Even knowledgeable students of World War Two might not know that the war's longest battle was the Battle of the Atlantic, the continuous and manifold maritime confrontations between the Allies and the Axis that spanned virtually the length of the European war from September 1939 to Nazi Germany's surrender in May 1945.
The reason why it was so long is that Britain is an island nation dependent upon seaborne imports of vital goods to sustain its population--and its ability to fight Germany. That meant convoys supplying Britain primarily from North America and the Mediterranean, with merchant ships falling prey to German submarines ("U-boats") while naval vessels and airplanes escorting the convoys tried to repel them.
"Wolf Pack: U-Boats in the Atlantic (1939-1944)," the tenth installment of "The World at War," brings this unsung, underappreciated, and overlooked battle to the bracing fore in poignant, intimate, compelling, and tragic detail. Integral to that is the impressive range of interviewees, British and German, all participants in the battle, who, for the first time in this superlative British documentary series, assume center stage in the narrative penned by J. P. W. Mallalieu rather than narrator Laurence Olivier.
At the war's outset, the expectation was that convoys would be attacked by surface raiders such as the German battleship Bismarck, which the British did sink in the North Atlantic in May 1941, providing Britain with a morale boost, although "Wolf Pack," remaining exclusive to U-boats, does not cover that or other actions.
German Admiral Karl Dönitz explains how he lobbied to build more submarines instead of surface ships, which reached fruition after he became Grand Admiral of the Kriegsmarine (Navy) in January 1943; ironically, U-boats were more effective when they attacked like surface raiders and not submerged as their low silhouette made them harder to spot and attack.
More importantly, Dönitz championed the "wolf pack," groups of U-boats working together to decimate a convoy. Furthermore, the fall of France in May 1940 afforded Germany ports on the Bay of Biscay, which made it much easier to feast on merchant fleets during this "happy time" that saw Dönitz's wolf packs sink millions of tons of shipping, culminating in 1942 with 1675 ships lost, a total of nearly eight millions tons sunk.
The British were slow to respond to the German tactics. Royal Navy anti-submarine tactician Gilbert Roberts notes that the Germans had broken the British radio code, which the British didn't realize until after the war, enabling U-boats to quickly know convoys' locations. But convoy escort commander Peter Gretton explains how anti-submarine lessons learned during the previous world war were ignored while Royal Air Force Coastal Command officer Wilfred Oulton cites unsuitable aircraft and a lack of equipment and training that left the RAF ill-prepared to provide the air cover and support crucial to protecting convoys.
While foul weather could make the North Atlantic perilous to cross beyond the U-boat threat--Chief Petty Officer Edward Butler describes the often-miserable conditions aboard convoy ships, enduring the cold and wet and cramped, unhygienic quarters--U-boat attacks made the conditions tragic.
Thomas Finch, captain of the oil tanker SS San Emiliano, relates a harrowing account of a torpedoing that set oil ablaze on the ocean's surface, with sailors forced to dive into that flaming water. Merchant Navy Captain William Eyton-Jones relates being stranded in an overcrowded lifeboat between Africa and South America, with the U-boat that sunk them simply ignoring them. Several British interviewees note that their own convoys couldn't even stop to pick up survivors. One of every three merchant seamen died during the Battle of the Atlantic.
By contrast, German interviewee Otto Kretschmer, captain of U-99, recounts his part in the October 1940 attack on convoy SC 7--during the "happy time"--that sunk half of its 34 merchant ships, airily describing it as a "Night of the Long Knives," a disconcerting reference to the bloody 1934 Nazi purge of "Brownshirt" storm troopers. (Indeed, Dönitz himself was an unrepentant Nazi war criminal and admirer of Adolf Hitler, even briefly succeeding Hitler as President of Germany as the Third Reich collapsed.)
As Allied anti-submarine tactics improved, including escort aircraft carriers to provide air cover and support anywhere along the convoy route and electronic countermeasures such as advanced direction finders, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and American President Franklin Roosevelt, meeting in January 1943, made defeating the U-boat menace their top priority.
Sailing in May 1943, convoy ONS 5 provided the turning point of the battle. While 13 merchant ships were sunk, seven U-boats were also sunk and seven others damaged. Captain Raymond Hart, commanding the destroyer HMS Vidette, describes the elation his crew felt at sinking a U-boat, adding soberly that there were "no feelings at destroying 70 lives." It was the start of what the Germans termed "Black May," with 41 submarines sunk and even Dönitz's son killed as, overall, four of every five submariners perished in their "iron coffins."
Because of the lack of archival footage available, producer-director Ted Childs and editor Beryl Wilkins make judicious use of it, occasionally using a montage of still photographs, as when describing the exploits of legendary British anti-submarine hunter "Johnnie" Walker, while some film footage, particularly inside the U-boats, appears to have been staged or lifted from stock sources. However, the extended, intimate interviews, a remarkable departure from previous episodes, distinguish "Wolf Pack" as one of the most gripping and revealing episodes to date.
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