The Battle of the Atlantic was the struggle for the sea routes that carried supplies to Britain and to the Allied armies: from North America to the British Isles above all, and also from Britain to Gibraltar, West Africa and North Russia. It began on the first day of Britain’s war in September 1939 and lasted until the German surrender in May 1945, the longest continuous campaign of the Second World War. On one side were the merchant ships that carried food, oil, raw materials, weapons and troops, and the British, Canadian and American warships and aircraft that escorted them. On the other were Germany’s U-boats, helped at times by surface raiders, long-range aircraft, mines and Italian submarines. Britain could not feed itself or run its war industry from its own resources: its prewar imports ran to well over 55 million tons a year, and even in 1941 it needed 30.5 million tons, every ton carried by ship (Hancock and Gowing, British War Economy). Germany’s aim, directed by Karl Doenitz, was to sink ships faster than the Allies could replace them. The Allied answer was the convoy, defended by escorts and aircraft and guided by codebreakers and scientists. Every landing the Western Allies made in Europe and North Africa depended on the outcome (Roskill, The War at Sea, vol. I).

Sources: Roskill, The War at Sea, vol. I; Hancock and Gowing, British War Economy; Morison, vol. I

Read more: Chapter 1: The Lifeline · The collection

It began on the evening of 3 September 1939, the day Britain and France declared war, when U-30 under Oblt. Fritz-Julius Lemp torpedoed the liner Athenia about 250 miles west of the north coast of Ireland, at about 1939 by uboat.net’s record (other accounts give 1940). Of the 1,418 people aboard, uboat.net counts 112 dead; other accounts give 117. Twenty-eight of the dead were Americans. Lemp seems to have taken the darkened, zigzagging liner for an armed merchant cruiser, and Germany denied responsibility until a statement by Doenitz admitting the sinking was read at Nuremberg in January 1946. The battle ended in the first week of May 1945. Doenitz, by then Hitler’s successor, ordered all U-boats to cease hostilities on 4 May. A few did not hear in time. On the night of 7 May U-1023 sank the Norwegian minesweeper NYMS 382 off Lyme Bay, and the small Type XXIII U-2336 sank the steamers Avondale Park and Sneland I in the Firth of Forth at 2303 and 2306, which uboat.net records as the last U-boat attacks of the war. The surrender required German forces to cease operations at 2301 Central European Time on 8 May 1945: five years and eight months after Athenia (uboat.net; NHHC).

Sources: uboat.net, “Athenia” and U-2336; NHHC, “Victory in Europe”; Roskill, vol. I

Read more: Chapter 1: The Lifeline · Chapter 8: Hunter-Killers and Victory

Winston Churchill. On 6 March 1941, as Prime Minister and Minister of Defence, he issued a directive to the service departments and the ministries responsible for shipping. Its opening sentence read: “In view of various German statements, we must assume that the Battle of the Atlantic has begun.” The directive, which Roskill printed in full as an appendix to the official history, ordered an offensive against the U-boat and the Focke-Wulf Condor wherever they could be found, priority for fitting merchant ships with catapult-launched fighters and guns, and a drive to clear the congestion in British ports and repair yards, where damaged ships lay idle for want of berths and labor. A standing Battle of the Atlantic Committee, chaired by Churchill, met weekly to see it carried out. The name stuck, and historians now apply it to the whole campaign from September 1939, not only to the months after the directive. Churchill also left the sentence most often quoted about the battle. Writing after the war in his memoirs, he said that “the only thing that ever really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril” (Roskill, vol. I, appendix O; Churchill, The Grand Alliance and The Second World War).

Sources: Roskill, The War at Sea, vol. I, appendix O; Churchill, The Second World War, vols. II–III

Read more: Chapter 2: The Happy Time · Chapter 1: The Lifeline

Because almost everything else the Western Allies did in Europe had to cross the Atlantic first. Britain’s food, nearly all its oil and most of its raw materials came by sea; Hancock and Gowing record that by 1942 its imports had fallen to less than 42 percent of the prewar average. The American army that invaded France, its equipment and its fuel had to be carried to Britain, and Lend-Lease supplies for Britain and the Soviet Union went in convoys. If the ships could not cross, none of the rest could happen. That is why, at the Casablanca conference in January 1943, the British and American Combined Chiefs of Staff put the defeat of the U-boat at the head of their plans for the year, ahead of the invasion of Sicily, and approved more escorts, escort carriers and long-range aircraft (Matloff, Strategic Planning for Coalition Warfare). The battle also absorbed enormous resources on both sides: shipyards, aircraft, scientists and hundreds of thousands of men. In the worst months the danger was less that Britain would starve than that the build-up for the invasion of Europe would be delayed, perhaps by a year. The 2020 law honoring America’s merchant mariners records that they “provided the bulk tonnage of material necessary for the invasion of Normandy” (Pub. L. 116-125).

Sources: Hancock and Gowing; Matloff, Strategic Planning for Coalition Warfare, 1943–1944; Roskill, vol. II; Pub. L. 116-125

Read more: Chapter 1: The Lifeline · Chapter 7: Crisis and Black May

A convoy was a group of merchant ships sailing together in columns at the speed of the slowest, with a convoy commodore, often a retired admiral, responsible for the merchant ships and the senior officer of the escort responsible for defending them. The Admiralty had resisted convoy for most of the First World War. It gave way in late April 1917, the month U-boats sank more than 860,000 tons of shipping, and losses fell through the rest of the war. Convoy worked less because escorts fought off U-boats than because it made the ocean look empty: forty ships together were scarcely easier to find than one, and a U-boat that did find them found escorts with them. The lesson was confirmed within weeks in 1939. By the end of that year 5,756 ships had sailed in British convoys and only four had been sunk by submarines; of the 114 Allied merchant ships sunk by U-boats from September to December 1939, only 12 were in convoy (Roskill, vol. I). The pattern held. Across the 377 HX convoys from Halifax and later New York, one tally counts 206 ships lost, about one percent, and only 110 of them while in convoy. Ships sailing alone, as off the American coast in early 1942, suffered far worse.

