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By Root 1612 0

Germany lost the Battle of the Atlantic before it started. This was a technological fight from the first, and at the start of the campaign the Germans held several advantages. Admiral Karl Donitz (also Doenitz), the German U-boat commander, devised a new way of waging war with submarines. Donitz recognized the two highest hurdles for submarine warfare were spotting a convoy and then successfully attacking it. Believe it or not, finding the convoy was the hardest part, but once found the submarines needed to sink several ships to gain victory. First, a line of scout submarines (sub) was deployed to spot convoys. After a sub acquired a convoy they radioed the position, speed, and direction of the ships to U-boat headquarters in France. Second, German HQ radioed a number of subs and ordered their convergence on the convoy for a large coordinated attack designed to inflict maximum damage while overwhelming the convoy escort. Donitz’s wolf pack concept gave the Germans a critical advantage during the first months of the war. The problem in modern war is technological and tactical advantages disappear fast.

The Germans lost before they started because they produced so few modern oceangoing submarines prior to September 1939. The majority of their subs were coastal types, designed for shallow water and not cruising on open seas. In the critical prewar years Germany produced few oceangoing subs, and one year they produced just ONE U-boat. During the essential months of 1939, Germany had twelve oceangoing subs, and struggled to keep four U-boats on the western approaches to England.[230] Even with so few U-boats, ace German captains sank numerous British merchant ships. The Royal Navy swiftly took countermeasures to avoid the wolf packs through the code breakers by just routing the convoys around the subs with known locations. With so few subs an effective picket line was impossible. The few U-boats available at war’s outbreak doomed the Nazi effort. Donitz needed three hundred oceangoing U-boats for his campaign. The admiral possessed twelve, about 4 percent of his needs.

Documentaries on the Battle of the Atlantic show German U-boats attacking from under water in daylight. In fact, few attacks occurred this way. Underwater, a U-boat was very slow and could not keep up with a convoy; therefore, Germans carried out their attacks at night on the surface. U-boats stayed on the surface when searching for convoys and, once the quarry was spotted, tracked it at a safe distance while surfaced. Underwater, the U-boats found it impossible to spot or track convoys; thus, surface operations were imperative. After a Wolf Pack assembled, the German U-boat captains awaited darkness then skillfully approached the convoy, on the surface, avoiding the escorts. Once in close, the subs, gliding low in the sea, either fired their torpedoes outside the convoy perimeter, or—if expert and fearless—sailed into the convoy itself, between the lines of ships, and commenced their attack from point blank range.

For the first few months of the war an extremely small set of brilliant U-boat commanders accounted for the majority of English shipping losses. As these superb captains and their crews were destroyed Britain’s shipping losses declined, illustrating the impact of a few extraordinary men.

By 1943, the technological advantage lay completely with the Allies as new submarine detection and fighting methods forever shifted the tide. The increasing Allied ability to place aircraft above the convoys ended the U-boats’ operational effectiveness, and Allied shipping losses fell significantly. To illustrate: in 1942 Allied shipping losses were 8,245,000 tons, for the loss of 85 U-boats; in 1943 Allied shipping losses were 3,611,000 tons for the loss of 287 U-boats. The tide turned dramatically in May of 1943 and Germany lost the undersea struggle.

All this Allied technological innovation and its rapid deployment was assisted by decisions at the Casablanca Conference in January 1943, where Roosevelt and Churchill met to co-ordinate strategy. The leaders agreed