Having looked at iconic Allied ships and aircraft from the Battle of the Atlantic, perhaps it is an easier task to do the same for the Axis powers, in this instance the Germans.
And although it is difficult to look beyond the dreaded U-boat, we will start with a quartet of battleships whose reputations far exceeded their achievements, although they had the potential to wreak havoc amongst Allied convoys.
Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, displacing almost 40,000 tons, were commissioned shortly before the war and spent the first part of the conflict working together against British ships in the Atlantic, although they withdrew to Germany in the Channel Dash of early 1942.
After that they played no part in the Battle of the Atlantic Gneisenau was damaged by air raids in Kiel and never repaired, while Scharnhorst was sunk at Christmas 1943 by a Royal Navy force led by battleship HMS Duke of York at the Battle of North Cape, part of the Arctic campaign.
The second – and last – pair of German battleships were Bismarck and Tirpitz, topping 50,000 tons and commissioned in 1940 and 1941 respectively.
Bismarck was on a raising mission in the North Atlantic in May 1941 when it sank British battlecruiser HMS Hood, and was itself sunk three days later by a powerful Royal Navy force which was seeking revenge – more of that at a later date.
Tirpitz remained a threat but little more than that – much of her career was spent holed up in Norway, acting as a deterrent and forcing the Allies to allocate warships to convoy escort duties, though she rarely ventured out from the fjords.
Allied attempts to sink here failed until the autumn of 1944 when three RAF raids caused her to capsize and sink.
Two of Germany’s thtee ‘pocket battleships’ – heavy cruisers Deutschland (later renamed Lutzow) and Admiral Graf Spee – also sailed on commerce raiding missions in the Atlantic early in the war; Deutschland was fairly ineffective and later transferred to the Eastern Front, while Graf Spee was damaged at the Battle of the River Plate in December 1939 and, under the impression a powerful Royal Navy force was waiting for her off Montevideo, she was scuttled just outside the port.
Which brings us to the U-boat, or U-boats, to be precise, as there were several classes of German (and Italian) submarines involved in the Battle of the Atlantic.
Bold plans were laid for ‘wolf packs’ of the latest submarines – the Type VII Atlantic boats – to lie in wait across known convoy routes, attacking in groups and mauling the merchantmen far from land and the protection of air cover.
Karl Doenitz, a seasoned submariner who headed the U-boat arm of the German navy at the start of the war, lobbied for the resources to produce 300 Type VIIs, which he believed would be sufficient to quickly put Britain out of the war, but he was thwarted by his senior Erich Raeder, who insisted the main effort should be put into capital ships.
That error proved costly, because even with numbers much lower than he wanted, Doenitz’s force caused many a sleepless night amongst Allied commanders – Winston Churchill later noted that "The only thing that really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril. I was even more anxious about this battle than I had been about the glorious air fight called the ‘Battle of Britain’.”
Part of the problem was that submarines were still seen as the darker side of naval work and generally looked down on in many navies, and the Royal Navy had not in general been vigorously pursuing new ideas or tactics in anti-submarine warfare.
The workhorse of the German navy was the Type VII, which was first introduced (in its A variant) in 1935-6. Their endurance was limited but they were nimble and powerful for their size, however only ten were built, and only two survived the war.
The 24 Type VIIB boats had a longer range and were faster than the Type A, and amongst their number were U-48 (the most successful U-boat in the Battle of the Atlantic, sinking 51 ships totalling almost 300,000 tons in just two years) and another commerce raider U-47, which slipped into Scapa Flow in October 1939 to sink battleship HMS Royal Oak with the loss of more than 800 men and boys.
The slightly larger Type VIIC was a colossal class of almost 570 submarines, which could range some 8,500 nautical miles (an extensive reach as they could operate from bases on the Atlantic coast of occupied France).
A further 91 Type VIIC/41, a slight variant with strengthened hulls, were also built, and other Type VII variants included six minelaying VIIDs (only one survived the war) and four VIIFs as armament boats, resupplying operational patrol U-boats with fresh torpedoes (three of the four were sunk).
