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00:00From this seaside villa on the edge of the French port of Lorient, Karl Dönitz directed
00:12the Battle of the Atlantic. By the summer of 1942, Dönitz commanded 330 U-boats, five
00:22times more than at the beginning of the war. With these, he hoped to strike a decisive
00:30blow against the convoys on which the Allied war effort depended. Fast on the surface, able
00:41to hide beneath it, the U-boat seemed an invincible enemy. This is the story of how the Allies
00:50fought back and within a year drove the U-boat from the Atlantic.
01:00After three years of success, the hunter became the hunted.
01:18The hunter's U-boat sank more than 130 ships in June 1942. The crews called this their
01:25happy time.
01:27We were convinced we were fighting in the right service. We expected to have success
01:37in battle. We were young, optimistic, and we'd sworn our oath of allegiance to the fatherland
01:44and to a, well, as he was then, beloved FĂĽhrer.
01:55The U-boat was winning the Battle of the Atlantic. More than 500 Allied ships were sunk in the first
02:03half of 1942 for the loss of just 21 German U-boats.
02:07The leader of the U-boat arm judged a decisive victory in the Atlantic to be within his grasp.
02:18But Carl Dönitz's confidence was shaken that summer by a new and entirely unexpected threat.
02:25On the night of July the 13th, 1942, U-159 was making good speed home to its base on the French coast. Its crew felt safe. The dark hull of the boat was almost invisible at night.
02:44We were sailing at full speed at night when we were suddenly caught in the glare of a searchlight. A plane was running in to attack us.
02:59The U-boat had been detected by a Wellington from RAF Coastal Command.
03:07It dropped five depth charges next to the boat, pretty close.
03:13We didn't know how it had found us. We only knew for the first time a plane had attacked us at night and caught us in the full beam of its searchlight.
03:24The U-159 limped back into Lorient to discover that two other boats had been attacked that night.
03:30The mystery was, how had the Allies found them in the dark?
03:36It was a surprise for us. The U-boats were now always being detected. We didn't know how it was happening.
03:49The U-boats were always found.
03:53British air crews were using a new detection device, one that threatened to force the U-boat from the surface.
04:00In the first months of the war, the Admiralty had contacted a small civilian research team that was working for the RAF.
04:12Admiral Somerville rang up one day from the Admiralty and said,
04:19Do you think with an aeroplane you could detect a conning tower of a submarine?
04:27I'll give you a submarine in the Solent, L-27. You go and try it.
04:34So I fitted a Lockheed Hudson with early form radar. We went out to meet our submarine.
04:43We saw it at three and a half miles, peering into a cathode ray tube anxiously.
04:55And it was the first detection of a submarine, I think, by radar.
04:59The radar was a crucial breakthrough. The U-boat spent more than 90% of its time on the surface.
05:06Beneath it, it was slow and blind.
05:09If it could be detected above the waves, a vital step would be taken towards victory in the Atlantic.
05:18The lessons of radar were not lost on the naval staff.
05:22By the summit of 1942, the Admiralty and the Air Ministry had opened their doors to a new type of scientist.
05:28The operational researcher.
05:30For the first time, civilians were given the freedom to assess not just the equipment needed to defeat the U-boat, but the tactics too.
05:41After three years of war, the number of U-boat kills from the air was still disappointingly low.
05:47It was soon clear why.
05:53Aircraft could be spotted by day many miles away.
05:56Time enough for a U-boat to dive.
06:00The solution was astonishingly simple.
06:02To paint Allied planes the colour of the Atlantic sky.
06:06The scientists were also able to prove that a large number of small depth charges, timed to go off close to the surface, would improve the chances of a kill.
06:23Their work promised to turn the radar-guided aircraft into a formidable hunter.
06:44On December the 8th, 1942, a liberator from the RAF's 120 squadron set out from Iceland.
06:50It used to take us five hours to get out to pick up a convoy.
06:57And sometimes they were hundreds of miles out of position.
07:01We'd pick them up on radar.
