DONITZ AND THE WOLF PACKS

On the outbreak of war in 1939, Hitler's U-boat supremo, Admiral Dönitz, waged war against the Allies with a ferocity derived from his year as a British prisoner of war in WWI. The Battle of the Atlantic started hours after the declaration of war, when a U-boat attacked the passenger liner Athenia and made no attempt to rescue the survivors. Following an outcry, survivors of an attack on the Olivegrove were helped to escape, and the two captains even shook hands. Dönitz promptly issued Standing Order 154: "Rescue no-one". In the first years of the war, Dönitz's "wolf-pack" programme produced a series of successes, relying on a system that identified the sound of a ship's propeller and directed the torpedo towards the stern. But the superiority of British radar in locating surfaced submarines was continually thwarting the U-boat programme by 1943. Allied air power reached its peak in 1943 and the cracking of the Enigma code at Bletchley Park had huge consequences. The author quotes Dönitz as saying he is unable to understand his losses unless the unthinkable had happened and the enemy had captured an Enigma machine. Meanwhile long-range Liberator III RCAFs had at last closed the gap in the north Atlantic, and the first British aircraft carrier specifically designed for convoy escort work made its appearance. In one of the book's most gripping incidents, U230 was catapulted to the bottom five miles down, completely out of control, but the crew held out and survived. Finally Dönitz called off his wolf packs from the north Atlantic. He was charged with war crimes at Nuremberg but escaped with his life when an American commander admitted to similarly inhumane treatment of Japanese survivors. 240pp, photos, maps.