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By Root 1489 0

of a brave naval action at the battle of the River Plate but also a brilliant British deception operation, dented the myth of invincibility that had begun to surround the big German raiders. Similarly, although it was successful the German invasion of Norway in April 1940 cost the German Navy dear – almost half its entire destroyer force. But the fall of France in June allowed the Kriegsmarine to establish itself right along France’s Atlantic seaboard, with major bases at Lorient, Brest, La Rochelle and Saint-Nazaire. October 1940 saw Admiral Scheer break into the Atlantic Ocean, followed two months later by the heavy cruiser Admiral Hipper. The British Admiralty seemed incapable of preventing German raiders from sailing through the Denmark Straits between Greenland and Iceland. ‘For the first time in our history,’ Vice-Admiral Günther Lütjens told the crews of Scharnhorst and Gneisenau in January 1941, as they passed through the Faeroes–Iceland gap, ‘German battleships have today succeeded in breaking through the British blockade. We shall now go forward to success.’34 He was right in the short term: in two months the two ships together sank 116,000 tons of Allied shipping.

Yet both Admiralties were wrong in assuming that the big battleships would be decisive. In fact, it very soon became clear that the U-boats posed the primary threat, especially during what their crews were later to dub ‘the happy times’ of 1939–41. U-boats were often faster than their prey, averaging 17 knots on the surface, where they often sailed at night (they managed only 3 knots when submerged). Long after the war, Dönitz enumerated the advantages of the U-boat, which were more manoeuvrable than their Great War predecessors and:

had only a small silhouette consisting only of the conning tower and that is why the submarine could only be seen with difficulty during a night attack. Gradual development in communications meant the submarines were no longer obliged to fight alone, but they could attack together. This enabled us to develop the ‘wolf-pack’ tactics that became very useful against the convoys.35

After April 1941 Dönitz pioneered Rudeltaktik (herd tactics), by which the first U-boat to spot a convoy shadowed it while sending out signals to headquarters and other U-boats in the area, prior to a concerted night-time, surface, close-range torpedo attack by them all, acting as a wolf-pack. Monsarrat described how the U-boats took the upper hand in 1941:

The enemy was planning as well as multiplying. At last, the U-boats were co-ordinating their attack: they now hunted in packs, six or seven in a group, quartering a huge area of the convoy route and summoning their full strength as soon as a contact was obtained. They had the use of French, Norwegian and Baltic ports, fully equipped for shelter and maintenance: they had long-range aircraft to spot and identify for them, they had numbers, they had training, they had better weapons, they had the spur of success.36

By March 1941 the Allies had lost over 350,000 tons of shipping in the Atlantic, but the following month this rose to 700,000 tons. Since in 1939 Britain’s entire merchant marine totalled a gross tonnage of 17.5 million, the largest in the world, the danger to her from losing more than 1 million tons in two months was obvious.37 Setting up the Battle of the Atlantic Committee on 6 March 1941 to co-ordinate ministers, civil servants and the services, Churchill announced that ‘the Battle of the Atlantic has begun… We must take the offensive against the U-boat and the Focke-Wulf wherever we can and whenever we can. The U-boat at sea must be hunted, the U-boat in the building yard or in the dock must be bombed.’38

Yet it was the Germans who took the initiative, unleashing the battleship Bismarck and the new heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen into the Atlantic shipping lanes, in the hope of asphyxiating Britain and forcing her to sue for peace. Bismarck had been launched in Hamburg by the Iron Chancellor’s granddaughter, Dorothea von Löwenfeld, on 14 February 1939, and Göring, Goebbels, Hess, Ribbentrop,