fitted to the larger escort ships. HF/DF let an operator see the direction of a broadcast, even if the messages they were sending could not be read. Since the wolf pack tactics relied on U-boats surfacing to report the position of a convoy, there was a steady stream of messages to intercept. A destroyer could then run down the direction of the signal to attack the U-boat, or at least force it to submerge, preventing a coherent attack on the convoy. When two ships fitted with HF/DF were present with a convoy, the exact position of the U-boat could be triangulated. The British also made extensive use of shore HF/DF stations, so they could keep convoys updated with positions of U-Boats around them at all times.

The radio technology behind HF/DF was well understood by both sides, but the common technology before the war used a manually rotated aerial to fix the direction of the transmitter. This was delicate work, took quite a time to do to any degree of accuracy, and could easily fix the reciprocal of the signal at 180 degrees away. Knowing this, the German U-boat radio operators considered themselves fairly safe if they confined themselves to short messages. The British, however, developed an oscilloscope-based indicator which instantly fixed the position of the shortest message. With this there was hardly any need to triangulate—the escort could just run down the precise bearing provided and use radar for final positioning. Many U-boat attacks were suppressed and submarines sunk in this way—a good example of the great difference minor aspects of technology could make in this battle.

Enigma cipher

A major factor in the success of the British during the second half of 1941, and throughout the rest of the campaign, was the cracking of the Naval Enigma machine cipher. The wolf pack tactics relied on radio communications, based on the assumption that the Enigma cipher could not be broken and that short signal messages could not be pinpointed with enough accuracy to endanger the signalling U-boat. Both assumptions were wrong. Throughout the summer and autumn of 1941, a combination of reading Enigma messages and radio direction finding enabled the British to plot the positions of the U-boat patrol lines, allowing the convoys to be routed to evade them.

But this infusion of strength to the Allied side had to be set against the growing numbers of U-boats now coming into service. The German Type VIIC submarine started reaching the Atlantic in large numbers in 1941; eventually 585 of them would be delivered. Although the Allies generally succeeded in defending the convoys through the summer and autumn of 1941, they were not sinking U-boats in anything like sufficient numbers. The Flower-class corvette escorts could detect and defend, but they were not fast enough to go on the attack.

In October 1941, Hitler ordered Dönitz to move many of the U-boats into the Mediterranean, to support German operations in that theatre. The resulting concentration near Gibraltar resulted in a series of battles around the Gibraltar and Sierra Leone convoys. In December 1941, Convoy HG 76 sailed, escorted by the 36th Escort Group of two sloops and six corvettes under Captain Frederic John Walker, reinforced by the first of the new escort carriers HMS Audacity and three destroyers from Gibraltar. The convoy was immediately intercepted by the waiting U-boat pack, resulting in a brutal battle. Walker was a tactical innovator, his ships were highly trained and the presence of an escort carrier meant that the U-boats were frequently sighted and forced to dive before they could get close to the convoy. Over the next five days, five U-boats were sunk (four by Walker's group) despite the loss of the Audacity after two days. The British lost the Audacity, a destroyer and just two merchant ships. The battle was the first clear Allied convoy victory in the campaign.

Through dogged effort, the Allies slowly gained the upper hand through until the end of 1941. Although Allied warships failed to sink U-boats in large numbers, most convoys evaded attack completely. Shipping losses were high, but manageable.

Operation Drumbeat (January 1942 – June 1942)

Allied tanker Dixie Arrow torpedoed by a German submarine U-71 in 1942.

A tanker silhouetted against lights of a city (animation).

An Allied Casablanca convoy heads eastward across the Atlantic bound for Africa, November 1942.

Depth charge being loaded aboard the corvette HMS Dianthus, August 14, 1942.

Hedgehog, anti-submarine mortar, mounted on the forecastle of the destroyer HMS Westcott

A Leigh Light used for spotting U-boats on the surface at night fitted to a Liberator aircraft of Royal Air Force Coastal Command, February 26, 1944.

