The Battle of the Atlantic: How the RAF Helped Close the Ocean to the U-boats
It’s three in the morning in the middle of the Atlantic, in a stretch of ocean sailors call the black pit because no aircraft can reach it. A lookout on a corvette watches a tanker catch fire somewhere in the dark, and no engine crosses the sky to answer it. Convoys are dying in this gap, and for years nobody has found a way to close it.
This episode matters because the ships crossing that gap were carrying the food, fuel, steel and aircraft parts Britain needed simply to keep fighting, and for a long stretch of the war German U-boats knew exactly where to wait for them. Getting long-range aircraft, codebreakers, radar, escort carriers and a relentless naval captain all pointed at the same stretch of ocean at the same time took years, and when it finally happened, in the spring of 1943, it turned the whole campaign within weeks.
In this episode:
- How Karl Doenitz’s wolf pack tactics exploited convoys with almost no air cover in 1940 and 1941
- Why the Atlantic Gap existed, and how long-range Liberators, escort carriers and Bletchley Park’s codebreakers closed it
- The Leigh Light, centimetric radar, and the naval captain who invented a way to hunt U-boats to exhaustion
- Why May 1943, remembered ever since as Black May, was the month the campaign turned for good
Listen if you’re interested in:
- RAF Coastal Command and the war against the U-boats
- Convoy battles, codebreaking and the intelligence war at sea
- How air power and naval power combined to win a six-year campaign
- The people behind Britain’s wartime radar and anti-submarine technology
Explore more from The RAF Chronicle: For more stories from RAF history, including the people, aircraft and operations behind the Battle of the Atlantic, visit therafchronicle.co.uk.
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