Implacable Foes!
On the very first day of the war, September 1, 1939, German U-boats sank a British passenger liner, the Athena, and, two weeks later, a warship, HMS Courageous. On September 14, the British sank their first U-boat. During this first month, Germany also deployed two great surface raiders, Admiral Graf Spee and Deutschland. Gneisenau and Scharnhorst would follow in November. In the meantime, the British carrier Royal Oak was sunk on October 12 in its Scapa Flow anchorage, the principal home base of the Royal Navy.
On December 13, 1939, off the coast of Uruguay in the South Atlantic, the British cruisers Ajax, Exeter, and Achilles trapped the Admiral Graf Spee in the Battle of the River Plate. As a result of the engagement, the commander of the Graf Spee scuttled his ship rather than let it fall into British hands.
March 1940 saw the maiden voyage of the German surface raider Atlantis, which would sink 145,697 tons of Allied shipping—the most of any surface raider—before it was sunk in November 1941 by HMS Devonshire. During April 9–13, off Narvik, Norway (see Narvik, Battles of), the British battleship Warspite, in concert with the destroyers Hardy, Hotspur, Havock, Hunter, and Hostile, engaged a 10-ship German destroyer flotilla, sinking or forcing the scuttling of all the German combatants. In May, the Royal Navy managed one of the great rescues of the war, evacuating trapped British forces from Dunkirk (see Dunkirk evacuation), but on June 8, the Royal Navy suffered a sharp blow when the carrier HMS Glorious and two escort vessels were lost in action to Scharnhorst and Gneisenau.
Elsewhere, in July 1940, British ships fired on the French fleet at Oran, North Africa, after it refused to surrender. At about this time in the Mediterranean, British warships sank the Giulio Cesare, pride of the Italian fleet.
On September 2, 1940, U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an executive order transferring 50 obsolescent U.S. Navy destroyers to the Royal Navy in exchange for leases on various British bases. These ships would perform valuable convoy escort duty. However, on September 21, 11 British merchant ships were lost when German U-boats put into practice wolfpack tactics and attacked Convoy HX 72. Even worse came the next month, during the so-called Night of the Long Knives, October 17–18, when a wolfpack attacked Convoy SC 7, sinking 20 of 34 ships.
The first two months of 1941 brought more terrible destruction against Allied shipping. In January, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau renewed their attacks, and in February, the Germans staged the first coordinated assault on a convoy (HG 53), using aircraft, surface ships, and U-boats to sink 9 of 16 ships. In a single day, February 22, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau sank five British vessels.
March 9 saw the loss of five more British ships, and on March 15, German surface raiders and U-boats worked in concert to sink 13 ships and capture three tankers. However, at the Battle of Cape Matapan, March 27–28, 1941, British warships struck a devastating blow against the Italian fleet, sinking the cruisers Pola, Fiume, and Zara as well as two destroyers—without the loss of a single British vessel or sailor. More than 2,400 Italian sailors were drowned. Yet, during March 27–28, U-boats sank another 43 British ships. The ratification of the Lend-lease Act by the United States Congress during this month promised to make up at least some of the British losses, but the record for April, 45 ships sunk, was grim, and the U.S. Navy, transferring ships from the Pacific to the Atlantic Fleet, began its undeclared naval war with Germany.
In May, while hunting the formidable German pocket battleship Bismarck and its companion, the cruiser Prinz Eugen, HMS Hood was sunk with the loss of all hands. Efforts to sink the Bismarck were redoubled after this catastrophe, and Bismarck was indeed sunk—a grave loss to the German surface fleet and a terrible blow to German morale. Despite this triumph, U-boats sank 58 ships this month. Nevertheless, during the summer, the effectiveness of U-boat attacks dipped as the Allies improved convoy tactics. It was the first glimmer of hope in the long struggle.
Although the United States would not enter World War II until December, increasing numbers of U.S. Navy destroyers began escorting convoys through waters adjacent to the North American continent. Germany’s admiral Karl Dönitz ordered his U-boats to avoid attacking American vessels—he had no desire to provoke the United States into joining the war—but on September 4, 1941, U-652 fired on the destroyer USS Greer. This prompted President Roosevelt to authorize outright defense of convoys and brought the United States significantly closer to joining the battle. On October 16, the U.S. destroyer Reuben James was sunk with the loss of 115. In November, the British lost the carrier Ark Royal to a U-boat attack.