The attack on Pearl Harbor and the subsequent German declaration of war on the United States had an immediate effect on the campaign. Dönitz promptly planned to attack shipping off the American East Coast. Dönitz had only 12 boats of the Type IX class that were able to make the long trip to the U.S. East Coast, and half of them had been removed by Hitler's order to counter British forces in the Mediterranean. One of the remainder was under repair, leaving only five boats to set out for the U.S. on the so-called Operation Drumbeat (Paukenschlag).

The U.S., having no direct experience of modern naval war on its own shores, did not employ shore-side black-outs. The U-boats simply stood off the shore of the eastern seaboard and picked off ships as they were silhouetted against the lights of the cities. The Commander-in-Chief of the United States Fleet, Admiral Ernest King, who disliked the British, initially rejected the Royal Navy's calls for a coastal blackout or a convoy system. King has been criticized for this decision, but his defenders argue that the United States destroyer fleet was limited (partly because of the sale of 50 old destroyers to Britain earlier in the war), and King claimed that it was far more important that the destroyers protect Allied troop transports than shipping. His ships were also busy convoying Lend-Lease material to Russia, as well as fighting the Japanese in the Pacific. This does not explain the refusal to require coastal black-outs, or to respond to any advice the Royal Navy provided. No troop transports were lost, but merchant ships sailing in U.S. waters were left exposed and suffered greatly. Britain eventually had to build coastal escorts and provide them for free to the U.S. in a 'reverse Lend Lease', since King was unwilling (or unable) to make any provision himself.

The first boats started shooting on January 13, 1942, and by the time they left for France on February 6 they had sunk 156,939 tonnes of shipping without loss. The first batch of Type IXs had been replaced by Type VIIs and IXs refuelling at sea from Type XIV Milk Cows tankers and had sunk 397 ships totalling over 2 million tons (as mentioned previously, not a single troop transport was lost). In 1943, the United States launched over 11 million tons of merchant shipping; that number declined in the latter war years, as priorities moved elsewhere.

In May, King (by this time both Commander-in-Chief U. S. Fleet and Chief of Naval Operations) finally scraped together enough ships to institute a convoy system. This quickly led to the loss of seven U-boats. But the U.S. did not have enough ships to cover all the holes, and the U-boats continued to operate freely during the Battle of the Caribbean and throughout the Gulf of Mexico (where they effectively closed several U.S. ports) until July, when the British-loaned escorts began arriving. The institution of an interlocking convoy system on the American coast and in the Caribbean Sea in mid-1942 resulted in an immediate drop in attacks in those areas. As a result of the increased coastal convoy escort system, the U-boats' attention shifted back to the Atlantic convoys. For the Allies, the situation was serious but not critical throughout much of 1942.

Operation Drumbeat had one other effect. It was so successful that Dönitz's policy of economic war was seen even by Hitler to be the only effective use of the U-boat, and he was given complete command to use them as he saw fit. Meanwhile, Dönitz's commander Raeder was dismissed as a result of a disastrous Battle of the Barents Sea in which two German heavy cruisers were beaten off by half a dozen Royal Navy destroyers. Dönitz was eventually made Grand Admiral of the fleet, and all building priorities turned to the U-boats.

Battle returns to mid-Atlantic (July 1942 – February 1943)

With the U.S. finally arranging convoys, ship losses to the U-boats quickly dropped, and Dönitz realized his boats were better used elsewhere. On July 19, 1942, he ordered the last U-boats to withdraw from the United States Atlantic coast, and by the end of July 1942 he shifted his attention back to the North Atlantic. Convoy SC 94 marked the return of the U-boats to the convoys from Canada to the British Isles.

