.Other campaigns.Contemporaneous wars.The Battle of the Atlantic, the longest continuous in, ran from 1939 to the in 1945, covering a major part of the. At its core was the naval, announced the day after the declaration of war, and Germany's subsequent counter-blockade. The campaign peaked from mid-1940 through to the end of 1943.The Battle of the Atlantic pitted and other warships of the German (Navy) and aircraft of the (Air Force) against the, and Allied merchant shipping., coming mainly from North America and predominantly going to the United Kingdom and the, 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 beginning September 13, 1941. The Germans were joined by of the Italian (Royal Navy) after Germany's ally entered the war on June 10, 1940.As a small island country, the United Kingdom was highly dependent on imported goods.

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Britain required more than a million tons of imported material per week in order to survive and fight. In essence, the Battle of the Atlantic involved a: the Allied struggle to supply Britain and the Axis attempt to stem the flow of merchant shipping that enabled Britain to keep fighting. From 1942 onward the Axis also sought to prevent the build-up of Allied supplies and equipment in the in preparation for the. The defeat of the U-boat threat was a prerequisite for pushing back the Axis in Western Europe.

The outcome of the battle was a strategic victory for the Allies—the German blockade failed—but at great cost: 3,500 merchant ships and 175 warships were sunk in the Atlantic for the loss of 783 U-boats (the majority of them ) and 47 German surface warships, including 4 battleships (, and ), 9 cruisers, 7 raiders, and 27 destroyers. Of the U-boats, 519 were sunk by British, Canadian, or other allied forces, while 175 were destroyed by American forces; 15 were destroyed by the Soviets and 73 were scuttled by their crews before the end of the war for various reasons.The Battle of the Atlantic has been called the 'longest, largest, and most complex' naval battle in history. The campaign started immediately after the European War began, during the so-called ', and lasted more than five years, until the in May 1945. It involved thousands of ships in more than 100 convoy battles and perhaps 1,000 single-ship encounters, in a theatre covering millions of square miles of ocean. The situation changed constantly, with one side or the other gaining advantage, as participating countries surrendered, joined and even changed sides in the war, and as new weapons, tactics, counter-measures and equipment were developed by both sides. The Allies gradually gained the upper hand, overcoming German surface-raiders by the end of 1942 and defeating the U-boats by mid-1943, though losses due to U-boats continued until the war's end.

British Prime Minister later wrote 'The only thing that really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril. I was even more anxious about this battle than I had been about the glorious air fight called the '.' Contents.Name On 5 March 1941, asked for 'many more ships and great numbers of men' to fight 'the Battle of the Atlantic', which he compared to the, fought the previous summer. The first meeting of the 'Battle of the Atlantic Committee' was on March 19. Churchill claimed to have coined the phrase 'Battle of the Atlantic' shortly before Alexander's speech, but there are several examples of earlier usage. Background Following the use of by Germany in the, countries tried to limit, even abolish, submarines.

The effort failed. Instead, the required submarines to abide by ', which demanded they surface, search and place ship crews in 'a place of safety' (for which lifeboats did not qualify, except under particular circumstances) before sinking them, unless the ship in question showed 'persistent refusal to stop.or active resistance to visit or search'. These regulations did not prohibit arming merchantmen, but doing so, or having them report contact with submarines (or ), made them de facto naval auxiliaries and removed the protection of the cruiser rules. This made restrictions on submarines effectively moot.

Early skirmishes (September 1939 – May 1940) In 1939, the Kriegsmarine lacked the strength to challenge the combined British Royal Navy and ( Marine Nationale) for command of the sea. Instead, German naval strategy relied on commerce raiding using, submarines and aircraft. Many German warships were already at sea when war was declared, including most of the available U-boats and the ' ( Panzerschiffe) and which had sortied into the Atlantic in August. These ships immediately attacked British and French shipping. Sank the 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; many of the 57 available U-boats were the small and short-range, useful primarily for and operations in British coastal waters.