Sources: Roskill, The War at Sea, vol. I, ch. VI; Encyclopedia 1914–1918 Online; HX convoy listings

Read more: Chapter 1: The Lifeline · Chapter 4: Torpedo Junction

Each series was named for its route, usually by the initials of its ports, and the number was the convoy’s place in the series. HX convoys ran from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to Britain, and from 1942 from New York; the first, HX 1, sailed on 16 September 1939 with 18 ships, taken out by the Canadian destroyers St. Laurent and Saguenay. SC convoys, for Sydney, Cape Breton, carried ships too slow for the HX series from August 1940. OA and OB convoys sailed outward from the Thames and Liverpool in 1939; they were replaced in 1941 by ON convoys escorted all the way across, and the slow westbound ships became the separate ONS series in March 1943. SL convoys came home from Freetown in Sierra Leone, HG from Gibraltar, and OG convoys went out to Gibraltar. The Arctic convoys to North Russia were PQ outward and QP homeward, letters usually said to be the initials of an Admiralty planning officer, renumbered JW and RA from December 1942. Along the American coast, KS convoys ran from Hampton Roads to Key West from May 1942, and the UGS series carried American troops and supplies to the Mediterranean (Roskill, vol. I; U.S. Navy, History of Convoy and Routing).

Sources: Roskill, vol. I; U.S. Navy, History of Convoy and Routing, ch. IV; convoy listings after Hague, The Allied Convoy System

Read more: Chapter 1: The Lifeline · Chapter 6: The Air Gap and the Arctic Convoys

At first, almost anything that could carry ASDIC, the British sonar, and depth charges. In 1939 the Royal Navy had about 100 fleet destroyers and 101 escort destroyers and sloops across the Empire, only 32 of them in the Western Approaches (Roskill). Britain added 50 old American flush-deck destroyers under the destroyers-for-bases agreement of 2 September 1940 and, above all, the Flower-class corvette: a 205-foot, 925-ton escort built to a whale-catcher design in merchant yards, which crews said “would roll on wet grass.” About 294 were built in Britain and Canada. Frigates, sloops, American destroyer escorts and escort carriers followed. Escorts were formed into permanent groups that trained together, a system built by Adm. Sir Percy Noble at Derby House in Liverpool and led to victory by Adm. Sir Max Horton. Canada’s navy grew more than any other. It began the war with six ocean-going ships and about 3,500 men (Veterans Affairs Canada); by 1945 the Canadian War Museum counts more than 350 warships and a peak strength above 90,000, and Veterans Affairs Canada 434 commissioned vessels and 95,000 people. From May 1941 its Newfoundland Escort Force carried a large share of the North Atlantic run, and in 1943 RAdm. Leonard Murray became the only Canadian to command an Allied theater of the war. Above the convoys flew RAF Coastal Command, the RCAF and U.S. Navy and Army aircraft.

Sources: Roskill, vol. I; Veterans Affairs Canada; Canadian War Museum; Milner, North Atlantic Run

Read more: Chapter 2: The Happy Time · Chapter 3: The Undeclared War

Germany went to war with 56 completed U-boats by Roskill’s count (most sources say 57), only about 46 of them ready for operations and only 26 or 27 able to reach the Atlantic. Doenitz had argued for 300 ocean-going boats, but the navy’s building plan put battleships first. The force reached its peak in the spring of 1943, with more than 400 boats in commission and about 240 counted operational. Over the whole war Germany commissioned about 1,150 to 1,170. The workhorse was the Type VII. The VIIB of 1939 displaced 753 tons on the surface, made 17.9 knots on its diesels but only 8 submerged, carried 14 torpedoes and had a crew of 44 to 48. The larger Type IX carried 22 torpedoes and had the range to reach American waters; the IXC was rated at 13,450 miles at 10 knots. The Type XIV “milch cows” carried no torpedo tubes and refueled other boats at sea. All of them were submersibles that fought mostly on the surface and dived to escape: a IXB could go only 64 miles at 4 knots on its batteries. The schnorkel, from 1944, let boats run their diesels at periscope depth, and the Type XXI electro-boat of 1945 could make 17.2 knots submerged, but only one made a war patrol (uboat.net; Roskill).

Sources: Roskill, vol. I, ch. IV; uboat.net, Types VIIB, VIIC, IXB, IXC, XIV and XXI; Niestlé, German U-Boat Losses

Read more: Chapter 1: The Lifeline · Chapter 8: Hunter-Killers and Victory

The wolf pack, in German Rudeltaktik or “pack tactics,” was Doenitz’s answer to the convoy. As a U-boat officer in the First World War he had seen convoys defeat the lone submarine, and he concluded that several boats had to attack together. Boats were spread in a patrol line across a convoy’s expected track. The first to sight it became the shadower: instead of attacking at once, it followed the convoy and reported its position, course and speed by radio to U-boat headquarters ashore, the BdU, which ordered every boat within reach to close in. They attacked together, usually on the surface at night, when a U-boat trimmed down to show only its conning tower was very hard to see and ASDIC could not detect it, aiming to swamp the escorts (uboat.net, “What is a wolfpack?”). In 1940 there were too few boats for proper patrol lines, and the convoy battles were fought by groups gathered around whichever boat made contact; formal packs became possible from about May 1941. By 1943 packs of 15 to 40 boats lay across the convoy routes, and close to 60 U-boats were in the area of convoy ONS 5. The system had one great weakness: it ran on radio traffic, which Allied direction finders could locate and codebreakers could read.

Sources: uboat.net, “What is a wolfpack?”; Roskill, vols. I–II; Gannon, Black May

Read more: Chapter 2: The Happy Time · Chapter 5: Codes and Science

Karl Doenitz (1891–1980) commanded Germany’s U-boats from 1 January 1936 (some accounts date his appointment to 1935) to the end of the war. A U-boat commander in the First World War, he lost UB-68 in the Mediterranean on 4 October 1918 and spent about nine months as a British prisoner. Between the wars he developed the group attack on convoys and the night surface attack and trained his crews in both. In September 1939 his title became Befehlshaber der Unterseeboote (BdU), Commander U-boats, and he was promoted to rear admiral; from November 1940 to March 1942 he ran the campaign from a villa at Kernevel, across the harbor from Lorient. On 30 January 1943, after Hitler’s fury over the Battle of the Barents Sea forced Grand Adm. Erich Raeder to resign, Doenitz became grand admiral and Commander in Chief of the Navy, keeping direct control of the U-boat war. He withdrew his packs from the North Atlantic on 24 May 1943, days after his younger son, Peter, was lost in U-954 near convoy SC 130; his elder son, Klaus, was killed in May 1944. Hitler named him his successor, and he was briefly head of state in May 1945. Sentenced at Nuremberg to ten years’ imprisonment, he served them in Spandau and was released in 1956.