Painting of burning tanker of the North Atlantic. Painted by Lieutenant Commander Anton Otto Fischer, U.S.C.G.R., in early February 1943. The burning tanker sends up a pyre of red flame as its crew pull away in lifeboats. The scarlet glare of the oil fire and the shimmering waves of unbearable heat will soon be replaced by bitter, numbing cold as boats leave the stricken ship behind.

There were enough U-boats spread across the Atlantic to allow several wolf packs to attack several different convoy routes. Often as many as 10 to 15 boats would attack in one or two waves, following convoys like SC 104 and SC 107 by day and attacking at night. Losses quickly increased, and in October 1942 56 ships of over 258,000 tonnes were sunk in the "air gap" between Greenland and Iceland that was still free of the ever-increasing Allied air patrols.

On November 19, 1942, Admiral Noble was replaced as Commander-in-Chief of Western Approaches Command by Admiral Sir Max Horton. Horton used the growing number of escorts that were becoming available to Western Approaches Command to organize "support groups" that were used to reinforce convoys that came under attack. Unlike the regular escort groups, the support groups were not directly responsible for the safety of any particular convoy. This lack of responsibility gave them much greater tactical flexibility, allowing the support groups to detach ships to hunt submarines spotted by reconnaissance or picked up by high-frequency direction finding (HF/DF). In situations where the regular escorts would have had to return to their convoy, the support groups were able to persist in hunting a submarine for many hours. One tactic used by Captain Walker was to sit on top of a U-boat and wait until its air ran out and it was forced to the surface.

Hedgehog

By late 1942, the British had developed a new weapon, and warships were being fitted with the Hedgehog anti-submarine mortar which fired twenty-four contact-fused bombs directly ahead of the attacking ship. Unlike depth charges, which exploded at certain set depths behind the attacking warship, disturbing the water and making it hard to keep track of the target, Hedgehog charges only exploded on impact. This meant that a U-boat could be continuously tracked and attacked until it was sunk. The Hedgehog was a particularly effective weapon, raising the percentage of kills from 7% of attacks to nearer 25%. When one of the Hedgehog charges exploded, it set off the others which increased the weapon's effectiveness.

Leigh Light

Detection by radar-equipped aircraft could suppress U-boat activity over a wide area, but an aircraft attack would only be successful with good visibility. U-boats were quite safe from aircraft at night, since the deployment of an illuminating flare gave adequate warning of an attack. The introduction by the British of the Leigh Light in June 1942 was a significant factor in the North Atlantic struggle. It was a powerful searchlight that was automatically aligned with the airborne radar to illuminate targets suddenly while in the final stages of an attack run. This let British aircraft attack U-boats recharging batteries on the surface at night, forcing German submarine skippers to switch to daytime recharges.

The U-boat commanders who survived reported a particular fear of this weapon system since the hum of an aircraft was inaudible at night above the noise of the boat. The aircraft made contact with the submarine using centimetric radar, which was undetectable with the typical U-boat equipment, then lined up on an attack run. When metric radar was used, the set would automatically lower the radar power during the approach so the submarine would not realize it was being tracked. With a mile or so to go the searchlight would automatically come on, immediately and accurately illuminating the target from the sky, which had about five seconds warning before it was hit with a stick of depth bombs. A drop in Allied shipping losses from 600,000 to 200,000 tonnes per month was attributed to this ingenious device.

Metox receiver

By August 1942, U-boats were being fitted with radar detectors to enable them to avoid the sudden ambushes which a radar-equipped aircraft or corvette might spring. The first such receiver, named Metox after its French manufacturer, was capable of picking up the metric radar bands used by the early radars. This not only enabled U-boats to avoid detection by Canadian and U.S. escorts, which were equipped with obsolete radar sets, but allowed them to track convoys where these sets were in use.