Much of the early German anti-shipping activity involved minelaying by, aircraft and U-boats off British ports. Admiral Graf Spee shortly after her scuttlingWith the outbreak of war, the British and French immediately began a, although this had little immediate effect on German industry. The Royal Navy quickly introduced a for the protection of trade that gradually extended out from the British Isles, eventually reaching as far as,. Convoys allowed the Royal Navy to concentrate its escorts near the one place the U-boats were guaranteed to be found, the convoys. Each convoy consisted of between 30 and 70 mostly unarmed merchant ships.Some British naval officials, particularly the First Lord of the Admiralty, sought a more 'offensive' strategy. The Royal Navy formed anti-submarine hunting groups based on to patrol the shipping lanes in the and hunt for German U-boats.

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, and 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 14 September 1939, Britain's most modern carrier, narrowly avoided being sunk when three torpedoes from exploded prematurely. U-39 was forced to surface and scuttle by the escorting destroyers, becoming the first U-boat loss of the war. Another carrier, was sunk three days later by.Escort destroyers hunting for U-boats continued to be a prominent, but misguided, technique of British anti-submarine strategy for the first year of the war. U-boats nearly always proved elusive, and the convoys, denuded of cover, were put at even greater risk.German success in sinking Courageous was surpassed a month later when in penetrated the British base at and sank the old battleship at anchor, immediately becoming a hero in Germany.In the South Atlantic, British forces were stretched by the cruise of Admiral Graf Spee, which sank nine merchant ships of 50,000 in the South Atlantic and Indian Ocean during the first three months of war. The British and French formed a series of hunting groups including three, three aircraft carriers, and 15 cruisers to seek the raider and her sister Deutschland, which was operating in the North Atlantic. These hunting groups had no success until Admiral Graf Spee was between and by an inferior British force.

After suffering damage in the subsequent action, she took shelter in neutral harbour and was on 17 December 1939.After this initial burst of activity, the Atlantic campaign quieted down. Admiral, 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.

That level of deployment could not be sustained; the boats needed to return to harbour to refuel, re-arm, re-stock supplies, 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.

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 for fleet operations in.The resulting revealed serious flaws in the (firing mechanism) of the U-boats' principal weapon, the. Although the narrow fjords gave U-boats little room for manoeuvre, 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 (due to the influence pistol), or hit and failed to explode (because of a faulty contact pistol), or ran beneath the target without exploding (due to the influence feature or depth control not working correctly). 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. The director in charge of torpedo development continued to claim it was the crews' fault. In early 1941, the problems were determined to be due to differences in the earth's magnetic fields at high latitudes and a slow leakage of high-pressure air from the submarine into the torpedo's depth regulation gear.

These problems were solved by about March 1941, making the torpedo a formidable weapon. Similar problems plagued the U.S. Ignored reports of German problems. Submarine warfare. The German submarine base in Lorient, BrittanyThe completion of Hitler's campaign in Western Europe meant U-boats withdrawn from the Atlantic for the Norwegian campaign now returned to the war on trade. So at the very time the number of U-boats on patrol in the Atlantic began to increase, the number of escorts available for the convoys was greatly reduced.

The only consolation for the British was that the large merchant fleets of occupied countries like Norway and the Netherlands came under British control. After the German occupation of Denmark and Norway, Britain and the, establishing bases there and preventing a German takeover.It was in these circumstances that Winston Churchill, who had become on 10 May 1940, first wrote to to request the loan of fifty obsolescent US Navy destroyers. This eventually led to the ' (effectively a sale but portrayed as a loan for political reasons), which operated in exchange for 99-year leases on certain British bases in, and the, a financially advantageous bargain for the United States but militarily beneficial for Britain, since it effectively freed up British military assets to return to Europe. A significant percentage of the US population opposed entering the war, and some American politicians (including the US Ambassador to Britain, ) believed that Britain and its allies might actually lose. The first of these destroyers were only taken over by their British and Canadian crews in September, and all needed to be rearmed and fitted with ASDIC.

It was to be many months before these ships contributed to the campaign.' The Happy Time' (June 1940 – February 1941). This section does not any. Unsourced material may be challenged and.Find sources: – ( July 2015) ASDIC (also known as ) was a central feature of the Battle of the Atlantic.

