Sixty years after Germany’s U-boats and the navies of England and the United States fought it out in World War II’s battle of the Atlantic, tales about that monumental confrontation still excite readers.
“The Twilight of the U-Boat” by Bernard Edwards is one such thrilling story.
Throughout the war, U-boats attempted to starve the British Isles of essential supplies of food, fuel and raw materials. Their spectacular successes from 1939 through 1941 brought the U-boats close to their goal of sinking Allied ships faster than replacements could be built. But the relentless onslaught was countered tenaciously by the Royal Navy as it gained valuable experience in anti-submarine warfare tactics and techniques.
When the United States entered the war in December 1941, the battle was at its toughest and appeared to be favoring Germany. But the tide began to turn with the availability of more naval ships to provide convoy escort and the construction in America of large numbers of merchant ships that eventually counterbalanced the losses due to German torpedoes.
In the early days of the war, ships were lost by the hundreds and U-boats by mere handfuls. Then U-boat losses began to soar and by mid-1943, the battle of the Atlantic was shaping up as an Allied victory.
Edwards picks up the thread of events as the heyday of U-boats began to fade. He provides a thorough but succinct account of German wolf pack tactics and of the conflict’s many bloody encounters – several of which were fought in the atrocious weather of the North Atlantic.
He follows closest the campaign of U-223 and its captain, Karl-Jurgen Waehter, who had sunk the U.S. Army’s troop transport Dorchester off the coast of Greenland in early January 1943, killing 675 of the 904 on board. Among them were four Army chaplains who gave their life jackets to soldiers without them and assisted others as the ship sank.
The book includes many important and colorful details of the war against U-boats, whose dominance slowly but steadily faded. Even so, on May 7, 1945 – only two days before the war’s end – U-boats sank a Norwegian minesweeper and a British steamer.
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