by Mark Hopkins

Created on: February 14, 2011

The 'Battle of the Atlantic', a phrase first coined by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill on March 6th 1941, was the struggle to keep open the supply routes upon which Great Britain depended for her survival. Fighting on alone against Nazi Germany after the Fall of France, Britain needed to import huge quantities of raw materials and fuel to sustain the war effort, as well as commodities such as food to feed her people. Much of it came from North America. The Germans knew full well that if they could cut off her supplies they could starve Britain out of the war.

At the start of the War in 1939 the Germans had relatively light forces in the Atlantic, mainly surface vessels, which the British Royal Navy was well able to counter. With the German occupation of Norway in April 1940 and then the surrender of France, the Germans were able to access the Atlantic directly and the British faced a much more serious threat. More German submarines, U-boats, ( Unterseeboot)  were built to take advantage of the situation and a massive base was established for them at Bordeaux in south west France. Between June and December 1940 German U-boats, surface vessels, mines and aircraft sank 3 million tons of Allied shipping, most of it British.

The Royal Navy proved able to deal with German surface raiders such as the pocket battleship Graf Spee, sunk in December 1939 and the monster battleship Bismarck, sunk in May 1941. U-boats were harder to counter. The Royal Navy had introduced ASDIC, an early form of sonar to help detect submerged submarines and began to group merchant vessels into convoys with screens of destroyers to protect them while crossing from North America. The Germans countered by organizing their U-Boats into large groups known as 'wolf packs' , from late 1940 onwards. These would attack on the surface under cover of darkness in order to evade visual and ASDIC detection until too late.

The Royal Canadian Navy was rapidly expanded to aid the struggle against the U-boat menace and played a major role in convoying merchant ships across the Atlantic. British troops occupied Iceland, (then a possession of German occupied Denmark) providing a useful mid-Atlantic base for naval and air operations. Hurricane fighters were based on specially adapted merchant ships, CAMS, to provide some air support and reconaissance in mid Atlantic, where shore based aircraft could not reach. From May 1941, the officially

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