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generals, was badly mistaken. The German navy thus went to war with a force completely inadequate to match the Allied navies, with a service starved of the resources allocated to the German army and the Luftwaffe. Even its U-boat arm was weak, small in numbers, short in range, and forced to go all the way around northern Scotland to reach the broad Atlantic. The overall odds looked hopeless.
    Those odds changed, in the most dramatic ways possible, during May and June 1940. The collapse of France and Belgium, and the escape of the battered BEF through Dunkirk, meant there was no longer a Western Front. Worse still, the Luftwaffe could now operate against England out of forward bases in Pas-de-Calais, while the German navy could steam in and out of Brest and the Gironde. To compound these disasters, there was the staggeringly fast Nazi takeover of the Netherlands, Denmark, and Norway, with all the consequent strategic and geopolitical implications. Now all the waters beyond the Channel and North Sea were open to German surface ships and submarines. The odds tilted further when Mussolini, cagily neutral in September 1939, opportunistically declared war on the British Empire and a falling France on June 10, 1940. An entire new navy, including one of the world’s largest fleets of submarines, entered the war on Berlin’s side, just as most French warships were abandoning hostilities and anchoring in Toulon and the North African ports.
    The result was that—after the Battle of Britain and the survival of the island nation itself in 1940—the Battle of the Atlantic became the center of the western struggle. Once the immediate German invasion threat diminished, the various British countermoves—such as the maritime relief of Gibraltar, Malta, and Cairo, the preservation of the Cape routes to the East, the military buildups (including dominion and empire forces) in Egypt, Iraq, and India, and the development of the early strategic bombing offensive against the Third Reich—were, while criticallyimportant, impossible to sustain unless a constant flow of foodstuffs, fuel, and munitions reached the home islands from across the seas and new British divisions and weaponry were carried from the home islands to Africa and India. That simple strategic fact did not change when Germany attacked the USSR in June 1941, or when Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and Hitler’s reckless declaration of war against the United States turned a European war into a global conflict. Indeed, the importance of winning the Battle of the Atlantic was only reinforced by the Anglo-American decision to build up a force of millions of men in the United Kingdom for the future invasion of western Europe.
    Thus the struggle to defend the sea-lanes simply to preserve the British Isles now became a gigantic fight by the Allied navies as the first step in ensuring Germany and Italy’s unconditional surrender. Fortunately for the British, the German surface threat could never reach full fruition (just as Raeder had warned). The sinking of the giant battleship
Bismarck
in May 1941 eliminated the greatest single danger, and the “Channel Dash” of the other German heavy ships from Brest back to Germany in February 1942, though highly embarrassing to the Royal Navy’s pride, put those warships once again into constricted waters, to be continually screened by the Home Fleet at Scapa and bombed repeatedly by the Royal Air Force. Futile and rather halfhearted sallies against Arctic convoys offered no challenge to the Allies’ command of the sea. Only the submarines could do that.
    And that they did very well. As the number of U-boats available to Doenitz rose steadily during 1942, their crews also grew in experience, their detection equipment became more reliable, their range was increased by the introduction of “milk cow” refueling subs, and they were masterfully coordinated by Doenitz. America’s entry into the conflict gave them fabulous