Battle of the Atlantic

The Event Multiyear struggle with U-boats for Allied supplies and war materials

Date 1939-1945

Place Atlantic Ocean

The massive U.S. shipbuilding program and a renewed U.S. naval and merchant marine commitment to the Atlantic after June, 1940, contributed substantially to the elimination of the U-boat threat in that ocean by May, 1943, ensuring that sufficient supplies and troops reached Great Britain in preparation for the invasion of Nazi-controlled Europe.

Describing the struggle of British naval and merchant ships primarily with German U-boats in the Atlantic since September, 1939, British prime ministerWinston Churchill coined the term “Battle of the Atlantic” in March, 1941. Five months later, Churchill met U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt off the coast of Newfoundland and again emphasized Britain’s difficulties in shipping badly needed supplies across the Atlantic. Roosevelt promised all possible assistance short of war. In a radio address to the American people in September, 1941, Roosevelt explained that the U.S. Navy would attack all Axis raiders in U.S. defensive areas. After Adolf Hitler declared war on the United States in December, 1941, U.S. naval forces assisted Britain and Canada in defeating the U-boat threat in the Atlantic by May, 1943. Moreover, during World War II, the U.S. Maritime Commission alone built almost five thousand ships, enabling the transfer of massive amounts of material and troops to Britain. Without this supply and the victory in the Atlantic, the landings in Normandy in June, 1944, would not have been possible.

Operation Drumbeat

Immediately after Hitler’s declaration of war, German U-boats targeted the eastern coast of the United States with devastating effect. Along that 1,500-mile coast, Rear Admiral Adolphus Andrews, who was in charge of the area between the Canadian border and North Carolina, initially had only twenty ships available for coastal protection. Even though only two dozen U-boats operated off the North and Central American coast, they sank 485 ships between February and the end of August, 1942. One historian has described this as the greatest American naval defeat in history. Only after the introduction of convoys and air defenses in the summer of 1942 was the U-boat threat eliminated along the U.S. Atlantic coast, although the enemy boats moved south to the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean. In response to the U-boat threat to shipping out of Galveston, Texas, a pipeline was built to supply the East Coast with oil.

In early 1942, the U-boats sank more than sixty ships between the Virginia border and Cape Lookout, North Carolina. When a British corvette, the HMS Bedfordshire, was sunk off the coast of North Carolina, the sailors were buried on Ocracoke Island; the burial plot, which was decorated by the British flag, was donated to Britain. Given the coastal conflict, rumors about spies and suspicion of Americans of German descent in areas such as Morehead and Salter Path, North Carolina, were rampant. The newspaper, the Norfolk Virginia-Pilot, and the journal, Life, published specific information about the sinking of American ships off the Atlantic coast that could have benefited the enemy. In addition, Atlantic coastal cities accidentally aided the U-boats by failing to dim their lights at night. Not until midsummer of 1942 did Miami cut its night lights after protests were published in the local newspaper.

The Battle of the North Atlantic

The most crucial battle to control the sea-lanes to Britain and Russia was fought in the North Atlantic, where U-boats were finally defeated in May, 1943, forcing the German naval command to withdraw the boats from the area. The United States fought this battle in two major ways. First came a massive shipbuilding program that eventually produced more tonnage than the U-boats could sink. For example, on September 27, 1941, fourteen Liberty cargo ships were launched in the United States to celebrate “Liberty Fleet Day.” This was only the beginning of a program that eventually produced almost three thousand Liberty ships. Employment in American shipyards increased from 100,000 to 700,000 by 1943. At the same time, the U.S. merchant marine saw a fourfold increase in personnel between 1940 and August, 1945. Unlike the U.S. Navy, the merchant marines did not discriminate against African Americans.

