Defeat of the Enemy Attack on Shipping, 1939-1945

The most powerful justification of the convoy system of warfare ever written.A revised edition of the first and only volume of the Naval Staff History of the Battle of the Atlantic. Its own history, and that of the Naval Historical Section which produced it, is one of repeated invention, abolition and reinvention as successive generations ignored and painfully relearned lessons from the past. First established in 1912 by Winston Churchill, the then First Lord of the Admiralty, it was closed down on the outbreak of war in 1914, recreated with the coming of peace, closed down again in 1925 but kept alive out of his own pocket by the First Sea Lord, recreated six months later in a reduced form, closed down yet again in 1939 and yet again hastily reinstated when it was appreciated that experience in the First World War was directly relevant to the Second. In parallel with its own history it relates how in both wars the demonstrable superiority of the convoy system over any other strategy for the protection of merchant shipping - as one of the authors put it succinctly, 'what was being fought about' - was repeatedly challenged as purely 'defensive' and its resources depleted in favour of more glamorous 'offensive' strategies, often with disastrous consequences. What its two authors, the somewhat maverick Lieutenant Commander 'Willie' Waters and the more stolid retired Merchant Navy deck officer and Temporary Commander Frederick Barley, brought to their task was meticulous statistical analysis of the data on the war against the U-boats which enabled them to refute any and all of the arguments put forward against the convoy system and in favour of alternative strategies. Further, they were able to demonstrate that, far from being purely defensive, convoys and their escorts proved in both world wars far more effective at finding and sinking U-boats than any other strategy based around, for example, hunter killer groups, attacks on U-boat bases or attempts to interdict U-boats on passage to or from their deployments. Their work was given greater urgency in 1949 when their boss, Rear Admiral Roger Bellairs, returned 'visibly shaken' from Exercise Trident which had been held to study the lessons of World War Two and apply them to a possible future conflict in 1957. Because the Battle of the Atlantic had been fought mainly by reservists both at sea and on shore, by 1948 only a tiny number of regular officers had knowledge of the higher direction of the U-boat war. Bellairs realised that, with Trident's emphasis on the 'offensive', should a war break out with the Soviet Union in the late '50s, history would once again repeat itself. Waters' and Barley's achievement was to demonstrate that, even in the nuclear age, the experiences of the two World Wars remained fundamental to a strategy for the protection of trade in wartime.