The Battle of the Atlantic: How the Allies Won the War

611 Pages·2015·14.74 MB·English

by  Jonathan Dimbleby

Jonathan Dimbleby

THE BATTLE OF THE ATLANTIC
How the Allies Won the War
Contents
List of Maps and Illustrations
Preface: A Momentous Victory
1 The Phoney War that Wasn’t
2 Caught Hopping
3 Rash Moves
4 The End of the Beginning
5 U-Boats on the Rampage
6 Churchill Declares ‘The Battle of the Atlantic’
7 Moving the Goalposts Again
8 America Goes for It
9 Secret Weapons
10 Fingers in the Dyke
11 Shifting Fortunes
12 Beating the Drum
13 Overstretched Everywhere
14 Disaster in the Arctic
15 Goading the Bear
16 Dönitz Seizes His Chance
17 Changes at the Top
18 ‘The Battle of the Air’
19 A Very Narrow Escape
20 A Dramatic Turnabout
21 The Reckoning
22 The Beginning of the End
Epilogue: Fates Disentwined
Illustrations
Select Bibliography
Notes
Acknowledgements
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For Daisy and Gwendolen
in the hope that one day they will want to know
how Britain was saved from the Nazis
Maps and Illustrations
Maps
The Home Waters
The Mediterranean
The Eastern Seaboard
The Atlantic Convoy Routes
The Arctic Convoy Routes
Illustrations
1. Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt at their first formal
meeting, at Placentia Bay, in August 1941 (© akg-images)
2. Sir Charles Forbes, commander-in-chief of the Home Fleet, 1938–40
(© Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans)
3. Churchill and Admiral Sir John Tovey arriving on board HMS King
George V, October 1942 (© IWM [A 12204])
4. Admiral Sir Percy Noble addressing the ship’s company of HMS Stork
at Liverpool (© IWM [A 8663])
5. Admiral Sir Dudley Pound, the First Sea Lord, 1939–43 (©
Popperfoto/Getty Images)
6. Admiral Sir Max Horton, commander-in-chief of the Western
Approaches Command, 1942–5 (© IWM [A 17423])
7. Sir Arthur Harris, the commander-in-chief of Bomber Command (©
IWM [CH 13020])
8. Admiral Ernest King (Mary Evans/The Everett Collection)
9. Admiral Harry ‘Betty’ Stark, the US Navy’s Chief of Naval
Operations, 1939–42 (© Bettmann/CORBIS. All rights reserved)
10. Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt’s closest aide, posing with Josef Stalin (©
Margaret Bourke-White/Getty Images)
11. German Admiral Erich Raeder, commander-in-chief of the
Kriegsmarine (Everett Collection/Mary Evans)
12. Admiral Karl Dönitz, commander-in-chief of the U-boat fleet
(Sueddeutsche Zeitung Photo/Mary Evans)
13. Hitler presents the Knight’s Cross to Günther Prien (© akg-
images/Ullstein Bild)
14. Otto Kretschmer, German submarine commander (© Ullstein
Bild/Getty Images)
15. New recruits to the Merchant Navy (© IWM [A 4469])
16. Survivors from the SS Athenia, sunk on the first day of the war (©
IWM [HU 51008])
17. The German pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee sinks in the River
Plate, Montevideo, Uruguay (Everett Collection/Mary Evans)
18. The destroyer HMS Eskimo, damaged during the Battle of Narvik,
May 1940 (© IWM [N 233])
19. The German battleship Bismarck, sunk on 27 May 1941 (© akg-
images)
20. Survivors from the Bismarck are pulled aboard HMS Dorsetshire
21. Teams drawn principally from the ranks of the WRAF and the WRNS
charting the shifting positions of the Atlantic adversaries (© IWM [A
9891])
22. A U-boat entering one of the bomb-proof pens in the port of Lorient
23. Survivors of the SS City of Benares (© AP/Press Association Images)
24. British housewives queue to buy eggs in 1940 (Grenville Collins
Postcard Collection/Mary Evans)
25. Officers on the bridge of a British Warship escorting an Atlantic
convoy in 1941 (© IWM [A 5667])
26. The torpedo room of a German U-boat (© akg-images)
27. A German U-boat crew at rest (© akg-images/Ullstein Bild)
28. A Hedgehog anti-submarine mortar mounted on the destroyer HMS
Westcott (© IWM [A 31000])
29. PQ17 in Hvalfjord, Iceland, June 1942 (© IWM [A 8953])
30. Arctic conditions on an Allied merchant ship (© AP/Press Association
Images)
31. At least 400 US merchant ships were sunk by U-boats in the first half
of 1942 (© Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
32. By 1943, Atlantic convoys frequently exceeded sixty vessels in size (©
akg-images)
33. U-boat POWs were few in number (Everett Collection/Mary Evans)
34. Patriotic poster distributed in British ports (© IWM [Art.IWM PST
14440])
35. Officers in the Plot Room at the Admiralty in December 1942 (© IWM
[A 13205])
36. Bletchley Park, the secret headquarters of the Government Code &
Cypher School (GC&CS) (© Bletchley Park Trust/Getty Images)
37. The Enigma machine, which the German high command used to
encrypt secret military traffic (Interfoto/Mary Evans)
38. An emergency feeding centre in Liverpool (© IWM [V 50])
39. A rating inscribing another U-boat kill on board HMS Hesperus (©
IWM [A 20897])
40. D-Day, 6 June 1944: British commandos land on Gold Beach (© IWM
[B 5246])