The Battle of the Atlantic: A New Dimension of War

Abstract

From the outbreak of World War II in l939 to the cessation of hostilities in 1945, the Battle of the Atlantic was one of the major war scenes. It was the longest continuous military campaign of the war that reached its height between the mid-1940 and 1943. At the beginning, Germany gained a victory by employing a new tactic of a "wolf-pack" of U-boats to attack British convoys. However, when Britain later succeeded in decoding orders, generated by the "Enigma" machines that Britain seized from Germany, U-boats assembly areas in the Atlantic were exposed. This discovery unquestionably led to the significant decrease in numbers of ships assaulted by U-boats. Early in 1942, Germany began to read the orders of the Allies' convoys, which resulted in their successful attack again. The number of attacked allied ships exceeded that of the ships newly constructed by Britain and the U.S then. Nevertheless, in 1943, such greater numbers and modern weapons as very-long-range aircrafts, small escort aircrafts carriers, short-wave radars, and long-range liberator boomers which were manufactured by the British and the Americans eventually brought a great victory to the Great Britain and the U.S. in this battle.