Climax of the campaign (March 1943 – May 1943, "Black May")

After Convoy ON 154, winter weather provided a brief respite from the fighting in January before convoys SC 118 and ON 166 in February 1943, but in the spring of 1943 convoy battles started up again with the same ferocity. By the spring of 1943, there were so many U-boats on patrol in the North Atlantic that it was difficult for the convoys to evade detection, resulting in a succession of vicious convoy battles. In March the escorts were heavily defeated in the battles of convoys UGS 6, HX 228, SC 121, SC 122 and HX 229. One hundred twenty ships were sunk worldwide, 82 ships of 476,000 tons in the Atlantic, and 12 U-boats were destroyed.

The supply situation in Britain was such that there was talk of being unable to continue the war effort, with supplies of fuel being particularly low. It appeared that Dönitz was winning the war. And yet the next two months would see a complete reversal of fortunes.

In April, losses of U-boats increased while their kills of ships fell dramatically. Thirty-nine ships of 235,000 tons were sunk in the Atlantic, and 15 U-boats were destroyed.

By May, wolf packs no longer had the advantage and that month was to become known as Black May for the U-Boat Arm (U-Boot Waffe). The turning point was the battle centered around the slow Convoy ONS 5 (April–May 1943), when a convoy of 43 merchantmen escorted by 16 warships was attacked by a pack of 30 U-boats. Although 13 merchant ships were sunk, six U-boats were sunk by the escorts or Allied aircraft. Despite a storm which scattered the convoy, the merchantmen reached the protection of land-based air cover causing Admiral Dönitz to call off the attack. Two weeks later, SC 130 saw five U-boats destroyed for no losses. Faced with disaster, Dönitz called off operations in the North Atlantic. In all, 43 U-boats were destroyed in May, 34 in the Atlantic. This was 25% of UbW's total operational strength. The Allies lost 58 ships in May, 34 ships (totalling 134,000 tons) of these in the Atlantic.

A U-Boat under attack by Allied aircraft in 1943

Convergence of technologies

The Battle of the Atlantic was won by the Allies in two months. There was no single reason for this, but what had changed was a sudden convergence of technologies, combined with an increase in Allied resources.

The mid-Atlantic gap that had been unreachable by aircraft was closed by long-range B-24 Liberator aircraft. Effective employment of these aircraft required shift of operational control from the United States Army Air Forces Antisubmarine Command to the United States Navy. At the May 1943 Trident conference, Admiral King requested General Henry H. Arnold to send a squadron of ASW-configured B-24s to Newfoundland to strengthen air escort of North Atlantic convoys. General Arnold ordered his squadron commander to engage only in "offensive" search and attack missions and not in escort-of-convoys. In June, General Arnold suggested the Navy assume responsibility for ASW operations. Admiral King requested the Army's ASW-configured B-24s in exchange for an equal number of unmodified Navy B-24s. Agreement was reached in July and the exchange was completed in September 1943.^[16]

Further air cover was provided by the introduction of merchant aircraft carriers or MAC ships and later the growing numbers of American-built escort carriers. Flying primarily Grumman F4F/FM Wildcats and Grumman TBF/TBM Avengers, they sailed in the convoys and provided the much needed air cover and patrols all the way across the Atlantic.

The larger numbers of escorts became available, both as a result of American building programmes and the release of escorts that had been tied up in the North African landings during November and December 1942. In particular, destroyer escorts (similar British ships were known as frigates) were designed, which could be built more economically than expensive fleet destroyers and were also more seaworthy than corvettes. There would not only be sufficient numbers of escorts to securely protect convoys, they could also form hunter-killer groups (often centered around escort carriers) to aggressively hunt U-boats.

By spring 1943 the British had developed an effective sea-scanning centimetric radar small enough to be carried on patrol aircraft armed with airborne depth charges. Centimetric radar greatly improved detection and was undetectable by the German Metox radar warning equipment. Armed with radar, RAF Coastal Command sank more U-Boats than any other Allied service in the last three years of the war.^[17] During the year 1943, U-Boat losses amounted to 258 to all causes. Of this total, 90 were sunk by Coastal Command, and 51 damaged.^[18]

The continual breaking of the German naval Enigma enabled the Allied convoys to evade the wolf packs while British support groups and American hunter-killer groups were able to hunt U-boats that approached the convoys or whose positions were revealed by Enigma decrypts.