The second major contribution to the Battle of the Atlantic was in the form of convoys and naval protection. The sheer size of this task is illustrated by the fact that 1,462 convoys left New York City during the war. More than three million soldiers departed and returned to that same city. In 1940, the U.S. Atlantic Fleet was reestablished, initially under the command of Admiral Ernest King. Naval conflicts between American ships and German U-boats occurred in the Atlantic long before the declaration of war by Hitler. In 1942, King decided to use his escort ships for troop transports to Britain. Not one troop ship was lost that year. However, U-boats were more successful against merchant ships during that year, particularly since the German navy was able to read British convoy codes in 1941 and 1942. The Allies lost 1,664 ships in 1942, and 80 percent were destroyed by submarines. In January, 1943, Roosevelt and Churchill agreed to give priority to the fight against U-boats. Large antisubmarine groups were formed to hunt U-boats, air support was increased, and technological innovations ranging from short-wave radar to breaking the German Enigma code played a decisive role in the Allied victory in the Atlantic. In May, 1943, the Germans lost forty-three submarines, forcing the German commander Karl Dönitz to withdraw his U-boats to safer waters. New designs of German U-boats never saw active service, although the last U.S. ship sunk by an “older” U-boat occurred on May 5, 1945, near Newport, Rhode Island.

A 1943 Warner Bros. film starring Humphrey Bogart, Action in the North Atlantic, commemorated the conflict in the Atlantic. It recounts the heroic experiences of a crew of a convoy ship that was torpedoed on its voyage to Britain. The survivors ended up on another ship, which sailed from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to Murmansk, Soviet Union. At the premiere of the film in New York City in May, 1943, seamen who had survived U-boat attacks and other sailors and merchant mariners honored Jack Warner. The film attracted large audiences in the United States, and the U.S. merchant marines used it in its training program.

Impact

One could argue that the challenge faced by the British in the Atlantic in 1939 and 1940 induced the United States to begin significant industrial and military preparations. Most important, however, the control of the Atlantic was absolutely crucial for the defeat of Nazi Germany. Britain was totally dependent on imports in order to survive and continue the fight against Hitler. In addition, one quarter of American supplies received by the Soviet Union had to be shipped across the North Atlantic and the Arctic to reach Murmansk. This not only was crucial for the Russian conduct of the war but also played a key role in maintaining the alliance with the Soviets. When shipping supplies to Russia was temporarily suspended in preparation forOperation Torch in 1942, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin felt betrayed.

Command of the Atlantic sea-lanes was essential for transporting the men and supplies necessary for the invasion of the Continent and to maintain the “Germany first” strategy supported by Roosevelt. Admiral Ernest King had argued at one point, when the defeat of the U-boats was still uncertain, that the strategy should be shifted to “Japan first.” A change in strategy and the failure to land in Normandy in 1944 could have induced Stalin to renew peace negotiations with Hitler, which he had first proposed the previous year. Finally, Hitler’s massive commitment to building U-boats drained skilled manpower and scarce raw material, which could have been used to produce thousands of tanks and antiaircraft guns.

Bibliography

Blair, Clay. Hitler’s U-Boat War: The Hunters, 1939-1945. 2 vols. New York: Random House, 1996. Massively documented, this is the most comprehensive scholarly account of the struggle against German U-boats available in English. Volume 2 includes bibliography and notes.

Bunker, John Gorley. Liberty Ships: The Ugly Ducklings of World War II. Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1972. Good coverage of Baltimore and other U.S. port cities. Includes appendix on ship designs but no bibliography. Illustrated.

Gannon, Michael. Operation Drumbeat: The Dramatic True Story of Germany’s First U-Boat Attacks Along the American Coast in World War II. New York: Harper & Row, 1990. Based on American and German sources, including the accounts of U-boat commander Reinhard Hardegen, it is critical of Admirals Ernest King and Adolphus Andrews for their belated defense of American shipping along the Atlantic coast.

Hoyt, Edwin P. U-Boat Offshore: When Hitler Struck America. New York: Stein & Day, 1978. Effective use of local newspaper accounts, ranging from Norfolk to Miami, revealing the impact of Operation Drumbeat on coastal cities. Bibliography and notes.

Milner, Marc. Battle of the Atlantic. Strout, England: Tempus, 2005. Helpful for Canadian contributions but very critical of British actions. Map, photos, illustrations, but only a short bibliography and no notes.

Walling, Michael G. Bloodstained Sea: The U.S. Coast Guard in the Battle of the Atlantic, 1941-1944. New York: McGraw Hill, 2004. Chronological account of convoys to Britain and Russia by a Coast Guard veteran. Photos, appendixes, list of sources.

Wiggins, Melanie. Torpedoes in the Gulf: Galveston and the U-Boats, 1942-1943. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1995. Used local newspapers and municipal records to illustrate impact of the U-boat threat to Galveston. Effective use of German naval records deposited in the U.S. National Archives, but weak on maps.