The Battle of the Atlantic

From the team that brought you 'The Nazis: A Warning from History', comes a thrilling new World War II series, 'The Battle of the Atlantic'. This series will, for the first time on British television, tell the story of Hitler's attempt to sever Britain's lifeline across the Atlantic. For Winston Churchill it was 'the only thing that ever frightened me during the war'. The book brilliantly recounts the tale of the longest, most bitterly fought campaign of World War II. Publication ties in with the 60th anniversary of the Battle of the Atlantic.From 1939 until 1942, Hitler's U-Boats - his 'grey wolves' - threatened to do what his air force couldn't - starve Britain into submission. The Allies lost a total of fifteen-million tons of shipping, and forty thousand sailors lost their lives during the five-year Battle of the Atlantic. Britain's imports - upon which it heavily relied - were halved during the war by the U-Boat threat, leading to enforced rationing and the introduction of the victory gardens.These were humiliating blows for a nation boasting the largest navy in the world. The first casualty of the war was the battleship Royal Oak - torpedoed by U-Boats and suffering the loss of 833 men - news of which brought tears to Churchill's eyes. For the charismatic leader of the U-Boat command, Karl Doenitz ('the lion') it was a brilliant start, leading to German domination of the waters for most of the war. Even after the discovery of a German enigma coding machine on board a sunk U-Boat, the Allies were still losing this strategically important battle. (Britain's careless use of the information had led the German's to change the Enigma code.) The Americans entry into the war in 1941 also failed to stop the U-Boat's sucessful torpedoing of Allied shipping - for the U-Boat crew this period of the war was known as the 'Happy Time'.Gradually, the Allied losses began to decline largely due to the use of Radar - a system that could detect U-Boats on the surface of the oceans - and to the inaccuracy of the U-Boats torpedoes. Doenitz had failed. The U-Boat commander had neglected to install a research department at its headquarters. Meanwhile the British navy had opened its doors to both academics and scientists and had won the technological race. On 24 May 1943 Doenitz admitted defeat and withdrew his U-Boats from the North Atlantic. The Battle of the Atlantic was over.Pulling on exclusive interviews with U-Boat crews, Andrew Williams draws a compelling picture of the uncomfortable, claustrophobic and dangerous life on board the U-Boats (the 'Iron Coffins') and looks at the making of this elite 'brotherhood' - a great proportion of whom were killed. He also gathers interviews from the British and American navy to illustrate the story with numerous untold tales of enormous personal courage and horrific losses.