The Victory at Sea: the Allied Campaign Against U-Boats During the First World War 1917-18

Victory snatched from imminent defeat This book by the American Admiral Sims will be a revelation to many. The British public had no idea that by the time America entered the First World War on 6th April 1917 the Allied cause was on the brink of falling to the might of Imperial Germany. No plan had been conceived to ensure that vital materials would reach Britain by sea without them falling prey to the omnipresent U-Boat menace. Thousands of tons of essential war supplies were going to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean each week and serious Allied analysts believed that Britain would last less than four months before surrender was inevitable. Given what we now know of the great German land offensives of the final phase of the war the consequences for the Allies without a solution to the issue of maritime supply could have been catastrophic. The solution came in the form of the creation of the convoy system and its effectiveness was due in no small part to the addition of the U. S. N. destroyer fleet to support the activities of the Royal Navy. This book describes how the German U-Boat threat was finally overcome and how this impacted on the Allied victory. Sims also gives much operational detail including the activities of the deadly decoys the Q ships and the operations of the King Cobras of the undersea war-the anti-submarine submarines. This is the view and account of a senior officer in a position to experience and describe for posterity the strategic and tactical issues of the anti U-Boat campaign and it describes in detail the many methods and types of craft employed together with anecdotes reports and eyewitness accounts of the action on and under the waves. Recommended. Leonaur editions are newly typeset and are not facsimiles; each title is available in softcover and hardback with dustjacket.