The German occupation of Norway in April 1940, the rapid conquest of the Low

Countries and France in May and June, and the Italian entry into the war on the Axis side in June
transformed the war at sea in general and the Atlantic campaign in particular in three main ways:

 Britain lost its biggest ally. In 1940, the French Navy was the fourth largest in the world. Only
a handful of French ships joined the Free French Forces and fought against Germany, though
these were later joined by a few Canadian-built corvettes. With the French fleet removed from
the campaign, the Royal Navy was stretched even further. Italy's declaration of war meant that
Britain also had to reinforce the Mediterranean Fleet and establish a new group at Gibraltar,
known as Force H, to replace the French fleet in the Western Mediterranean.
 The U-boats gained direct access to the Atlantic. Since the English Channel was relatively
shallow, and was partially blocked with minefields by mid-1940, U-boats were ordered not to
negotiate it and instead travel around the British Isles to reach the most profitable hunting
grounds. The German bases in France at Brest, Lorient, and La Pallice (near La Rochelle), were
about 450 miles (720 km) closer to the Atlantic than the bases on the North Sea. This greatly
improved the situation for U-boats in the Atlantic, enabling them to attack convoys further west
and letting them spend longer time on patrol, doubling the effective size of the U-boat force. The
Germans later built huge fortified concrete submarine pens for the U-boats in the French Atlantic
bases, which were impervious to Allied bombing until mid-1944 when the Tallboy bomb became
available. From early July, U-boats returned to the new French bases when they had completed
their Atlantic patrols.
 British destroyers were diverted from the Atlantic. The Norwegian Campaign and
the German invasion of the Low Countries and France imposed a heavy strain on the Royal
Navy's destroyer flotillas. Many older destroyers were withdrawn from convoy routes to support
the Norwegian campaign in April and May and then diverted to the English Channel to support
the withdrawal from Dunkirk. By the summer of 1940, Britain faced a serious threat of invasion.
Many destroyers were held in the Channel, ready to repel a German invasion. They suffered
heavily under air attack by the Luftwaffe's Fliegerführer Atlantik. Seven destroyers were lost in
the Norwegian campaign, another six in the Battle of Dunkirk and a further 10 in the Channel
and North Sea between May and July, many to air attack because they lacked an adequate anti-
aircraft armament.[26] Dozens of others were damaged.

German submarine pens in Lorient, Brittany

The completion of Hitler's campaign in Western Europe meant U-boats withdrawn from the Atlantic
for the Norwegian campaign now returned to the war on trade. So at the very time the number of U-
boats on patrol in the Atlantic began to increase, the number of escorts available for the convoys
was greatly reduced.[27] The only consolation for the British was that the large merchant fleets of
occupied countries like Norway and the Netherlands came under British control. After the German
occupation of Denmark and Norway, Britain occupied Iceland and the Faroe Islands, establishing
bases there and preventing a German takeover.
It was in these circumstances that Winston Churchill, who had become Prime Minister on 10 May
1940, first wrote to President Franklin Roosevelt to request the loan of fifty obsolescent US Navy
destroyers. This eventually led to the "Destroyers for Bases Agreement" (effectively a sale but
portrayed as a loan for political reasons), which operated in exchange for 99-year leases on certain
British bases in Newfoundland, Bermuda and the West Indies, a financially advantageous bargain
for the United States but militarily beneficial for Britain, since it effectively freed up British military
assets to return to Europe. A significant percentage of the US population opposed entering the war,
and some American politicians (including the US Ambassador to Britain, Joseph P. Kennedy)
believed that Britain and its allies might actually lose. The first of these destroyers were only taken
over by their British and Canadian crews in September, and all needed to be rearmed and fitted with
ASDIC. It was to be many months before these ships contributed to the campaign.

