BATTLE OF THE ATLANTIC (see Cover)
The battle of the Atlantic last week narrowed toward a showdown. The Allies announced a plan for a transatlantic air umbrella to protect convoys "over every mile of the route from North America to Europe." Germany spoke of a "totality of U-boat warfare, which means that German U-boat warfare is equivalent to German naval warfare as a whole."
For weeks the Nazis had been forecasting an intensified U-boat offensive, a climactic effort to throttle the Allies' offensive plans in Europe. Submarines were indeed abroad in herds, but up to this week the offensive had not attained the promised scale. Now, or never, was the time for the effort. If Germany won, an Allied second front in Europe would be indefinitely postponed. If she failed —and her time was running out — the first great breach in the Atlantic Wall of Hit ler's Fortress Europe would be accomplished.
The outlook, after more than three and a half years of war, was still not good for the Allies. Germany was building subs faster than they were being sunk; Allied shipbuilding was just beginning to hold its own. The balance was close, and there were factors weighing heavily in Nazi Germany's favor. What Adolf Hitler could not do by land to stop the Allies' march toward Europe's borders, Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz, CINC of the German Navy, was working hard to do by sea in the Atlantic moat where the first defense of Europe lay.
The Weapon. Grand Admiral Doenitz had not been CINC for long. Only three months ago he replaced Erich Raeder as the head of Hitler's Navy, and the shift in command was a tip-off on the Nazis' future strategy. For Karl Doenitz was a submariner from away back. A submariner he remained, in personal command of the U-boat fleet.
Sooner than most, he had recognized that Germany's hope on the high seas, in this war as in the last, lay in the slender, lonely little craft effectively typed "torpedo carriers." When he took the supreme command, he pledged: "The entire German Navy will henceforth be put into the service of inexorable U-boat warfare." From his headquarters somewhere in Axis Europe last week, Doenitz wielded a potent weapon:
> Some 400-500 U-boats operating on a constant schedule;
> Some 150 of them out on the hunting grounds simultaneously; one-sixth of them on the way to and from their bases; one-half of them in port refitting or undergoing repairs;
> Between 20 and 30 new U-boats each month — and this estimate may be low —being produced in German factories and assembled at bases along the German coast (see map).
Most of these submarines were in the 740-ton class or over, carried 4.1-inch guns, anti-aircraft guns and six 21-inch torpedo tubes. Fueled and armed, they could cruise up to 15,000 miles for six to eight weeks, had enough torpedoes to sink at least half a dozen ships, ammunition for their deck guns to take care of more if they found stragglers who could be sent to the bottom by shell fire.