It's an exceptional series, using newsreel footage, reenactments, prudent computer-generated images, and graphics. It deals in some detail with the battle between the German U-boats in the Atlantic during World War II and the Allied countermeasures that eventually turned German patrols into suicide missions.
Britain, an island nation, was dependent on necessities like food and war supplies like oil being sent through the shipping lanes from Canada and America. The German commander, Admiral Dönitz realized that if his submarines could cut that lifeline Britain would be starved into submission. The rest of Europe had already fallen to the Nazis. But the admiral began the war with only some forty-two U-boats. At its peak the number would be ten times that many. His pleas for more met with a tepid reception because Hitler was more interested in the image of naval strength projected by the battleship. His battleships didn't get the job done but Dönitz's U-boats almost did.
The workhorse of the submarine fleet was the Type 7. It could travel as fast as most cargo ships on the surface, propelled by diesel engines, carried a 3-inch deck gun and secondary armament, and eleven torpedoes. Initial success was great. Two torpedoes sunk an important British aircraft carrier. The crews became elite and were highly decorated and well treated.
But the battle for the Atlantic was a kind of tug of war between the submarines and the Allied surface ships. Dönitz had to rely on tactics to adjust to the changes, developing the wolf pack, for instance. The Allies relied on numbers and on rapid advances in technology. First, the British and Canadian escort vessels were equipped with what American's call sonar, which enabled ships to detect submerged U-boats. Later they used radar, enabling them to detect surfaced submarines at a distance of twelve miles. Blessed by Fortune, the British managed to capture a damaged U-boat with a decryption machine called Enigma still aboard, enabling them to decode messages sent to and from the U-boat fleet.
Also important was the building of small anti-submarine vessels, the corvettes, modeled on the design of a whaling ship. They were very lively at sea and their crew were generally miserable. The corvettes were slow and poorly armed, good for nothing except dropping depth charges where submarines were detected. Anyone interested in what living conditions were like on a corvette is referred to two feature films, "The Cruel Sea" and "Corvette K 225." The convoys consisted mainly of old cargo ships and tankers. Against a headwind, they made about as much speed as a man walking.
In January of 1943, Dönitz mounted the biggest wolf pack attack, fifty-two U-boats and two thousand men, including his own son, against the convoys. Aided by sonar and surface radar, the convoy escorts managed to sink half a dozen U-boats and damage five others. In May, Dönitz lost 1300 men, his son among them. The momentum in the battle had shifted to the side of the Allies and it would stay there.
It's a fine program, second only to the Battlefield Series. The narrative deals mainly with the role of the Royal Canadian Navy in the Battle of the Atlantic. There's nothing about the Italian submarine that slipped into Scapa Flow and sank a British battleship, and only a brief allusion to the Murmansk run. Nothing about the scandal of Convoy PQ 17.
The survivors' anecdotes are often harrowing, especially those of the U-boat crews. One engineer was trapped in a sunken submarine watching the water creep higher in the compartment and drown his comrades. When someone opened a hatch above him, he slipped through and rose to the surface, and he gives a compelling account of his entire life running through his mind, "as real as you and I are sitting here." He was the only survivor. "War is all hell," said General Sherman, and one imagines death aboard a U-boat to be among the most hellish.
