1939...Battleship Graf Spee

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1939: The German battleship 'Graf Spee' is scuttled after being trapped by the Royal Navy off Montevideo.
1967: Australian Prime Minister Harold Holt vanishes in mysterious circumstances while swimming near Melbourne.

The U-boat peril
Winston Churchill once wrote that, '... the only thing that ever really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril'. In saying this, he correctly identified the importance of the threat posed during World War Two by German submarines (the 'Unterseeboot') to the Atlantic lifeline. This lifeline was Britain's 'centre of gravity' - the loss of which would probably have led to wholesale defeat in the war.


Germany's best hope of defeating Britain lay in winning the Battle of the Atlantic.
If Germany had prevented merchant ships from carrying food, raw materials, troops and their equipment from North America to Britain, the outcome of World War Two could have been radically different. Britain might have been starved into submission, and her armies would not have been equipped with American-built tanks and vehicles.

Moreover, if the Allies had not been able to move ships about the North Atlantic, it would have been impossible to project British and American land forces ashore in the Mediterranean theatres or on D-Day. Germany's best hope of defeating Britain lay in winning what Churchill christened the 'Battle of the Atlantic'.

Germany had waged a similar campaign in World War One, and in 1917 had come close to defeating Britain. But in spite of this experience neither side was well prepared in 1939. Germany had underestimated the impact of U-boats, and was fighting with only 46 operational vessels, using mostly surface vessels - rather than submarines - to prowl the Atlantic. However, on 3 September 1939, the day Britain declared war on Germany, the British liner Athenia was torpedoed by a U-boat. This marked the beginning of the second Battle of the Atlantic.

 

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The menace grows
U-boat crews could be away from port for many weeks at a time In the early stages of World War Two, the Royal Navy placed much faith in ASDIC (an early form of sonar) to detect submerged U-boats. The British were largely able to master the surface threat posed by Germany, sinking the pocket battleship Graf Spee in December 1939 and the battleship Bismarck in 1941, but from the summer of 1940 the U-boat menace grew.

This was in part because the conquest by Germany of Norway and France gave the Germans forward bases, which increased the range of the U-boats and also allowed Focke-Wulf FW200 'Kondor' long-range aircraft to patrol over the Atlantic, carrying out reconnaissance for the U-boats and attacking Allied shipping.

The British were consequently forced to divert their own shipping away from vulnerable UK ports, and were faced with the need to provide convoys with naval escorts for greater stretches of the journey to North America. The Royal Navy was critically short of escort vessels, although this problem was eased somewhat by the arrival of 50 old American destroyers that President Roosevelt gave in return for bases in British territory in the West Indies.


U-boats succeeded in sinking three million tons of Allied shipping ...
U-boats, supplemented by mines, aircraft and surface ships, succeeded in sinking three million tons of Allied shipping between the fall of France in June 1940 and the end of the year. Admiral Dönitz, the commander of the U-boat arm, introduced the 'wolfpack' tactic at the end of 1940, whereby a group of submarines would surface and attack at night, thus greatly reducing the effectiveness of ASDIC.

Not surprisingly, the German submariners called this phase of the war the 'happy time'. This remorseless attrition of merchant shipping was a far greater threat to Britain's survival than the remote possibility of the Kriegsmarine landing German troops on the English coast.