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the coming of the new millennium invited any number of histories, real and alleged, constructed on the basis of noughts. It is one of the curses of history that, depending on the prejudices of the writer, either a decade or a century is an age, its counterpart an era, and that in neighboring periods there are elements of contrast that so determine character. In reality, history concerns itself with elements of constancy and change, and very seldom affords consideration to simplistic, single-cause representation and for very obvious reason: for every complicated human problem there is a simple explanation, which is neat, plausible, and invariably wrong. * * * Within two decades of the end of the Second World War the British historian Stephen Wentworth Roskill (1903–1982), writing in The Strategy of Sea Power, set out definitions of sea power and its constituent elements.1 One would provide one’s own definition of the historical role of naval power, which is that The purpose of sea power is to ensure in times of war those rights automatically commanded in times of peace, specifically the security of homeland and overseas possessions against raid and invasion and of seaborne trade, while denying those same rights to an enemy in terms of the conduct of amphibious operations and attacks on shipping.2 Introduction 4 definitions and terms of reference The crucial point herein is that while in a general war the offensive use of sea power in terms of assault or landing on enemy territory cannot necessarily be undertaken before and until a measure of defensive primacy has been secured, the line of demarcation between the offense and defense at sea is very different from that ashore, and battle itself is very different. The battle at sea does not possess those elements such as rivers, mountains, lines of communication, and settlement that ashore spell out the difference between offense and defense: the battle at sea has terms of reference supplied by latitude and longitude, daylight hours, and factors of time and distance that necessarily ally themselves with coastline and off-shore hazard. The battle at sea has to be fought repeatedly over the same reaches of sea and ocean in a way that the battle on land does not, and lest the point be doubted reference may be made to just one war and campaign. In the course of the Second World War the German offensive against shipping was defeated in May 1945. Various commentators—one hesitates to use the word “historians”—have tended to focus upon the month of May 1943 as the time when the German campaign againstAllied shipping was defeated, and it cannot be denied that in this month the German U-boat offensive suffered a defeat singular in significance. In this single month the German Navy lost no fewer than forty-one U-boats from all causes, and this total stands in very sharp contrast to the totals of nine, twenty-four, thirty-five, and eighty-seven U-boats lost to all causes in (3 September–31 December) 1939, 1940, 1941, and 1942, respectively . But the point was that the victory that was won by Allied forces in May 1943 had to be repeated until the very end of the European war, and Allied shipping had to be provided with escort and nonetheless took losses virtually to the very last day of the German war. The victory that was won in May 1943 was indeed repeated, most obviously in July–August and again in October–November 1943, and the victories that were recorded in these subsequent months were every bit as important as the victory won in May for the very simple reason that these subsequent losses were sustained by a U-boat service that had been re-organized , re-equipped, and committed afresh to the campaign in the North Atlantic . Losses in July and August 1943 were thirty-seven and twenty-five, respectively , and in October and November twenty-six and nineteen, respectively,3 and in terms of the war at sea and the proper recounting of history the crucial point is to see these subsequent Allied successes in terms of complementary victories, not episodes complete in their own right. The victories that were won between May and November 1943 undoubtedly served to ensure that the initiative at sea passed finally and irreversibly into Allied hands, but the basic reality—that the defensive commitment remained until the end of the war and that the victories of 1943 had to be...

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