An authoritative account of perhaps the least-known major campaign of World War Two, the Battle of the Atlantic, in which Allied merchant seamen heroically kept Britain in the war and eventually defeated Hitler’s U-boats.
Between 1939 and 1945 almost 30,000 merchant sailors lost their lives. An equal number of American, Canadian, and British sailors and airmen also lost their lives protecting the merchant ships and hunting the German U-boats and surface ships that preyed on the Allied north Atlantic convoys. Of the 1,099 U-boats that operated in the north Atlantic during these years, only 37 survived the war. The casualties in the Battle of the Atlantic were probably higher than in any other theatre of operations during World War Two.
The Battle of the Atlantic went badly for the Allies for the first few years. Without supplies coming from the U.S. and Canada, Britain could not continue to hold out against a continent controlled by Germany. The battle turned for good in 1943 thanks to two technological developments. The first was a new generation of radar that the German U-boats could not detect. The second was the delivery of long range bombers that closed the previous air gap in the north Atlantic. From the spring of 1943 until the end of the war, the Allies slowly but surely destroyed the German navy.
David White has done archival research in the U.S., Great Britain and Germany, and he has spoken to dozens of survivors of the Battle of the Atlantic to finally do justice to this extraordinary story. This is a riveting account of the north Atlantic convoys, told with dramatic flair and you-are-there immediacy. White recreates the stories of some of the convoys while placing them in the larger context of the Battle of the Atlantic. Bitter Ocean tells this story from sailors on the merchant ships, inside the U-boats and aboard the destroyers.
About the Author David Fairbank White has written about ships and the sea all his professional life, beginning as a reporter at The New York Times, where he wrote about New York Harbor; he also worked as a reporter at maritime desk of The Journal of Commerce. He is the author of a novel, True Bearing, and his work has appeared in numerous national magazines including Fortune, New York, Parade, and Reader’s Digest among others. He lives in New York City.
