Смекни!
smekni.com

The Atlantic Campaign Essay Research Paper The (стр. 2 из 2)

The U-boat was taken in tow and brought to Bermuda. All sailors of the escort group were sworn to secrecy in the hope of keeping the Germans unaware of the U-boat s capture. The U-505 booty contributed greatly to the Allies reading of German Enigma communications. The Enigma was a complex code machine that provided the Allies phenomenal insight into German strategy. The Germans believed, through the entire war, that the Enigma produced messages that could not be decrypted. In fact, the Allies had been able to read Enigma messages throughout the war, thanks to Allied code-breakers, who were aided by the capture of machines.

After the war the U-505 was taken on tour of U.S. ports and then put on permanent exhibition at the Chicago Museum of Science.

After the heavy losses of May 1943 Admiral Karl Donitz, commander and chief of the German Navy, withdrew his U-boats from the North Atlantic convoy routes. He acknowledged that Germany had suffered a serious defeat. But he was confident that the withdrawal was only temporary and that German technology would soon provide countermeasures against the Allied hunt-and-kill tactics.

U-boats now had acoustic homing torpedoes that could home on the sounds of an escort ship s propellers. But, alerted to the developing of the homing torpedo by intelligence sources, mostly interviews with German prisoners of war, the Allies countered with devices code-named Foxer. The Foxer was a towed noisemaker that attracted the torpedoes away from propellers.

When U-boats leaving French ports were regularly located on the surface at night by radar-equipped aircraft, Donitz had his submarines travel on the surface in daylight and gave them a heavy anti-aircraft armament to shoot down those planes. But Allied warplanes, some firing rockets, were soon able to outgun the U-boats. By then Donitz had outfitted several of his U-boats with snorkels that permitted his submarines to remain submerged indefinitely but impeded their speed. When Donitz attempted to keep his submarines away from port by refueling and respelling them with food and torpedoes at sea, Allied code breakers led sub killers to the transmitted rendezvous site where they were successful in preventing this practice.

At every turn the U-boat effort was frustrated. A new type of U-boat extended the submarine s range, but the new U-boats arrived too late to play a role. Allied bombers had also contributed to the U-boat campaign by damaging shipyards and blasting submarines at their bases. RAF fighter aircraft, attacking with rockets and bombs and laying mines, made it impossible for new U-boats to carry out trials and training in the Baltic.

The war in Europe ended in early May 1945, the Battle of the Atlantic had been won, but at great cost. U-boats sank more than 3,500 merchant ships, including 2,572 ships in the Atlantic. U-boats also sunk 175 naval warships and armed auxiliaries. More than 30,000 merchant seamen and sailors had died in those burning and sinking ships. Added to the toll were thousands of Allied sailors and airmen. The Germans lost 784 U-boats and, of the 40,900 men recruited for submarine service, 28,000 died and 5,000 were taken prisoner. Both of Donitz sons died, one in a U-boat, the other on a torpedo boat.

The Battle of the Atlantic, the only campaign to extend throughout the entire war, was always seesawing between victory and defeat for the Allies. “The only thing that ever really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril…” wrote Prime Minister Churchill, “I was even more anxious about this battle that I had been about the glorious air fight called the Battle of Britain.”