German Perspectives on the U-Boat War, 1939–1941

Until the United States entered World War II, Britain’s isolation left it vulnerable to U-boats. Yet even when the campaign appeared to be going well, the German Naval War Staff worried that it was likely to be unsuccessful. The staff’s pessimism has been largely absent from the Anglophone historiography. The fundamental problem was that the Germans needed to secure a decisive result quickly, before the full weight of U.S. industrial might could be felt, but they were deploying a weapon designed for a long war. This article calls attention not only to this dilemma, but to the German awareness of it.