Sources: uboat.net, “Befehlshaber der Unterseeboote”; Roskill; Doenitz, Memoirs: Ten Years and Twenty Days

Read more: Chapter 1: The Lifeline · Chapter 7: Crisis and Black May

It was the U-boat crews’ own name, die glückliche Zeit, for the months after the fall of France, when a small force sank British shipping at little cost. On 7 July 1940 Lemp brought U-30 into Lorient, the first U-boat to use a French base; Brest, St. Nazaire, La Pallice and Bordeaux followed, putting the boats hundreds of miles closer to the convoy routes. At the same moment Britain was shorter of escorts than at any other time in the war, and none of its escorts carried radar able to find a surfaced U-boat at night. From June 1940 through March 1941 U-boats sank about 450 merchant ships of some 2.4 million tons, for the loss of 14 boats (uboat.net). There is no agreed start or end date; some accounts confine it to July through October 1940. A few commanders did a large share of the damage: Otto Kretschmer of U-99, credited by uboat.net with 47 ships of 274,418 tons, the most of any commander in the war; Günther Prien of U-47, who had sunk Royal Oak in Scapa Flow; and Joachim Schepke of U-100. All three were gone within ten days in March 1941. Prien vanished with all hands near convoy OB 293 on 7 March; on 17 March Schepke was killed when HMS Vanoc, guided by her new radar, rammed U-100, and Kretschmer was captured by HMS Walker. The crews spoke of a second happy time off the American coast in 1942.

Sources: uboat.net, losses by month and commander pages; Roskill, vol. I, ch. XVII

Read more: Chapter 2: The Happy Time · Chapter 4: Torpedo Junction

SC 7, a slow convoy of old tramps, Great Lakes freighters and coasters, left Sydney, Nova Scotia, on 5 October 1940 with about 35 ships (sources give 30 to 35), carrying pit props, lumber, iron ore, steel, grain and sulphur to Britain. For most of the crossing its only escort was the sloop Scarborough. Stragglers were picked off from 16 October. Four more escorts joined piecemeal; none had radar, and they had never worked together. On the night of 18–19 October, about 100 miles west of the Hebrides, a pack that included Kretschmer’s U-99, Schepke’s U-100, Endrass’s U-46, Frauenheim’s U-101 and Moehle’s U-123 attacked on the surface, some from inside the convoy’s columns. Creekirk, loaded with iron ore, sank with all 36 men; Fiscus went down so fast that one of her 39 men survived; the commodore’s ship Assyrian was sunk under him. Secondary accounts count sixteen ships sunk in about six hours. The final tally, by uboat.net, was 20 ships of 79,592 tons sunk and six damaged, with no U-boat lost; about 141 men died (the same secondary summary also gives 142). The next night the same boats sank 12 ships of HX 79. Kretschmer is credited with six SC 7 ships by uboat.net and seven by others; Rohwer warned that with several boats firing at once, credits cannot be fixed with certainty.

Sources: uboat.net, convoys SC 7 and HX 79; warsailors.com, after Hague and Rohwer; Roskill, vol. I

Read more: Chapter 2: The Happy Time

On 5 November 1940 the German pocket battleship Admiral Scheer, with six 11-inch guns, found convoy HX 84, 38 ships from Halifax, in mid-ocean near 52°41′N, 32°52′W. Its only ocean escort was the armed merchant cruiser HMS Jervis Bay, a former passenger liner with old 6-inch guns, commanded by Capt. Edward Fogarty Fegen. Fegen ordered the convoy to scatter behind smoke and turned toward the raider, which opened fire beyond the range of his guns. Jervis Bay was set on fire and disabled; Fegen, his arm shattered, kept directing the fight until he was killed. His posthumous Victoria Cross citation, gazetted on 22 November 1940, records that “for nearly an hour the Jervis Bay held the German’s fire.” That hour and the falling darkness saved most of the convoy. Scheer sank five ships and set the tanker San Demetrio on fire, but her crew found her still afloat, reboarded her and brought her home, a story filmed in 1943 as San Demetrio London. Of Jervis Bay’s 254 men, 68 were picked up by the Swedish freighter Stureholm, which turned back after dark to search for them, and three of those died of their wounds. About 190 were lost, a figure derived from the survivors and the ship’s complement rather than from a published roll (London Gazette, 22 November 1940; HX 84 convoy records).

Sources: London Gazette, 22 November 1940; convoy HX 84 records; Roskill, vol. I

Read more: Chapter 2: The Happy Time

Yes, at sea, although the United States did not go to war with Germany until 11 December 1941. It moved step by step from neutrality to an undeclared shooting war: the Neutrality Patrol from September 1939; the destroyers-for-bases agreement of 2 September 1940; the Lend-Lease Act, signed on 11 March 1941, which ended “cash and carry” and by the end of the war provided about $50 billion in aid; Marines landing in Iceland on 7 July 1941; and, after Roosevelt met Churchill in Placentia Bay in August, American destroyers escorting convoys between the Canadian coast and Iceland. On 4 September 1941 U-652 fired two torpedoes at the destroyer Greer southwest of Iceland, after Greer had trailed her for hours and a British aircraft had depth-charged her. Both missed, and Greer’s 19 depth charges did no damage. In a fireside chat on 11 September Roosevelt called the U-boats “the rattlesnakes of the Atlantic” and announced what the press called the shoot-on-sight order. On 16 September HX 150 sailed from Halifax as the first convoy with an American escort. By 7 December American destroyers had been fighting U-boats for three months, and more than a hundred American sailors had been killed doing it (NHHC, Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships; Morison, vol. I).

Sources: Morison, vol. I; NHHC, DANFS, “Greer”; American Presidency Project, fireside chat of 11 September 1941; Public Law 294, 77th Congress

Read more: Chapter 3: The Undeclared War · Chapter 2: The Happy Time

Both were hit while escorting convoys in the autumn of 1941. On the night of 16–17 October four American destroyers went to help the slow convoy SC 48 south of Iceland, and U-568 torpedoed the new destroyer Kearny on her starboard side. Eleven men were killed and 22 wounded, commonly described as the first U.S. servicemen killed by German action in the war. Her crew raised steam in the after fireroom and brought her into Iceland on 19 October. Before dawn on 31 October, U-552 under Erich Topp torpedoed the old four-funnel destroyer Reuben James with eastbound convoy HX 156, about 600 miles west of Ireland. Her forward magazine apparently exploded and tore away the bow, and she sank within minutes; depth charges going off as the stern went down killed men in the water. The Navy’s history counts 100 dead, among them all seven officers and her captain, Lt. Cmdr. Heywood L. Edwards, and 44 survivors; the U.S. Naval Institute’s Proceedings gave 101 in December 1941. She was the first U.S. Navy ship sunk by enemy action in the war, and Woody Guthrie’s song kept her name alive. The sinkings helped Congress repeal the Neutrality Act’s shipping restrictions in November, by a House vote of only 212 to 194, but did not bring a declaration of war (NHHC, DANFS; uboat.net).

