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Michael Gannon - Black May: The Epic Story of the Allies Defeat of the German U-Boats in May 1943

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    Black May: The Epic Story of the Allies Defeat of the German U-Boats in May 1943
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Black May: The Epic Story of the Allies Defeat of the German U-Boats in May 1943: summary, description and annotation

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In May 1943, Allied sea and air forces won a stunning, dramatic, and vital victory over the largest and most powerful submarine force ever sent to sea, sinking forty-one German U-boats and damaging thirty-seven others. It was the forty-fifth month of World War II, and by the end of May the Germans were forced to acknowledge defeat and recall almost all of their remaining U-boats from the major traffic lanes of the North Atlantic. At U-Boat Headquarters in Berlin, despondent naval officers spoke of Black May. It was a defeat from which the German U-boat fleet never recovered.

Black May is a triumph of scholarship and narrative, an important work of history, and a great sea story. Acclaimed historian Michael Gannon, author of Operation Drumbeat, has done enormous research and produced the most thoroughly documented study ever done of these battles. In his compelling historical saga, the people are as significant as the technical information.

Given the strategic importance of the events of May 1943, it is natural to ask, How did Black May happen and why? Who or what was responsible? Were new Allied tactics adopted or new weapons employed?

This book answers those questions and many others. Drawing on original documents in German, British, U.S., and Canadian archives, as well as interviews with surviving participants, Gannon describes the exciting sea and air battles, frequently taking the reader inside the U-boats themselves, aboard British warships, onto the decks of torpedoed merchant ships, and into the cockpits of British and U.S. aircraft.

Throughout, Gannon tells the Black May story from both the German and Allied perspectives, often using the actual words of captains and crews. Finally, he allows the reader to listen in on secretly recorded conversations of captured U-boat men in POW quarters during that same incredible month, giving intimate and moving access to the thoughts and emotions of seamen that is unparalleled in naval literature. Rarely, if ever, has the U-boat war been presented so accurately, so graphically, and so personally as in Black May.

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BLACK MAY MICHAEL GANNON To B UZ W YETH This May the - photo 1
BLACK
MAY
MICHAEL
GANNON
To B UZ W YETH This May the situation was quite out of hand as I was soon - photo 2
To B UZ W YETH
This May the situation was quite out of hand: as I was soon to learn, the number of boats that failed to return from patrol reached 41, more than one a day, and there was talk of Black May.
K APITNLEUTNANT
P ETER A LI C REMER
U-Boat Headquarters Staff, Berlin
May was a very black month for the U-boats. Sinkings of U-boats probably averaged one a day.
B RITISH A DMIRALTY
Monthly Anti-Submarine Report
We had lost the Battle of the Atlantic.
G ROSSADMIRAL K ARL D NITZ
Commander-in-Chief, German Navy
CONTENTS

