Naval Warfare in WWII: The Atlantic Struggle

Introduction

Between 1939 and 1945, one of the longest military operations that had ever happened continuously termed as the Battle of the Atlantic (henceforth termed as ‘the battle’). Considered as part of the naval history of the Second World War (WWII), the battle of the Atlantic saw the defeat of the German Nazi, occasioned by the iconic naval blockade of German naval by the Allied, with German conducting a counter-blockade attack on the Allied brigade. The war was at its climax between 1940 and 1943. The battle involved a variety of warring equipment from the German and its allies including U-boats, aircraft, warships (the Kriegsmarine) against the United States Navy, the Royal Navy and the Royal Canadian Navy with their warships. Accounts by Blair indicate that the British and Canadian navies and air forces protected convoys from North America heading to the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom. The forces used aircraft and ships from the United States, starting from the thirteenth day of September 1941. On the other hand, the Germans were supported by the Italian Royal Army with their submarines after Italy had joined the Axis ally in mid-June 1940.

The United Kingdom, as an island nation, was highly dependent on imports. They received millions of tons of imported goods weekly, which they used for fighting and survival. Therefore, the battle was crafted by the Axis allies to block United Kingdom’s supply of merchant goods so that they could not keep fighting. In fact, the period from 1942 onwards saw Germany and its allies focused on preventing the UK’s receipt of equipment and supplies as they prepared to invade occupied Europe. After the British had defeated the U-boat threat, the Germans and its allies pushed back, while the British and its allies celebrated the strategic victory of the non-achievement of the German Blockade. However, the victory attained by the British and its allies came at significant costs, including the sinking of 175 warships, 3,500 merchant ships, and the destruction of 783 U-boats, a majority of which were submarines. The Germans and its allies also experienced a significant loss, considering that they lost 47 surface warships, 7 raiders, 9 cruisers 27 destroyers and 4 battleships.

The Battle of the Atlantic is considered one of the most complex, longest and largest naval battles history has ever encountered. The rivals began their campaigns immediately after the commencement of the European war (i.e. during the Phoney War) and continued for 6 years until 1945 when the Germans surrendered. Thousands of ships were involved in the battle, with an estimated 1000 single ship encounters within the oceanic theatre covering millions of square meters in the Atlantic Ocean. During the war, there were constant changes as both sides gained and lost advantage over the other. Participant countries also switched sides, use new weapons and employed new tactics and counter-measures to defeat their enemies. As the war continued, the Allies gained more advantage by overpowering the German surface warships by the end of 1942. They defeated the German U-boats by 1943 even though the U-boat loses continued afterwards till the end of the war. The name Battle of the Atlantic was coined when the A.V Alexander, the first lord of the Admiralty, asked the parliament for a supply of more ships and more soldiers to participate in what he termed as ‘the Battle of the Atlantic’. Alexander compared the ‘the Battle of Atlantic to the ‘Battle of France,’ which they had fought the previous summer. While asking for more resources from the British Government, Alexander said that “we need more ships and great number of men.” Consequently, a meeting was held by the so-called ‘Battle of Atlantic Committee’ in March 19th 1941. However, Churchill claimed to have come up with the phrase after Alexander’s speech although there are pieces of evidence indicating an earlier usage of the phrase.

The use of Submarines

After the use of submarines by Germans in the unrestricted submarine warfare, most countries tried to minimize, restrict or abolish the use of submarines, albeit with little success. Consequently, the London Naval Treaty obliged submarines to maintain ‘cruiser rules’ which required them to search, surface and place ships on a ‘safe place.’ (The treaty excluded lifeboats from this requirement unless under special circumstances) before sinking them unless the ship resisted the request to search or visit. However, according to Holwitt, these regulations did not prevent arming merchants from their operations. Yet, doing so affected the protection of the cruiser rules. Ultimately, the restrictions on submarines were made ineffective.

The Outbreak of the War

In 1939, the Kriegsmarine failed to challenge the British Royal Navy and its ally, French Navy’s control of the sea. Ideally, the German’s strategy was highly reliant on commerce raiding using armed merchant ships, capital ships aircraft and submarines. By the time the war was declared, many German warships were already engaged in sea wars, including most of their pocket battleships and U-boats. The ships that were already in the Atlantic immediately attacked the British and French Ships, with the SS Athenia (an ocean liner) sunk immediately after the declaration of the war despite orders not to sink passenger ships. Apparently, the U-boat ships that were to the Battle of the Atlantic were not sufficient because most of them were short-range and small in size, only useful in minelaying battles within the British coastal waters. Besides, most of the German’s early anti-shipping operations used aircraft, destroyers and U-boats. Immediately after the outbreak of the war, the British and their French allies began to block Germans, although the blockade had a little immediate impact on Germany’s industry.

