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During the Second World War, there were intense disputes between the Admiralty and the Air Ministry over the provision of air support for the Battle of the Atlantic. This was not mere inter-service squabbling but the product of deep and long-standing differences about the nature and conduct of war. The Admiralty, fully appreciating the central role of air power in attacking and defending sea communications, repeatedly asked for reinforcement of the under-resourced Coastal Command. The Air Staff, however, consistently and strenuously resisted these requests due to the overwhelming priority it placed on the strategic air offensive against Germany. This chapter by Tim Benbow examines these disputes between 1940 and 1943, assessing the arguments presented by the Air Staff and by the Admiralty. It maintains that the Air Staff was dogmatically fixated on demonstrating that bombing could win the war on its own, despite ample evidence to the contrary, and failed to allocate aircraft appropriately. As a result, the war at sea did not receive the support that its strategic importance justified. It further asserts that Churchill and his government failed to adjudicate effectively on this vital issue as a result of their sloppy and inconsistent approach to setting priorities.

Often undervalued in the existing historiography of the Second World War, the dominions provided assistance to the UK in many ways that proved fundamental to British strategy. This chapter seeks to demonstrate how important this was in one such area—bolstering British maritime power. The most crucial support was provided by Canada in the North Atlantic. Canada helped maintain the link between North America and the UK, which was essential to both British survival and the capacity to maintain offensives. More surprisingly, the Union of South Africa had a vital role to fulfill on the Cape Route once the Mediterranean was effectively closed to Allied shipping. The island dominions of Australia and New Zealand could do little more than fall in line with Allied strategy, since the direction of the war to some extent marginalized the importance of their role in the British maritime effort. In the long attritional war at sea, the dominions proved foundational in their importance to British maritime power. This effort kept the Commonwealth connected during one of the most challenging phases of its existence.

In this chapter, George H. Monahan discusses the success of the German U-boat offensive in the Western Atlantic after the U.S. entry into World War II, which led the War Department leadership to believe that the U.S. Navy was not employing adequate antisubmarine tactics. In the application of airpower to combat the submarine threat, the War Department and Army leadership believed that aggressive "hunter-killer" tactics would prove more effective than the Navy's preferred defensive tactic of conducting aerial patrols in the vicinity of convoys. Navy leaders, meanwhile, contended that its defensive tactics were the best method of protecting shipping. A bitter interservice conflict ensued as the War Department sought to initiate an Army Air Forces antisubmarine offensive over the Bay of Biscay. Claiming jurisdiction over all air operations at sea, the Navy leadership firmly opposed the War Department's initiative and insisted that Army Air Forces antisubmarine units operate according to the Navy's defensive doctrine. Secretary of War Henry Stimson's frustration over Admiral Ernest King's refusal to accede to the War Department antisubmarine initiative led the former to support a post-war reorganization of the military command apparatus, thereby ensuring Navy subordination to civilian leadership under an overarching Secretary of Defense.

This chapter by Christopher M. Bell examines how Winston Churchill's approach to the Battle of the Atlantic was shaped by the demands of British grand strategy. His preference for offensive operations on the largest possible scale deprived the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force's Coastal Command of resources needed for the protection of merchant shipping. Churchill counted on the United States to replace Britain's shipping losses so that imports would not decline to critical levels. American ships did not appear in the expected numbers, and in late 1942 Britain appeared to be heading towards an import crisis. Churchill was forced to reconsider his strategic priorities. Some resources were diverted from the strategic bombing campaign to trade defense, but Churchill remained reluctant to abandon his offensive priorities. He pursued a diplomatic agreement with the United States to secure additional merchant ships and expedited efforts to master the U-boat challenge by increasing the number of very-long-range aircraft capable of protecting Allied convoys in the mid-Atlantic.

This chapter by Marc Milner challenges the popular perception of the "Battle of the Atlantic" as a shooting war, and the notion that Allied strategy was impaired by the depredations of Germany's U-boats. He asserts that the Atlantic war of 1939-45 is better understood like the great maritime wars of the age of sail, in which battle played a small part in the larger struggle for resource accumulation and the application of power ashore. The British and Canadians understood the Atlantic war in precisely this way, and focused on avoidance of the enemy as their primary method of defending shipping. In contrast, the USN followed a Mahanian concept of naval warfare in which destruction of the enemy was the underlying concept of escort operations. In this "new" paradigm, the Allied (really British) victory over the U-boats in 1943 was not something that could be achieved quickly. Rather, like the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, it was the culmination of a long process that forced the enemy to stand and fight in a campaign he had already lost.

This chapter by Ben Jones examines the efforts of the Fleet Air Arm to assist in the defense of Britain's sea-borne trade, especially in the Atlantic and Arctic, between 1939–1944. It assesses early setbacks, the hunting for surface raiders, and the options considered to deploy aircraft at sea in defense of convoys. In the early war years, the Fleet Air Arm was thinly-spread and lacked the resources for trade defense. Due to a lack of other assets, the Royal Navy was forced to employ its escort carriers for a range of duties, rather than just trade defense, and the arguments with the Americans over their employment will be explored. Finally, the effectiveness of the Fleet Air Arm's aircraft in the anti-submarine role is assessed in terms of their design, the types of operations they undertook, and the weapons they carried. There is a comparison between the success of the escort carriers of the British and American navies in the anti-submarine role and an explanation of why the latter achieved greater success.

