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During the early years of World War II, the German navy's U-boat wolf packs traversed the Atlantic almost unchallenged. They were feared hunters of the deep, although, Clay Blair writes, they were never as effective as some historians have maintained. At the midpoint of the long Battle of the Atlantic, those wolf packs became the hunted, as the Allies developed antisubmarine technologies (including radar, sonar, and long-distance surveillance aircraft) and diligently sought to rid the ocean of the "U-boat peril." Armed with inferior technology but led by brilliant strategists, the Germans fought back ferociously, even as many sailors resisted Adolf Hitler's hated Laconia Order that Allied merchant seamen be gunned down in their lifeboats, in violation of international law.
Blair, who served as a submariner in World War II, knows firsthand the dangers of underwater warfare. "The U-boat war," he writes, "was not a close-run thing, but rather one more suicidal enterprise foisted on the Germans by Adolf Hitler." Blair documents the slow decline of Germany's U-boat forces--the result of a 75 percent rate of battlefield losses, shortages of supplies and equipment, and Hitler's periodic purges of politically suspect commanders--in this volume, which continues his Hitler's U-Boat War: The Hunters, 1939-1942. The two books, which add up to nearly 2,000 pages, are essential reading for anyone with an interest in modern naval history. --Gregory McNamee
Review
"A triumph of naval history-writing." --The Times (London)
"An admirable and important book.... Should become the standard history of
the Unterseeboote for many years."
--Russell F. Weigley, The Washington Post
Review
"A triumph of naval history-writing." --The Times (London)
"An admirable and important book.... Should become the standard history of
the Unterseeboote for many years."
--Russell F. Weigley, The Washington Post
Book Description
"As always with Blair, the work is meticulously reported and smoothly written."---Los Angeles Times
In The Hunters, 1939-1942, the first volume of Hitler's U-boat War, Clay Blair described the Battle of the Atlantic, waged first against the British Empire and then against the Americas. Now he brings his magisterial, highly praised narrative history to a conclusion by looking at the period when the fortunes of the German Navy were almost completely reversed, and when it suffered perhaps the most devastating defeat of any of the German forces.
In unprecedented detail and drawing on sources never before used, Clay Blair continues the dramatic tale of the failures and fortunes of the German U-boat campaign against the United States and Great Britain. All of the major patrols and sorties made by the Germans are described meticulously and with considerable human interest: the Peleus and Laconia affairs; the capture at sea of U-505; the crisis of German command; the futile operations against the Americas; and the mounting and devastating losses that, in effect, entirely destroyed the German submarine service.
Hitler's U-boat War: The Hunted, 1942-1945 is the brilliant finale to Blair's comprehensive treatment of the rise and fall of German U-boat warfare in World War II.
From the Inside Flap
"As always with Blair, the work is meticulously reported and smoothly written." ---Los Angeles Times
In The Hunters, 1939-1942, the first volume of Hitler's U-boat War, Clay Blair described the Battle of the Atlantic, waged first against the British Empire and then against the Americas. Now he brings his magisterial, highly praised narrative history to a conclusion by looking at the period when the fortunes of the German Navy were almost completely reversed, and when it suffered perhaps the most devastating defeat of any of the German forces.
In unprecedented detail and drawing on sources never before used, Clay Blair continues the dramatic tale of the failures and fortunes of the German U-boat campaign against the United States and Great Britain. All of the major patrols and sorties made by the Germans are described meticulously and with considerable human interest: the Peleus and Laconia affairs; the capture at sea of U-505; the crisis of German command; the futile operations against the Americas; and the mounting and devastating losses that, in effect, entirely destroyed the German submarine service.
Hitler's U-boat War: The Hunted, 1942-1945 is the brilliant finale to Blair's comprehensive treatment of the rise and fall of German U-boat warfare in World War II.
From the Back Cover
"A triumph of naval history-writing." --The Times (London)
"An admirable and important book.... Should become the standard history of
the Unterseeboote for many years."
--Russell F. Weigley, The Washington Post
About the Author
Clay Blair is the author of two dozen books that have created a permanent place in the telling of our history. These include Silent Victory: The U.S. Submarine War Against Japan; biographies of Admiral H. G. Rickover; Generals Douglas MacArthur, Matthew B. Ridgway, and Omar N. Bradley; and John F. Kennedy; and, most recently, The Forgotten War, about Korea. He died in 1998.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
FOREWORD
In Volume I of this history, The Hunters, I described, analyzed, and assessed in great detail the first three years of the German U-boat war: August 1939 to August 1942. This volume, The Hunted, is a continuation of the U-boat story from September 1942 to the surrender of Germany in May 1945.