One crucial development was the integration of ASDIC with a plotting table and weapons ( and later ) to make an anti-submarine warfare system.ASDIC produced an accurate range and bearing to the target, but could be fooled by, currents or, and schools of fish, so it needed experienced operators to be effective. ASDIC was effective only 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 escort'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, 1–1.5 mi (1.6–2.4 km) apart.

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 (910 m). Once it was decided to attack, the escort would increase speed, using the target's course and speed data to adjust her own course. 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 40 yd (37 m) to either side. The intention was to lay a 'pattern' like an elongated diamond, hopefully with the submarine somewhere inside it. To effectively disable a submarine, a depth charge had to explode within about 20 ft (6.1 m). Since early ASDIC equipment was poor at 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, and working in daylight and calm weather. U-boats could dive far deeper than British or American submarines (over 700 feet (210 m)), well below the 350-foot (110 m) maximum depth charge setting of British depth charges. More importantly, early ASDIC sets could not look directly down, so the operator lost contact on 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 ASDIC contact was very difficult to regain if the first attack had failed.

It enabled the U-boat to change position with impunity.The belief ASDIC had solved the submarine problem, the acute budgetary pressures of the, and the pressing demands for many other types of rearmament meant little was spent on anti-submarine ships or weapons. Most British naval spending, and many of the best officers, went into the battlefleet. Critically, the British expected, as in the First World War, German submarines would be coastal craft and only threaten harbour approaches. As a result, the Royal Navy entered the in 1939 without enough long-range escorts to protect ocean-going shipping, and there were no officers with experience of long-range anti-submarine warfare. The situation in was even more dire: patrol aircraft lacked the range to cover the North Atlantic and could typically only machine-gun the spot where they saw a submarine dive.Great surface raiders. A scout bomber from USS Ranger flies anti-submarine patrol over Convoy WS-12, en route to, November 27, 1941. The convoy was one of many escorted by the US Navy on ', before the US officially 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 east almost as far as. British forces 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 of British, and Canadian, and American destroyers and corvettes was organised following the declaration of war by the United States.In June 1941, the US realised the tropical Atlantic had become dangerous for unescorted American as well as British ships.

On May 21, an American vessel carrying no military supplies, was stopped by 750 nautical miles (1,390 km) west of. 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.' At the same time, the British were working on a number of technical developments which would address the German submarine superiority. Though these were British inventions, the critical technologies were provided freely to the US, which then renamed and manufactured them. In many cases this has resulted in the misconception these were American developments. Likewise, the US provided the British with flying boats and bombers, that were important contributions to the war effort.Catapult Aircraft Merchantmen.

Sea Hurricane Mk IA on the catapult of a CAM shipAircraft ranges were constantly improving, but the Atlantic was far too large to be covered completely by land-based types. A stop-gap measure was instituted by fitting ramps to the front of some of the cargo ships known as Catapult Aircraft Merchantmen , equipped with a lone expendable fighter aircraft. When a German bomber approached, the fighter was fired off the end of the ramp with a large to shoot down or drive off the German aircraft, the pilot then in the water and (hopefully) 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.Although the results gained by the CAM ships and their Hurricanes were not great in enemy aircraft shot down, the aircraft shot down were mostly that would often shadow the convoy out of range of the convoy's guns, reporting back the convoy's course and position so that U-boats could then be directed on to the convoy. The CAM ships and their Hurricanes thus justified the cost in fewer ship losses overall.High-frequency direction-finding.

This section does not any. Unsourced material may be challenged and.Find sources: – ( July 2015) One of the more important developments was ship-borne direction-finding radio equipment, known as HF/DF (high-frequency direction-finding, or ), which started to be fitted to escorts from February 1942.

These sets were common items of equipment by the spring of 1943. HF/DF let an operator determine the direction of a radio signal, regardless of whether the content could be read. Since the wolf pack relied on U-boats reporting convoy positions by radio, there was a steady stream of messages to intercept.

