The Battle of the Atlantic: How the Allies Won the War

The Battle of the Atlantic: How the Allies Won the War

Language: English

Pages: 560

ISBN: 0190495855

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


"The only thing that ever really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril," wrote Winston Churchill in his monumental history of World War Two. Churchill's fears were well-placed-the casualty rate in the Atlantic was higher than in any other theater of the entire war. The enemy was always and constantly there and waiting, lying just over the horizon or lurking beneath the waves. In many ways, the Atlantic shipping lanes, where U-boats preyed on American ships, were the true front of the war.

England's very survival depended on assistance from the United States, much of which was transported across the ocean by boat. The shipping lanes thus became the main target of German naval operations between 1940 and 1945. The Battle of the Atlantic and the men who fought it were therefore crucial to both sides. Had Germany succeeded in cutting off the supply of American ships, England might not have held out. Yet had Churchill siphoned reinforcements to the naval effort earlier, thousands of lives might have been preserved. The battle consisted of not one but hundreds of battles, ranging from hours to days in duration, and forcing both sides into constant innovation and nightmarish second-guessing, trying desperately to gain the advantage of every encounter. Any changes to the events of this series of battles, and the outcome of the war-as well as the future of Europe and the world-would have been dramatically different.

Jonathan Dimbleby's The Battle of the Atlantic offers a detailed and immersive account of this campaign, placing it within the context of the war as a whole. Dimbleby delves into the politics on both sides of the Atlantic, revealing the role of Bletchley Park and the complex and dynamic relationship between America and England. He uses contemporary diaries and letters from leaders and sailors to chilling effect, evoking the lives and experiences of those who fought the longest battle of World War Two. This is the definitive account of the Battle of the Atlantic.

Rommel's Desert Army (Men-at-Arms, Volume 53)

Closing the Ring (The Second World War, Volume 5)

Strong Men Armed: The United States Marines Against Japan

Leben mit dem Feind

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Realizing that the U-boat killing spree was over, Dönitz withdrew his fleet from the coast of America and despatched it once more to the North Atlantic. The ‘Second Happy Time’, as it had been dubbed by the U-boat commanders, had run its dreadful course. For the loss of twenty-two of their own submarines, they had sunk upwards of 400 merchant ships in which some 5,000 individuals – servicemen, merchant sailors and civilian passengers, women and children among them – had perished. By any.

Ships yet to be accounted for would in due course arrive in Archangel; in which case, he averred, only a third of the convoy had been lost, a proportion ‘deemed acceptable having in mind necessity of supporting Russia’.3 This assessment was endorsed by Averell Harriman (who had helped negotiate the Lend-Lease deal with Stalin and had established close relations with Moscow in the process), subject to the proviso that future convoys were to prioritize the supply of tanks and planes over all other.

What he persisted in calling ‘the simple and bloodless operation’ of mining these neutral waters.18 Nor was he detained in this by the niceties of maritime law, telling his own officials how obvious it was that ‘we should be prepared to violate Norwegian neutrality’.19 In December he went a step further. Insisting that it ‘cannot be too strongly emphasized that British control of the Norwegian coast-line is a strategic objective of first-class importance’, he urged the invasion and occupation of.

Bleichrodt, was lurking some sixty miles further to the west, and had already detected the slow-moving convoy. A little after ten o’clock that night, the Benares shuddered violently and the ship was plunged into darkness. Mary Cornish, one of the volunteers escorting the children, heard ‘a muffled thud, followed by a noise of crashing glass and splintering woodwork’. U-48’s third torpedo – the first two had missed – struck the hull amidships, passing just below the cabins where the children had.

Ploughing steadily through a heavy swell when she was stopped by a U-boat in the South Atlantic some 700 miles off Freetown. With a complement of nine officers, twenty-nine crew, and eight passengers (including three women and a child), she was bound for Mozambique with a general cargo of commercial goods for the Portuguese colony. Claiming – illegitimately – he was acting in accordance with the Prize Rules, the U-boat’s captain, Jost Metzler, gave the Robin Moor’s passengers and crew time to.

Download sample

Download