On December 11, just three days after the United States declared war on Japan following the attack on Pearl Harbor, Germany declared war on the United States and immediately dispatched U-boats to prowl the waters of the American East Coast. This rapidly evolved into Operation Drumbeat, a concerted campaign against Allied shipping in American waters, inaugurated on January 13, 1942. Tankers were deemed first-priority targets, and 35 ships were sunk near the United States coast before the month ended. U.S. Navy air patrols began hunting for submarines, scoring their first kill off the East Coast on March 1. Nevertheless, Germany was committed to expanding operations in American waters and developed large submarines dubbed “milk cows,” which performed underway replenishment of fuel and provisions for the attack U-boats, thereby greatly extending patrol range and endurance. In May alone, U-boats sank 45 ships in the Gulf of Mexico.
Success in American waters notwithstanding, Admiral Dönitz decided in July to reconcentrate his U-boat fleet in the North Atlantic. Despite the deadly effectiveness of the U-boat campaign, Allied ships successfully landed U.S. and British troops in Northwest Africa, and the Allies also reinstated convoys to the Soviet Union. Determined to make up for losses and to ensure an uninterrupted flow of supplies and materiel, the United States inaugurated a crash program of ship building, launching Liberty Ships, specially designed to be built rapidly. Not only were the ships launched at an amazing rate, the pace of recruitment of sailors for the United States Merchant Marine was dazzling. The Allies also became increasingly aggressive in beating off attacks against convoys, as the Battle of Barents Sea on December 31, 1942, demonstrated. The Royal Navy cruisers Jamaica and Sheffield and the destroyers Obdurate, Onslow, and Achates engaged the German pocket battleship Lutzow, the cruiser Hipper, and seven destroyers, sinking one German destroyer for the loss of the Achates, but successfully driving off the attack on a convoy.
Disappointed in the performance of his surface fleet, Adolf Hitler began 1943 by ordering the effective liquidation of his surface navy and greatly increased production of U-boats. Allied losses continued to mount, but, by April, it was becoming clear that these losses were beginning to level off even as U-boat losses increased. This was thanks mainly to new and improved escort tactics. Indeed, in May, Admiral Dönitz generally halted attacks on North Atlantic convoys because U-boat losses had reached unacceptable levels. Some historians believe that the Battle of the Atlantic essentially ended with this withdrawal, an assessment that sailors of the Allied merchant marine and German U-boat crews would certainly have disputed.
In September 1943, Royal Navy commandos were sent to sink the battleship Tirpitz using limpet mines. Although Tirpitz was damaged in this attack, it did not sink and would survive until November 1944, when Royal Air Force bombers finally destroyed it. On December 26, 1943, Scharnhorst was engaged by the Royal Navy’s battleship Duke of York and the cruisers Belfast, Norfolk, Sheffield, and Jamaica. Scharnhorst was sunk with the loss of 1,927 sailors; the 36 crew members who were rescued became prisoners of war. In view of Hitler’s abandonment of the surface navy, the loss of the Scharnhorst was the final blow for the German surface fleet.
During 1944 and through the opening months of 1945, the Battle of the Atlantic continued with far less intensity. One significant episode occurred on June 4, 1944, off the North African coast, when a U.S. Navy “hunter-killer group,” consisting of the escort carrier Guadalcanal and five destroyers, attacked U-505, forcing it to surface. The German commander ordered his men to abandon ship and to scuttle the boat, but U.S. sailors boarded the vessel, disarmed its self-destruction device, and saved the U-505 from sinking. The first enemy prize taken by the U.S. Navy since the War of 1812, the U-505 was salvaged and eventually donated to the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. A more important prize than the submarine, however, were the code books recovered from it, which allowed American cryptanalysts to break the special code used to position U- boats. This intelligence allowed hunter-killer groups to home in on these locations and also to vector Allied convoy commanders away from them.
Although the Battle of the Atlantic did not fully end until Germany surrendered in May 1945, the role of the Atlantic fleets of the U.S. Navy and Royal Navy turned for a time almost exclusively to supporting Operation Overlord, the D-day invasion, in June 1944. Following this, most Allied Atlantic naval assets were deployed for ongoing convoy escort duty.
Further reading: Gannon, Michael. Operation Drumbeat: The Dramatic True Story of Germany’s First U-Boat Attacks Along the American Coast in World War II. New York: Harper Perennial, 1991; Ireland, Bernard. The Battle of the Atlantic. Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2003; Morison, Samuel Eliot. The Battle of the Atlantic: September 1939–May 1943. New York: Castle Books, 2001; Pitt, Barrie. The Battle of the Atlantic. Boston: Little, Brown, 1977; Williams, Andrew. The Battle of the Atlantic: Hitler’s Gray Wolves of the Sea and the Allies’ Desperate Struggle to Defeat Them. New York: Basic Books, 2003.
