Endgame: The U-boats In-shore Campaign 1944-45

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: Aug 4, 2016
• ISBN: 9780750979535

John White

John White was a medical missionary with New Tribes Mission and later associate general secretary of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students of Latin America. He served as associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Manitoba and also helped lead churches in Winnipeg and Vancouver. Before he died in 2002 he had written more than two dozen books including The Fight and Daring to Draw Near.