The Royal Navy introduced a warring strategy (i.e., the convoy system) meant to protect the trade that emanated from the British Isles, reaching as far as Bombay, Singapore and Panama. The Royal Navy convoy escorts concentrated on areas they were they speculated U-boats could be found, and each convoy consisted of at least 70 merchant ships. Besides, some British marine officials (e.g. Winston Churchill) used a different offensive strategy by forming anti-submarine offensive groups with aircraft carriers to patrol the shipping lanes and hunt for German U-boats. However, the strategy was highly unsuccessful because the presence of tiny silhouette on the U-boats that enabled the Germans to spot the surface warships and submerge long before they could be seen. Besides, the aircraft were of little help because they had no weapons to attack the U-boats before they could submerge, even though they could see the submarines on the surface; and because any submarine spotted by the aircraft could be gone long before the warships could arrive. This strategy came into a disaster within a few days of implementation. For instance, on 14th September 1939, British carrier, HMS Ark was almost sunk after a premature explosion of three torpedoes from U-39. The U-39 had to surface, thus being the first U-boat to be lost at the war. Three days later, another carrier sunk by U-29. Whereas the escort carriers hunting for the U-boats maintained a significant level of prominence, they were mostly misguided due to poor British anti-submarine strategy in the first year of the war. The U-boats, in most cases, proved elusive, putting the convoys at a greater risk. A month later, German success of sinking the Courageous was boosted when Gunther Prien penetrated the British Base at Scapa Flow, sinking the old warship (HMS Royal Oak) and becoming ‘a German hero.’ Nonetheless, in South Atlantic, the British marines formed a series of battle groups with the French navy including 3 battle cruisers, 15 cruisers and 3 aircraft carriers in search of the raider and its accomplice, Deutschland operating in the North Atlantic. However, the battle groups hardly had any success until when the Admiral Graf Spee was ambushed along the banks of river Plate by a British Navy force. The subsequent action led to a variety of damages, after which it took shelter in the Montevideo harbor before being scuttled in December 1939.

The War Calmed

After these earlier skirmishes, the Battle of the Atlantic calmed down. The U-boat commander, Karl Donitz had developed a massive submarine mission in the first month of the war placing almost all the available U-boats on patrol in September 1939. Ideally, this level of deployment was unsustainable because the boats had to return to the harbor for rearmament, refueling, refitting and restocking. Furthermore, there was a harsh winter in 1939-1940 that froze many of the Baltic ports, leading to a serious hampering of the German offensive by trapping many U-boats in ice. Also, Hitler’s invasion of Denmark and Norway in the spring of 1940 triggered the withdrawal of German’s surface warship fleet as well as the ocean-going U-boats.

Faulty Submarines

While fighting the Norwegians, there were several revelations about weapons that emerge, especially with regards to the magnetic influence pistol, which is the firing mechanism of U-boat’s torpedo. Whereas the U-boats had little space to maneuver in the narrow fjords the concentration of the British troopships, supply ships and warships provided a massive opportunity for the U-boats to attack. In several occasions the German U-boat captains targeted and fired at British warships, only to see the ships hit but fail to explode due to faulty contact pistol. No British warship was sunk by any U-boat among 20 of the attacks. As the other German navy team in the U-boat fleet received the news, the begun to loose morale and blaming each other. In one incident, the Navy seal in charge of the torpedo development blamed the crews for the failed torpedoes. Later in early 1941, the problems were attributed to high latitudes and earth magnetic fields. By March 1941, these problems were solved, leading to the rebound of the torpedo as an effective and popular weapon.

