By the time of the Normandy invasion in June 1944, the U-boats were a
beaten force, hunted and harried wherever they appeared by Allied warships
and aircraft.The U-boats proved to be little more than pin pricks against
the landings, and advancing Anglo-American armies had driven them
out of their French west Atlantic bases all the way back to Norway by
September 1944.
Yet the U-boat force mounted a sustained and effective campaign from their
Norwegian bases. Admiral Doenitz revived the ‘New U-boat War’ against Allied
merchant shipping with new inventions, such as the schnorchel, in the face of a massive
Allied naval defence while Germany collapsed. The book examines in detail the U-boat reaction to the
Normandy landings in June 1944, the Norwegian U-boat bases, German
torpedoes, the interference by U-boat Command, the Scapa Flow carrier
operation and the Allied response up to the final surrender in May
1945.
This is the first book
in English devoted to the U-boat Inshore Campaign against Britain’s eastern
coast, with their unique attributes. The east coast waters
were shallow and heavily mined. Other German naval forces made a
significant contribution. The campaign also saw the first and only
appearances of the new Type XXIII electric U-boats, a radically new
submarine design, the forerunner of modern diesel-electric submarines.
The book uses sources seized from German archives after the Second
World War, those at the Naval Historical Branch, Portsmouth, personal
reminiscences of former U-boatmen, and English decryptions of messages sent to and from the U-boats.
Updated 6 October 2008.
