The British were consequently forced to divert their own shipping away from vulnerable UK ports, and were faced with the need to provide convoys with naval escorts for greater stretches of the journey to North America. This was in part because the conquest by Germany of Norway and France gave the Germans forward bases, which increased the range of the U-boats and also allowed Focke-Wulf FW200 'Kondor' long-range aircraft to patrol over the Atlantic, carrying out reconnaissance for the U-boats and attacking Allied shipping.
The British were largely able to master the surface threat posed by Germany, sinking the pocket battleship Graf Spee in December 1939 and the battleship Bismarck in 1941, but from the summer of 1940 the U-boat menace grew. In the early stages of World War Two, the Royal Navy placed much faith in ASDIC (an early form of sonar) to detect submerged U-boats. U-boat crews could be away from port for many weeks at a time This marked the beginning of the second Battle of the Atlantic.
However, on 3 September 1939, the day Britain declared war on Germany, the British liner Athenia was torpedoed by a U-boat. Germany had underestimated the impact of U-boats, and was fighting with only 46 operational vessels, using mostly surface vessels - rather than submarines - to prowl the Atlantic. But in spite of this experience neither side was well prepared in 1939. Germany had waged a similar campaign in World War One, and in 1917 had come close to defeating Britain. Germany's best hope of defeating Britain lay in winning what Churchill christened the 'Battle of the Atlantic'. Moreover, if the Allies had not been able to move ships about the North Atlantic, it would have been impossible to project British and American land forces ashore in the Mediterranean theatres or on D-Day. Britain might have been starved into submission, and her armies would not have been equipped with American-built tanks and vehicles. If Germany had prevented merchant ships from carrying food, raw materials, troops and their equipment from North America to Britain, the outcome of World War Two could have been radically different.
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