Sources: NHHC, DANFS, “Reuben James I” and “Kearny”; uboat.net, “USS Kearny (DD 432)”; Proceedings, December 1941

Read more: Chapter 3: The Undeclared War

In May 1941 Germany sent the new battleship Bismarck, with eight 15-inch guns, and the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen into the Atlantic to attack convoys, in Operation Rheinübung. Shadowed through the Denmark Strait by the radar-equipped cruiser Suffolk, they met the battlecruiser Hood and the new battleship Prince of Wales at dawn on 24 May. At about 0600 a shell from Bismarck’s fifth salvo reached one of Hood’s after magazines, as two Admiralty boards of inquiry concluded; she blew up and sank in about three minutes. Of 1,418 men aboard, three survived. Prince of Wales had hit Bismarck three times, cutting her off from part of her fuel, and Adm. Günther Lütjens turned for St. Nazaire. Lost for more than a day, Bismarck was found on 26 May by an RAF Catalina whose co-pilot was a U.S. Navy ensign, Leonard B. Smith, flying with Coastal Command while his country was neutral. That evening a torpedo from one of Ark Royal’s Swordfish biplanes jammed her rudders. On the morning of 27 May King George V and Rodney wrecked her; after torpedoes from Dorsetshire and, survivors said, scuttling charges, she sank more than 300 miles west of Brest. Of about 2,200 aboard, 114 survived. No German battleship again entered the Atlantic to attack the convoys (Roskill, vol. I; Bercuson and Herwig).

Sources: Roskill, vol. I; Bercuson and Herwig, The Destruction of the Bismarck; HMS Hood Association; Smith’s ONI report, 9 June 1941

Read more: Chapter 3: The Undeclared War

Because so many ships were torpedoed there in the first half of 1942. Off Cape Hatteras, Diamond Shoals runs miles out to sea, and ships rounding the cape had to pass through a narrow band of water between the shoals and the Gulf Stream. Tankers carrying oil from Texas, Louisiana, Aruba and Venezuela to the East Coast and to the Halifax convoys came to the U-boats, instead of the U-boats having to search for them. The campaign opened with Operation Drumbeat, Paukenschlag, which began on 13 January 1942 with five long-range Type IX boats (some accounts say six). The first ship lost off North Carolina was the tanker Allan Jackson, torpedoed by Richard Zapp’s U-66 about 60 miles east-northeast of Diamond Shoals early on 18 January 1942; 22 of her 35 men died. That night Reinhard Hardegen’s U-123, running on the surface close to the beach, sank Norvana, with all 29 aboard, City of Atlanta and Ciltvaira. The heaviest loss of life came on 19 January, when U-66 sank the Canadian liner Lady Hawkins about 150 miles east of Hatteras, with 251 of 322 aboard lost. The waters had long been called the Graveyard of the Atlantic for their shipwrecks; Homer Hickam’s 1989 history of the campaign took Torpedo Junction as its title (uboat.net; NPS, Cape Hatteras National Seashore).

Sources: uboat.net, U-66, U-123 and ship records; NPS, “Torpedo Junction”; NOAA, Monitor National Marine Sanctuary; Hickam, Torpedo Junction

Read more: Chapter 4: Torpedo Junction

It depends on what is counted. NOAA’s Monitor National Marine Sanctuary counts 90 vessels lost off the state from 1942 to 1945: 78 merchant ships, eight Allied warships and four U-boats, most of them between January and July 1942. NOAA’s 2009 expedition materials and the National Park Service say “more than 80”; the state’s historical marker program says U-boats sank 78 vessels and damaged 18 (N.C. Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, marker B-68); and NOAA’s 2014 announcement of the U-576 discovery gave more than 50 merchant ships in the first eight months of 1942. The totals differ over how far offshore to count, whether warships, patrol craft, U-boats and mine losses are included, and whether the count covers 1942 or the whole war. The worst weeks came in March 1942, when the Eastern Sea Frontier recorded 21 ships sunk in fourteen days, twelve of them near Hatteras. The death toll is even less settled. NOAA and the Park Service say only “hundreds”; NOAA’s maritime archaeologist Joe Hoyt has said that more than 1,600 mariners died in the area in the first six months of America’s war. The 21 deadliest sinkings listed in Chapter 4 alone account for 572 dead, without the 141 men of the Q-ship Atik, lost 300 miles out, or the 145 Germans killed in the four U-boats.

Sources: NOAA, Monitor National Marine Sanctuary; NPS; NC DNCR, marker B-68; Eastern Sea Frontier War Diary, March 1942; uboat.net

Read more: Chapter 4: Torpedo Junction · Chapter 9: The Cost and the Memory

Adm. Ernest J. King, Commander in Chief of the U.S. Fleet, held that a convoy without enough escorts would only bunch the targets together, and in January 1942 the Navy had very few to spare; most were committed to the transatlantic convoys. Even in April 1942 the Eastern Sea Frontier, which ran from the Canadian border south past North Carolina, listed nine destroyers, five corvettes, nine patrol craft, two gunboats and ten trawlers to guard more than a thousand miles of coast, and in the first weeks the 165-foot Coast Guard cutter Dione was the only vessel patrolling the Fifth Naval District off Hatteras (NPS). The coast was not blacked out. The frontier’s war diary complained of “lights from shore which silhouette vessels against the sky,” and not until 14 March did the Chief of Naval Operations recommend a dimout of coastal lights. In March the Navy began daylight runs between Cape Lookout and the Chesapeake, with protected anchorages for the night, the system Morison called the “Bucket Brigade.” The first coastal convoy, KS-500, sailed from Norfolk on 14 May, and the coastal convoy system formally began on 15 May 1942; losses off the state then fell sharply. Critics led by the historian Michael Gannon argue that even weak convoys, a blackout and better use of British warnings would have saved ships and lives; King’s defenders point to the shortage of escorts.

