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States and their armed forces must fight wars as they must rather than as they would, but at a distance of some eight decades from events it is very difficult to discern what the inter-war British Navy intended, hoped, or anticipated would be the type of war it would be called upon to fight. What seems clear is that for most of the inter-war period the navy never expected to have to fight another U-boat guerre de course, and there are at least three obvious indications of this belief. First, for much of the inter-war period British destroyers were not equipped with depth-charges. The first destroyers built after the war with asdic (to Americans, sonar) were ordered in 1923–1924,1 and very few escorts were built in a period of difficult financial circumstances. Second, in the entire inter-war period something like one in fifty appointments to flag rank were officers versed in anti-submarine operations, and in 1935 just 11 of 1,029 lieutenants and 16 of 972 lieutenant-commanders in the British navy were anti-submarine specialists.2 Third, the one detailed study of convoy and the experience of the First World War, undertaken in 1917–1918 by Commander Rollo Appleyard, was classified, with the result that in the interwar period his study was all but inaccessible to its intended readership, and in 1939 the Admiralty ordered that all copies of his report be destroyed.3 chapter six Britain and the Defeat of the U-boat Guerre de Course 120 The Second World War: The European Theater * * * The war at sea in the European part of the Second World War can be divided in many ways, but one approach is division into eight constituent parts.The first four were the periods September 1939 to March 1940, which is generally known as the Phoney War but which was anything but that for the Poles; April to June 1940, in which time Germany fought a series of campaigns that brought successive victories over and the occupation of Denmark and Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg, and northern and western France; July 1940 to May 1941, which is the first period of very considerable German success in the conduct of the war against shipping, in large measure because of marked British weakness and vulnerability on account of threatened invasion; and June to December 1941, which saw the German invasion of and seeming victory over the Soviet Union, but which ran in tandem with a checking—an exercise of deliberate restraint in the conduct—of the U-boat campaign in the North Atlantic, primarily because of the increased forward American stance in theater. These four periods were not so much four parts of a war as, on the German side, four campaigns that really represented an attempt to avoid a war, or at least a general war. But with the German failure in front of Moscow and declaration of war on the United States in the wake of the Japanese attack on the U.S. Pacific Fleet at its Pearl Harbor base, this war was reality, and what followed at sea were four more parts. First was the period December 1941 to June 1942, in which time of major American and British distraction and weakness, there was major U-boat success. These declined quite markedly in the second period, between July 1942 and April 1943, when Britain for the first time came into possession of adequate numbers of escorts and was able to concentrate patrols and searches in the eastern North Atlantic. At the same time the American measures on the eastern seaboard more or less ended the vulnerability of shipping in the western North Atlantic and Caribbean and forced the U-boats back to the east, and to losses that for the first time assumed significant proportions: U-boat losses were in double figures for eight of the ten months between July 1942 and April 1943, before the disastrous month of May 1943. Thereafter the phase of Allied success divides into two, between June 1943 and May 1944 and between June 1944 and May 1945. The natural dividing line between the two is the invasion of northwest Europe, which, over the next three months, resulted in the German loss of most of its U-boat bases in France, and with them immediate and ready access to the North Atlantic. This, however, did not amount to anything of real strategic significance : between June 1943 and May...

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