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allocation of planes. Doenitz had an extremely competent deputy, Rear Admiral Godt, for the day-to-day management of the U-boats, though very few middle-ranking staff. An enormous responsibility was thus placed upon the U-boat commanders themselves, many of whom became legends, not unlike the First World War fighter aces, with an instinct for both killing and surviving despite the very high loss rate—until the strain became too great. As we shall see, there was little evidence that Allied morale, whether of captains or crews, Royal Navy personnel or merchant sailors, ever sagged even when losses and general conditions were at their worst. Moreover, the Western Allies simply possessed far more trained officers of the captain and commander rank, not to mention naval reserve officers who could be thrown into any breach.
    The remaining factor has to be that of relative force strengths and endurance. It was not just the measure of crews’ physical and mental stamina during a fourteen-day convoy struggle; it was also a matter of sustaining each side’s campaign through reinforcement, sending fresh numbers to replace those lost, and steadily building up the fightingpunch of one’s service. This was total, industrialized war, measured most clearly by the flows of new U-boats vis-à-vis Allied warships and aircraft, of merchant vessels, and of fresh crews. Here again, one might have assumed that by early 1943 the odds were tilting in Doenitz’s favor; certainly the steady buildup in U-boat numbers pointed to that conclusion. Moreover, while German shipbuilding production could concentrate ever more narrowly on submarines and lighter attack craft (E-boats), British yards were being stretched to produce light fleet carriers for future Far East operations, newer classes of cruisers and destroyers, landing gear, and the Royal Navy’s own submarines. Had it not been for the stupendous gearing up of American war industries as 1942 unfolded into 1943, this could have been a very one-sided production battle. In any event, at the time of Casablanca no one on the Allied side was very cheery about how the naval odds looked in the Atlantic.
The Battle at Sea, and the U-boats’ Triumph
    As Hitler’s attack upon Poland in September 1939 led to the Anglo-French declarations of war, the strategic situation in the Atlantic basin and across western Europe was eerily similar to that of a quarter century earlier, when the Entente Cordiale and its empires had gone to war in response to Germany’s invasion of Belgium. A small British Expeditionary Force (BEF) once again crossed the Channel to stand with the French armies. The other countries of Europe remained neutral, as did the United States, due to congressional fiat. Most of the British dominions (that is, Australia, Canada, Newfoundland, New Zealand, and South Africa, but not, unhappily, de Valera’s Eire) joined the struggle, as did the dependent parts of the Anglo-French empires. The Royal Navy assembled its surface fleets at Scapa Flow and Dover to close the two egresses from the North Sea, except of course to a small number of German commerce raiders already in the wider oceans. The broad impression that history was indeed repeating itself was fully captured, symbolically and physically, by Churchill’s return to the revered cabinet position of First Lord of the Admiralty, the position he had occupied in 1914. “Winston is back!” went out the message to the fleet.
    The strategic position at sea could not have been worse for the Germannavy, headed by Raeder. His service did indeed have plans (the famous Z Plan) for a massive transoceanic battle fleet, with giant battleships, aircraft carriers, and all, but even Nazi Germany’s formidable production capacities could not produce such a force—or even a quarter of it—by 1939. Another four or five years at least were needed, and Raeder had believed the Fuehrer would keep out of a major war for that long. He, like a lot of Wehrmacht