Sources: Eastern Sea Frontier War Diary, March and April 1942; U.S. Navy, History of Convoy and Routing; Morison, vol. I; Gannon, Operation Drumbeat

Read more: Chapter 4: Torpedo Junction

Four U-boats were sunk off North Carolina, all in 1942. U-85, under Oblt. Eberhard Greger, was found by radar and sunk with gunfire by the old destroyer USS Roper off Bodie Island just after midnight on 14 April, the first U-boat sunk off the American coast after Drumbeat began; all 46 aboard died, and 29 were buried at Hampton National Cemetery in Virginia. She lies on her starboard side about 14 nautical miles from Oregon Inlet. U-352, under Kptlt. Hellmut Rathke, which had sunk nothing, was depth-charged to the surface by the Coast Guard cutter Icarus about 25 miles off Cape Lookout on 9 May; 15 men died and 33 were picked up, one of whom died aboard. U-701, under Kptlt. Horst Degen, had laid mines off the Chesapeake and sunk the patrol boat YP-389 and the tanker William Rockefeller before an Army A-29 Hudson flown by Lt. Harry Kane sank her off Hatteras on 7 July; seven men survived 49 hours adrift in the Gulf Stream, and 39 died. U-576, under Kptlt. Hans-Dieter Heinicke, attacked convoy KS-520 on 15 July and was sunk with all 45 men by two Navy Kingfisher floatplanes and the Armed Guard gunners of the merchant ship Unicoi. Her wreck was found only in 2014, about 30 to 35 miles off Cape Hatteras in some 700 feet of water, a few hundred yards from her last victim, the freighter Bluefields (NOAA; uboat.net).

Sources: NOAA, Monitor National Marine Sanctuary, “U-85,” “U-352,” “U-701,” “U-576”; uboat.net boat pages

Read more: Chapter 4: Torpedo Junction · Chapter 9: The Cost and the Memory

Many of them, yes, for trained divers in the right conditions. U-85 lies in about 90 to 100 feet of water east of Oregon Inlet; U-352 in about 110 feet off Cape Lookout, which NOAA calls probably the most-dived U-boat off the state; U-701 in about 100 to 110 feet off Hatteras; HMT Bedfordshire in about 105 feet; and the tanker Dixie Arrow upright in about 90 feet south of Hatteras Inlet. Charters run from Hatteras, Morehead City and Beaufort. Gulf Stream currents and fast-changing weather make most of these advanced dives. U-576 and Bluefields, at about 700 feet, are far beyond recreational diving and have been visited only by crewed submersibles. The law is the Sunken Military Craft Act of 2004, which protects U.S. military wrecks wherever they lie and foreign military wrecks in American waters: disturbing or removing anything requires a federal permit, but non-intrusive recreational diving is not restricted (NHHC). The U-boats remain the property of Germany and, like Bedfordshire, which Britain still owns and which is covered by a 2016 agreement between NOAA and the Royal Navy, are war graves. Several wrecks, including U-85, U-352, Bedfordshire and Dixie Arrow, are on the National Register of Historic Places. Look, photograph, take nothing and do not penetrate the hulls. NOAA publishes dive slates, site plans and 3-D models for those who would rather explore the battlefield without getting wet.

Sources: NOAA, Monitor National Marine Sanctuary, shipwreck pages; NHHC, “Sunken Military Craft Act”

Read more: Chapter 9: The Cost and the Memory · Chapter 4: Torpedo Junction

In March 1942 the Royal Navy, itself short of escorts, lent the U.S. Navy 24 armed anti-submarine trawlers (some accounts say Bedfordshire and 24 others). HMT Bedfordshire, a 913-ton Grimsby trawler with a crew of 37 under Lt. Russell Bransby Davis, RNR, worked out of Morehead City. Late on 11 May 1942, local time (12 May by the German clock used in U-boat records), U-558 under Kptlt. Günther Krech torpedoed her off Cape Lookout. She sank almost at once, with no survivors; one crewman, Sam Nutt, lived because he had missed the sailing. On 14 May two bodies came ashore at Ocracoke and were identified as Sub-Lt. Thomas Cunningham and Ordinary Telegraphist Stanley Craig. Two more men, never identified, came ashore days later. The Coast Guard and islanders buried all four in a plot given by a local family. A bronze plaque carries the lines from Rupert Brooke’s poem “The Soldier” that begin “If I should die, think only this of me.” The plot was leased in perpetuity to the British government in 1976 (uboat.net says 1977) and is in the custody of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, cared for with the Coast Guard and local volunteers. Each May a memorial service, open to the public, is held there with the Royal Navy, Royal Canadian Navy, Coast Guard and Park Service. A second small British cemetery at Buxton holds Michael Cairns of the tanker San Delfino and an unknown sailor.

Sources: uboat.net, “HMS Bedfordshire”; NOAA, “HMT Bedfordshire”; NCpedia, “British Cemetery”; NPS; Hickam, Torpedo Junction

Read more: Chapter 4: Torpedo Junction · Chapter 9: The Cost and the Memory

Probably not, despite a durable legend. The best-known version says that German sailors from a sunken U-boat were found with loaves of American bread, cinema ticket stubs or local newspapers, proving that they had slipped ashore to shop or see a film. Versions are told in towns up and down the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, usually about a U-boat sunk nearby. We have found no documentary evidence for any of them, and Outer Banks local historians have called the U-85 version “a good story, but probably untrue” (OBX Guides). The crews of the boats sunk off North Carolina either died at sea or, in the cases of U-352 and U-701, were captured and interrogated, and we have found no record of any of them describing such a visit. Nor do U-85’s dead all lie in the wreck: Roper recovered 29 bodies, now at Hampton National Cemetery. German submarines did land agents in North America, and those cases are well documented. In Operation Pastorius, U-202 put four saboteurs ashore at Amagansett on Long Island on 13 June 1942, and U-584 landed four more at Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, on 17 June. All eight were caught within weeks after one of them went to the FBI, and six were executed on 8 August 1942. U-1230 landed two agents in Maine late in 1944 (Chapter 9 gives November, Chapter 8 December). None of these landings was in North Carolina.