Like the U-boat war itself, Volume I was subdivided into two sequential books: the U-boat war against the British Empire (1939-1941) and the U-boat war against the Americas (December 1941-August 1942). This second volume contains but one book: the U-boat war against the naval forces of the British Commonwealth, including notably Canada, and those of the United States.
Adolf Hitler's Third Reich was absurdly unprepared for a naval war with the Allies. Therefore, for the second time in the twentieth century, German navalists were compelled to resort to cheap, mass-produced submarines, manned mostly by civilian volunteers, to conduct the war at sea, often and somewhat misleadingly called the "Battle of the Atlantic." They conceived and waged a guerre de course, or war against British-controlled merchant shipping, designed to blockade the British Isles so tightly that the starved-out British government would be forced to lay down arms and withdraw from the war.
The commander in chief of the U-boat force, Karl Donitz, characterized this German naval strategy as a "tonnage war." The objective was the destruction of British-controlled merchant ships wherever they could be found with the least risk to the U-boats. It did not matter whether the ships were large, medium, or small, laden or empty, close to or distant from the battlefronts. The goal was to sink merchant ships (tonnage) at a rate much faster than the British could replace them with new ships, thereby whittling down the existing tonnage to a decisively unworkable level.
As described in Volume 1, this "tonnage war" against the British-controlled merchant fleet failed in the period from 1939 to 1941 for various reasons. There were not enough U-boats to bring it off and those deployed to the battlefronts had so many shortcomings that they were not suitable for the task. They sank 1,125 ships for about 5.3 million tons, but the British Commonwealth more than made good these losses by new construction and by acquisition of shipping from the United States, German-occupied nations such as Norway, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Greece, and by captures of Axis-controlled vessels. At the end of 1941, the British-controlled merchant fleet, including tankers, was larger by about three million tons than it was in 1939.
After the United States formally entered the war against the Axis powers in December 1941, Donitz viewed the British and American merchant-marine fleets as a single entity and continued the "tonnage war" as before. Sensing an opportunity to strike a heavy blow at low risk, he threw the main weight of the U-boat force at the Americas for about eight months, from December 1941 to August 1942. That campaign destroyed about six hundred Allied ships for about three million tons, but by that time American shipyards, employing tens of thousands of women, were mass-producing "Liberty ships," tankers, and other types at a prodigious rate, not only making good all Allied merchant-ship losses but also swelling the size of the combined Allied fleet to undreamed of tonnage levels.
As in World War I, strategists at the British Admiralty and senior fleet commanders of the Royal Navy were slow to recognize and to properly come to grips with the U-boat threat. They believed that by convoying and by arming merchant ships with 4" or larger guns, and employing secret asdic (sonar) technology, which was developed between the wars, any U-boat force the Germans deployed could be neutralized and quickly defeated. This smugness did not last for long. It turned out that the besieged Royal Navy, committed to an overabundance of tasks, had nowhere near enough blue-water escorts to properly protect convoys and, furthermore, the smallish Hunt-class destroyer escort, specifically designed for that purpose and rushed into production, failed to live up to its promise and could not be employed on the vital North Atlantic run between the Americas and the British Isles.
Hard-pressed on land and sea and in the air, the British chose brains over brawn. To counter the Luftwaffe, British scientists perfected a radar-warning net, then miniaturized radar to fit into aircraft, sharing this ingenious, war-decisive technology with Canada and the United States. At the same time, other British intellectuals, capitalizing on technical help from the defeated Poles, broke into the German Enigma military encoding-machine system. Still other British scientists and engineers developed an astonishingly accurate land-based high-frequency direction-finding network (Huff Duff), then miniaturized the devices to fit on ships. Radar, codebreaking, and to a limited extent Huff Duff, and other scientific breakthroughs, enabled the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force to thwart "wolf pack" attacks by the Atlantic-based U-boats on convoys in 1941, in large part, by simply routing convoys around known U-boat positions.