A destroyer could then run in the direction of the signal and attack the U-boat, or at least force it to submerge (causing it to lose contact), which might prevent an attack on the convoy. When two ships fitted with HF/DF accompanied a convoy, a fix on the transmitter's position, not just direction, could be determined. The British also made extensive use of shore HF/DF stations, to keep convoys updated with positions of U-boats.The radio technology behind direction finding was simple and well understood by both sides, but the technology commonly used before the war used a manually-rotated aerial to fix the direction of the transmitter. This was delicate work, took quite a time to accomplish to any degree of accuracy, and since it only revealed the line along which the transmission originated a single set could not determine if the transmission was from the true direction or its reciprocal 180 degrees in the opposite direction. Two sets were required to fix the position. Believing this to still be the case, German U-boat radio operators considered themselves fairly safe if they kept messages short. The British, however, developed an oscilloscope-based indicator which instantly fixed the direction and its reciprocal the moment a radio operator touched his key.

It worked simply with a crossed pair of conventional and fixed directional aerials, the oscilloscope display showing the relative received strength from each aerial as an elongated ellipse showing the line relative to the ship. The innovation was a 'sense' aerial which when switched in, suppressed the ellipse in the 'wrong' direction leaving only the correct bearing. 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 apparently minor aspects of technology could make to the battle.Enigma cipher. Enigma rotors and spindleThe British codebreakers needed to know the wiring of the special naval Enigma rotors, and the destruction of by in February 1940 provided this information.

In early 1941, the Royal Navy made a concerted effort to assist the codebreakers, and on May 9 crew members of the destroyer boarded and recovered her cryptologic material, including bigram tables and current Enigma keys. The captured material allowed all U-boat traffic to be read for several weeks, until the keys ran out; the familiarity codebreakers gained with the usual content of messages helped in breaking new keys.Throughout the summer and autumn of 1941, Enigma intercepts (combined with HF/DF) enabled the British to plot the positions of U-boat patrol lines and route convoys around them.

Merchant ship losses dropped by over two-thirds in July 1941, and the losses remained low until November.This Allied advantage was offset by the growing numbers of U-boats coming into service. The began reaching the Atlantic in large numbers in 1941; by the end of 1945, 568 had been. Although the Allies could protect their convoys in late 1941, they were not sinking many U-boats. The Flower-class corvette escorts could detect and defend, but they were not fast enough to attack effectively.U-boat captured by an aircraft An extraordinary incident occurred when a Coastal Command of captured U-570 on 27 August 1941 about 80 miles south of Iceland. Squadron Leader J. Thompson sighted the U-boat on the surface, immediately dived at his target, and released four depth charges as the submarine crash dived. The U-boat surfaced again, a number of crewmen appeared on deck, and Thompson engaged them with his aircraft's guns.

The crewmen returned to the conning tower while under fire. A few moments later, a white flag and a similarly coloured board were displayed. Thompson called for assistance and circled the German vessel. A Catalina from 209 Squadron took over watching the damaged U-boat until the arrival of the armed trawler 'Kingston Agate' under Lt Henry Owen L'Estrange. The following day the U-boat was beached in an Icelandic cove. Although no codes or secret papers were recovered, the British now possessed a complete U-boat.

After a refit, U-570 was commissioned into the Royal Navy as. Mediterranean diversion. Fitted to a Royal Air Force Coastal Command, February 26, 1944Detection by radar-equipped aircraft could suppress U-boat activity over a wide area, but an aircraft attack could only be successful with good visibility. 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; 2) flares deployed to illuminate any attack gave adequate warning for evasive manoeuvres. The introduction of the by the British in January 1942 solved the second problem, thereby becoming a significant factor in the Battle for the Atlantic.

Developed by RAF officer, it was a powerful and controllable searchlight mounted primarily to and B-24 Liberators. These aircraft first made contact with enemy submarines using air-to-surface-vessel (ASV) radar. Then, about a mile from the target, the Leigh light would be switched on. It immediately and accurately illuminated the enemy, giving U-boat commanders less than 25 seconds to react before they were attacked with depth charges. The first confirmed kill using this technology was U-502 on July 5, 1942.The Leigh light enabled the British to attack enemy subs on the surface at night, forcing German and Italian commanders to remain underwater especially when coming into port at sub bases in the Bay of Biscay.

