By the end of the war, although the U-boat arm had sunk 6,000 ships totalling 21 millionGRT, the Allies had built over 38 million tons of new shipping. The Battle of the Atlantic, the longest continuous military campaign[11][12] in World War II, ran from 1939 to the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945, covering a major part of the naval history of World War II. It immediately and accurately illuminated the enemy, giving U-boat commanders less than 25seconds to react before they were attacked with depth charges. 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. The search failed and Admiral Scheer disappeared into the South Atlantic. With the exception of the Japanese invasion of the Alaskan Aleutian Islands, the Battle of the Atlantic was the only battle of the Second World War to touch North American shores. "We had reached a stage when it took one or two days to decrypt the British radio messages. [34] The only consolation for the British was that the large merchant fleets of occupied countries like Norway and the Netherlands came under British control. At the end of the war in 1945, the Norwegian merchant fleet was estimated at 1,378ships. When the year ended 9 of them had been lost. On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. It had been costly to the Allies. They realised that the area of a convoy increased by the square of its perimeter, meaning the same number of ships, using the same number of escorts, was better protected in one convoy than in two. These developments initially caught RAF pilots by surprise. Six Canadian destroyers and 17corvettes, 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. Admiral Karl Dnitz, commander of the U-boat fleet, 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. Only 39 ships of 235,000tons were sunk in the Atlantic, and 15U-boats were destroyed. In good visibility a U-boat might try and outrun an escort on the surface whilst out of gun range. One of the remainder was under repair, leaving only five boats for Operation Drumbeat (Paukenschlag), sometimes called by the Germans the "Second happy time. With the US finally arranging convoys, ship losses to the U-boats quickly dropped, and Dnitz realised his U-boats were better used elsewhere. 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. Late in the war, the Germans introduced the Elektroboot: the Type XXI and short range Type XXIII. [98], Dan van der Vat suggests that, unlike the US, or Canada and Britain's other dominions, which were protected by oceanic distances, Britain was at the end of the transatlantic supply route closest to German bases; for Britain it was a lifeline. Most British naval spending, and many of the best officers, went into the battlefleet. [106] After the improved radar came into action shipping losses plummeted, reaching a level significantly (p=0.99) below the early months of the war. This new key could not be read by codebreakers; the Allies no longer knew where the U-boat patrol lines were. A three-barrelled mortar, it projected 100lb (45kg) charges ahead or abeam; the charges' firing pistols were automatically set just prior to launch. When it came to capturing merchant ships during wartime, ships that traveled on the surface were required to adhere to specific rules set by international treaties. [15] The campaign started immediately after the European War began, during the so-called "Phoney War", and lasted more than five years, until the German surrender in May 1945. U-boat losses also climbed. The hunting group strategy proved a disaster within days. Nor were the U-boats the only threat. The introduction of the Leigh Light by the British in January 1942 solved the second problem, thereby becoming a significant factor in the Battle for the Atlantic. U-boats were relatively safe from aircraft at night for two reasons: 1) radar then in use could not detect them at less than 1 mile (1.6km); 2) flares deployed to illuminate any attack gave adequate warning for evasive manoeuvres. [citation needed] His ships were also busy convoying Lend-Lease material to the Soviet Union, as well as fighting the Japanese in the Pacific. The attack on Pearl Harbor and the subsequent German declaration of war on the United States had an immediate effect on the campaign. The Flower-class corvette escorts could detect and defend, but they were not fast enough to attack effectively. At the end of the year 1940, the Admiralty viewed the number of ships sunk with growing alarm. Early British marine radar, working in the metric bands, lacked target discrimination and range. [81], Despite U-boat operations in the region (centred in the Atlantic Narrows between Brazil and West Africa) beginning autumn 1940, only in the following year did these start to raise serious concern in Washington. Web57 U-boats were capable of going out to sea when the war began in September 1939. More than 3,700 Norwegian merchant seamen died. Norwegian tankers carried nearly one-third of the oil transported to Britain during the war. This gave them much greater tactical flexibility, allowing them to detach ships to hunt submarines spotted by reconnaissance or picked up by HF/DF. As historian Erik Larson writes inDead Wake, Turners New York managers at Cunard, the company that owned the boat, even issued an official statement reassuring the public. Webwhat