The Battle of the Atlantic was the longest contiguous campaign of World War II, occurring from 1939 to 1945 as the U-boats and warships of the Nazi German Kriegsmarine battled against the British Royal Navy, Royal Canadian Navy, US Navy, and Allied merchant shipping in the Atlantic Ocean.
Early in the war, the commander of the German U-boat fleet, Karl Doenitz, persuaded Kriegsmarine chief Erich Raeder that effective submarine warfare could bring the island country of Britain to its knees because of the British Empire's dependence on overseas commerce. Doenitz planned for Germany's 300 U-boats to travel in "wolf packs" and spread out to detect Allied convoys, upon which they would converge upon their target and destroy it. After the Fall of France in 1940, Germany used naval bases in occupied France to launch wildly successful U-boat attacks against British and Commonwealth shipping, resulting in the "First Happy Time" of June 1940-February 1941; from June to October 1940 alone, over 270 Allied ships were sunk. In June 1940, Italy entered the war on the side of the Axis, contributing its Regia Marina to the fight. The Germans waged a devastating tonnage war against the Allies for the first three years of the war, forcing the British government to introduce rationing in order to reduce demand, reduce wastage, and improve the equality of distribution of rationed goods.
After the United States joined the war on the Allied side in December 1941, the tide began to turn against Nazi Germany. German U-boats took advantage of the US Navy's inability to adequately defend its shores by preying on shipping in the Caribbean, the Gulf of Mexico, and even North Carolina's Outer Banks. In July 1942, however, the United States began arranging convoys, causing U-boat attacks to meet with less success. In the first six months of 1942, Germany lost 21 U-boats, while this number grew to 60 from August to September 1942. That same year, British codebreakers at Bletchley were able to break the German code, Enigma, obtaining information on German submarine movements. From 1942 on, Germany's objective for the Battle of the Atlantic shifted towards preventing the Allies from moving supplies to the British Isles in preparation for an invasion of Europe. From March to May 1943, German U-boat losses escalated while Allied shipping losses decreased, and, in "Black May", 43 German U-boats - 25% of the U-boat arm's total strength - were destroyed. The Allies' increased use of convoy escorts, depth charges, and RAF Coastal Command air cover reduced the number of successful convoy attacks, and the German blockade of the Atlantic ultimately failed, as their surface raiders had been defeated by late 1942 and the U-boat menace by mid-1943. The Germans lost 783 U-boats and 47 surface warships (4 battleships, 9 cruisers, 7 raiders, and 27 destroyers), while the Allies had lost 3,500 merchant ships and 175 warships in 100 convoy battles and 1,000 single-ship encounters. On 7–8 May, U-320 was the last U-boat to be sunk in action, and the 174 remaining U-boats were surrendered to the Allies upon the German surrender; most of them were destroyed in Operation Deadlight.
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