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Unlike the Pacific, the critical campaign in the Atlantic would not be between powerful surface forces. Hitler promised Grand Admiral Raeder a powerful surface fleet with massive battleships and aircraft carriers. In fact, he launched the War before building a sizeable fleet. Hitler had time and again promised him a huge surface and assured him that there would not be another campaign against Britain and the Royal Navy until the mid-1940s. But Hitler launched the War much earlier -- 1939. Thus for the Kriegsmarine as Raeder would phrase it after the War was to 'go down fighting' and demonstrate that they knew how to die gallantly. OKM was left with only one option -- commerce raiding. 【Raeder】 OKM at first hoped that surface raiders could play a role, by by 1941 it was clear that it all came down to the U-boats. Germany would again have to fall back on its U-boats. And to wage a guerre de course against Britain. In the North Atlantic, unrestricted submarine warfare began almost immeiately. Such was the case when U30 sank the paaangerr liner SS Athena (September 3, 1939). 【Mawdsley】 When the war began, Germany had only about 57 U-boats, and early operations were largely single-ship attacks. U-boat commanders were not fully committed to unrestricted tactics, but Adm. Dönitz issued formal orders (March 1941). This was by its very nature a brutal campaign. Merchant mariners sunk in the cold waters of the North Atlantic had little chance of survival unless rescued quickly. Which usually was not possible. Convoys could not stop to rescue survivors. Commerce raiding was not what Reader had planned. Thus began a second effort to blockade Britain which would be a cold mathematical calculation. Admiral Dönitz calculated that to win the Battle of the Atlantic, he would need a force of 300 medium Type VII U-boats. (OKM favored the larger types.) This would enable him to keep 100 on station in the Atlantic shipping lanes. OKM had in the years leading up to the War, dreaming of a powerful surface fleet, repeatedly refused to focus resources on Dönitz's U-boats. This of course changed after the War began. Based on World War I operations, he calculated that his force of 300 Type VIIs could sink a million tons of shipping monthly. The British merchant marine at the onset of the War was large, about 3,000 cargo ships and tankers totaling 17.5 million tons. Döntitz thus reasoned that Britain, dependent as it was on imports for raw material and food could very rapidly be forced to make peace. 【Blair, p. 39.】 The issue this became how rapidly Döntiz could build his 300 U-boat fleet. The German victories in Norway and France (1940) would greatly increase the U-boat threat, making it impossible to bottle them up in the North Sea. For the British it became how rapidly they could build escorts and new merchant ships and develop effective ASW tactics and weapons. Here Canada would play a key role. The great unknown was the United States. Would America enter the War before Germany had forced Britain to make peace.
Blair, Clay. Hitler's U-Boat War: The Hunters, 1939-1942 (Random House: New York, 1996), 809p.
Mawdsley, Evan. The War for the Seas (Yale University Press: 2020).
Raeder, Erich. Grand Admiral
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