07:03A big convoy, about 50 ships, would show up enormously on the radar screen.
07:10So we used to home in on that.
07:15Bullock and his crew picked up the ships of Convoy HX-217.
07:20Within minutes, he'd made another contact.
07:28I knew there were about 15 U-boats in the area.
07:32You'd pick up the...
07:34Its wake, first of all.
07:37Big stream behind it.
07:39There was one there, about 10 miles astern.
07:44And we spotted him on the surface.
07:48We felt a lot of satisfaction that we made a good attack.
07:53You don't worry about it, there are 48 people on board the thing.
08:10Bullock had sunk the U-611.
08:16That day he attacked and damaged another six U-boats.
08:19In the first three years of the war, aircraft had sunk just 15 U-boats.
08:36But in the six months from September 1942, they sank 29.
08:40Naval intelligence began to detect encouraging signs.
08:48A new reticence among U-boat crews to press home the attack when they came within range of Allied aircraft.
08:54The Allied staff effort was bearing fruit.
09:03The contrast with U-boat command in France couldn't have been more marked.
09:07In 1942, Dönitz's headquarters was based in a villa on the outskirts of Lorient.
09:19The Chateau Courneval.
09:22The U-boat ward in the Atlantic was run from two rooms on the ground floor,
09:27and the small bunker beneath the hooves.
09:29Headquarters was so small, staff dubbed it the Sardine Tin.
09:33Dönitz relied on a cord of just six young staff officers.
09:43Orders for the U-boats had to be written with stencils and water-soluble ink,
09:48so that if the U-boat was sunk, it would be impossible to find them.
09:54I would first of all hang up these stencils to dry in my little room,
09:58on a washing line over my bunk.
09:59They had to dry first of all, you know.
10:03That was a joke in itself.
10:06How primitive this whole warfare business was.
10:10Dönitz's headquarters looked across to huge new U-boat pens.
10:12Millions of marks were spent on protecting the U-boat and port,
10:25but next to nothing on improving its fighting capability at sea.
10:29Dönitz and his staff relied entirely on Navy experts in Berlin for technical advice.
10:34Their record was poor.
10:35The boats hardly differed from the ones that were already in service at the end of the First World War.
10:48That meant no significant improvements had been made in 20 years.
10:55The same old U-boats were still being launched.
11:01No serious effort had been made to develop a submarine with high underwater speeds,
11:11one that would be safe from Allied airtime.
11:14But there was one stretch of ocean in which the old U-boats could still operate on the surface.
11:27Dönitz began to direct his packs into the waters south of Greenland, the air gap.
11:39Here they were beyond the range of all but a handful of aircraft.
11:44By September 1942, it was clear to Dönitz that whilst the Allies might be one step ahead in the technical race,
11:51the battle was still there to be won.
11:53Sinkings were as high as ever, and the number of front-line U-boats was still steadily rising.
12:00But the more distant future caused me some anxiety.
12:06Dönitz took his fears to Hitler.
12:11Hitler had a simple solution.
12:14Shoot anyone who survived a U-boat attack.
12:17Then Allied seamen would no longer want to serve.
12:19Dönitz refused to consider such a brutal step.
12:31But two weeks after his meeting with Hitler, an event took place which hardened Dönitz's attitude towards survivors.
12:37The liner Laconia was homebound from Cape Town with 2,700 people on board.
12:461,800 of the Italian prisoners of war.
12:49She was sailing alone, unprotected.
12:52We thought we were fast enough to survive anything, so it was speed and zigzagging, you know, it's the usual thing.
13:03On the evening of September the 12th, the Laconia was 900 miles from Freetown on the west coast of Africa.
13:13Among the passengers were Janet Walker and her five-year-old daughter Noreen.
13:18I was putting my little girl to bed and it was me getting her to say her prayers.
13:29And she was sitting up in bed and I heard this bang.
13:32People in the army said, what was that? Well, I don't know that he knew about that before.
13:38I didn't want to panic them all, so I said, I don't know.