Sources: OBX Guides, “The Story of U-85”; NOAA, “U-85”; NHHC, H-Gram 047

Read more: Chapter 9: The Cost and the Memory · Chapter 8: Hunter-Killers and Victory

Polish mathematicians broke the German army’s Enigma first. Marian Rejewski reconstructed its rotor wiring at the end of 1932, and on 25 July 1939 the Poles gave British and French codebreakers their methods and a replica machine. At Bletchley Park, Alan Turing took on naval Enigma, harder because the navy used more rotors and stricter procedures, and designed the British bombe, an electromechanical machine that tested settings against a “crib,” a guess at part of a message’s plain text. Without captured material, Hut 8 could not get started. The way in came through “pinches”: rotors from U-33 in February 1940, the February 1941 keys from the armed trawler Krebs in the Lofoten raid, and the June and July keys from the weather ships München and Lauenburg. On 9 May 1941 escorts of convoy OB 318 forced U-110 to the surface east of Cape Farewell, Greenland. Her commander, Lemp, the man who had sunk Athenia, died, and a boarding party from HMS Bulldog under Sub-Lt. David Balme carried off her Enigma machine, short signal book, officer procedures and reserve cipher tables. The boat sank under tow and the capture was kept secret. U-110 did not break Enigma by itself: captures, cribs, statistics and bombes together kept the key open, and from mid-1941 convoys were steered around the patrol lines (uboat.net; Hinsley; Bletchley Park).

Sources: Bletchley Park, “The Breaking of German Naval Enigma”; uboat.net, “Enigma breaking” and “U-110”; Hinsley, British Intelligence in the Second World War, vol. I

Read more: Chapter 5: Codes and Science · Chapter 3: The Undeclared War

On 1 February 1942 the Atlantic U-boats switched to a four-rotor machine, the M4, on the key Bletchley Park called Shark. The thin fourth wheel multiplied a bombe’s search by 26, and the orders to the wolf packs went dark until 13 December 1942, a little over ten months that coincided with the heaviest sinkings of the war: by uboat.net’s count U-boats sank 1,155 ships of about 5.87 million tons in 1942. The break came from a short signal book and a weather cipher book carried out of the sinking U-559 off Port Said on 30 October 1942 by Lt. Anthony Fasson and Able Seaman Colin Grazier, who drowned and received the George Cross, and by Tommy Brown, a 16-year-old canteen assistant, who received the George Medal. From late 1943 American four-rotor bombes, built by the National Cash Register Company in Dayton, Ohio, and run by WAVES, took over much of the work. The Germans read the Allies, too. Their naval intelligence service, the B-Dienst, broke into Naval Cypher No. 3, the joint Allied convoy cipher, in the autumn of 1941; by one account it read as much as 80 percent of intercepted traffic after August 1942, at times 10 to 20 hours before the events described. In March 1943 it read the rerouting of convoy SC 122. The cipher was replaced on 10 June 1943, and the B-Dienst never regained its hold (uboat.net; Hinsley; NHHC).

Sources: uboat.net, “Enigma breaking” and “U-559”; Heriot-Watt University; NHHC, “U.S. Navy WAVES on Top-Secret Duty”; Rohwer and Bonatz on the B-Dienst

Read more: Chapter 5: Codes and Science

They were the tools that let an escort find and kill a U-boat. Huff-Duff, high-frequency direction finding or HF/DF, showed the bearing of a radio transmission instantly as a line of light on a cathode-ray screen, fast enough to catch the short signals a shadowing U-boat sent to bring in its pack. An escort could run down the bearing and force the shadower under before the pack gathered; one estimate credits HF/DF with a part in about a quarter of all U-boat sinkings. Centimetric radar grew from the cavity magnetron, first switched on at the University of Birmingham by John Randall and Harry Boot on 21 February 1940. The shipborne Type 271, in service from May 1941, could pick up a surfaced U-boat at about three miles, and the U-boats’ Metox receivers could not detect it; in the fog of 5–6 May 1943 it let the escorts of ONS 5 see U-boats that could not see them. Coastal Command’s ASV Mark III radar and the Leigh Light, a searchlight switched on in the last mile of a night attack, did the same for aircraft. Hedgehog threw 24 contact-fuzed bombs about 200 to 250 yards ahead of the ship while ASDIC still held the target. After a poor start it reached about one kill in six attacks, by the British count, against about one in 60 for depth charges (British wartime figures, as cited in Chapter 5).

Sources: uboat.net, “Fighting the U-boats: HF/DF” and “Hedgehog”; IEEE Milestones, “Cavity Magnetron”; Baxter, Scientists Against Time

Read more: Chapter 5: Codes and Science · Chapter 7: Crisis and Black May

It was the stretch of the mid-North Atlantic, south of Greenland and east of Newfoundland, that land-based aircraft from Britain, Iceland and Newfoundland could not reach. Sailors called it the Black Pit or the Greenland gap. Richard Goette describes it as roughly 300 miles from east to west and 600 from north to south; other accounts put its width as high as 700 miles. Aircraft rarely sank U-boats early in the war, but a U-boat forced to dive lost touch with its convoy, so the packs gathered where no aircraft could come. Only very-long-range (VLR) Liberators, fitted with extra fuel tanks in the bomb bay and stripped of some equipment, could reach the middle of the gap and stay there, and in 1941 and 1942 there were very few; No. 120 Squadron RAF had about ten. Most four-engined bombers went to Bomber Command, whose chief, Arthur Harris, wrote in August 1942 that “the purely defensive use of air power is grossly wasteful.” Goette concludes that Britain had the means to close the gap in 1942 and did not; Christopher Bell argues that the blame was more widely shared. Coastal Command estimated in November 1942 that 40 VLR Liberators could close the gap. By mid-May 1943 there were 41, and with escort carriers and merchant aircraft carriers sailing with the convoys, the gap was effectively closed (Goette, The Northern Mariner, 2005).

Sources: Goette, “Britain and the Delay in Closing the Mid-Atlantic ‘Air Gap’,” The Northern Mariner (2005); Bell, Journal of Military History (2015); Roskill, vol. II

Read more: Chapter 6: The Air Gap and the Arctic Convoys · Chapter 7: Crisis and Black May

PQ 17 sailed from Hvalfjord, Iceland, for Archangel on 27 June 1942 (The National Archives gives 22 June) with 35 merchant ships, most of them American, carrying tanks, aircraft, trucks and ammunition for the Soviet Union. On the evening of 4 July, north of Bear Island, the First Sea Lord, Adm. Sir Dudley Pound, feared that the battleship Tirpitz was about to fall on the convoy. Between 2111 and 2136 the Admiralty sent three signals: the cruisers were to withdraw to the westward at high speed, the convoy was to disperse, and then “Convoy is to scatter.” The close escort’s destroyers went with the cruisers, and the merchant ships headed for Russia alone or in small groups. Tirpitz was still in harbor; she sailed only on 5 July and was recalled the same day. Bombers and U-boats picked off the scattered ships over the next days. Twenty-four of the 35 were lost, with 153 seamen, 210 aircraft, 430 tanks and 3,350 vehicles (The National Archives). Eleven reached port, among them Winston-Salem, named for the North Carolina city, which survived by running aground on Novaya Zemlya; the Wilmington-built Liberty ship William Hooper was lost. Churchill called it “one of the most melancholy naval episodes in the whole of the war.” On the Arctic route as a whole about 1,400 merchant ships sailed and 85 were lost, with 16 Royal Navy warships.