U-boat commanders who survived such attacks reported a particular fear of this weapon system since aircraft could not be seen at night, and the noise of an approaching aircraft was inaudible above the din of the sub's engines. Subsequently, the common practice of surfacing at night to recharge batteries and refresh air was mostly abandoned as it was safer to perform these tasks during daylight hours when enemy planes could be spotted. A drop in Allied shipping losses from 600,000 to 200,000 tons per month was attributed to this device. Metox receiver. On anti-submarine warfare in the South Atlantic, 1944.Despite U-boat operations in the region (centred in the Atlantic Narrows between and ) beginning autumn 1940, only in the following year did these start to raise serious concern in Washington. This perceived threat caused the US to decide that the introduction of US forces along Brazil's coast would be valuable.

After negotiations with Brazilian (on behalf of dictator ), these were introduced in second half of 1941.Germany and Italy subsequently extended their submarine attacks to include Brazilian ships wherever they were, and from April 1942 were found in Brazilian waters. On 22 May 1942, the first Brazilian attack (although unsuccessful) was carried out by aircraft on the. After a series of attacks on merchant vessels off the Brazilian coast by, Brazil officially entered the war on 22 August 1942, offering an important addition to the Allied strategic position in the South Atlantic. U-199 under attack by PBY Catalina, 31 July 1943.Although the was small, it had modern minelayers suitable for coastal convoy escort and aircraft which needed only small modifications to become suitable for. During its three years of war, mainly in Caribbean and South Atlantic, alone and in conjunction with the US, Brazil escorted 3,167 ships in 614 convoys, totalling 16,500,000 tons, with losses of 0.1%. Brazil saw three of its warships sunk and 486 men (332 in the cruiser ); 972 and civilian passengers were also lost aboard the 32 Brazilian merchant vessels attacked by enemy submarines.

American and Brazilian air and naval forces worked closely together until the end of the Battle. One example was the sinking of in July 1943, by a coordinated action of Brazilian and American aircraft. In Brazilian waters, eleven other Axis submarines were known to be sunk between January and September 1943—the Italian and ten German boats:, U-507, and.By fall 1943, the decreasing number of Allied shipping losses in the South Atlantic coincided with the increasing elimination of Axis submarines operating there. From then on, the battle in the region was lost by Germany, even though most of the remaining submarines in the region received an official order of withdrawal only in August of the following year, and with ( Baron Jedburgh) the last Allied merchant ship sunk by a U-boat ( U-532) there, on 10 March 1945.

Final years (June 1943 – May 1945). Seamen raise the over a captured German U-boat in 1945The Germans failed to stop the flow of strategic supplies to Britain. This failure resulted in the build-up of troops and supplies needed for the. The defeat of the U-boat was a necessary precursor for accumulation of Allied troops and supplies to ensure Germany's defeat.Victory was achieved at a huge cost: between 1939 and 1945, 3,500 Allied merchant ships (totalling 14.5 million gross tons) and 175 Allied warships were sunk and some 72,200 Allied naval and merchant seamen lost their lives.

The vast majority of Allied warships lost in the Atlantic and close coasts were small warships averaging around 1,000 tons such as frigates, destroyer escorts, sloops, submarine chasers, or corvettes, but losses also included two battleships ( Royal Oak and ), one battlecruiser , two aircraft carriers ( and Courageous), three escort carriers (, Audacity, and ), and seven cruisers (, and ). The Germans lost 783 U-boats and approximately 30,000 sailors killed, three-quarters of Germany's 40,000-man U-boat fleet.

Losses to Germany's surface fleet were also significant, with 4 battleships, 9 cruisers, 7 raiders, and 27 destroyers sunk.Losses: AlliesGermany36,200 sailors30,000 sailors36,000 merchant seamen3,500 merchant vessels783 submarines175 warships47 other warshipsMerchant Navy. This section does not any. Unsourced material may be challenged and.Find sources: – ( July 2015) United Kingdom During the Second World War nearly one third of the world's merchant shipping was British. Over 30,000 men from the lost their lives between 1939 and 1945. More than 2,400 British ships were sunk.

