Although the Battle of Britain had been lost, Germany continued to pressure Great Britain. While the aerial bombardments persisted, the German navy intensified its campaign of submarine warfare against the Allied naval convoys, which endeavoured to supply a besieged Britain.
Under Admiral Karl Dönitz, Commander-in-Chief of submarines, the German navy employed the wolf pack strategy of attack. German wolf packs of submarines were to be stationed at right angles to known Allied ship lanes in the North Atlantic. The first submarine captain to spot the target was to radio headquarters and then mirror the ships until the remaining submarine could zero in. Once together, the wolf pack executed a surface attack under cover of darkness. Daring U-boat commanders even surfaced in the middle of the convoy before launching their devastating assault, bringing both fore and aft torpedo tubes to bear on the unlucky merchant ships.
Germany initiated its wolf pack assaults in August and September of 1940. The odds in these opening stages of the Battle of the Atlantic were firmly in favour of the German submarines. After the fall of France in June 1940, German U-boats were able to range from French ports farther west into the mid-Atlantic, beyond the reach of Royal Navy (RN) escorts. There, they ravaged Allied shipping. Over the winter of 1940-1941, German submarines sank roughly 250,000 tonnes of British shipping per month.
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