Sources: Roskill, vol. II; The National Archives, “The PQ 17 disaster”; uboat.net, “William Hooper”; The Royal Household (2016); Churchill, The Hinge of Fate

Read more: Chapter 6: The Air Gap and the Arctic Convoys

The Admiralty’s staff thought so at the time. In March 1943 Allied and neutral merchant losses from all causes reached about 693,000 tons. Between 16 and 20 March convoys HX 229 and SC 122, attacked by close to 40 U-boats in the air gap, lost 22 ships of about 146,000 tons and about 360 men, for one U-boat sunk, U-384: the largest convoy battle of the war. What alarmed the Admiralty was that the ships lost had been sailing in convoy, the system meant to protect them, and that the B-Dienst had read the convoys’ routing signals. The Admiralty’s staff later concluded that the Germans had never come so close to breaking the link between the New World and the Old as in the first twenty days of that month, an assessment widely cited from Roskill’s official history and repeated by the Royal Navy in 2021. Historians since, Clay Blair foremost among them, have argued that the danger was overstated: most convoys still crossed without loss, American shipbuilding was already outrunning sinkings, and U-boat losses were rising. Both views can be held at once. The real risk was probably delay rather than defeat; losses on the March scale, sustained, would have set back the build-up for the invasion of Europe. By the end of May the position had reversed (Rohwer, The Critical Convoy Battles of March 1943; Middlebrook, Convoy).

Sources: Roskill, vol. II; Rohwer, The Critical Convoy Battles of March 1943; Middlebrook, Convoy; Blair, Hitler’s U-Boat War, vol. II

Read more: Chapter 7: Crisis and Black May

Black May was the Germans’ own name for May 1943, when the U-boat arm lost 41 boats by the most commonly cited count (uboat.net and British official figures; other lists give 42 or 43), nearly three times its previous worst month. The turn began with ONS 5, a slow westbound convoy of 43 ships escorted by Cmdr. Peter Gretton’s group B7. Close to 60 U-boats were in the area. Between 28 April and 6 May the convoy lost 13 ships, twelve of them in about 24 hours on 4–5 May, after gales had scattered it and fuel shortages had sent Gretton’s destroyer Duncan and other escorts away. Then fog came down over the edge of the Grand Banks. The escorts, now led by Lt. Cmdr. Robert Sherwood of the frigate Tay, saw on their centimetric radar what the U-boats could not, and in about two dozen attempts that night no U-boat reached the convoy. Six U-boats were sunk around ONS 5 by its escorts, five of them that night, and two more by aircraft nearby. Two weeks later SC 130 crossed without loss while three U-boats were sunk, one of them U-954, with Doenitz’s son Peter aboard. On 24 May, with his war diary recording that “the losses in May have, therefore, reached an impossible height,” Doenitz withdrew his boats from the North Atlantic convoy routes (Gannon, Black May; BdU war log).

Sources: uboat.net, May 1943 losses; BdU war diary, 24 May 1943 (uboatarchive.net); Gannon, Black May; Gretton, Convoy Escort Commander

Read more: Chapter 7: Crisis and Black May

A hunter-killer group was an American task group built around a small escort carrier, with Avenger and Wildcat aircraft, and four or five destroyers or destroyer escorts. Unlike a convoy escort, it went wherever intelligence placed the U-boats, passed on by the Navy’s Tenth Fleet from codebreaking and direction finding, and stayed on a contact until the end. In 1943 the groups of Bogue, Card, Core and Santee destroyed most of the Type XIV supply boats that let U-boats patrol distant waters. Capt. Daniel V. Gallery of Guadalcanal went further and had every ship of Task Group 22.3 organize a boarding party. On 4 June 1944, about 150 miles off French West Africa, the destroyer escort Chatelain depth-charged U-505 to the surface. Her crew abandoned ship, and a party from Pillsbury under Lt. (j.g.) Albert L. David went down the hatch of the circling boat, replaced the cover of a strainer through which seawater was pouring, disconnected scuttling charges and passed up an Enigma machine and code books. One German, Gottfried Fischer, was killed. Guadalcanal and then the tug Abnaki towed the boat to Bermuda. It was the U.S. Navy’s first capture of an enemy warship on the high seas since 1815, and David received the Medal of Honor. The capture was kept secret until May 1945 (NHHC; uboat.net; Museum of Science and Industry).

Sources: NHHC, “Defeating the Sharks” and H-Gram 064-2; USS Chatelain action report; uboat.net, U-505; Griffin Museum of Science and Industry

Read more: Chapter 8: Hunter-Killers and Victory

The U-boats kept fighting for two years after Black May, and most of their men died in that time: uboat.net counts 244 boats lost in 1943, 249 in 1944 and more than 120 in the first five months of 1945. Their new weapons, the Zaunkönig acoustic torpedo from September 1943 and the schnorkel from 1944, were countered or came too late, and of 118 Type XXI electro-boats commissioned only one made a war patrol. The last big American operation, Operation Teardrop in April 1945, was mounted against a feared rocket attack on East Coast cities by the six boats of group Seewolf; none carried rockets, and the destroyer escort Frederick C. Davis was sunk by U-546 before her hunters sank U-546. Off Rhode Island, U-853 sank the collier Black Point on 5 May, after Doenitz’s cease-fire order, killing 12; she was destroyed with all hands off Block Island the next morning. U-boats still at sea were ordered to surface, fly a black flag and steer for Allied ports, and U-858, U-805, U-1228 and U-234, which carried uranium oxide bound for Japan, were brought into American ports. Hundreds more were scuttled by their crews or surrendered in port; the counts vary from source to source. In Operation Deadlight, from 17 November 1945 to 11 February 1946, the Royal Navy towed 116 surrendered U-boats out northwest of Ireland and sank them (NHHC, H-Gram 047; uboat.net).

