A unique perspective of the global history of U-boats during the
entirety of the Second World War by Lawrence Paterson, one of
the world's leading U-boat experts.
The accepted historical narrative of the Second World War predominantly
assigns U-boats to the so-called "Battle of the Atlantic," almost as if
the struggle over convoys between the new world and the old can be
viewed in isolation from simultaneous events on land and in the air.
This has become an almost accepted error. The U-boats war did not exist
solely between 1940 and 1943, nor did the Atlantic battle occur in
seclusion from other theaters of action. The story of Germany's second
U-boat war began on the first day of hostilities with Britain and France
and ended with the final torpedo sinking on May 7, 1945. U-boats were
active in nearly every theater of operation in which the Wehrmacht
served, and within all but the Southern Ocean. Moreover, these
deployments were not undertaken in isolation from one another; instead
they were frequently interconnected in what became an increasingly
inefficient German naval strategy.
This fascinating new book places each theater of action in which U-boats
were deployed into the broader context of the Second World War in its
entirety while also studying the interdependence of the various
geographic deployments. It illustrates the U-boats' often direct
relationship with land, sea and aerial campaigns of both the Allied and
Axis powers, dispels certain accepted mythologies, and reveals how the
ultimate failure of the U-boats stemmed as much from chaotic German
military and industrial mismanagement as it did from Allied advances in
code-breaking and weaponry.
