Endgame: The U-Boat Inshore Campaign

by John White

By the time of the Normandy invasion in June 1944, the U-boats were a beaten force, hunted and harried wherever they appeared by Allied warships and aircraft. The U-boats proved to be little more than pin pricks against the landings, and advancing Anglo-American armies had driven them out of their French west Atlantic bases all the way back to Norway by September 1944. Yet the U-boat force mounted a sustained and effective campaign from their Norwegian bases. Admiral Doenitz revived the U-boat War against Allied merchant shipping with new inventions in the face of a massive Allied naval defence while Germany collapsed. The east coast waters were shallow and heavily mined. Other German naval forces made a significant contribution. The campaign also saw the first and only appearances of the new Type XXIII electric U-boats, a radically new submarine design, the forerunner of modern diesel-electric submarines. John White examines in detail the U-boat reaction to the Normandy Landings in June 1944, the Norwegian U-boat bases, German torpedoes, the interference by U-boat Command, the Scapa Flow carrier operation and the Allied response up to the final surrender in May 1945.

128 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2008

About the author

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Reviews

[mat · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fine book about one of the less known episodes of the WWII Battle of Atlantic - the last roll of dice of the Germans to regain initiative in the "Tonnagenkrieg" (war for tonnage) with the use of the latest German inventions in the field of the submarine warfare. Sehds new light on the last months of WWII and shows that even in this stage Germany could still change the, one could think, inevitable outcome of the war.

[Keith Budzynski · Rating 4 out of 5]

Desperate Campaign

A good book about this desperate campaign at the end of World War II. It provided a lot of analysis of the campaign without all the details of every sailing. I enjoyed the operations by the Type XXIII boats that are not often covered.

[Gerry Guindon · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are two things I learned from this book. Germany introduced new U boats too late to do any good. The U boat leaders still believed they could affect the outcome of the war to the very end.

A very good read.