Bitter Ocean The Battle of the Atlantic, 1939-1945

Prologue W INTER, N ORTH A TLANTIC Out here only weather exists, and the immense field of the sea, wide as a wilderness all its own, white-flecked, deep blue, marked by the endless waves that march away in perfect, receding uniformity. The spot at latitude 42 80' north, longitude 37 20' west on the Atlantic Ocean is vacant, blank, chilly, grooved by the layers and furrows of the mid-ocean currents, precisely identical to every other mile around it. Beneath these waters lie the countless graves of navy sailors and merchant seamen who perished at the hands of German U-boats to keep the supplies flowing to feed World War II. There are no headstones out here, no markers, no monuments. For sailors lost at sea, there are no tablets. There is only this place, the wind-whipped, empty, anonymous ocean. A modern containership passing by in 2002 hustles past the froth, and the waves turn to marbled swirls of aqua, blue, white, mingling and turning and folding into frigid pinwheels of color. More than 36,200 Allied sailors, airmen, and servicemen and women went to their death on this ocean, or in the contest centered around it, between 1939 and 1945, in Lightning Class destroyers, tiny corvettes, and B-24 Liberator aircraft, or at land installations ashore. Alongside these, some 36,000 merchant ship sailors were lost, many dying terrible deaths, plunging to the bottom of the Atlantic in ships which disappeared from the surface with all hands in less than twenty seconds, many others succumbing to isolation, exposure, or starvation in open lifeboats or on rafts. The Germans paid a high price, too. One thousand one hundred seventy-one U-boats went to war between 1939 and 1945. Six hundred sixty, almost 57 percent, were lost. The loss in men was far greater; the casualty rate for the German U-boat service is the highest for any military unit since the time of the Romans. Forty thousand German officers and men went to war in U-boats. Only 7,000 came home. The Battle of the Atlantic was fought all across the 32 million square miles of the pitching, heaving Atlantic Ocean, in the frigid, green wastes up by Iceland, in the empty waters off the Azores, in the gray, quick approaches to the English coast. It saw lone, knifelike U-boats surface in the pit of night on heaving seas to set, aim, and slam torpedoes into aging merchant ships; it saw wolfpacks of ten or more U-boats gather to maul convoys of forty or fifty merchant ships in battles that stretched over three or four days; it saw the development of advanced, futuristic Type XXI U-boats which could race along underwater at phenomenal speeds. The conflict was Hitler's ambitious bid to win the war on the Atlantic with his U-boats, long, tapered, bristling with guns. The battle -- it was not really a battle but a struggle that lasted the entire war -- was a six-year effort of fundamental importance to every other engagement of World War II. On this battle hinged the effort to bring massive convoys of merchant ships across the Atlantic, carrying the provisions, food, raw materials, and oil to keep solitary England alive during the years she stood alone against the Germans until 1941, and later every tank, gun, tent, helmet, bomb, all the troops, gasoline, coffee, wheat, rations to feed, fuel to supply the Allied armies sprawled across Europe. Without the men and ordnance on the ships, no battle, on any front, in any country overseas could be fought. The Battle of the Atlantic was the confrontation upon which the rest of World War II depended. The convoys -- eastbound formations were designated HX, for Halifax, Nova Scotia, and SC for Slow Convoy; westbound formWhite, David Fairbank is the author of 'Bitter Ocean The Battle of the Atlantic, 1939-1945', published 2006 under ISBN 9780743229296 and ISBN 0743229290.