13:41Might have hit something in the dark under the ship, you know.
13:45We were sort of looking at one another, sort of what's happened like, and it was the second tour we did.
13:50There was a lot of screaming going on. I think it was the children that were screaming in the passage.
14:01I was just stunned. I stood there because I didn't know where to go.
14:13No one picked up the Laconia's distress signal.
14:15This Navy boy came up and he says, come on, I'll show you where the lifeboat is.
14:24And he took my little girl and he said, follow me. So I followed him.
14:33He says, you go down first and I'll hand her down to you.
14:37When I got in the lifeboat, I looked up and he wasn't there.
14:40And I started screaming.
14:42And this Air Force man was in the lifeboat and he said, I'll go up and get her.
14:51He came back down, he says, taking her to another lifeboat.
14:54He said, don't worry, you'll see her in the morning.
14:59The port side was coming up and you could see the rust and barnacles on the bottom.
15:04So I jumped and that was that, really.
15:06Hundreds of men, most of them Italian prisoners, were struggling in the sea.
15:17They were desperate for a place and a lifeboat.
15:19They were sharks about. Screams they were, some of them, yeah.
15:25Some of them, yeah.
15:27In fact, one fellow in the boat says, if any of them are hanging on to the side, he said, call out and I'll give you the hatch and chop the fingers off.
15:34But I wasn't thinking like that.
15:35I could see it, it was like a, it was a low vessel, it was a submarine really.
15:41And she had a lamp on going like a circle like that and she was picking people up.
15:47He drew up alongside us and he said, the women and children must go in the submarine.
15:55And one of the men said, they are not going in the submarine.
15:58He said, don't worry, it'll be all right.
16:01So we went in the submarine.
16:06The crew of the U156 had heard the Italians crying out from the water.
16:18Its commander sent a message to U-Board headquarters, asking for immediate assistance.
16:22Doernitz directed three of his nearest boats to join the rescue operation.
16:33They were quite concerned about me losing my wee girl.
16:37Every time they saw a live boat, they would call me up to the Conan Tower and tell me to have a look to see if she was in any of the boats.
16:45They were very good.
16:46I said to him, cigarette.
16:49And he, he, he, this German took a cigarette out and I gave him back.
16:53And our comrades, I gave him, give him his mates.
16:56I thought, this is, this is a funny German.
16:58Well, I've been brought to believe about him.
17:04The U-Boards had hundreds of survivors standing on their decks.
17:08They'd made red cross flags and they kept sending radio messages so that everyone would know where they were.
17:13Then American planes arrived and flew over the boats.
17:19They asked their commander what they should do.
17:22And the order came back, attack.
17:25The American aircraft knew nothing of the rescue operation, but thought it had caught the enemy on the surface.
17:38No boats were lost, but Dönitz was furious.
17:46On September the 17th, he sent a new order to his commanders.
17:50No attempt was to be made at rescuing enemy crews.
17:54No help offered.
17:56Be harsh.
17:58The war called for the destruction of men as well as ships.
18:01Above all, no commander was to risk his U-Board to help survivors.
18:201,600 people were lost with the Laconia.
18:23I never gave up hope. Never.
18:24I used to spend as much money in fortune tellers.
18:33Maybe they would give me some clue.
18:36I heard later on this boy was drowned trying to save a little girl.
18:42But they didn't know who the little girl was, but I presumed it was mine.
18:50And yet they still didn't believe it.
18:52By the winter of 1942, the war was becoming more brutal elsewhere.
19:07News began to reach the U-Board bases of a terrible defeat.
19:12Not at sea, but more than 3,000 miles away on the Eastern Front.
19:17The unthinkable had happened at Stalingrad.
19:22The German army had surrendered.
19:2590,000 men marched off into Soviet captivity.
19:33Only at sea were there still victories to report.
19:36On the day before the final surrender at Stalingrad,
19:46Adolf Hitler appointed Dönitz Gross Admiral to head all operations at sea.
19:52It was a sign of the confidence he placed in him.