The ships were crewed by sailors from all over the, 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 made up of vessels from the many and varied private shipping lines, examples being the tankers of the and the freighters of and Lines. The British government, via the (MoWT), also had new ships built during the course of the war, these being known as.United States In addition to its existing merchant fleet, United States shipyards built 2,710 totalling 38.5 million tons, vastly exceeding the 14 million tons of shipping the German U-boats were able to sink during the war.Canada Canada's Merchant Navy was vital to the Allied cause during World War II. More than 70 Canadian merchant vessels were lost. 1,600 merchant sailors were killed, including eight women.

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 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.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. U-boats disrupted coastal shipping from the Caribbean to Halifax, during the summer of 1942, and even entered into.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 Germans and the Allies both recognised the great importance of Norway's merchant fleet, and following Germany's invasion of Norway in April 1940, both sides sought control of the ships. Norwegian Nazi puppet leader ordered all Norwegian ships to sail to German, Italian or neutral ports. He was ignored. All Norwegian ships decided to serve at the disposal of the Allies. The vessels of the Norwegian Merchant Navy were placed under the control of the government-run, with headquarters in London and New York.Nortraship's modern ships, especially its tankers, were extremely important to the Allies.

Norwegian tankers carried nearly one-third of the oil transported to Britain during the war. Records show that 694 Norwegian ships were sunk during this period, 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.Assessment. This section needs additional citations for.

Unsourced material may be challenged and removed.Find sources: – ( July 2015) It is maintained by some historians that the U-boat Arm came close to winning the Battle of the Atlantic; that the Allies were almost defeated; and that Britain was brought to the brink of starvation. Others, including Blair and Alan Levin, disagree; Levin states this is 'a misperception', and that 'it is doubtful they ever came close' to achieving this.The focus on U-boat successes, the and their scores, the convoys attacked, and the ships sunk, serves to camouflage the Kriegsmarine 's manifold failures. In particular, this was because most of the ships sunk by U-boats were not in convoys, but sailing alone, or having become separated from convoys.At no time during the campaign were supply lines to Britain interrupted; even during the Bismarck crisis, convoys sailed as usual (although with heavier escorts). 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. Overall, more than 99% of all ships sailing to and from the British Isles during World War II did so successfully.Despite their efforts, the Axis powers were unable to prevent the build-up of Allied invasion forces for the liberation of Europe.

In November 1942, at the height of the Atlantic campaign, the US Navy escorted the Operation Torch invasion fleet 3,000 mi (4,800 km) across the Atlantic without hindrance, or even being detected. (This may be the ultimate example of the Allied practise of evasive routing.) In 1943 and 1944 the Allies transported some 3 million American and Allied servicemen across the Atlantic without significant loss. By 1945 the USN was in mid-Atlantic with little real difficulty a wolf-pack suspected of carrying V-weapons.Third, and, the Germans were never able to mount a comprehensive blockade of Britain. Nor were they able to focus their effort by targeting the most valuable cargoes, the eastbound traffic carrying war materiel. Instead they were reduced to the slow attrition of a.

To win this, the U-boat arm had to sink 300,000 GRT per month in order to overwhelm Britain's shipbuilding capacity and reduce its merchant marine strength.In only four out of the first 27 months of the war did Germany achieve this target, while after December 1941, when Britain was joined by the US merchant marine and ship yards the target effectively doubled. As a result, the Axis needed to sink 700,000 GRT per month; as the massive expansion of the US shipbuilding industry took effect this target increased still further. 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.By the end of the war, although the U-boat arm had sunk 6,000 ships totalling 21 million GRT, the Allies had built over 38 million tons of new shipping. The reason for the misperception that the German blockade came close to success may be found in post-war writings by both German and British authors. Attributes the distortion to 'propagandists' who 'glorified and exaggerated the successes of German submariners', while he believes Allied writers 'had their own reasons for exaggerating the peril'.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. It is this which led to Churchill's concerns.

Coupled with in the space of a month, it undermined confidence in the convoy system in March 1943, to the point Britain considered abandoning it, not realising the U-boat had already effectively been defeated. These were 'over-pessimistic ', Blair concludes: 'At no time did the German U-boat force ever come close to winning the Battle of the Atlantic or bringing on the collapse of Great Britain'.

