U-Boats
After losing the Battle of Britain in 1940, Germany tried to defeat Britain by sinking its merchant shipping and starving the people. This was mainly the task of the Navy's U-boats (Submarines) and their commander, Admiral Donitz. In 1936 Germany had signed an agreement that Merchant Navy personnel must be safeguarded before their ships were sunk, but Hitler and Donitz didn't stop their attacks.As the passage of the Channel was closed to the U-boats, they had to reach their hunting -grounds in the North Atlantic by making the long and dangerous northward voyage around the Orkneys, and this limited their operational period conside
Radio direction-finding experts pinpointed the briefest signal sent out by Allied convoys and decoding experts deciphered signals from mid-ocean, as well as instructions from the British Admiralty. In the end the U-boats were defeated. To the British the U-boat concentrations were 'wolf packs'. The convoy system had been adopted during World War I and had proved successful. The group attack was the Germans' great innovation in submarine tactics: they called it 'pack tactics'. The main British defense against them was to sail the merchant ships in convoys. So in the summer of 1940, Donitz left Germany and moved to the west coast of France. Another innovation was that instead of attacking by day from a submerged position, the U-boats now began to attack at night and on the surface. With this kind of information, Donitz could use powerful radio transmitters to pass information to the U-boats on patrol and direct them to their targets, deploying them not as isolated warships but as hunting packs. This new idea took the British by surprise and they reacted slowly. In the darkness, the low silhouette of a U-boat was hard to spot. On any one day about 1500 British merchant ships were at sea and vulnerable to submarines. But by 1939 there were not enough escorts, and ships with speeds greater than 5 knots were encouraged to sail independently. World Book Encyclopedia, Volume 18, 1988U-boat, under the Swastika, Showell, 1973.
Common topics in this essay:
British U-boat,
French Atlantic,
British Admiralty,
German U-boats,
World War,
Battle Britain,
North Atlantic,
Hitler Donitz,
Admiral Donitz,
Merchant Navy,
german u-boats,
merchant ships,
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Acceptance Essays