The War of Submarines

The popularity of submarines in the Battle of the Atlantic was somewhat triggered by Erich Raeder, the German’s navy commander in chief who claimed that effective submarine warfare could contribute to the defeat of the British because the country largely depended on overseas commerce. Thus, Erich advocated for what he termed Rudeltaktik, which involved the spread of U-boats in a long line within the projected path of convoy. The U-boats would then conduct a joint attack at the enemy’s warship upon siting the target. The strategy would also be crafted in a way that while the escorts chased individual enemy’s submarines, the rest of the team would attach the merchant ships. Furthermore, it was estimated that 300 of the Atlantic boats (i.e. Type VII) were enough to create havoc among the British ships and knock them off the war. This strategy was a sharp contrast with a traditional submarine war where submarines were used as lone ambushers that could wait outside the enemy’s port to attack any ships that were entering or leaving the port. Ideally, this tactic had been very successful and was even used by the British marines in the First World War, despite not being quite successful if the port approaches were under heavy patrol. Other marine theorists were also of the opinion that submarines should be organized into a fleet and used like destroyers; a strategy that had been tried by Germans albeit with poor results because by then, underwater communication had not yet advanced. In general terms, the submarine war was still considered by much of the world as inferior compared to the capital warships, an opinion that was also held by the German’s Kriegsmarine, thus more money was lobbied by Raeder to be spent on capital ships.

Before the war, the Royal Navy used the inshore patrol craft as the anti-submarine weapon, which was armed with small guns and fitted with hydrophones. In the 1920s and 1930s, the Royal Navy, like other navies, had not considered submarine warfare as a tactical subject. Moreover, during that time, the London Naval Treaty had not outlawed the unrestricted submarine warfare, and thus most marines believed that anti-submarine campaigns were similar to minesweeping and that submarines were impotent.

The Transformation of the War

The rapid conquering of France and Low Countries in May and June 1940, the German conquering of Norway in April and the Italian entry into the war by joining the Axis powers transformed the Battle of the Atlantic in three main ways. First, in 1940 the British lost the French Navy, one of their biggest allies, which was also the fourth-largest navy in the world. Ideally, only a few French Navies were part of the Free French Forces that fought against the Germans despite later being joined by a few Canadian-built corvettes. With the removal of the French Navy form the campaign, the Royal Navy became even more overstretched. Italy’s declaration of war implied that the British also had to find the additional force to strengthen the Mediterranean Fleet and develop a new group at Gibraltar (i.e., the Force H) as a replacement to the French Fleet in the Western Mediterranean. Secondly, the U-boats directly accessed the Atlantic. Because the English Channel was blocked with minefields and was relatively shallow, the U-boats were advised not to follow through it and instead follow the British Isles to reach the most prospective hunting grounds. Furthermore, the German bases of La Pallice, Lorient and Brest were closer to the Atlantic Ocean than to the North Sea. Consequently, the U-boats’ situation in the Atlantic was improved because they could spend longer time patrolling and attack convoys further west. Ultimately, the U-boats’ effect size was doubled. The Germans then built huge concrete pens for the submarines in the French Atlantic bases, which were resistant to Allied attacks until mid-1944 when the Tallboy bomb was invented. The U-boats could now return to the new French bases after completing their Atlantic patrols. The third unfolding was the diversion of British destroyers from the Atlantic. The German invasion of the Low Countries and France, and the Norwegian Campaign led to the straining of Royal Navy’s destroyers. Besides, many destroyers no longer plied the convoy routes and shifted to support the Norwegian campaign. Furthermore, they diverted from the convoy routes to support the British withdrawal from the Dunkirk. Consequently, the British faced a serious threat of invasion by the summer of 1940. More, unfortunately, most destroyers were held in the British Channel in readiness for the German invasion. Meanwhile, the Royal Navy lost 7 destroyers in the Norwegian campaign, 6 others were lost in the Battle of the Dunkirk, while 10 were lost in the North Sea and British Channel between May and July.

After Hitler completed his campaign in Western Europe, all the U-boats that had been withdrawn from the Atlantic returned for the war of trade. This caused an increase in the number of U-boats while the number of escorts in the convoy reduced. The only advantage to the British was that the large merchant ships that had occupied Netherlands and Norway were under their control. When Germans had occupied Norway and Denmark, the British moved swiftly to occupy the Faroe Islands and Iceland to prevent Germans from taking over the two territories. These circumstances triggered Winston Churchill, the then UK’s Prime Minister to write a letter to Franklin Roosevelt requesting for a loan of 50 US destroyers. Consequently, the ‘Destroyers for Bases Agreement’ was made, which was a sale but was depicted as a lean for political reasons, and saw the British lease the bases of West Indies, Bermuda and Newfoundland for 99 years. While the agreement was financially disadvantageous to the United States, it was beneficial to the British because it freed up its assets to move back to Europe. A significant percentage of the US population opposed the US’ entry into the war (including the US ambassador to the UK Joseph Kennedy) because they believed that Britain and the Allies would lose.

