A unique perspective of the global history of U-boats during the entirety of World War II 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 theatres 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 theatre 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
After 1944, Donitz with drew U-boats from the Atlantic and brought them closer to home. Caught unawares, the Allies were quite unprepared and it proved a dangerous development not just in WW2 but late
"Hitler's daring and pioneering special forces served in every German theatre of action. This is the most comprehensive account of an unusual and profoundly successful band of men. Lawrence Paterson t
This study of the Kriegsmarine’s Sicherungsstreitkräfte, their security forces, fills a glaring gap in the study of the German navy in World War Two. This wide array of vessels included patrol boats,
Between September 1941 and May 1944, the Germans sent sixty-two U-boats into the Mediterranean. To get there, the boats had to pass through the Strait of Gibraltar, the British-held entry point, where
As the land war raged along the Eastern Front between 1941 and 1945, an equally fierce and unrelenting war ensued on the seas. From German Wolf Pack attacks on Russian convoy traffic and military vess