Shipping and U-boat sinkings each month. This section does not any. From 1941. From 1942. Until 1943.

For a significant part of 1941, the Scharnhorst, Gneisenau and Prinz Eugen were all out of service whilst bomb damage was being repaired in the Brest naval dockyard. Scharnhorst was successfully attacked by the RAF at La Pallice on 24 July 1941 and repairs took 4 months. Gneisenau was hit by a torpedo on 6 April 1941 then bombed again whilst in dry dock, necessitating lengthy repairs, then received minor bomb damage on 18 December. Prinz Eugen was seriously damaged by a bomb on 1 July 1941 and was under repair for the rest of the year. The resulting demands on the dockyard at Brest caused delays in the servicing of U-boats as there was a shortage of workers with the right skills.Bibliography. Behrens, C.B.A. Merchant Shipping and the Demands of War London: HMSO).

Douglas, William A.B., Roger Sarty and Michael Whitby, No Higher Purpose: The Official Operational History of the Royal Canadian Navy in the Second World War, 1939–1943, Volume 2 Part 1, Vanwell Publishing 2002,. Douglas, William A.B., Roger Sarty and Michael Whitby, A Blue Water Navy: The Official Operational History of the Royal Canadian Navy in the Second World War, 1943–1945, Volume 2 Part 2, Vanwell Publishing 2007,.

Morison, S.E. The Two Ocean War and History of United States Naval Operation in World War II in 15 Volumes.

Volume I The Battle of the Atlantic and volume X The Atlantic Battle Won deal with the Battle of the Atlantic. Schull, Joseph, Far Distant Ships: An Official Account of Canadian Naval Operations in World War II, King's Printer, Ottawa, 1952 - reprinted by Stoddart Publishing, Toronto, 1987,.Biographies. Kew: The National Archives. Retrieved November 8, 2017. Dead synchronicity trophy guide. Blair, Clay.

Hitler's U-boat War. Comprehensive history of the campaign. Brown, Ken. U-Boat Assault on America: Why the US was Unprepared for War in the Atlantic (US Naval Institute Press, 2017), 288 pp.

Costello, John; Hughes, Terry (1977). The Battle of the Atlantic. London: Collins.

CS1 maint: ref=harv. Doherty, Richard, 'Key to Victory: The Maiden City in the Battle of the Atlantic'.

Fairbank, David. Bitter Ocean: The Battle of the Atlantic, 1939–1945. Gannon, Michael. Operation Drumbeat: The Dramatic True Story of Germany's First U-Boat Attacks Along the American Coast in World War II. Harper and Row. Gannon, Michael.

Black May: The Epic Story of the Allies' Defeat of the German U-Boats in May 1943. Dell. Haslop, Dennis. Britain, Germany and the Battle of the Atlantic: A Comparative Study (A&C Black, 2013). Keegan, John.

Atlas of World War II (2006). Macintyre, Donald.

The Battle of the Atlantic. (London 1961). Excellent single volume history by one of the British Escort Group commanders. Milner, Marc. 'The Atlantic War, 1939–1945: The Case for a New Paradigm.' Global War Studies 14.1 (2017): 45-60.

O'Connor, Jerome M, 'FDR's Undeclared War', WWW.Historyarticles.com. The Critical Convoy Battles of March 1943 (London: Ian Allan 1977). A thorough and lucid analysis of the defeat of the U-boats.

Sarty, Roger, The Battle of the Atlantic: The Royal Canadian Navy's Greatest Campaign, 1939–1945, CEF Books, Ottawa, 2001. Syrett, David. The Defeat of the German U-Boats: The Battle of the Atlantic (University of South Carolina Press, 1994.). Terraine, John, Business in Great Waters, (London 1987) Wordsworth Military Library. The best single-volume study of the U-Boat Campaigns, 1917–1945. van der Vat, Dan. The Atlantic Campaign, 1988.

Mechwarrior 5 forum. Do you really think MW5 is at any stage ready for steam?

Williams, Andrew, The Battle of the Atlantic: Hitler's Gray Wolves of the Sea and the Allies' Desperate Struggle to Defeat ThemExternal links Wikimedia Commons has media related to.; see footnote 3 page 2.