was the louvre before it was a museum. Advertising Notice While initial operation met with little success (only 65343GRT sunk between August and December 1940), the situation improved gradually over time, and up to August 1943 the 32 Italian submarines that operated there sank 109ships of 593,864tons,[38][39][pageneeded] for 17 subs lost in return, giving them a subs-lost-to-tonnage sunk ratio similar to Germany's in the same period, and higher overall. [107] [100] Coupled with a series of major convoy battles in the space of a month, it undermined confidence in the convoy system in March 1943, to the point Britain considered abandoning it,[101][102] not realising the U-boat had already effectively been defeated. Your Privacy Rights The intention was to pass over the submarine, rolling depth charges from chutes at the stern at even intervals, while throwers fired further charges some 40yd (37m) to either side. When he spotted the Gulfamerica five miles off Jacksonville Beach on April 11, 1942, the tanker loaded with 101,500 barrels of furnace oil was not running a zigzag course, a standard for ships in a combat zone. This state persisted for ten months. Unfortunately, this confidence was premature. In May, King (by this time both Cominch and CNO) finally scraped together enough ships to institute a convoy system. It enabled the U-boat to change position with impunity. The Allies lost 58ships in the same period, 34 of these (totalling 134,000tons) in the Atlantic. Nevertheless, the U-boats continued to take a heavy toll on the Atlantic convoys: 59 ships were sunk in September 1940 and 63 in October, which, combined with the 56 vessels lost in August, meant that in three months 700,000 tons of supplies had disappeared beneath the waves. In October, the slow convoy SC 7, with an escort of two sloops and two corvettes, was overwhelmed, losing 59% of its ships. The following day the U-boat was beached in an Icelandic cove. This new strategy was rewarded at the beginning of April when the pack found Convoy SC 26 before its anti-submarine escort had joined. 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 TypeXXI could run submerged at 17 knots (31km/h), faster than a TypeVII at full speed surfaced, and faster than Allied corvettes. With this there was hardly any need to triangulatethe escort could just run down the precise bearing provided, estimating range from the signal strength, and use either efficient look-outs or radar for final positioning. WebHow many American ships did U-boats sink? Destroyer escorts and frigates were also better designed for mid-ocean anti-submarine warfare than corvettes, which, although maneuverable and seaworthy, were too short, slow, and inadequately armed to match the DEs. This not only enabled U-boats to avoid detection by Canadian escorts, which were equipped with obsolete radar sets,[70][pageneeded] but allowed them to track convoys where these sets were in use. Others of the new ships were crewed by Free French, Norwegian and Dutch, but these were a tiny minority of the total number, and directly under British command. In May, the Germans mounted the most ambitious raid of all: Operation Rheinbung. These messages included signals from coastal forces about U-boat arrivals and departures at their bases in France, and the reports from the U-boat training command. When a German bomber approached, the fighter was launched off the end of the ramp with a large rocket to shoot down or drive off the German aircraft, the pilot then ditching in the water and in the best case recovered by ship. Convoy losses quickly increased and in October 1942, 56 ships of over 258,000tonnes were sunk in the "air gap" between Greenland and Iceland. The 700,000 ton target was achieved in only one month, November 1942, while after May 1943 average sinkings dropped to less than one tenth of that figure. The new battleship Bismarck and the cruiser Prinz Eugen put to sea to attack convoys. The Germans received help from their allies. In 1939, the Kriegsmarine lacked the strength to challenge the combined British Royal Navy and French Navy (Marine Nationale) for command of the sea. The British lost Audacity, a destroyer and only two merchant ships. Unlike the regular escort groups, support groups were not directly responsible for the safety of any particular convoy. It is maintained by G. H. Persall[97] that "the Germans were close" to economically starving England, but they "failed to capitalize" on their early war successes. Then on October 30, crewmen from HMSPetard salvaged Enigma material from German submarineU-559 as she foundered off Port Said. Once it was decided to attack, the escort would increase speed, using the target's course and speed data to adjust her own course. Many U-boat attacks were suppressed and submarines sunk in this waya good example of the great difference apparently minor aspects of technology could make to the battle. The Italian submarines had been designed to operate in a different way than U-boats, and they had a number of flaws that needed to be corrected (for example huge conning towers, slow speed when surfaced, lack of modern torpedo fire control), which meant that they were ill-suited for convoy attacks, and performed better when hunting down isolated merchantmen on distant seas, taking advantage of their superior range and living standards. On 14 September 1939, Britain's most modern carrier, HMSArk Royal, narrowly avoided being sunk when three torpedoes from U-39 exploded prematurely. During World War I, Germanys unprecedented use of Untersee-boots (U-boatsfor short) significantly changed the face of the conflict. U.S. 