Duel U-Boats vs Destroyer Escorts The Battle of the Atlantic Osprey Books

Winston Churchill claimed that the U-boat peril was the only thing that ever frightened him during World War II. Indeed, the Battle of the Atlantic was not only a fight for Britains survival but the survival of any real opposition to Hitlers Reich. If Germany has prevented food, raw materials, troops and equipment from reaching Britain, the outcome of the war would have been radically different. Britain would have been starved into submission and it would have been impossible to launch the D-day landings. The stakes could not have been higher and with the U-boat the Germans seemed to be in possession of the most lethal and effective of weapons. The U-boat was a formidable foe, developed from a small coastal vessel into a state of the art killer, it successfully stalked the high seas picking off merchant convoy ships. It was not until the destroyer escort was introduced, alongside the development of destroyer groups with dedicated anti-submarine tactics, that there was an effective means of defence and attack against the U-boat peril. This was a duel between the U-boats and destroyer escorts in a battle that developed into the lengthiest and costliest campaign of the war. This book describes the design and development of these two deadly opponents, analysing their strengths and weaknesses and assessing their tactics, weaponry and training. Moreover, it is an insight into the lives of the Royal Navy and Wolf Pack crews as they played their deadly games of cat and mouse on the high seas as they gambled not only with their lives but with the fate of the war.