EXPERT BIO
LAWRENCE PATERSON
Lawrence is a historian who has written several books on the German military, including Hitler’s Brandenburgers: The Third Reich’s Elite Special Forces and Eagles Over The Sea 1943-45: A History of Luftwaffe Maritime Operations.
During the First and Second World War, Germany’s submarines sought to terrorise Allied shipping lanes in the Atlantic in the hopes of cutting off supplies to their enemy. In so doing they created a lasting image of the fast-moving, impossible-to-spot U-boat terror. But how much of this impression is matched by the facts of World War II? We speak with Lawrence Paterson, author of The U-Boat War: A Global History 1939-45, about the real story of submersible warfare and its impact on WWII.
German U-boats have a prominent place in the public memory of WWII. What made them so effective against Allied sea power?
Actually they were not as effective as people would like to believe. The popular image of the U-boat from the Second
