Wolfpack - History

 

The Battle of the Atlantic, which lasted from September 1939 until the defeat of Germany in 1945, was the war’s longest continuous military campaign. During six years of naval warfare, German U-boats and warships – and later Italian submarines – were pitted against Allied convoys transporting military equipment and supplies across the Atlantic to Great Britain and the Soviet Union. This battle to control the Atlantic shipping lanes involved thousands of ships and stretched across thousands of perilous square miles of ocean.

The ‘Wolf pack’ tactic began with widely-dispersed German U-boats searching for an Atlantic convoy. When one U-boat spotted a target, a radio message sent its location to all other U-boats, who converged for the kill.

Historians estimate that more than 100 convoy battles took place during the war. They cost the Merchant Navy more than 30,000 men, and around 3,000 ships. The equally terrible cost for the Germans was 783 U-boats, and 28,000 sailors.