A unique perspective of the global history of U-boats during the entirety of World War II by Lawrence Paterson, one of the world’s leading U-boat experts.The accepted historical narrative of the Second World War predominantly assigns U-boats to the so-called “Battle of the Atlantic,” almost as if the struggle over convoys between the new world and the old can be viewed in isolation from simultaneous events on land and in the air. This has become an almost accepted error. The U-boats war did not exist solely between 1940 and 1943, nor did the Atlantic battle occur in seclusion from other theatres of action. The story of Germany’s second U-boat war began on the first day of hostilities with Britain and France and ended with the final torpedo sinking on May 7 1945. U-boats were active in nearly every theatre of operation in which the Wehrmacht served, and within all but the Southern Ocean. Moreover, these deployments were not undertaken in isolation from one another; instead they were fre
