The Battle of the Atlantic

The Battle of the Atlantic

As a nation with an overseas empire, the United Kingdom was highly dependent on imported goods. Britain required more than a million tons of imported materials per week in order to be able to survive and fight. Basically, the Battle of the Atlantic was a tonnage ( military strategy aimed at merchant shipping) the Allied powers struggled to keep Britains supply lines open, and the Axis powers struggled to cut off the merchant shipping forcing Britain to surrender due to starvation and the lack of raw materials.

A major threat towards the British ships was German U-boats ( Unterseeboten) which could hunt ships beneath the ocean and destroy allied ships with torpedoes. The only point where the U-boats lacked was speed, U-boats would be extremely slow when it was underwater. If it were to attack a convoy and wasn't able to succeed in that, the only job left was to wait for the next lot of convoys to pass, since it can't follow or chase those convoys due to the slow speed. Although U-boats lacked in speed however they are proven to be destructive and was able to sink many British ships. As protection against U-boat attacks, ships traveled in convoys, guarded by Royal navy destroyers and corvettes. However, the Germans took to hunting in wolf packs where 15-20 U-boats waited in a line across possible convoy routes, ready to attack. By early 1941 so many British ships were sunk by the German wolf packs that Churchill, Prime Minister of Great Britain, declared that a Battle of the Atlantic was taking place. The battle of the Atlantic widened after the US joined WW2 in December 1941, through a program called lend-lease. This lend-lease program was a program that the US allowed Britain to buy their weapons without immediate payments. Before the entrance of the United Kingdom in WW2, U-boats only had eyes for attacking British ships, however after the US entered the war and supported Britain by shipping weapons to them in the lend-lease program, u-boats then started sinking American ships. The U-boats sank more than 200 American ships before the US Navy began its own convoy system. As the battle of the Atlantic moved onto 1943, the Allied Powers benefited from new technology that helped them to prevent U-boat secretive attacks. An invention would be the Huff Duff ( High Frequency Direction finding) which could detect short radion signals from a surfaced U-boat, allowing the American and British ships to be directed away from the area. Another discovery that benefited the Allies was the discovery of an Enigma coding machine that was obtained on board of a captured U-boat. This discovery allowed the British to decipher the secret Ultra codes which the Germans used for sending orders to the U-boats. However, despite these new discoveries and inventions, the Allies were losing the battle of the Atlantic by early 1943, the Germans encouraged by their success in the Black Gap, sent 60 U-boats for an attack on a convoy in May 1943. This time however, the allies were better prepared and managed to sink7 U-boats for the loss of 12 ships. German U-boats continued to hunt Allied ships for the rest of 1943, but May 1943 was a major turning point for the allies since the Germans failed to cut Britain's supply lines across the Atlantic.

Credits to: Sangtawun, Amy ,Jenny and Tina