After the June 1944 D-Day landings Donitz withdrew his U-boat wolf-packs from the Atlantic convoy war and sent them into coastal waters, where they could harass the massive shipping movements necessary to supply the Allied armies advancing across Europe. Caught unawares by this change of strategy, the Allied anti-submarine forces were ill-prepared for the novel challenges of inshore warfare. It proved surprisingly difficult to locate U-boats that could lie silently on the seabed, and the shallow waters meant less than ideal conditions for sonar propagation. Furthermore, because the battle was nearer home, the U-boats wasted less time on transit, so at any one time there were more of them in combat. In the final months of the war there was also the threat of far more advanced and potent submarine types entering German service, but thanks largely to overwhelming numbers of escorts this last gamble by Donnnitz was defeated. In fact, the Allied navies had never really established superiority, and this was to have enormous significance later during the Cold War, when the same tactics were planned by the Soviets. Since it had such a major impact on post-war naval thinking, it is a story of the utmost importance told by an accomplished U-boat author. AUTHOR Lawrence Paterson was born in NZ and has a long-standing interest in the Kriegsmarine, initially inspired by his time scuba diving on WWII wreck-sites. He also lived for some years near the Brest submarine pens, which turned his attention specifically to U-boats, and since then his research has led to the publication of many books on various aspects of German submarine history, this being his ninth. His first two books were First U-Boat Flotilla and Second U-Boat Flotilla, followed by Hitler's Grey Wolves, U-boat War Patrol, Hunt cKill and Weapons of Desperation, U-Boats in the Mediterranean and U-Boat Combat Missions.
