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By Root 1021 0

and developed better ones. The search for new weapons continued. The Allies produced the hedgehog, a multiple projectile that would fire ahead of the escort while it still had sonar contact with the sub; it was several times more efficient than the old World War I–style depth charge. The Germans riposted with the acoustic torpedo, which would home in on the noise of the ship’s propeller, follow the wake of the ship, and hit in the stern. The Allies answered that with a towed box that imitated a propeller’s noise and caused the torpedo to detonate prematurely. The Germans, just too late, introduced the snorkel breathing tube, similar to that used by skindivers today, so that a sub could get air and recharge its batteries without surfacing. At the end of the war, one German submarine went from Norway to Argentina on its snorkel; the crew turned green, but they made it.

Through 1943 and after, things went downhill for the Germans. The Allies gradually gained the upper hand; finally, in 1944, as the ring closed in on Germany, the U-boats’ Atlantic bases were lost one by one; all the old aces disappeared—bombed, depth-charged, rammed, or sunk by gunfire. New replacements drafted out of the surface navy went to sea and never came back. U-boat sailors who survived one patrol became veterans, those who survived two were old men at twenty. The happy days were gone, and gone forever. The seas calmed, the wreckage disappeared, the sinkings stopped.

The statistics of the Battle of the Atlantic defy the imagination. More than 2,600 ships were sunk, totaling over 15,000,000 tons. The British alone lost about 30,000 sailors of the Royal Navy, and 30,000 of the merchant service. The Germans built 1,162 U-boats during the course of the war; 785 of them were sunk, 156 surrendered at the end of the war, and the rest were either scuttled or otherwise destroyed. Almost 41,000 men served in the U-boats; 5,000 were taken prisoner, and 28,000 were killed. In balance the campaign was more costly for the Allies than for the Germans, but they could afford the losses better—they had no choice in the matter.

The merchant ships, corvettes, and submarines were always there. They hit the headlines only when there was some spectacular disaster, such as befell the famous Convoy PQ17, a north Russian convoy, in midsummer of 1942, when it lost twenty-two out of thirty-three ships. But for the most part the battle of the convoys went on almost unheralded. It was when the big ships clashed that excitement peaked.

The major surface units of the German fleet, all of them new, were qualitatively among the best in the world. Ship for ship they were superior to the equivalent units of the Royal Navy, most of which were older and designed to meet a wider variety of needs. The Germans, for example, did not have the imperial responsibilities that required British ships to sail all over the world; with fewer habitability problems, they were able to provide better damage control facilities, and such factors counted heavily in battle. But there were not enough German ships to make an open challenge, and therefore they reverted to the classic role of the inferior power, the guerre de course, the attempt to destroy the enemy’s maritime trade. Their super battleships became powerful but expensive commerce raiders.

Some of the Kriegsmarine’s ships were at sea when war was declared. One of them, the Deutschland, managed to sink only two merchant ships before coming home through the Denmark Strait; afraid of the propaganda effect if a ship with such a name were sunk, Hitler rechristened her Luetzow, after a cruiser given to Russia. Far more spectacular was what happened to the other pocket-battleship at sea, the Graf Spee.

Under Captain Hans Langsdorf, Graf Spee was at large in the mid-Atlantic in early September. For two months she ranged the south Atlantic and into the Indian Ocean, sinking 50,000 tons of shipping. She then returned to try the rich hunting off the South American coast, and it was there, early on the morning of December 13, that she was run to earth