Allied air forces developed tactics and technology to make the Bay of Biscay, the main route for France-based U-boats, very dangerous. The introduction of the Leigh Light enabled accurate attacks on U-boats re-charging their batteries on the surface at night. The Luftwaffe responded by providing fighter cover for U-boats exiting into and returning from the Atlantic and for returning blockade runners. Still, with intelligence coming from resistance personnel in the ports themselves, the last few miles to and from port proved hazardous to many U-Boats.

Dönitz's aim, in this tonnage war was to sink Allied ships faster than they could be replaced; as losses fell, and production, particularly in the United States, rose, this became increasingly unachievable.

Final years (June 1943 – May 1945)

Desperate to get back into the battle, Germany made several attempts to bolster the obsolescent U-boat force, while awaiting the next generation of U-boat designs (the Walter and the Elektroboot types).

Notable among these attempts were the fitting of massively improved anti-aircraft defences, radar detectors, torpedoes, and finally the addition of the Schnorchel (snorkel) device to allow U-boats to run underwater off their diesel engines to avoid radar.

By September 1943 Dönitz was ready to restart the offensive on the North Atlantic route. The return to the offensive in the North Atlantic saw initial success, with an attack on ONS 18 and ON 202; but a series of battles saw less success and more losses for UbW. After 4 months BdU again called off the offensive; 8 ships of 56,000 tons, and 6 warships had been sunk in the North Atlantic for the loss of 39 U-boats, a catastrophic loss ratio.

The Luftwaffe also introduced the long-range He 177 bombers, and the Henschel Hs 293 guided glider bomb, which claimed a number of successes, but Allied air superiority prevented them being a major threat to the Royal Navy.

Tactical and technical fixes

To counter Allied air power, UbW increased the anti-aircraft armament of the U-boats, and introduced specially equipped "Flak Boat" submarines so that they could better defend against air attack. These developments initially caught RAF pilots by surprise. However, U-boats which remained surfaced increased the risk of having vulnerable pressure hulls punctured, while attacking pilots often radioed in convoy escorts if they met too much resistance. Diving remained a U-boat's best change of survival when encountering aircraft. According to German sources, only six aircraft had been shot down by U-flaks in six missions (three by U-441, and one each by U-256, U-621, and U-953).

The Germans also introduced improvements in radar detection, such as the Wanze system.

Development of torpedoes also improved with FAT, which ran a pre-programmed course criss-crossing the convoy path, and the German Navy Acoustic Torpedo (GNAT), which would home on the propeller noise of a target. This was initially very effective, but the Allies quickly developed counter-measures, both tactical ("Step-Aside") and technical ("Foxer", CAT).

None of these German measures were truly effective and by 1943 Allied air power was so strong, U-boats were being attacked right in the Bay of Biscay as they left port. The Germans had lost the technological race. This was clear even to the Germans, whose actions were restricted to lone-wolf attacks in British coastal waters, and preparing to resist the expected invasion of France.

Over the next two years, many U-boats were sunk, usually with all hands. With the battle won by the Allies, supplies started to pour into England and North Africa for the eventual liberation of Europe.

Last actions (May 1945)

Late in the war, the Germans introduced the 'Elektroboot' series, the Type XXI U-boat and a short range Type XXIII U-boat. The Type XXI could run underwater at 17 knots (31 km/h), faster than a Type VII running full-out on the surface and almost as fast as the ships attacking her. Designs were finalized in January 1943 but mass-production of the new types did not start until 1944; by 1945 just five Type XXIII and one Type XXI boats were operational. These made nine patrols, sinking five ships in the first five months of 1945; only one combat patrol was carried out by a Type XXI before the war ended, making no contact with the enemy.

