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The Role Of The Black May In World War II

1169 Words5 Pages

Timothy Li
Dr. Hogge
AP European History
March 8th 2018
Black May The Black May in World War II had been a major turning point in the Battle of the Atlantic for the Allied countries. Until May of 1943, the Germans had led a massive U-boat campaign that devastated the Allies vessels. Great Britain especially was hurt by the U-boats as Britain had relied on supplies from other nations in order to not only fight in the war, but also protect itself from a Nazi invasion. The German U-boats were effective because of the lack of proper armorment on shipping vessels moving to and from Great Britain and that the U-boats often hunted in wolf-packs, where multiple submarines would stay close together to hunt and sink specific targets. England was losing …show more content…

Over this time period, the Germans had been using the same strategie of “Attack! Advance! Sink!” (Gannon) All of this was in part due to German U-boats focusing on attacking transport vessels at their most vulnerable, out at sea away from the Royal Air Force. This was the logic of Admiral Karl Dönitz, the commander of the submarine fleet. In 1942, Dönitz had surprised the British by stating over the radio waves that Germany would be increased casualties. This had startled the British as most military leaders would never have publicly admitted that they were going to lose more men in the near future as it would decrease confidence in the German population and would signal to the Allies that Germany is in fact acknowledging that they knew that they were losing. However, this announcement helped balance the German people’s emotions after they have been bombarded with news of how well the German military was doing. However, this was more of a precursor to Germany further increasing the size of their U-boat fleet. As the Allies had repositioned their escorts to better support convoys in the west ,the Germans had increased their submarine fleet to over 300 U-boats produced, with 140 that were fully operational and 20 commissioned per month. With this amount of U-boats in operation, Dönitz was able to increase the attacks on transport ships in the north-Atlantic while continuing operations in the Caribbean and in the Gulf of Mexico. Between the end of Paukenschlag and August 31st, this had resulted with 15 ships being sunk at the cost of only three U-boats being

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