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Battles of the Atlantic 1939-41 RAF Coastal Command’s Hardest Fight Against the
Battles of the Atlantic 1939-41 RAF Coastal Commands Hardest Fight Against the U-Boats by Mark Lardas
Soft Cover
96 pages
Copyright 2020
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION4
CHRONOLOGY6
ATTACKERS' CAPABILITIES9
DEFENDERS' CAPABILITIES24
CAMPAIGN OBJECTIVES37
THE CAMPAIGN46
AFTERMATH AND ANALYSIS86
FURTHER READING94
INDEX95
INTRODUCTION
The only thing that ever really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril.
Winston Churchill, Their Finest Hour (The Second World War Volume 2) History is always obvious in retrospect. Yet when occurring, its path is less certain. In 1938-39, no one really worried about the U-boat peril. Virtually all navies viewed submarines as adjuncts to the battle fleet. They were to be used for scouting, and to attack enemy warships prior to naval battles. The submarine was widely seen as an outdated weapon against merchant shipping.
Britain believed convoys and ASDIC (what Britain called sonar) would neutralize the submarine threat. Even in Germany the Kriegsmarine's commander, Erich Raeder, considered U-boats auxiliary to surface warships. They failed in World War I, and defences against them had only improved since then. Luftwaffe commander Hermann Goring believed U-boats (and the rest of the Kriegsmarine) were superfluous. Aircraft could replace them. Only Karl Donitz, who commanded Germany's U-boats, believed they were a war-winning weapon.
Everyone, except Donitz and his submarine commanders, was surprised at the effectiveness of the U-boat. Sonar proved less effective than the British believed it to be. Surface attack made the U-boat invisible to sonar, especially at night. Wolf-pack tactics overwhelmed convoy escorts. At the war's end, Diinitz, who led the Kriegsmarine's U-boat arm through most of the war, was Nazi Germany's commander-in-chief, a testimony to the role played by the U-boat.
Politics kept Donitz from unleashing his U-boats against Allied merchant shipping during the first few months of the war. Initially, Adolf Hitler insisted Germany adhere to Article 22 of the 1930 London Naval Treaty, which required submarines to warn unarmed merchant ships before sinking them (this became known as the London Submarine Protocol). Faulty German torpedoes in the war's first year further limited U-boat success. Even after Hitler permitted unrestricted submarine warfare in August 1940, the limited number of available U-boats during the 'Happy Time' that followed kept the damage they did within acceptable levels for Britain and its allies. The U-boat had not proved the war-winning weapon Diinitz hoped it would be during the first two years of the war.
Britain possessed the major piece of the solution to the U-boat peril right from the start of the Battle of the Atlantic: the anti-submarine aircraft. Used assiduously and effectively in the first months of the war, aircraft could have ended the Battle of the Atlantic in its first year with Nazi Germany abandoning a U-boat campaign their top leaders had been unenthusiastic about when the war started.
There was no more potent threat to U-boats than aircraft. If U-boats were barracudas, slashing at schools of merchant ships, then aircraft were eagles, capable of ripping into a barracuda from above and carrying it away. Even when aircraft could not attack, they could observe their prey and call other hunters to the spot.
In World War I, aircraft contributed as much to defeating the U-boat as did arming merchantmen and convoys. Aircraft forced U-boats to submerge, limiting mobility and destroying their effectiveness. It was the main reason everyone assumed the U-boat was outdated. Aircraft in 1914-18 were primitive, barely able to stay aloft, but by the 1930s the wood and canvas kites had been replaced by all-metal monoplanes capable of carrying a ton or more of weapons.
Britain's leaders bungled this opportunity, failing to build an adequate aerial anti-submarine capability. There were too few aircraft assigned to carry out maritime patrols; most of those assigned were either obsolescent, incapable of carrying a sufficient bomb-load or lacking endurance. When the war started, the primary focus of Britain's maritime patrol aircraft was protection of Britain's seaborne trade from surface raiders. Submarines were viewed as unlikely to pose a serious problem.
Britain had almost no effective weapons that aircraft could use against submarines. Those few that were effective could only be carried by the largest maritime aircraft, a small fraction of total available aircraft. The bombs the aircraft most commonly used for maritime patrol could carry would not damage a U-boat, even with a direct hit. The result was that both sides were fighting a battle for which neither had prepared, yet one that would make the struggle's winner the victor of the war. Instead of ending in 1940, the Battle of the Atlantic continued from the first day of World War II until Germany's surrender in May 1945.
Nicholas Monsarrat fought that war as an officer on a Royal Navy corvette. In his magnificent novel of the Battle of the Atlantic, The Cruel Sea, he described the early years of the battle as 'like a game of hide-and-seek played by a few children in an enormous rambling garden ... some of the children were vicious and cruel, and pinched you when you were discovered.' While Monsarrat's view of the war was from the bridge of a surface warship, it was little different for the aircrew flying aircraft seeking U-boats, or the U-boat crews watching for aircraft. Both sides could 'pinch' hard in the right circumstances.
Both the Allies and the Axis spent the period covered in this book learning to fight the Battle of the Atlantic. The Germans perfected their weapons and tactics against their primary target merchant shipping while trying to cope with the threat posed by aircraft. They also worked desperately to increase U-boat production, seeking to raise their numbers to decisive quantities.
Similarly, Britain developed aircraft capable of effectively hunting U-boats, munitions capable of sinking U-boats, systems (such as radar, but also signal intelligence and radio direction finding) capable of finding U-boats and tactics capable of destroying them. They were aided in minor ways during the first eight months of the war by France, and during the last six months of 1941 by the United States, but it was almost entirely an all-British effort.
By the end of December 1941, Britain had finally assembled all the tools to conduct an effective aerial offensive against the U-boat peril. But in late 1941, Germany finally succeeded in increasing U-boat production to war-winning numbers. Additionally, the entrance of the United States into the war following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor both expanded the battlefield and vastly changed resources available for the Battle of the Atlantic.
The climactic battles would be fought in 1942 and 1943. But they could not have been fought without the foundations laid between 1939 and 1941. This is the story of the building of those foundations.
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