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| The Battle of the Atlantic was the longest campaign of World War II. For the British between the years 1940 and 1943, the fight against Hitler's U-boats was a struggle for national survival. Had the German navy - the Kriegsmarine - severed Britain's Atlantic supply line, it would have interrupted the flow from America of raw materials and munitions vital to the British war effort as well as the food needed to sustain the British population. Once victory had been secured, the British prime minister Winston Churchill made the heartfelt admission that 'The only thing that really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril ... It did not take the form of flaring battles and glittering achievements; it manifested itself through statistics, diagrams and curves unknown to the nation, incomprehensible to the public.'
At the outbreak of war in September 1939, Karl Doenitz, the German U-boat admiral, had 57 U-boats under his command, of which 30 were short-range coastal types and 27 ocean-going. Until the fall of France in June 1940, this fleet was confined to the waters around the British Isles. However, Doenitz believed that with 300 U-boats he could strangle Britain. After June 1940, possession of the French Atlantic ports gave him a springboard to operate in the eastern Atlantic. At the same time, many British warships had been diverted from escort duties to concentrate in British home waters against the German invasion threat. U-boat crews dubbed the period July-October 1940 the 'happy time'. Throughout late 1940 and 1941, Doenitz moved his operations steadily westward, away from British air cover. In January 1942, with the entry of the United States into the war, he transferred the main weight of his offensive to the unprotected shipping of the western hemisphere. U-boat crews called this period - January-July 1942 - the second 'happy time'. During it, U-boats in the Atlantic were at their safest, with an average life of 13 months, and also at their most deadly, sinking on average 19 ships of about 100,000 tons each before being sunk themselves. By July 1942, Doenitz had achieved his fleet of 300 U-boats, enabling him to maintain 140 boats on operations, hunting in so-called 'wolf packs' and sinking shipping at an annual rate of seven million tons - five times the rate that the British were able to build replacement ships. But the scales were tipping inexorably against Doenitz. With the strengthening of US coastal escorts, the U-boats were driven into the north Atlantic. Requisitioning and charter had added seven million tons of shipping to the British merchant fleet, a figure that was augmented by the output of American shipyards, which were producing over three ships for every one sunk by the U-boats. To these was added more than 500 warships (as opposed to merchant ships) that joined the Royal Navy's escort fleet in the north Atlantic. Long-range patrol aircraft based in North America, Iceland, Britain and the Azores were steadily reducing the mid-Atlantic 'air gap' in which U-boats had been able to operate safely on the surface. Soon the convoys would have their own integral air cover, provided by a growing number of escort aircraft carriers. However, it was not until the spring of 1943 that Anglo-American co-operation, and American production, closed the door on the U-boats. In May, 43 U-boats were lost, twice as many as could be replaced. Wolf pack tactics were eventually abandoned in favour of individual attacks. In the closing months of the war, U-boats operated principally around the British Isles, using schnorkel technology to remain permanently submerged. Despite this, by the end of the war, at the beginning of May 1945, the average lifespan of a U-boat had sunk to three months. During the Battle of the Atlantic, the U-boats sank 2,452 Allied merchant ships and 175 warships; more than 30,000 British merchant seamen lost their lives. For its part, the Kriegsmarine lost 696 of the 830 U-boats despatched on operations, almost all in the Atlantic; 25,870 submariners were killed out of 40,900 who sailed. The U-boat casualty rate of 75% overall was the worst incurred by any arm of any service in World War II.
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