Marc Milner, Battle of the Atlantic, 2nd Ed (Gloucestershire, UK: The History Press, 2011)
The campaign for naval supremacy in the North Atlantic was the longest of World War II and represents a microcosm of the challenge and response paradigm that beset the war in general—initial German superiority was quickly matched by Allied ingenuity, technology, and material. In Battle of the Atlantic, Canadian naval historian Marc Milner provides a comprehensive and detailed update on history’s longest submarine campaign that revises historians’ understanding of German limits and American and Canadian contributions. Milner has published widely on the Battle of the Atlantic and the Canadian effort in World War II. He is a Senior Affiliate at the Gregg Centre for the study of War and Society at the University of New Brunswick and serves on the Board of Governors of the Royal Military College of Canada.
Milner argues that victory in the Atlantic was never within Germany’s grasp unless the Allies defeated themselves. According to the author, the Allies were superior in everything from industrial production to technology to command and control. Regardless, the Germans hedged their bets early and built a large fleet of Unterseeboots to disrupt allied shipping. Admiral Karl Dönitz intended his submarine fleet to function as glorified torpedo boats with underwater capabilities, which meant that they required unimpeded surface maneuverability. The Allies realized this and countered with a defensive system designed to limit that mobility. Milner thus sees the campaign as one that progressively denied German maneuverability while pushing more cargo across the sea than expanding U-Boat fleets could hope to destroy. The Allies forced the German submarine fleet into a battle they could not win—fixing the vaunted U-Boat in the mid-Atlantic air gap to force decisive confrontations. Despite successes in 1941, the first half of 1942 witnessed a German comeback as both sides raced to implement new technologies, crack one another’s codes, and enhance and update operational practices. The German effort peaked in June 1942 as they sunk a total of 136 ships and 637,000 tons of cargo. As the year progressed, Dönitz knew he was losing the technology battle—new torpedoes, radar detectors, and anti-aircraft guns were quickly offset by Allied countermeasures such as larger and better protected convoys, radar on all manner of aircraft and ships, and long-range Liberator bombers.
May 1943 was the significant turning point in the campaign, with 41 U-boats sent to the bottom in that month alone. Rather than an end to the campaign, it opened a new phase. Donitz did not withdraw U-boats from the oceans entirely as Winston Churchill and others have suggested, but rather redeployed south and west of the Azores to disrupt US convoys to the North African theater. These were then met with increasing American capabilities, including escort carriers accompanying destroyers to present a three-dimensional approach to submarine hunting wherever they sailed. The Washington conference of May 1943 established the Allied Anti-Submarine Survey Board—which was critical to developing a coordinated response to the submarine problem but did not establish unity of command across the Allied naval effort. Regardless, while a nuisance throughout the entirety of the war, Milner argues that the German submarine effort against allied shipping had no influence on the outcome of the war.
Milner has produced a well-written narrative that progresses chronologically through the campaign for supremacy in the North Atlantic. Milner’s notes and source work, however, leave much to be desired. Rather than endnotes, he supplies a short bibliography of official histories and secondary works, and much of the evidence rests on his (well earned) reputation as a scholar. It is clear throughout his prose that ship’s logs, intelligence reports, and other primary sources are paramount to his research, but he fails to point future historians in the right direction outside of his bibliography and acknowledgments section. Nevertheless, his conclusions are sound and thought-provoking as he is arguing that Germany was never in a position to win their submarine campaign outright. This book is a single-volume comprehensive treatment of the battle from German, British, Canadian, and American perspectives and focuses therein. It is ideal for the naval specialist or the general reader interested in the complexity of industrial naval combat in such a foreboding theater as the North Atlantic.