The German navy also built almost 200 of the much larger, truly ocean-going Type IX submarine, the C variant of which had a range of over 15,000 miles and could harry a convoy for days on end as it carried 22 torpedoes.
While the smaller U-boats were somewhat limited by range and lack of reload torpedoes, and their speed made it difficult to gain an attacking position on a convoy, the sheer number of U-boats and their wolf-pack tactics, along with a lack effective Allied anti-submarine procedures, led to some bloody encounters.
The period of the Battle of the Atlantic from July 1940 to the start of November became known to U-boat crews as the Happy Time – the fall of France brought their operating bases to the French Atlantic coast and in that time they sank more than 280 ships for a total of 1.5 million tons.
A second Happy Time followed the entry of the United States into the war, and saw Axis U-boats, initially the larger Type IXs, causing mayhem along the American coast – in the first eight months of 1942 German submarines sank more than 600 ships for a total of 3.1 million tons.
The response from America was patchy and initially ineffective, and as many of the ships sunk were tankers, it raisied concerns that some Allied nations could run low of fuel. The introduction of convoys to the Eastern seaboard effectively ended the Happy Time, with most of the U-boats heading back to seek prey in the mid-Atlantic.
A force of Italian submarines operated from Bordeaux, and although their design made them less effective in attacks on convoys, and they were not generally included in the wolf packs, they were very capable at picking off individual ships, and by August 1943 they had accounted for more than half a million tons of Allied shipping – a strike rate which matched that of the Germans.
Figures for the Battle of the Atlantic alone are difficult to pin down – there are differences of opinion as to where the boundaries of the campaign should be drawn, for example (some include the Arctic Convoys, others demur), but the overall figures for the German submarine service make for sobering reading.
They started the war with just 56 U-boats, fewer than half of them capable of Atlantic operations. More than1,150 were built during the conflict, of which well over half (784) were lost to enemy action or other causes. For comparison, the Royal Navy lost fewer than 80 submarines.
At least 28,000 German sailors of the 41,000 in the submarine service lost their lives – a survival rate of little more than one in four – and another 5,000 were taken prisoner.
The force sank more than 2,600 Allied merchant ships (more than 13.5 million tons), killing some 30,000 civilian mariners, while the U-boats also sank 175 enemy Naval vessels.
The only other German war machine we will consider here is the Focke-Wulf Fw 200 Condor long-range maritime patrol bomber, a four-engined design based on a civilian airliner.
This elegant aircraft was a successful commerce raider in the initial stages of the Battle of the Atlantic, sinking more than 350,000 tons of shipping by the start of 1941 with a combination of bombs and mines, and once again the German’s early success rate had Churchill worrying about how to counter this particular “scourge of the Atlantic”.
But the aircraft’s fortunes quickly changed by the summer of 1941, when Hawker Hurricanes from CAM ships (merchant ships acting as emergency carriers) and later naval fighters such as the Grumman Martlet began to shoot them down with relative ease – the somewhat fragile fuselage of the Condor was at some risk of failure if the aircraft was put through violent aerial manoeuvres.
Today’s images from the extensive Imperial War Museum collection are (© IWM AX 70A) the Type VIIC U-boat U-660 pictured from Flower-class corvette HMS Starwort on 12 November 1943, just after the submarine had been blown to the surface by depth charges. It was sunk shortly afterwards by gunfire. This type was the most common submarine in the wartime German navy, and (© IWM CH 16122) a Focke-Wulf Fw 200 Condor long-range maritime patrol bomber
This series is by no means a comprehensive review of the Battle of the Atlantic, which was a colossal clash – in terms of casualties alone more than 100,000 men are thought to have died as a direct result to the battle, and more than 4,000 vessels were sunk, while many times more those numbers were involved.
Instead, we have picked out some of the more important or thought-provoking features of the campaign, and would encourage you to read further on individual aspects such as eye-witness accounts from escort ships (both fiction and non-fiction) and the role of Enigma.
