World War 2
The Battle of the Atlantic
Winston Churchill considered that the Battle of the Atlantic was the 'dominating factor all through the war. Never could we forget that everything depended on its outcome'. If Britain's trans-Atlantic supply line with America had been cut by the German Navy's U-boats, the British would have struggled to continue its war effort. The battle to defeat the submarine threat was the longest and most important fought solely by the British.
At first the German U-boat's gained the upper hand. Hunting in groups known as 'wolfpacks' and guided to their targets by long-range reconnaissance aircraft. By co-ordinating surface attacks at night, the Germans could overwhelm convoy escorts by sheer weight of numbers.
Crisis point was reached at the beginning of 1943. The U-boats were sinking ships at twice the rate they were being built, while for every U-boat sunk, two were being launched. The German U-boats seemed to have victory within their grasp.
The U-boats could stay at sea for long periods of time; refuelled by supply submarines, so there was no need for them to return to shore. However, the cramped living conditions with most of the interior packed with survival equipment, along with lack of sleep and rancid air, to breath, coming in from the ventalation system, a lot of the servicemen aboard these vessels were ending up with cabin sickness and other illnesses.
It was technology that turned the tide. Powerful new centimetric radars were fitted to long-range Allied aircraft equipped with searchlights and depth charges, enabling the British Royal Air Force to hunt the U-boats at night. High Frequency Direction Finding (known as 'Huff Duff' helped the Allied convoy escorts to pinpoint and shadow U-boats when they were transmitting back to base. Hunter-killer groups built around fast escort carriers took a heavy toll of German U-boats.
In January to July 1942, the average life of a U-boat in the Atlantic was 13 months. By the end of the war the life expectancy of a U-boat had dwindled to three months. Out of 830 U-boats dispatched on operations, the German Navy lost 690, almost all of them in the Atlantic.
By the summer of 1943 the tonnage of Allied shipping produced and launched overtook that lost to the U-boats for the first time in the war. Thanks to technology and great planning by the British, the U-boat menace had been mastered. The German's own technological innovations, the endurance-improving Schnorkel tube and the ocean-going Type XX1, ancestor of all modern submarines, but they proved too little and too late to regain the initative.
The Battle of the Atlantic claimed a heavy price in lives. Some 300'000 men of the British Merchant Navy (one-fifth of its pre-war strength) fell victim to the German U-boats. Casualties among the German U-boat crews ran at 75% overall, greater by far than any other arm of service in the navy, army or air force in any combatant country.