This chapter by James Goldrick examines the creation of a sophisticated learning and training system for the anti-U-boat war, which is one of the most significant elements of the Atlantic campaign, critical to the effectiveness of the escort units of the RN and RCN. This system's development took place as both services were forced to adapt rapidly to profound changes in their operational environments. That development faced many challenges, not only from a scarcity of resources, but from the necessity to develop sufficient understanding of the problem. The "master-apprentice" culture of professionalization managed through long service would not serve under the pressure of the oceanic small-ship war. The effort had to be industrialized. Acceptable levels of collective efficiency only became possible when the right equipment and training assets, sufficiently – even if barely – experienced personnel, and proven tactical doctrine could be brought together to provide the necessary fidelity within the training experience. From the outset, this would always be a much more complex and resource-intensive operation than the straightforward working-up of individual units.

Since 1945, the U-boat campaign has dominated the attention of scholars of the Battle of the Atlantic, and in the popular imagination 1943 remains the year in which the U-boat campaign turned decisively against Germany. That interpretation has been increasingly challenged by historians. However, many historians have completely overlooked a set of convoy battles in late 1943 that did mark a decisive turning point in the war at sea. Those battles were not fought in the Atlantic, but along the English coast from September to December. They marked the eclipse of the German Schnellboot as a serious threat to British coastal shipping, just at the point where the build-up to D-Day meant that the coastal convoys had an added strategic value in terms of the outcome of the Second World War. This chapter by G.H. Bennett examines why the German campaign against Britain's coastal convoys collapsed in 1943, and challenges an existing historiography which has failed to identify the coastal campaign as an integral part of the Battle of the Atlantic.

This chapter by Kevin Smith examines Britain's survival in the Second World War and how it depended upon maintaining its lines of maritime communications for overseas supplies. Obsession with anti-submarine warfare obscures examination of complementary British managerial efforts to maximize merchant shipping capacity – especially through the key task of rapid, thorough repair of damaged cargo vessels. An examination of the comparative cost to shipping capacity imposed by submarine attacks and by repair delays illustrates the need to integrate our analysis of the managerial and martial aspects of maritime warfare by suggesting that even after acknowledging the permanent loss of sunken ships, the much larger volume of ships immobilized by reason of repair imposed a comparable reduction in cargo capacity. Consequently, Britain's dependence upon American allocations of newly-built cargo vessels was exacerbated. One especially important impediment to repairing ships (and a legacy of the Great Depression) was bitter class conflict between shipyard workers and shipbuilders, especially the Admiralty Controller of Merchant Shipbuilding and Repair – as well as between that Controller and the Minister of Labour. This chapter suggests new avenues toward situating maritime warfare in a broader context.

This chapter by David Kohnen examines the Allied response to the initial German submarine operations in the Indian Ocean during the Second World War. Roughly forty German submarines sailed for East Asian waters after 1942; U-188 was among the few to navigate the Allied gauntlet in the Atlantic to reach the Indian Ocean. Only three German submarines, including U-188, returned to Europe from operations in the Indian Ocean before the Allied victory in May of 1945. The discussions between key British and American commanders regarding the presence of German submarines in the Indian Ocean provide unique insight into the operations and intelligence organizations of the Admiralty and Navy Department and are examined in detail. The chapter also looks at the Allied submarine tracking rooms, which assisted the Special Operations Executive and Office of Strategic Services in the capture of the skipper of U-188 – thereby securing information on the Imperial Japanese during a critical period in the closing months of the Second World War.

In the vast literature concerning the German attack on Allied maritime communications in the Atlantic theater during the Second World War, one particular factor has received little to no consideration – the potential threat that German aircraft carriers posed to Allied naval operations and the passage of maritime traffic in the North Atlantic and Arctic Oceans. While ultimately the Kriegmarine never fielded an operational carrier, such a development could not be discounted at the time. This chapter addresses what the British knew about the German effort and what implications this had on British strategy, naval planning, and fleet deployments. In covering these aspects, this chapter by Marcus Faulkner fills an existing gap concerning the Admiralty's perception and contributes to understanding the complexity of the maritime threat Britain faced during the war. It also illustrates the problems involved in evaluating enemy military capabilities and intentions on the basis of a very limited intelligence picture. This in turn helps historians understand why the Admiralty remained so apprehensive of the Kriegsmarine's surface fleet until 1943.

During the Second World War, the United States transitioned gradually to a foreign policy of "multilateral engagement" from a policy of "unilateral political disengagement." One of those tasked with implementing policy, Secretary of Agriculture Claude Wickard, reverted to nationalism and unilateralism when pressed to implement a promise to expand meat exports to Britain as part of an effort to maximize efficiency in usage of refrigerated shipping capacity during the Battle of the Atlantic. This episode illustrates the challenges in this transition and also depicts the broader managerial context of maritime warfare, ranging far beyond anti-submarine warfare to questions of shipping allocation, cargo provision, and inter-Allied relations. Thus this chapter by Kevin Smith integrates the study of resource management, scarcity, alliance diplomacy, and maritime warfare.