Sources: NHHC, H-Gram 047 and “Victory in Europe”; uboat.net; Paterson, Black Flag; Roskill, vol. III

Read more: Chapter 8: Hunter-Killers and Victory

No single count is agreed, because sources count different things. The figure most often given for the Atlantic campaign is about 3,500 Allied merchant ships and 175 Allied warships. It sits between Hughes and Costello’s 2,603 merchant ships and 175 naval vessels sunk in the Atlantic and uboat.net’s 3,474 U-boat attacks on 3,304 ships in all oceans, damaged ships included; worldwide, from all causes, Allied and neutral losses came to about 5,150 merchant ships. Roskill’s official tables give 1,664 ships of 7.79 million tons lost in 1942 alone, 1,160 of them to submarines. More than 30,000 men from British merchant ships died by enemy action (30,189 in the figure Clement Attlee gave Parliament; the Commonwealth War Graves Commission commemorates 36,749 Merchant Navy and fishing fleet dead), along with about 9,500 American merchant mariners, 3,638 Norwegians and about 1,600 Canadians, besides the naval and air dead of every Allied nation. A total of about 72,000 Allied seamen and airmen is often quoted, but we have found no single primary source for it. On the German side, of about 1,150 to 1,170 U-boats commissioned, about 780 to 785 were lost, and about 28,000 to 30,000 of some 40,000 U-boat men were killed, roughly three in four, the highest loss rate of any German service (uboat.net; Niestlé).

Sources: Roskill, vol. II, appendix O; Hughes and Costello; uboat.net; CWGC; Niestlé, German U-Boat Losses; national figures in Chapter 9

Read more: Chapter 9: The Cost and the Memory · Chapter 8: Hunter-Killers and Victory

Only in 1988, more than forty years after the war. The U.S. Merchant Marine was a civilian service: its seamen were hired through union halls and the War Shipping Administration and paid wages, and when the war ended they had no discharge papers and no claim to GI Bill benefits, VA medical care or burial in a national cemetery. Their losses were heavy. The figure most often used is 9,521 dead of about 243,000 who served, roughly one in 26 (the Associated Press has said “more than 8,000”), and Congress found in 2020 that the merchant marine “likely bore a higher per-capita casualty rate than any of the military branches during the war.” The route to recognition ran through the GI Bill Improvement Act of 1977, which allowed civilian groups who had served with the armed forces to be treated as veterans. Merchant seamen were turned down until a federal court, in Schumacher v. Aldridge, 665 F. Supp. 41 (D.D.C. 1987), sent their applications back. On 19 January 1988 the Secretary of the Air Force determined that oceangoing merchant marine service between 7 December 1941 and 15 August 1945 was active duty for VA purposes. A 1998 law extended burial benefits to mariners who served through 31 December 1946. A Congressional Gold Medal, authorized on 13 March 2020 (Pub. L. 116-125), was presented in Statuary Hall at the Capitol on 18 May 2022 (CRS, RL33992).

Sources: Congressional Research Service, RL33992; 53 Fed. Reg. 2775 (1988); Pub. L. 105-368; Pub. L. 116-125; Associated Press, 18 May 2022

Read more: Chapter 9: The Cost and the Memory

More than almost anywhere else in the United States, because the battlefield lies just offshore. Start at the Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum, run by the N.C. Department of Natural and Cultural Resources at the south end of Hatteras village beside the Ocracoke ferry docks; its World War II galleries include the four-rotor Enigma machine that divers recovered from U-85 in July 2001. From the beaches of Cape Hatteras National Seashore near Buxton you look out over Diamond Shoals, where many of the 1942 sinkings took place, and the small British cemetery at Buxton holds Michael Cairns of San Delfino and an unknown sailor. Take the free state ferry across Hatteras Inlet to Ocracoke for the British Cemetery on British Cemetery Road, a short walk from the harbor, and its May ceremony. Near Manteo, the Dare County Regional Airport, once Civil Air Patrol Coastal Patrol Base 16, has a small aviation museum and a monument naming Frank M. Cook and Julian L. Cooper, two Base 16 members killed on duty on 21 December 1942. In Wilmington, highway marker D-96 marks the North Carolina Shipbuilding Company yard, which built 243 ships, 126 of them Liberty ships (NCpedia gives 125), and the Battleship North Carolina across the Cape Fear River is the state’s memorial to its Second World War dead. Divers can visit the wrecks; others can explore them through NOAA’s online site plans and models. Check hours and ferry schedules before you go.

Sources: NC DNCR, Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum and markers B-68 and D-96; NPS, Cape Hatteras National Seashore; NOAA, Monitor National Marine Sanctuary; NCpedia

Read more: Chapter 4: Torpedo Junction · Chapter 9: The Cost and the Memory

In London, the Tower Hill Memorial in Trinity Square Gardens carries 23,765 names of Merchant Navy and fishing fleet dead of the Second World War who have no grave but the sea, listed ship by ship with the master first. In Liverpool, the Western Approaches Museum preserves the bunker under Derby House from which the battle was directed from February 1941, with its great wall plot; a statue of Capt. F. J. Walker stands at the Pier Head, and the Merseyside Maritime Museum has Battle of the Atlantic galleries. Bletchley Park, in Milton Keynes, is open as a museum. In Halifax, the Halifax Memorial in Point Pleasant Park names 3,267 Canadians and Newfoundlanders lost at sea, and HMCS Sackville, the last Flower-class corvette, is Canada’s Naval Memorial. In New York’s Battery Park, the East Coast Memorial names 4,601 Americans of all services lost in the western Atlantic (some sources give 4,611), and Marisol’s American Merchant Mariners’ Memorial, dedicated in 1991, is based on a photograph of the survivors of the tanker Muskogee taken from U-123. U-505 is displayed at the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, and the Liberty ships John W. Brown in Baltimore and Jeremiah O’Brien in San Francisco can be visited. On Kiel Fjord, the U-boat memorial at Möltenort names about 30,000 German submariners. Canada marks Battle of the Atlantic Sunday on the first Sunday in May, and Britain holds its main commemorations each May in Liverpool.

Sources: CWGC, “Tower Hill Memorial”; Veterans Affairs Canada; ABMC; NYC Parks; Western Approaches Museum; U-Boot-Ehrenmal Möltenort

Read more: Chapter 9: The Cost and the Memory · Chapter 8: Hunter-Killers and Victory