19:57But Dönitz's job changed little.
20:00Germany's small surface fleet had claimed less than 4% of the ship sunk.
20:03The struggle in the Atlantic had rested from the first with the U-Board.
20:08Dönitz continued personally to direct them.
20:11By now, there were 405.
20:24There was also a new man in charge of the Royal Navy's escort ships.
20:27A poacher turned gamekeeper.
20:32A former submarine commander, Admiral Max Horton.
20:36Horton was to bring a new vigour to the war against the U-Board.
20:43His captains were sent back to school to learn new group tactics for the defence of the convoys.
20:485,000 officers were to play what was known as the game.
20:56Wrens would come behind the curtain and say,
20:59ship number so-and-so has been torpedoed, you see, and what action were you going to take?
21:04What type of searches should you use in this weather?
21:13If it's really, really, really foul weather, is it worth it at all?
21:17Should any escorts go back to pick up stragglers?
21:21All these things you need to have a coordinated plan for.
21:25Terrible criticisms.
21:28I mean, you've got murder if you've made a mistake.
21:31We got all the right ideas of defence.
21:35And then we got the right ideas of how to attack a U-Board.
21:42By the spring of 1943, the Allies were beginning to make the training and the technical edge count.
21:52A second volley of high explosives.
21:59On April the 17th, the U-175 was detected by a US Navy cutter.
22:09And there's the Nazi submarine, forced to the surface.
22:13Dönitz's packs were still sinking ships, but at a price.
22:1757 U-Boats were sunk in the first four months of 1943.
22:22But now the Allies had access again to a vital source of intelligence.
22:32The cryptographers at Bletchley Park were able at last to read some of the messages sent by the U-Boats in the key Enigma cipher, Shark.
22:41We were well in on Shark traffic for some time.
22:48The common signal was, Gustav Gelb, and that means, geleitzugesichtet, convoy sighted.
22:56Unfortunately, it reminded me most often so.
23:02It was clear from the decrypts that Dönitz was able to maintain as many as a hundred U-Boats at sea every day.
23:09Most of them in the air gap.
23:11That spring, a convoy would sail into this huge concentration of boats.
23:17It would prove to be one of the most decisive moments of the Battle of the Atlantic.
23:21ONS-5 set out on April the 22nd, with just six escorts in support.
23:31We had fog, icebergs drifting south of the cold Labrador County.
23:42It got worse and worse.
23:45Eventually, we were making only about two or three knots.
23:51And, you see, we were being routed farther north all the time,
23:54as they knew the U-Boats were packing onto us.
24:03Admiral Horton was notified by Naval Intelligence that ONS-5 was sailing into trouble.
24:09And for a time, he was able to offer some air support.
24:13But by May the 4th, the convoy was on its own.
24:17And on that day, it sailed into packs Amsel and Fink.
24:22We received a signal, and I remember it quite well,
24:27that you are encircled by approximately 34 U-Boats.
24:31You may expect attack from down moon at approximately 0230.
24:41Durnett sent a message to the waiting boats, stating simply,
24:45Fight with everything you've got. Strike the enemy dead.
24:51I was able to take up a position on the port side of the convoy.
25:03And when a gap opened between the destroyers,
25:06I turned towards the convoy and fired two double shots.
25:12Two double shots.
25:14The steam ship was hit, and began to sink at once, on an even keel.
25:38That night, the pack sank seven ships.
25:49When you had a mass attack, as you had an ONS-5,
25:53the only thing you could do was to get them under the water,
25:57and they would lose contact with the convoy,
26:00and that would be another night they would be out of action.
26:04On the morning of May the 5th, 40 U-Boats were still in pursuit.
26:11But the escorts had one hidden advantage.
26:15Some of the ships were equipped with the latest radio direction-finding sets.
26:18There was a great deal of chatter went on among the U-Boats.
26:27And, er, strangely enough, the U-Boats hadn't realised
26:33that we were able to work on this chatter.
26:36When the escorts picked up a radio signal, they went in pursuit.