That same year, 1941, the United States gradually-and illegally-entered the "Battle of the Atlantic." Having already loaned the British sixty warships for convoy escort (fifty old destroyers and ten Coast Guard cutters), the United States occupied the Avalon Peninsula of Newfoundland and built a naval base at Argentia. It then occupied Greenland and Iceland and built substantial naval and air bases on Iceland. It commenced building a naval base in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, and slated about fifty more destroyers to escort fast convoys on the North Atlantic run between Canada and Iceland and the reverse. The passage of the Lend-Lease Act enabled America to build warships ("jeep" carriers, destroyer escorts, and frigates, among other types) and Liberty-type merchant ships for Britain and Canada and to repair warships of those nations in American naval shipyards. A relaxation of the Neutrality Act authorized American merchant ships to enter the war zones in Europe to deliver Lend-Lease war materiel and oil.
When the United States formally entered the war in December 1941, President Roosevelt and his military chiefs, adhering to prior secret agreements, revalidated a war policy of defeating Germany and Italy first, then Japan. Notwithstanding the losses incurred in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and other places in the Pacific and Far East, the United States retained substantial naval forces in the Atlantic Ocean area to combat the U-boats, to insure that the vital North Atlantic cargo run to the British Isles and the Arctic cargo route to northern Russia continued to operate effectively, and to transport tens of thousands of troops to Iceland, Northern Ireland, and the British Isles. Owing to its prior gift of sixty warships to the Canadian and British navies, the United States did not have enough escorts to initiate convoying in the waters of the East Coast, Gulf of Mexico, and the Caribbean Sea in the first four months of 1942, during which time the Allies incurred grievous merchant-ship and crew losses to U-boats.
By the end of August 1942, when Volume I of this history, The Hunters, concludes, the U-boats in three years of naval warfare had sunk in all waters about two thousand Allied ships of all sizes, shapes, and types, for about 9.3 million gross tons. While these figures are quite impressive-indisputably a notable chapter in the history of naval warfare-they were not anywhere near enough. New merchant-ship production in American yards alone had reached a level of about six million gross tons a year and was rising dramatically; the Commonwealth turned out another million-plus gross tons of new shipping and repaired a great number of ships that had been laid up with damage.
Moreover, by August 1942, the Allies, in a reverse tonnage war, had in hand sufficient naval and air assets not only to defend convoys but also to kill U-boats faster than the Germans could replace them or produce meaningful numbers of radically improved models. Those assets included growing numbers of antisubmarine warfare (ASW) aircraft and experienced convoy surface-ship escorts (destroyers, destroyer escorts, corvettes, catapult merchant ships, and with merchant aircraft carriers and "jeep" carriers in the offing), centimetric-wavelength (microwave) radar, land-based and shipboard Huff Duff, forward-firing Hedgehog antisubmarine bombs, improved conventional shipboard and air-dropped depth charges with Torpex warheads, and a large number of experts on both sides of the Atlantic working to break back into German naval Enigma.
Nevertheless, in the remaining years of the war, from August 1942 to May 1945, the U-boat force sank about one thousand more Allied ships for about 5.7 million gross tons. Most of those sinkings (seven hundred ships for about four million gross tons) were achieved in the nine months from September 1942 to June 1943, a result comparable to the eight-month onslaught in the Americas from January to August 1942. These new sinkings brought the final toll of the German tonnage war to about three thousand ships of all types for about fourteen million gross tons.
What lies ahead in these pages are further accounts of intense and exhausting battles between convoys and "wolf packs"-few days in the North Atlantic were ever easy-and the story of how the Allied navies learned that electronic intelligence combined with aircraft was the most effective anti-U-boat weapon system, how those navies finally acquired the correct aircraft to do the job, and how the Germans sought desperately to produce radically new submarines to counteract these Allied technical advances-and failed.
As the term implies, a "tonnage war" is by its very nature a naval war entailing an analysis of many statistics. Only a very few historians and readers welcome the intrusion of statistics, and partly as a result, this aspect of the U-boat war has been egregiously neglected. This neglect, in turn, has led to serious distortions in the perception of the results of the U-boat war. Although I have sought to include as few statistics as possible, this account is the first attempt by anyone to prove by statistical analysis that, contrary to the accepted wisdom-and mythology-at no time did the German U-boat force ever come close to winning the "Battle of the Atlantic," bringing on the collapse of Great Britain and, in such case, a different shape and outcome of the war in Europe.
I did not set out beforehand to prove this revolutionary conclusion. It became obvious along the way. I was at first startled and skeptical, even disbelieving. I invested years of study, analysis, and writing before I became fully convinced of these findings and was willing to present them to the community of naval historians and to the public.
CLAY BLAIR
Washington, D.C., London, Hamburg,
and Washington Island, Wisconsin,
1987-98
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