The Battle of the Atlantic

Page 2 of 7

• 1. The U-boat peril
• 2. The menace grows
• 3. Learning to fight back - with ships
• 4. The role of aeroplanes
• 5. The role of intelligence
• 6. The crisis
• 7. Find out more
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The menace grows

In the early stages of World War Two, the Royal Navy placed much faith in ASDIC (an early form of sonar) to detect submerged U-boats. The British were largely able to master the surface threat posed by Germany, sinking the pocket battleship Graf Spee in December 1939 and the battleship Bismarck in 1941, but from the summer of 1940 the U-boat menace grew.

This was in part because the conquest by Germany of Norway and France gave the Germans forward bases, which increased the range of the U-boats and also allowed Focke-Wulf FW200 'Kondor' long-range aircraft to patrol over the Atlantic, carrying out reconnaissance for the U-boats and attacking Allied shipping.

The British were consequently forced to divert their own shipping away from vulnerable UK ports, and were faced with the need to provide convoys with naval escorts for greater stretches of the journey to North America. The Royal Navy was critically short of escort vessels, although this problem was eased somewhat by the arrival of 50 old American destroyers that President Roosevelt gave in return for bases in British territory in the West Indies.

'U-boats succeeded in sinking three million tons of Allied shipping ...'

U-boats, supplemented by mines, aircraft and surface ships, succeeded in sinking three million tons of Allied shipping between the fall of France in June 1940 and the end of the year. Admiral Dönitz, the commander of the U-boat arm, introduced the 'wolfpack' tactic at the end of 1940, whereby a group of submarines would surface and attack at night, thus greatly reducing the effectiveness of ASDIC.

Not surprisingly, the German submariners called this phase of the war the 'happy time'. This remorseless attrition of merchant shipping was a far greater threat to Britain's survival than the remote possibility of the Kriegsmarine landing German troops on the English coast.

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