26:45A log of contact was kept by the commanding officer of HMS Oribe.
26:51There's constant enemy wireless activity.
26:55A first-class bearing at 155.
26:58We see the smoke haze from the submarine's diesel engines.
27:01The submarine dives and we have contact.
27:11We drop a ten-charge pattern.
27:14The escort group sank a U-Boat that day, but four ships were lost.
27:25At nightfall on the 5th, at least 15 U-Boats were still in close contact with the convoy.
27:35We heard the radio messages from all the other U-Boats.
27:42And we thought, oh, God, if they all rush the convoy at once, this will end up as a night of the long lives.
27:51Suddenly, a thick P-Super appeared. I'd never seen anything like it out at sea. It was dreadful.
28:06We heard on the radio that two or three U-Boats were already in danger.
28:19At Weston approaches headquarters, the battle around the convoy was plotted through the night.
28:25Only if the escorts could find the pack and drive it from the surface would the defence succeed.
28:30Radio detection and, above all, radar would be the key to victory.
28:41Radar contact picked up on the port bow.
28:44Closed to investigate at 14 knots.
28:47We picked the submarine up on Earth.
28:49Radar contact picked up ahead at 3,400 yards.
28:53A torpedo fired from Red 20.
28:56Turned towards it.
28:57The pattern was dropped set at 150 feet.
29:02It was a most promising attack.
29:08While we were doddering about in this P-Super, trying to achieve something, we were almost rammed by a destroyer.
29:19It suddenly appeared behind us, lighting up the stern of our U-Boat with a big searchlight on its foremast.
29:28It thundered past our stern with about three metres to spare.
29:35Five U-Boats were sunk on the night of May the 5th.
29:50The operations chart at U-Boat Command told its own story.
29:55A total of nine boats lost in the week-long battle.
30:03A small escort group equipped with radio detection and radar had beaten off the largest concentration of U-Boats ever assembled.
30:11Dönitz called off the rest of the pack.
30:15That was depressing.
30:20We realized that the ONS-5 operation had pretty much failed.
30:26And that it represented a colossal setback for the U-Boats.
30:31The crews that managed to make it home in the spring of 1943 began to grumble about their U-Boats.
30:48It wasn't just Allied aircraft.
30:51The escort ships were now able to detect them as soon as they approached the convoys.
30:55We had one song which went something like this.
31:02Give me a little U-Boat that can no longer be located, Karl Dönitz.
31:17That was the kind of thing.
31:19Once, when coming into port after a short trip, we were welcomed by people singing these songs.
31:25After the ONS-5, the convoy battle seemed to follow a new pattern.
31:39U-Boats sunk for little or no loss.
31:45By the end of May 1943, the air gap had all but closed.
31:50The huge Allied technical and training effort had thrown the U-Boats on the defensive.
31:56Forty U-Boats were lost in May.
31:58Two thousand men.
32:00Among the dead was Dönitz's own son, Peter.
32:11On May 24th, Dönitz ordered all his boats to withdraw from the main North Atlantic convoy routes.
32:17It was a bitter blow.
32:18He was really in despair.
32:31He saw how things were going.
32:33This was a very great burden for him.
32:35As if to underscore the importance of these successes, just six weeks later, the Allies celebrated the news that American Yards had replaced all the ships lost in almost four years of war.
32:54They were building ships really very fast indeed.
33:03In fact, it was a joke in America that they were building ships so fast that they were running out of names for the new ships.
33:13You couldn't come up with enough names.
33:15Recently, in one 24 hour working day, 27 brand new ships slid down the way.
33:25Nowhere else in all the world is such production possible.
33:28The goal for 1943, 23 million tons of shipping.
33:33Dönitz called a meeting with six of his most senior officers.
33:54He asked them, should the campaign and the Atlantic continue?
33:57The Allies enjoyed overwhelming material and technical superiority.
34:02And it would be two years before a new submarine with high underwater speeds could be developed.
34:14Everybody gave his view.
