Submarines of World War II (1997)

Despite the fact that German submarines had nearly brought Britain to her knees in World War I, the development of submarines was pursued with virtual indifference in the period between the wars except, in the case of the Japanese, for special purposes such as long-range scouting for their surface forces. From the outbreak of World War II in 1939 it became clear that the submarine could again become a decisive weapon. The Germans had only a small submarine force in 1939 but soon built the U-boat arm into a major force that, up to the crisis point in May 1943, nearly won the Battle of the Atlantic.

The British made very effective use of their submarines in the Mediterranean theatre to decimate the convoys ferrying equipment and fuel from Italy to the German and Italian forces in North Africa. In the Pacific theatre the Japanese soon learned that their submarines were too large for effective use against the American warships, while the Americans built variants of a standardized design in large numbers for the crippling of the shipping required by Japan.

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