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. The headquarters was commanded by Hans-Rudolf Rsing.[64]. WebDuring World War I, three U-boats sank ten ships off the Tar Heel coast in what primarily was considered a demonstration of German naval power. [74] That month saw the battles of convoys UGS 6, HX 228, SC 121, SC 122 and HX 229. Exercises in anti-submarine warfare had been restricted to one or two destroyers hunting a single submarine whose starting position was known, and working in daylight and calm weather. There are fears more than 100 people, including children, have died after their boat sank off southern Italy. [40], Amongst the more successful Italian submarine commanders who operated in the Atlantic were Carlo Fecia di Cossato, commander of the submarine Enrico Tazzoli, and Gianfranco Gazzana-Priaroggia, commander of Archimede and then of Leonardo da Vinci.[41]. [104] A history based on the German archives written for the British Admiralty after the war by a former U-boat commander and son-in-law of Dnitz reports that several detailed investigations to discover whether their operations were compromised by broken code were negative and that their defeat ".. was due firstly to outstanding developments in enemy radar"[105] The graphs of the data are colour coded to divide the battle into three epochs before the breaking of the Enigma code, after it was broken, and after the introduction of centimetric radar, which could reveal submarine conning towers above the surface of the water and even detect periscopes. On November 19, 1942, Admiral Noble was replaced as Commander-in-Chief of Western Approaches Command by Admiral Sir Max Horton. [77] 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 the air escort of North Atlantic convoys. Did an Ancient Magnetic Field Reversal Cause Chaos for Life on Earth 42,000 Years Ago? U-boat crews became heroes in Germany. In all, during the Atlantic campaign only 10% of transatlantic convoys that sailed were attacked, and of those attacked only 10% on average of the ships were lost. Shortly after, Le Tigre managed to hunt down the U-boat U-215 that had torpedoed the merchant ship, which was then sunk by HMSVeteran; credit was awarded to Le Tigre. While this was an embarrassment for the British, it was the end of the German surface threat in the Atlantic. The convoy was immediately intercepted by the waiting U-boat pack, resulting in a brutal battle. Further air cover was provided by the introduction of merchant aircraft carriers (MAC ships), and later the growing numbers of American-built escort carriers. The Empire of Japan also adhered to the idea of a fleet submarine, following the doctrine of Alfred Thayer Mahan, and never used their submarines either for close blockade or convoy interdiction. From the summer of 1940 a small but steady stream of warships and armed merchant raiders set sail from Germany for the Atlantic. Germany returned to the offensive in the North Atlantic in September 1943 with initial success, with an attack on convoys ONS 18 and ON 202. More than 2,400 British ships were sunk. The advent of long-range search aircraft, notably the unglamorous but versatile PBY Catalina, largely neutralised surface raiders. ASDIC produced an accurate range and bearing to the target, but could be fooled by thermoclines, currents or eddies, and schools of fish, so it needed experienced operators to be effective. The battle was the first clear Allied convoy victory.[61]. All sides will agree with Hastings that " mobilization of the best civilian brains, and their integration into the war effort at the highest levels, was an outstanding British success story."[108]. Operation Drumbeat had one other effect. Despite their success, U-boats were still not recognised as the foremost threat to the North Atlantic convoys. [89][90] In Brazilian waters, eleven other Axis submarines were known to be sunk between January and September 1943the Italian Archimede and ten German boats: U-128, U-161, U-164, U-507, U-513, U-590, U-591, U-598, U-604, and U-662. Canada's Merchant Navy was vital to the Allied cause during World War II. If an echo was detected, and if the operator identified it as a submarine, the escort 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 attacker closed to within 1,000 yards (910m). One crucial development was the integration of ASDIC with a plotting table and weapons (depth charges and later Hedgehog) to make an anti-submarine warfare system. On February 1, 1942, the Kriegsmarine switched the U-boats to a new Enigma network (TRITON) that used the new, four-rotor, Enigma machines. The first confirmed kill using this technology was U-502 on July 5, 1942. She has previously written for The Boston Globe, PolicyMic and Interview Magazine. Before the war, Norway's Merchant Navy was the fourth largest in the world and its ships were the most modern. By 1941, the United States was taking an increasing part in the war, despite its nominal neutrality. 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