Warring Equipment

The battle of the Atlantic also led to the development of important war equipment and accessories that later gained popularity during the Second World War. For instance, war-ship direction-finding equipment known as HF/DF was developed. The HF/DF could be used for determining the direction of a radio signal even if its content could never be read. Therefore, because combatants were more reliant on the radio to report U-boats positions, they could easily be intercepted when enemies used HF/DF. After detection, a destroyer could be used to run into the U-boats’ direction and launch an attack. The HF/DF was mostly fitted on two ships accompanying the convoy to determine not only the enemy’s direction but also exact position. The HF/DF was also popular among the British who used them to know the U-boats’ position. The simplicity of the radio system meant that both sides understood how it worked. However, the popular technology before the war entailed a revolving areal that could be manually rotated to achieve the desired transmitter direction. However, the use of a manual revolver was dangerous because it could take much effort to achieve an effective level of accuracy. Furthermore, because the manual transmitter could only the line of the transmission origin, it could be difficult to determine whether the transmission originated from its true direction or the 180 degrees opposite direction. Therefore, the German U-boats believed that they could maintain safety by keeping their messages short. Contrariwise, the British came up with different technology, oscilloscope-based equipment that enabled a quick fixing of direction as soon as the operator touched the operation key. The equipment worked with a pair of crossed aerials. It had a display screen showing the signal strength from each areal as well as the relative line of each ship. Ideally, the innovation could be switched on to suppress the signal from the wrong direction, leaving only the signal from the correct direction. Thus, there was no need to triangulate because the escort could just move along the radar towards its final positioning. As a result, many German U-boats and submarines were suppressed and sunk.

During the war, the German combatants had heavy radio traffic between them and the headquarters, and the communication was believed to be secure. Ideally, the Germans were assured that the Enigma cypher machine, which they used to encrypt their messages were safe and secure. Furthermore, the Germans used a generally more secure channel of communication among them and their allies compared to the British and their allies. For instance, they used the Kriegsmarine, a machine with three rotors that could be changed daily using key messages, thereby boosting its security and encryption features. In fact, in 1939, participants at the British Government Code and Cypher School (GC&SC) believed that the Enigma’s encryption could not be broken. Interestingly though, only Frank Birch, the head of German Naval Section as well as Alan Tung, a mathematician, believed the code could be broken. To break the encryption, the British code breakers needed to know Enigma rotors’ wiring. They finally had a breakthrough when the U-33 boats were destroyed by HMS Gleaner in the second month of 1941. On that day the Royal Navy worked tirelessly to assist the code breakers, especially in May when nine crew members accompanied the code breakers in the U-11 to recover the Enigma keys, bigram tables and cryptologic materials.

Conclusion

This historical account has revealed several events that shaped up the Second World War. In the beginning, the essay has illustrated how A.V Alexander participated in naming the war between Germans and British in the Atlantic as “Battle of the Atlantic.” Besides, there has been a detailed account of how the use of submarines begun and evolved throughout the war. For instance, the essay has illustrated how the disregard of the London Naval Treaty contributed to the ineffectiveness of the restriction on submarines, thereby creating an opportunity for their widespread use. Next, the essay has given an account of how the war between the Germans, together with its allies (i.e. the Axis) and the British and its allies (i.e., the Allied) begun, For instance, the essay has illustrated that the war began when German ships, already engaged in sea war, immediately attacked he British ships after the Kriegsmarine failed to secure victory against the British Royal Navy’s control over the Atlantic.; and how the Royal Navy introduced the convoy system to counter the attack. An account is also given of how the war between British and Germans calmed down, occasioned by the fact that Germans had to retreat for rearmament, refuelling, refitting and restocking. Afterwards, the essay has explored the discovery of some faults with the submarines. For instance, it emerged that the magnetic influence pistol, which is the firing mechanism of U-boat’s torpedo was faulty. The essay has also described, in detail, how the combatants used submarines, including how the German U-boats would conduct a joint attack at the enemy’s warship upon siting the target as well as how the British Navy and their allies used the inshore patrol craft as the anti-submarine weapon, which was armed with small guns and fitted with hydrophones. The essay has also described how the Germans’ U-boat final access to the Atlantic transformed the war, as well as the ‘Happy time,’ when the German U-boat crew sunk 270 ships belonging to the allied. This war was indeed phenomenal and will remain in the book of history as one of the complex and longest naval wars that ever happened.

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