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Gretton’s Convoy ONS-5, which was attacked in atrocious weather off the south coast of Iceland during the spring of 1943. The convoy of forty ships had sailed out of Londonderry on 23 April at 7 knots in bad weather with an escort of two destroyers, one frigate and four corvettes, which went more slowly than surfaced U-boats. On 28 April the first U-boat attacked the convoy off the coast of Iceland, and for the next nine days there were constant running battles – on one night there were twenty-four separate attacks – until 09.15 hours on 6 May when Dönitz called off the action. In all fifty-nine U-boats from four wolf-packs – Group Star, Group Specht, Group Ansel and Group Drossel – had engaged the convoy, losing eight and with seven more damaged, for the loss of thirteen Allied merchantmen. ‘The convoy was still together,’ wrote Gretton later, ‘and the longest and fiercest convoy action of the war had ended with a clear-cut victory.’61 In his review of Dönitz’s memoirs, the naval historian Captain Stephen Roskill noted that the convoy’s struggle ‘is marked only by latitude and longitude and has no name by which it will be remembered; but it was, in its own way, as decisive as Quiberon Bay or the Nile’.62 In the single month of May 1943 forty-one U-boats – 30 per cent of the total force at sea – were sunk at a heavy cost in German lives (including that of Dönitz’s youngest son Peter on U-954).63

On 24 May Dönitz was forced to withdraw all his U-boats from the North Atlantic, and report to Hitler in Berlin. ‘There can be no let-up in submarine warfare,’ Hitler told him at a conference also attended by Keitel, Warlimont and Karl-Jesko von Puttkamer, the Führer’s naval adjutant, on 5 June. ‘The Atlantic is my first line of defence in the West, and even if I have to fight a defensive battle there, that is preferable to waiting to defend myself on the coast of Europe.’64 No longer did Germany see the Atlantic as a potential means of strangling Britain; now it was somewhere to hold off the coming invasion of north-west Europe. Yet Dönitz was powerless to obey his Führer – though he wisely did not admit as much then or subsequently – and on 24 June Allied ships capable of sailing 15 knots or faster were allowed to sail across the Atlantic without convoy protection for the first time in four years. June 1943 was the first month of the war in which not a single Allied convoy was attacked in the North Atlantic. June also saw the British introduce a new code for ship-to-shore radio traffic, Naval Cipher No. 5, to replace the one that the Germans had been listening into since 1941.

It was ironic that just as Albert Speer, who had been appointed armaments minister after the death in a plane crash of Fritz Todt in April 1942, found a way of rationalizing the manufacture of U-boats – using time-and-motion studies prevalent in the pre-war motor-car industries – down from forty-two weeks to only sixteen, there were fewer places for them to be deployed.65 Although twenty-eight U-boats did return to the North Atlantic in September 1943, they sank only nine of the 2,468 ships that crossed in the next two months. Despite large numbers of U-boats being put into service – there were never fewer than 400 between the summer of 1943 onwards, of which one-third were operational – the battle of the Atlantic had been decisively lost by Germany. Shipping losses of over 7 million tons in 1942 fell to 3 million in 1943.66 It was not negligible, but it was survivable. In August 1943 more U-boats were destroyed than merchant ships were sunk, ‘a piece of news which stirred a thousand hearts, afloat and ashore’, recalled Monsarrat. ‘For the first time in the war, the astonishing balance was struck.’67

Between January and March 1944 Germany lost twenty-nine U-boats while sinking only three merchantmen. They were thus incapable of interdicting the D-Day landings, although by the start of 1944 they had perfected the Schnorchel, a hinged air mast which permitted the U-boats’ diesel engines to suck in air and expel exhaust while fully submerged. Batteries could