As the Allied armies closed in on the U-boat bases in North Germany, over 200 boats were scuttled to avoid capture; those that were of most value attempted to flee to Norway. In the first week of May twenty-three boats were sunk in the Baltic while attempting this journey.

The last actions in American waters took place on 5/6 May 1945, which saw the sinking of SS Black Point and the destruction of U-853 and U-881 in separate incidents.

The last actions of the Battle of the Atlantic were on 7/8 May. U-320 was the last U-boat sunk in action, by an RAF Catalina; while Allied minesweeper NYMS 382 and freighters Sneland and Avondale Park were torpedoed in separate incidents, just hours before the German surrender.

The remaining U-boats, at sea or in port, were surrendered to the Allies, 174 in total. Most were destroyed in Operation Deadlight after the war.

Outcomes

Seamen raise White Ensign over a captured German U-boat in St. John's, Newfoundland 1945

The Germans failed to strangle the flow of strategic supplies to Britain, and that failure resulted in the massive build-up of troops and supplies needed for the Normandy landings. The defeat of the U-boat campaign was a necessary precursor for the re-supply of Britain, and the build-up of a huge concentration of Allied forces that helped ensure Germany's defeat.

Victory was achieved at a huge cost: between 1939 and 1945, 3,500 Allied merchant ships were sunk (gross tonnage 14.5 million), as well as 175 Allied warships, against 783 German U-boats.

Losses:

Merchant Navy

Great Britain

During the Second World War nearly one third of the world's merchant shipping was British. Over 30,000 men from the British Merchant Navy lost their lives between 1939–1945, and more than 2,400 British ships were sunk. The ships were crewed by sailors from all over the British Empire, including some 25% from India and China, and 5% from the West Indies, Middle East and Africa. The British officers wore uniforms very similar to those of the Royal Navy. The ordinary sailors, however, had no uniform, and when on leave in Britain they sometimes suffered taunts and abuse from civilians who mistakenly thought the crewmen were shirking their patriotic duty to enlist in the armed forces. To counter this, the crewmen were issued with an 'MN' lapel badge to indicate they were serving in the Merchant Navy. The British merchant fleet was comprised of vessels from the many and varied private shipping lines, examples being the tankers of the British Tanker Company and the freighters of Ellerman Lines and Silver Line. The British government, via the Ministry of War Transport, also had new ships built during the course of the war, these being known as Empire ships.

Canada

Canada's Merchant Navy was vital to the Allied cause during World War II. More than 70 Canadian merchant vessels were lost during the war and 1,600 merchant sailors were killed, including 8 women. The Second World War began with Germany's invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, causing Britain and France to declare war on Germany on September 3. Canada quickly followed, declaring war on September 10, 1939. Information obtained by British agents regarding German shipping movements led Canada to conscript all its merchant vessels two weeks before actually declaring war, with the Royal Canadian Navy taking control of all shipping on August 26, 1939. At the outbreak of the war, Canada possessed 38 ocean-going merchant vessels. By the end of hostilities, in excess of 400 cargo ships had been built in Canada. Canadian merchant sailors knew the dangers of shipping during wartime, many having experienced mines and submarines during the First World War. The Battle of the Atlantic was the only battle of the Second World War that touched North American shores. German U-boats disrupted coastal shipping from the Caribbean to Halifax, and during the summer of 1942 they even penetrated the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Canadian officers wore uniforms which were virtually identical in style to those of the British. The ordinary seamen were issued with an 'MN Canada' badge to wear on their lapel when on leave, to indicate their service. At the end of the war, Rear Admiral Leonard Murray, Commander-in-Chief Canadian North Atlantic, remarked "...the Battle of the Atlantic was not won by any Navy or Air Force, it was won by the courage, fortitude and determination of the British and Allied Merchant Navy."

