What Helped Lead To The Increasing Allied Success In The Battle For Control Of The Atlantic

'Loose lips sink ships' poster, 1941 (Alexander Turnbull Library, Eph-D-WAR-WII-1941-02)

The Battle of the Atlantic was one of the most of import campaigns of the 2d World State of war. It was certainly the longest, lasting 2074 days: from 3 September 1939, the day war was declared, to 7 May 1945, the day Germany surrendered.Allied ships were sunk with loss of life in the Atlantic on both those days, and on almost every day in betwixt.

The Boxing of the Atlantic besides ranged across vast distances, from South America'due south River Plate, where the New Zealand cruiser HMS Achilles helped trap the Admiral Graf Spee in Dec 1939, to the freezing Arctic Sea, through which Allied convoys shipped vital supplies to the Soviet Spousal relationship.

Great britain was a maritime ability with the world'due south largest merchant fleet, but its heavy dependence on imported food (including meat and dairy products from New Zealand), fuel and raw materials made it vulnerable to a blockade. Germany'due south Atlantic strategy was simple: to starve United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland into submission past destroying merchant ships and their cargoes faster than they could exist replaced. As Prime Minister Winston Churchill remarked in 1941, 'Everything turns on the Battle of the Atlantic.'

Although mines, bombers and surface ships would claim many victims, the deadliest threat was the submarine, or U-boat. The Allies' defence force against, and eventual victory over, the U-boats in the Battle of the Atlantic was based on 3 main factors: the convoy arrangement, in which merchant ships were herded across the North Atlantic and elsewhere in formations of up to lx ships, protected, as far every bit possible, by naval escorts and patrolling aircraft; the painstaking, secret work of Centrolineal signals intelligence, especially the breaking of the U-boats' sophisticated Enigma code; and, peculiarly from 1943, the deployment of longer-range aircraft and more than powerful, better-equipped escort forces.

The campaign took a significant turn on 24 May 1943: the commander-in-chief of the German Navy, Admiral Karl Dönitz, alarmed at the heavy losses inflicted by increasingly strong Allied escort forces (41 U-boats were sunk that month), ordered the temporary withdrawal of U-boat 'wolf packs' from the Due north Atlantic. The U-boats would before long return, and the threat to Allied shipping would remain until May 1945, but Frg would never regain the initiative.

Although it was waged one-half a world away from New Zealand, the Battle of the Atlantic was vital to this country's interests. A German victory would have severed our links with Britain and hugely undermined the Allied cause, with grave consequences for New Zealand. Thousands of Kiwis took part in this bitter struggle, manning the warships of the Royal Navy and Royal New Zealand Navy, the troopships, freighters and tankers of the Merchant Navy, and the aircraft of RAF Littoral Command and the Navy's Fleet Air Arm. Many served with stardom, including Coastal Command pilot Lloyd Trigg, who won the Victoria Cross in August 1943 for a 'masterly set on' which sank U-468. His Liberator bomber was lost with all its crew, and his posthumous VC was awarded on the testify of survivors from the U-boat.

How to cite this page

'Turning bespeak in Boxing of the Atlantic', URL: https://nzhistory.govt.nz/page/turning-point-battle-atlantic, (Ministry for Culture and Heritage), updated twenty-Jan-2021

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