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The battle of the Atlantic is one of the most written about aspects of the Second World War, so any new book on the U-boat war needs to have something different about it to be interesting. In this case that is that it covers the entire U-boat war, from the Atlantic to the Far East, as part of an overall narrative rather than as individual episodes.
The book provides a detailed account of the entire U-boat war, rather than focusing on the main battle of the Atlantic. The author is good at pointing out how these other commitments reduced the number of U-boats actually operating in the Atlantic – deploying even a small number of U-boats to most different theatres actually took a much larger number out of action – the boats actually in place, those being prepared to replace them and those being serviced after a deployment, not to mention those lost on the way to their distant theatre, such as the fifteen lost trying to reach the Far East in 1944.
The focus on the wider war is the book’s key strength, with very good sections on the U-boats in the Far East, the Black Sea and the Caribbean. These cover operations in those areas in more detail than is often the case. We thus get a good idea of why the U-boats were initially succesful in the Caribbean, but also why that ‘happy time’ didn’t last.
For me the main weakness is the implication that because the U-boats never came close to successfully cutting Britain’s supply lines, their impact wasn’t massive. Although there were only a handful of months in which they reached their sinking targets, the damage they did in many of the less succesful months was still significant. Most sinkings saw a loss of life, often on a large scale, and many saw the loss of important cargoes.
Although there is perhaps a different tone to the book, with the U-boats seen as further away from success than is often the case, we do still reach the same turning point in May 1943, when several pieces of improved Allied technology came together, along with an increased number of escorts, to see the U-boats suffer their worst month of the war. The technology included Torpex filled depth charges, the Hedgehog anti-torpedo mortar, centimentric radar, an increased number of very long range aircraft and perhaps most importantly the abundance of escort vessels made possible by American mass production.
One interesting result of this was the successful American use of ‘hunter-killer’ groups, generally made up of one escort carrier and supporting destroyers, which we see repeatedly achieving great successes.
We see just how vulnerable the U-boats became later in the war when we reach D-Day. Here we see Donitz order a full scale commitment against the invasion fleet, but the result was the loss of large numbers of U-boats. Of a group of fifteen based at Brest sent to attack the fleet, five were sunk, four damaged and forced to return, one forced to go to Guernsey and the remaining five managed to damage on frigate and four Liberty ships. Of eleven U-boats sent from Norway seven were sunk on the way!
The final section, looking at the new tactics and technology the Germans introduced late in the war is of great value, undermining the often seen idea that things like the new models of U-boats or close inshore tactics might have turned the tide of the U-boat war. Instead we see that the first model of electric powered boats, the type XXIII, was a tiny design only capable of carrying two torpedoes, while the majority of boats used in the close inshore tactics were sunk.
This is an excellent study of the entire U-boat war, providing a well integrated study of all of the different theatres in which the U-boats fought, looking at how they related to each other, the problems faced in each, and the reasons that the Germans were never able to consistently reach their sinking targets even early in the war when Allied anti-submarine warfare resources were badly stretched.
Chapters
1 – Genesis
2 – War
3 – The Myth of the ‘Happy Time’
4 – Diverging Objectives
5 – The Descent
6 – Sun and Snow
7 – Drumbeat in the New World
8 – Losing the Race
9 – Tipping Point
10 – Reinforcing Failure
11 – Total Commitment
Author: Lawrence Paterson
Edition: Paperback
Pages: 368
Publisher: Osprey
Year: 2022