Norway

Before the war, Norway's Merchant Navy was the fourth largest in the world and its ships were the most modern. The Nazis and the Allies both recognised the great importance of Norway’s merchant fleet, and following Germany’s invasion of Norway in April 1940, the race was on to secure as many of its ships as possible. Vidkun Quisling ordered all Norwegian ships to sail directly to German, Italian or neutral ports. This request was ignored however, and all Norwegian ships decided to put their services at the disposal of the Allies. The vessels of the Norwegian Merchant Navy were placed under the control of the government run Nortraship, with headquarters in London and New York. The Nortraship fleet’s modern ships, especially its tankers, were extremely important to the Allies. Norwegian tankers carried nearly one-third of the oil carried to Britain during the war. Records show that 694 Norwegian ships were sunk during the Second World War, representing 47% of the total fleet. At the end of the war in 1945, the Norwegian merchant fleet was estimated at 1,378 ships. More than 3,700 Norwegian merchant seamen lost their lives during World War II.

United States

In addition to its existing merchant fleet, United States shipyards built 2,710 Liberty class cargo ships totaling 38.5 million tons, vastly exceeding the 14 million tons of shipping the German U-boats were able to sink during the war.

See also

• Aces of the Deep, the ten most successful U-boat commanders of the war
• Allied shipping losses during the Second Battle of the Atlantic
• Arctic convoys of World War II for the convoys to Russia
• BETASOM, the Italian submarine flotilla at Bordeaux
• Black May (1943) a turning point in the Battle of the Atlantic (U-boats withdrawn)
• Das Boot – Film about World War II submarine warfare
• The Norwegian Shipping and Trade Mission – Nortraship
• Timeline of the Second Battle of the Atlantic
• U-boat Campaign (World War I) for the First World War submarine campaign
• Allied submarines in the Pacific War

References

Notes

Bibliography

Further reading

Official histories

Biographies

General histories of the campaign

External links

• The Battle of the Atlantic Original reports and pictures from The Times
• U-Boat Fates 1945