34:16And this was, even if we can no longer expect to make a decisive impact with the U-Boat War,
34:21as long as there is fighting, we still have to keep up the pressure.
34:31And well, when everyone had had his say, myself last of all, Dönitz said,
34:38okay, you have simply confirmed what I also think.
34:42The U-Boat would fight on.
34:50But Dönitz knew well enough that the cost of continuing would be very great.
35:01That summer the Allies mounted their Biscay campaign.
35:05U-Boats were attacked as soon as they left their bases.
35:0760 more U-Boats were sunk in just three months.
35:26Most of the crews were lost with their boats.
35:29The few survivors that were fished out of the Atlantic by the British
35:32began to tell their interrogators of the growing sense of unease in the U-Boat messes.
35:41They knew it was their duty not to give away information and so forth,
35:45but they were perfectly happy to talk to other naval officers.
35:49They then went back to their cabins, and if they had somebody else there with them,
35:55he might well say, well, what are they asking you about, and so forth.
35:58And he'd say, well, what they really wanted to know was so-and-so,
36:03but I wasn't going to tell them.
36:05And all this was being recorded.
36:09The picture that began to emerge from these interrogations
36:12was of a crisis in morale.
36:13Naval intelligence reported that defeatist conversation was common.
36:27The prisoners spoke of frequent fights between Nazis and anti-Nazis.
36:32Agents in the U-Boat bases reported proof that some crews were damaging pieces of machinery
36:38to delay their departure on war patrol.
36:44We talked exactly the same way about this shitty war, if I may use that expression.
36:51We said to each other, for God's sake, it just can't go on like this.
36:57We suffer losses and don't sink a single ship.
37:00Is it worth carrying on?
37:08Hitler believed so.
37:11In October 1943, the U-Boat ace Eric Topp was invited to FĂĽhrer headquarters.
37:16It was soon clear to him that Hitler remained stubbornly optimistic about the future of the U-Boat war.
37:23Hopes now rested on the plans for a revolutionary new submarine.
37:28We were a group of four or five submarine commanders who had been invited to lunch by Hitler.
37:38He said they were in the process of developing new batteries, which would enable a U-Boat to remain underwater for days.
37:52With these new batteries, the U-Boat could at last become a true submarine.
38:02In the meantime, Dönitz was forced to turn to an old device to protect his crews, the Schnorkel.
38:16Through this, air was drawn down to the diesel engines.
38:20It meant the U-Boat could remain hidden just beneath the surface.
38:23On the 5th of February 1944, the first U-Boat to be equipped with the Schnorkel, Left and War Patrol.
38:31Hartwig Lux, U264.
38:38We ceased to think we'd be successful in battle.
38:44We realized that the U-Boats arriving from home, the new U-Boats with young crews, nearly all of them stayed out.
38:53And never came back.
39:02Just days before, the six ships of the 2nd Support Group had left Northern Ireland, to the strains of a hunting we will go.
39:11The Allies now had enough ships to form new escort groups, dedicated to hunting and killing U-Boats.
39:16The leader of the 2nd Support Group was Captain Johnny Walker.
39:20The leader of the 2nd Support Group was Captain Johnny Walker.
39:25It was a hunt day. He would sort of treat it as a sport.
39:30I mean, for instance, we sank one submarine, and there was oil and debris on the surface.
39:36And he signaled to the captain of the ship, which had sunk the submarine, and said,
39:45Come over here and look what a mess you've made.
39:48As the 2nd Support Group was setting out, a British intercept station picked up heavy signals traffic some 200 miles to the west of Ireland.
40:01A pack of U-Boats seemed to be converging on convoy ON-221.
40:05The Admiralty sent Walker to intercept them.
40:16The group's hunt was filmed.
40:23Walker had developed a new tactic, the creeping attack.
40:26One ship, usually Walker's own, the Starling, held sonar contact.
40:33It then directed one or more of the group in a slow, creeping attack along the U-Boats course.
40:39The rest of the group formed a ring around the target.
40:45Once a U-Boat was caught in this, it was almost impossible to escape.
