“Black May: The Epic Story of the Allies’ Defeat of the German U-Boats in May 1943”, by Michael Gannon

 

492 pages, HarperCollins, ISBN-13: 978-0060178192

In March 1941, Churchill warned that Britain would not be able to hold out for more than four more months at the present rate of shipping losses. Was he correct, dramatizing in order to motivate, fearful of what the future held regardless, and/or unsure of the facts? Statements after the war suggest strongly that he felt that the U-boat peril was not only catastrophic in terms of losses, of course, but also genuinely put the war at risk for Britain. Black May: The Epic Story of the Allies' Defeat of the German U-Boats in May 1943 by Michael Gannon is the story of the ultimate Allied victory against the Nazi U-boat Rudeltaktik, or “Wolf Packs”, that did so much damage to their shipping during the war. The title refers to when several pivotal battles with German U-boats played out, with the action of the book focusing on a detailed analysis of the battle of Convoy ONS 5, when some 30 U-boats were vectored to attack this slow convoy of forty-three merchant ships (escorted by only two destroyers, a frigate, and three corvettes), and ended up sinking thirteen merchant ships…but with the loss of seven U-boats and damage to several others.

This was, at the time, the worst result ever for a major U-boat operation and came about because of improved Allied training and tactics to make the most efficient use of the best technology available at the time (which included aircraft patrols with radar, and shipboard HF/DF radio detection, radar, sonar, and hedgehogs). Thus, the convoy battles of May 1943 marked the turning point in the Battle of the Atlantic as U-boat losses began to rise sharply while Allied shipping losses dropped. Gannon states that, while the German U-boat command recognized at the end of May 1943 that it had lost the battle of the Atlantic, it had been suffering steady increasing attrition for an extended period of time and that the steadily increasing proficiency (mostly RN/CANR) antisubmarine forces was masked by the increasing numbers of U-boats but shown by the decreasing average ton-boat figures. But there is much more in this book besides the month of May 1943. The book neatly summarizes almost the entire course of Allied anti-U-boat warfare during World War II.