Links to related articles U-boats Battle of the Atlantic (World War I) · Battle of the Atlantic (World War II) · Mediterranean (World War I) · Mediterranean (World War II) · Operation Regenbogen · Operation Deadlight U-boat lists Types · German · Successful · Never deployed · Austro-Hungarian · Foreign captured · Uncompleted projects U-boat flotillas World War I I · II · III · IV · Flanders · Pola · Constantinople World War II 1. · 2. · 3. · 4. · 5. · 6. · 7. · 8. · 9. · 10. · 11. · 12. · 13. · 14. · 18. · 19. · 20. · 21. · 22. · 23. · 24. · 25. · 26. · 27. · 29. · 30. · 31. · 32. · 33. Commanders Successful · Knight's Cross recipients · Erich Raeder · Karl Dönitz Wolf packs Blücher · Eisbär · Endrass · Hai · Hecht · Lachs · Lohs · Pfadfinder · Steinbrock · Tümmler · Vorwärts · Wolf Major engagements Convoy SC 7 · Convoy PQ 17 · Battle of the St. Lawrence · Black May · Bismarck chase Capital ships sunk World War I HMS Cornwallis · French battleship Danton · HMS Formidable · Russian battleship Peresviet · HMS Majestic · Italian battleship Regina Margherita · HMS Russell · French battleship Suffren · HMS Triumph World War II HMS Ark Royal · HMS Barham · HMS Courageous · HMS Eagle · HMS Royal Oak · Technology Asdic · Depth charge · Leigh light · Q-ship · Snorkel · Elektroboot Concepts Submarine warfare · Intensified submarine warfare · Unrestricted submarine warfare World War II Western Europe · Eastern Europe · Africa · Mediterranean · Asia and the Pacific · Atlantic Casualties · Military engagements · Topics · Conferences · Commanders Participants Allies (Leaders) Ethiopia · China · Czechoslovakia · Poland · United Kingdom · India · France · Australia · New Zealand · South Africa · Canada · Norway · Belgium · Netherlands · Greece · Yugoslavia · Soviet Union · United States · Philippines · Mexico · Brazil Axis and Axis-aligned (Leaders) Bulgaria · Reorganized National Government of China · Croatia · Finland · Germany · Hungary · Iraq · Italy · Italian Social Republic · Japan · Manchukuo · Romania · Slovakia · Thailand · Vichy France Resistance Austria · Baltic States · Belgium · Czech lands · Denmark · Estonia · Ethiopia · France · Germany · Greece · Hong Kong · India · Italy · Jewish · Korea · Latvia · Luxembourg · Netherlands · Norway · Philippines · Poland (Anti-communist) · Romania · Thailand · Soviet Union · Slovakia · Western Ukraine · Vietnam · Yugoslavia Timeline  Prelude Africa · Asia · Europe 1939 Invasion of Poland · Phoney War · Winter War · Battle of the Atlantic · Winter Offensive in China 1940 Denmark and Norway · Battle of the Netherlands · Battle of Belgium · Battle of France · Battle of Britain · Libya and Egypt · British Somaliland · Baltic states · Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina · Invasion of French Indochina · Invasion of Greece  · Operation Compass 1941 East Africa Campaign · Invasion of Yugoslavia · Yugoslav Front · Battle of Greece · Battle of Crete · Invasion of the Soviet Union (Operation Barbarossa) · Continuation War · June Uprising · Middle East Campaign  · Battle of Kiev  · Siege of Leningrad · Battle of Moscow · Siege of Sevastopol · Attack on Pearl Harbor · Battle of Hong Kong · Battle of the Philippines · Battle of Malaya · Battle of Borneo 1942 Japanese Conquest of Burma · Battle of Changsha · Battle of the Coral Sea · Battle of Gazala · Battle of Midway · Case Blue · Battle of Stalingrad · Dieppe Raid · Second Battle of El Alamein · Operation Torch · Guadalcanal Campaign 1943 End in Africa · Battle of Kursk · Battle of Smolensk · Solomon Islands · Invasion of Sicily · Lower Dnieper Offensive · Invasion of Italy · Gilbert and Marshall Islands · Battle of Changde 1944 Cassino and Anzio · Narva · Cherkassy  · Tempest · Ichi-Go · Normandy · Mariana and Palau Islands · Bagration · Eastern Poland · Tannenberg Line · Warsaw Uprising · Eastern Romania · Serbia · Paris · Gothic Line · Market Garden · Estonia · Crossbow · Pointblank · Lapland · Hungary · Leyte Gulf · The Bulge · Burma 1945 Western Poland · Iwo Jima · Okinawa · Italy · Berlin · Czechoslovakia · Budapest · West Hunan · Surrender of Germany · Manchuria · Philippines  · Borneo · Hiroshima and Nagasaki · Surrender of Japan Aspects General Attacks on North America · Blitzkrieg · Comparative military ranks · Cryptography · Home front · Military awards · Military equipment · Military production · Nazi plunder · Technology · Total war · Strategic bombing · Bengal famine of 1943 Aftermath Effects · Expulsion of Germans · Operation Paperclip · Occupation of Germany · Morgenthau Plan · Territorial changes · Soviet occupations (Romania, Poland, Hungary, Baltic States) · Occupation of Japan · First Indochina War · Indonesian National Revolution · Cold War · Decolonization · Contemporary culture  War crimes Allied war crimes · German war crimes · Italian war crimes · Japanese war crimes · Soviet war crimes · United States war crimes · The Holocaust War rape Rape during the occupation of Japan · Comfort women  · Rape of Nanking  · Rape during the occupation of Germany Prisoners Italian prisoners of war in the Soviet Union · Japanese prisoners of war in the Soviet Union · Japanese prisoners of war in World War II · German prisoners of war in the Soviet Union Category · Portal  definition ·  textbooks ·  quotes ·  source texts ·  media ·  news stories