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The Sunderland was the most famous British flying boat of the Second World War, seen as a solid, almost stately, heavily armed aircraft that posed a serious threat to the U-boats.
The introduction comments on the mismatch between public perception (then and now) of the Sunderland as the most numerous four engined aircraft involved in the Battle of the Atlantic, and the reality of it coming second behind the B-24 Liberator. The key to this was that there were never enough Sunderlands – production was always much slower than required.
The design and development chapter reminds us that the Sunderland was a huge advance on previous British military flying boats when it first appeared – it tends to be remembered as more of a solid performer, but it was 40% faster than the aircraft it replaced, a massive leap. It was also capable of being repeatedly upgraded, gaining ever more powerful engines and a greater payload. The U-boat section has to cover a rather larger topic, with four main types of U-boat active in the Bay of Biscay in 1943 (VII, IX, X and XIV), but we still get a brief overview of German submarine design from pre First World War days up to these boats. One quirk of these two weapons is that the smaller Sunderland was a spacious aircraft, with room for a wardroom, bunks and a galley, while the larger U-boats were famously cramped.
A sizable chapter looks at the men involved - the crews of Coastal Command and the U-boat force. These turn out to be similar in many ways, both filled with technically minded volunteers.
We don’t reach the Combat chapter until page 53, quite some way into the book. This section starts with several pages on the fighting in the Bay of Biscay earlier in the war. This generally saw a very small number of Sunderlands involved, and only a handful of contacts.
This changed in the spring of 1943, when more squadrons became available, at about the same time as the Germans decided to try fighting back on the surface when attacked by aircraft. Over the next two years the Sunderlands sank 24 U-boats in the Bay of Biscay, although not without cost. The battle finally ended when the Kriegsmarine had to withdraw its U-boats from the French ports as the Allies advanced from Normandy. We get a good series of accounts of these clashes, with quite a few illustrated by German accounts, which give a feel for how the balance of power had swung against the U-boats, making many of their patrols a nightmare of constant air attack.
We finish with an analysis of the overall performance of the Sunderland. Surprisingly only 35 of the thousands of encounters between U-boats and Sunderlands actually saw the U-boat or aircraft destroyed. Both sides are shown to have made mistakes. For the British the biggest was to not invest properly in Coastal Command before the war – a well equipped Command with enough Sunderlands and an effective anti-submarine weapon might have ended the Battle of the Atlantic before it ever developed into a threat. On the German side the decision to stop using their Metox radar warning set because they falsely believed the Allies could track it came at the same time as the decision to fight it out on the surface meant that the Sunderlands could use their older radar to find U-boats, which then stuck about to be sunk.
This is a useful examination of a key part of the Battle of the Atlantic, looking at why the Sunderland wasn’t effective earlier in the war and what changed in 1943-44 to give the Allies a crucial advantage.
Chapters
Introduction
Chronology
Design and Development
Technical Specifications
The Strategic Situation
The Combatants
Combat
Statistics and Analysis
Aftermath
Author: Mark Lardas
Edition: Paperback
Pages: 80
Publisher: Osprey
Year: 2023