Maritime battle that helped turn the tide of the Second World War

Jonathan Dimbleby's latest book lifts the lid on the Battle of the Atlantic during the Second World War. Chris Bond talks to the broadcaster about this often overlooked wartime story.
Jonathan Dimbleby, whose latest book examines the human drama of the Battle of the Atlantic. (Picture: Matt Austin).Jonathan Dimbleby, whose latest book examines the human drama of the Battle of the Atlantic. (Picture: Matt Austin).
Jonathan Dimbleby, whose latest book examines the human drama of the Battle of the Atlantic. (Picture: Matt Austin).

Winston Churchill once wrote that “the only thing that ever really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril.”

He was referring to the ‘Battle of the Atlantic’, a phrase he himself coined, which had the Allies not won would have changed the face of history. Britain’s war effort would have ground to a halt, there would have been no D-Day and Europe would, in all likelihood, have fallen under the shadow of communism.

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The Battle of the Atlantic was the longest campaign of the Second World War and the most destructive naval conflict in history. It’s also the subject of Jonathan Dimbleby’s latest book - The Battle of the Atlantic: How The Allies Won The War - which he will be discussing at the York Literature Festival tomorrow.

Crewmen of a German submarine U-boat abandoning ship in the Atlantic Ocean after being depth charged in 1944. (AP).Crewmen of a German submarine U-boat abandoning ship in the Atlantic Ocean after being depth charged in 1944. (AP).
Crewmen of a German submarine U-boat abandoning ship in the Atlantic Ocean after being depth charged in 1944. (AP).

Dimbleby is best known as a broadcaster and presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Any Questions?, but he is also an author and this is his second wartime book following on from the success of Destiny in the Desert: The Road to El Alamein.

In The Battle Of The Atlantic he weaves extracts from the diaries and letters of high ranking officers and humble sailors involved in this war of attrition. He says the inspiration for the book came from its predecessor. “In writing Destiny in the Desert I realised the huge importance of logistics. If the Germans and Italians controlled the Mediterranean then Rommel could advance. Conversely, if the Allies held it then Rommel had to retreat and this was one of the principle reasons why he was defeated at El Alamein in 1942.”

It was in North Africa where American soldiers first saw action on land, fighting alongside the British. But they were only able to do so because their military convoys were so closely protected as they headed across the Atlantic.

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“You have to be able to keep supplying armed forces with food, materials and fuel - everything required for a battle that could last months, if not years. If those lines are blocked then it’s game over and that took me to the Battle of the Atlantic.”

The battle pitted the German U-boats against the Allied merchant ships protected by the Royal Navy, as well as the Americans and Canadians. Each convoy consisted of up to 70 ships and was laden with raw materials crucial to the war effort.

As Dimbleby points out, Germany’s best hope of defeating Britain was by winning this campaign. “The Battle of the Atlantic was essentially the Germans seeking to throttle Britain’s lifeline and it was touch and go for a long time.

“We depended entirely on that lifeline for our oil, for huge quantities of our food and very large amounts of the raw materials for industry, without which the war machine would have come to a standstill.”

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It became a deadly game of cat and mouse where the stakes could hardly have been higher. “It’s a big human drama, it’s a very big military drama and it’s a huge political drama because of the differing perspectives of Washington, Berlin, London and Moscow.”

Crewmen of a German submarine U-boat abandoning ship in the Atlantic Ocean after being depth charged in 1944. (AP).Crewmen of a German submarine U-boat abandoning ship in the Atlantic Ocean after being depth charged in 1944. (AP).
Crewmen of a German submarine U-boat abandoning ship in the Atlantic Ocean after being depth charged in 1944. (AP).

Germany had waged a similar campaign during the First World War and at one point came close to defeating Britain, and when war broke out again in 1939 a second battle of the Atlantic began.

Admiral Dönitz, the German U-boat commander, developed a strategy known as the ‘wolfpack’, in which U-boats would close in on the enemy at night. “They used to gather in packs and they would be either side of a gap in the middle of the Atlantic where it was impossible to defend the convoys from the air because they couldn’t reach that far from land. So the convoys were fearfully exposed,” says Dimbleby.

For the merchant seaman it would have been a gruelling and, at times, frightening experience. “People found themselves in unbelievable circumstances. They endured great hardship and were under persistent threat of bombardment from U-boats, or from the air.”

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The weather, too, could be equally deadly. “Some of the ships they were travelling in were pre-First World War steamers and were fitted to cope with an Atlantic storm. But in the worst of the weather they had to chip ice off the merchant boats and so powerful were the waves that they would break the stanchion and the guns would be removed from their placements on the deck. From time to time boats sank because they had so much ice on them that they became top heavy and capsized and people perished in large numbers.”

Just over 30,000 Allied merchant seaman lost their lives during the conflict along with a similar number of U-boat crews. “The way they died was as undesirable as you can imagine. You drowned in freezing water or you could be incinerated by fire because a torpedo hit the fuel stores or ammunition.

“Sometimes they were in a lifeboat without water or food for days at a time. There’s a story after the sinking of one ship with 65 people on board of whom only six reached land alive because they spent a month at sea in a lifeboat. The rest perished due to exposure, lack of supplies and drinking seawater.”

Crewmen were under pressure the entire time. “You could end up totally unscathed but you didn’t know whether you would or wouldn’t. Once a torpedo strikes a boat the chances of it sinking are very high and they tend to sink rather rapidly.”

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Dimbleby says the U-boat crews suffered, too. “They were underwater and faced being depth charged and were constantly fearful of being attacked on the surface.”

Despite all this it’s an often overlooked chapter of the war. “It’s been written about by specialists, sometimes very powerfully, but I don’t think the Battle of the Atlantic has been put into its full context and just how much the western Allies depended on its victory.”

The pendulum swung between both sides before the decisive turning point arrived in 1943. By this time Britain was running out of fuel and the number of operational U-boats had increased from 47 to 200. At the Casablanca Conference in January that year the Allied leaders made the destruction of the U-boats one of their prime targets.

They were aided in this by radio intelligence and the ability to intercept the German Enigma code so that U-boat manoeuvres could be anticipated and the submarines destroyed. This proved decisive and even though the U-boats continued to maraud sporadically they no longer carried the same threat.

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For Dimbleby, the Battle of the Atlantic was of huge strategic importance. “It was the longest, the biggest and the most important sea campaign in history in my view,” he says.

“Had we not been able to land in France on D-Day then I believe the Russians would have overrun far more of Europe than they did and the Cold War barriers would have been much further west. So strategically and to the lives of many people it mattered a great deal.

Moreover, had we lost the battle earlier in the war then we would have gone under. We would have been forced to parlay, to use Churchill’s phrase, with the Germans and sue for peace - so it’s difficult to overestimate its importance.”

Jonathan Dimbleby will be appearing at the York Literature Festival tomorrow. For more details call 01904 623 568.

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The Battle of the Atlantic: How the Allies Won the War, published by Penguin, is out now in paperback priced £8.99.

War of attrition in the Atlantic

The Battle of the Atlantic was the longest continuous military campaign of the Second World War, and one of the most significant from a British perspective.

The first Atlantic convoy sailed on September 2, 1939, and to begin with many merchant ships were lost.

The fall of France in 1940 gave the U-boats bases on the Atlantic coast, and after U-boat production increased the following year the Germans had enough submarines to deploy in groups, or ‘wolf packs’.

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Radio intelligence, along with introduction of aircraft carriers, Very Long Range aircraft and roving ‘support groups’ of warships, eventually combined to effectively nullify the U-boat threat at the end of May 1943.

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