WinterSpring 1943
The Battle of the Atlantic was the dominating factor all through the war. Never for one moment could we forget that everything happening elsewhere, on land, at sea, or in the air, depended ultimately on its outcome, and amid all other cares we viewed its changing fortunes day by day with hope or apprehension.
W INSTON S. C HURCHILL
The decisive point in warfare against England lies in attacking her merchant shipping in the Atlantic.
K ARL D NITZ
Whatever efforts are made by the land armies, the Navy must have the casting vote in the present contest.
G EORGE W ASHINGTON, 1781
I N THE FIRST DARK HOURS of the first day of the forty-fifth month of the longest armed struggle of World War IIthe Battle of the Atlantic submarines of the German underseas fleet (U-Bootwaffe) were at sea, of which were on or proceeding to operational stations in the North Atlantic Ocean, where, were already deployed in four battle groups. Most of the U-boats, as they were called, had sortied from French bases on the Bay of Biscay, the remainder from bases on the Baltic Sea, from which they rounded the north of Scotland. It was the largest number assembled at sea to that date in the war, I May 1943. Steel-gray spectral presences, they made an ominous murmuring across the deep, as of the gathering of a host, on the eve of a titanic trial of strength. At issue was control of the oceans merchant shipping lanes. The enemy was Great Britains Royal Navy and Royal Air Force, helped by forces of the United States and Canada. Most of the U-boats were ordered to form patrol lines across the expected routes of warship-guarded transatlantic convoys of freighters and tankers that sailed between North America and the British Isles. Others watched for north-south coastwise convoys or for independently sailing vessels along the shores of Spain and West Africa, or for shipping inside the Mediterranean Sea.
Armed with the most recent types of destructive torpedoes, all the Atlantic boats were under the same general order from Grossadmiral Karl Dnitz, Commander-in-Chief of the German Navy (Kriegsmarine) and Flag Officer, U-Boats: Angreifen! Ran! Versenken!Attack! Advance! Sink! Their purpose in the transatlantic sea lanes: destroy British and American vessels that, through their deliveries of food, fuel, ferrous and nonferrous metals, other raw materials, and finished weapons, were keeping Great Britain in the war, and making possible a future Allied cross-Channel invasion of German-occupied Europe. As April gave way to May 1943, the Allied defensive war against the U-boat was perceived by many in London and Washington, if not in Moscow, as the single most important campaign of World War II, for upon its outcome rested the success or failure of the Allies strategies in all other theaters of operation. This was so because victory in Western Europe depended on uninterrupted sea communications across the North Atlantic, which provided aid to the Soviet ally as well as to the British (although Arctic convoys to Murmansk and Archangel had been suspended since March because of the growing crisis in the Atlantic), and because the Allied strategic assumption was that the defeat of Germany ensured the defeat of Japan, but not the converse.
Put in the simplest terms, Admiral Dnitz and his U-boats were engaged in a tonnage battle (Tonnageschlacht) with Allied trade, that is, in a campaign to sink more British and American merchant ship tonnage than the Allies could replace with new construction. Dnitz and his staff had calculated in 1940 that in order to accomplish that attrition, his boats (with surface raiders, aircraft, and mines accounting for a small percentage of the total) would have to inflict a monthly loss rate of 700,000 Gross Register Tons (GRT). If successful, Britains armed forces, industries, and people would be strangled or starved into submission. The British had estimated that 600,000 would be enough to do them in. But so far, by either measure, Dnitz was not winning that battle. Operating during the first half of 1942 in poorly defended waters off the United States East and Gulf coasts and in the Caribbean Basin, the best that he had done was 125 ships for 584, 788 GRT, of which only 10 percent was convoyed, in May 1942; and 131 ships for 616, 904 GRT, of which only 12 percent was convoyed, in June 1942. The best that he had done where most of the merchant traffic was convoyed under warship and aircraft protection was 118 ships for an impressive (and record) 743, 321 GRT, in November 1942. The numbers fell off in the following three months.
Then, in the first twenty days of March 1943, his sharks had gone on another feeding frenzy, sinking seventy-two vessels, sixty of them in fourteen Royal Navyprotected convoys. Twenty-two of the ship losses came on 1620 March during an attack by three U-boat groups code-named Raubgraf (Robber Baron), consisting of eight boats; Strmer (Go-Getter), eighteen boats; and Drnger (Pusher), eleven boats, with several other independently operating boats, against three convergent transatlantic eastbound convoys identified by the Allies as SC.122, HX.229, and HX.229A, with a combined 125 merchant ships in orderly columns. The three convoy formations had been protected during their passage by nine destroyers, three frigates, four sloops, nine corvettes, and two cutters, and at various times by fifty-one Royal Air Force and Royal Canadian Air Force aircraft. And more to the point, by spring 1943 neither number would have matched the minimum tonnage now required to keep pace with replacement construction from Americas unexpectedly productive ninety-nine shipyards. The bar on the high jump had been raised to 1.3 million GRT.
Still, the numbers for March, particularly the losses from SC.122 and HX.229HX.229A was unharmedwere of a magnitude to set off alarm bells in the Anti-U-Boat Division of the Naval Staff at the British Admiralty at Whitehall, London, the district where many government departments are located and a term frequently used as a synonym for Admiralty. In language committed to writing well after the convoy disaster, one senses the consternation that reputedly swept certain corridors of Whitehall at the time. Though the convoy system had proved in two world wars to be the keystone of Britains trade protection, for the first time in the second war there were doubters. It appeared possible, the Anti-U-Boat Division reflected, that we should not be able to continue [to regard] convoy as an effective system of defence.
One could have countered that there was no need for these expressions, since American shipyards were producing such prodigious numbers of replacement hulls, new Allied bottoms had already exceeded in the preceding fall any destruction that the U-boats were then inflicting; further, that 90 percent of all ships in convoys attacked by U-boats
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