40:50In just 12 days, the group found and sank five U-Boats.
41:02There were no survivors.
41:12None of them came to the surface.
41:14So the Admiralty needed proof that a sinking had taken place.
41:21And whatever tangible things that they could get hold of were picked up and put in the boat.
41:29This was a rather gruesome thing, picking up human remains.
41:33On February the 19th, Walker picked up another contact, the U-264.
41:55That was really pretty terrible.
41:57During this period, 12 hours, we were submerged for 12 hours.
42:05We got around 200 depth surges.
42:14Just about everything in the U-Boat was smashed.
42:17We shot out of the water like a champagne cork.
42:20And found ourselves inside the circle made by Captain Walker's submarine chasers.
42:25I'm sorry.
42:26Well, you kept me Walker.
42:31They were swimming through waters.
42:45Now, we had a rule that unless we discovered the number and name of the captain of the submarine, we would not pick them up.
42:59And a young boy was swimming towards us.
43:03He came alongside, near to where the scrambling net was.
43:10And I held his arm in my right hand.
43:15And another officer said, well, look, we're going to ask them for the last time.
43:19And no sort of unified number came up.
43:25And the call was, let the prisoner go.
43:28But I can still feel this young boy's arm or hand sliding through my hand.
43:33And I would say that this lad was no more than 16 years of age.
43:49And it's something which has haunted me for a very long period of time.
44:02It was not Navy policy.
44:05But on Walker's ship, he made the rules.
44:07The crew of the U264 was prepared to furnish him with all the details he required, including intelligence on the snorkel.
44:19They were the only survivors from six U-boats sunk in 20 days.
44:23They took me to the mess, and three or four British officers began bombarding me with questions.
44:34One of them said, that was a very, very clever fight.
44:38It was a very, very clever fight.
44:42That wasn't how I felt about it.
44:48Yeah.
44:53As we sailed in line ahead, up the Mersey, I think we felt, you know, pretty good.
45:04Well, there must have been hundreds of wrens and people sort of cheering us as we came in.
45:16Waiting to greet the group was the first Lord of the Admiralty.
45:19It was a moment of triumph that seemed to symbolize the final victory in the Atlantic.
45:28I want to say to you, fellas, that I feel that you've had an enormous part to play
45:35in settling the issue against the threat to dictatorship in Europe.
45:41Three months later, British and American troops landed in France.
45:49The Battle of the Atlantic was virtually over.
45:54There was still rationing and food shortages, but the convoys were arriving unmolested.
45:58On the land and the sea, let's swing out to victory over here, over there anywhere.
46:07We can take them one, two, three, with a riff, a break and a flare.
46:12Trumpets blasting through the air, with a rap and a tap on the drum.
46:18Yeah, man.
46:19The U-boat menace has, for the time being, been practically effaced.
46:24There was a recent month in which, up till the last day, they did not sink a single ship.
46:30Britain's ability to fight, Churchill wrote, to keep itself alive, depended on the Battle of the Atlantic.
46:40Yet it was difficult to cheer the final victory.
46:43More than half the ships sunk in the Atlantic had flown the Red Ensign,
46:48and 50,000 British seamen died protecting the lifeline.
46:51Dönitz's fleet of new submarines never sailed against the convoys.
46:58The old boats fought on to the end.
47:01650 were lost.
47:03With them, 30,000 U-boat men.
47:10I could tell you I wept.
47:12All my comrades, who I'd spent all those months with, had perished.
47:15We'd been trained to do our duty to the very end.
47:26That's why we still put to sea.
47:34I don't think that many people thought of us quite frankly,
47:38because we were an unseen war.
47:40You didn't see the sunken ships or the survivors who never made it.
47:45But it was our job.
47:48We knew we were going out. You might come back.
47:51You never dreads on us.
47:55This nation owes those people a great deal.
48:00If the North had land to convoy, Ruth had failed, all else would have failed.
48:15ORDERMANNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNND dua MONESH
48:17лич zug replaces
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