'The Happy Time' (June 1940 – February 1941)[edit]

See also: First Happy Time

A U-boat shells a merchant ship which has remained afloat after being torpedoed.
The early U-boat operations from the French bases were spectacularly successful. This was the
heyday of the great U-boat aces like Günther Prien of U-47, Otto Kretschmer (U-99), Joachim
Schepke (U-100), Engelbert Endrass (U-46), Victor Oehrn (U-37) and Heinrich Bleichrodt (U-48). U-
boat crews became heroes in Germany. From June until October 1940, over 270 Allied ships were
sunk: this period was referred to by U-boat crews as "the Happy Time" ("Die Glückliche Zeit").
[28]
 Churchill would later write: "...the only thing that ever frightened me during the war was the U-boat
peril".[29]
The biggest challenge for the U-boats was to find the convoys in the vastness of the ocean. The
Germans had a handful of very long-range Focke-Wulf Fw 200 Condor aircraft based
at Bordeaux and Stavanger, which were used for reconnaissance. The Condor was a converted
civilian airliner – a stop-gap solution for Fliegerführer Atlantik. Due to ongoing friction between
the Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine, the primary source of convoy sightings was the U-boats
themselves. Since a submarine's bridge was very close to the water, their range of visual detection
was quite limited.
The best source proved to be the codebreakers of B-Dienst who had succeeded in deciphering the
British Naval Cypher No. 3, allowing the Germans to estimate where and when convoys could be
expected.
In response, the British applied the techniques of operations research to the problem and came up
with some counter-intuitive solutions for protecting convoys. They realised that the area of a convoy
increased by the square of its perimeter, meaning the same number of ships, using the same
number of escorts, was better protected in one convoy than in two. A large convoy was as difficult to
locate as a small one. Moreover, reduced frequency also reduced the chances of detection, as fewer
large convoys could carry the same amount of cargo, while large convoys take longer to assemble.
Therefore, a few large convoys with apparently few escorts were safer than many small convoys
with a higher ratio of escorts to merchantmen.
Instead of attacking the Allied convoys singly, U-boats were directed to work in wolf packs (Rudel)
coordinated by radio. The boats spread out into a long patrol line that bisected the path of the Allied
convoy routes. Once in position, the crew studied the horizon through binoculars looking for masts or
smoke, or used hydrophones to pick up propeller noises. When one boat sighted a convoy, it would
report the sighting to U-boat headquarters, shadowing and continuing to report as needed until other
boats arrived, typically at night. Instead of being faced by single submarines, the convoy escorts
then had to cope with groups of up to half a dozen U-boats attacking simultaneously. The most
daring commanders, such as Kretschmer, penetrated the escort screen and attacked from within the
columns of merchantmen. The escort vessels, which were too few in number and often lacking in
endurance, had no answer to multiple submarines attacking on the surface at night as their ASDIC
only worked well against underwater targets. Early British marine radar, working in the metric bands,
lacked target discrimination and range. Moreover, corvettes were too slow to catch a surfaced U-
boat.
Pack tactics were first used successfully in September and October 1940 to devastating effect, in a
series of convoy battles. On September 21, convoy HX 72 of 42 merchantmen was attacked by a
pack of four U-boats, which sank eleven ships and damaged two over the course of two nights. In
October, the slow convoy SC 7, with an escort of two sloops and two corvettes, was overwhelmed,
losing 59% of its ships. The battle for HX 79 in the following days was in many ways worse for the
escorts than for SC 7. The loss of a quarter of the convoy without any loss to the U-boats, despite
very strong escort (two destroyers, four corvettes, three trawlers, and a minesweeper) demonstrated
the effectiveness of the German tactics against the inadequate British anti-submarine methods. On 1
December, seven German and three Italian submarines caught HX 90, sinking 10 ships and
damaging three others. The success of pack tactics against these convoys encouraged Admiral
Dönitz to adopt the wolf pack as his primary tactic.
At the end of the year 1940, the Admiralty viewed the number of ships sunk with growing alarm.
Damaged ships may survive but could be out of commission for long periods. Two million gross tons
of merchant shipping—13 % percent of the fleet available to the British—were under repair and
unavailable which had the same effect in slowing down cross-Atlantic supplies. [30]
Nor were the U-boats the only threat. Following some early experience in support of the war at sea
during Operation Weserübung, the Luftwaffe began to take a toll of merchant ships. Martin
Harlinghausen and his recently established command— Fliegerführer Atlantik—contributed small
numbers of aircraft to the Battle of the Atlantic from 1941 onwards. These were primarily Fw 200
Condors and (later) Junkers Ju 290s, used for long-range reconnaissance. The Condors also
bombed convoys that were beyond land-based fighter cover and thus defenceless. Initially, the
Condors were very successful, claiming 365,000 tons of shipping in early 1941. These aircraft were
few in number, however, and directly under Luftwaffe control; in addition, the pilots had little
specialised training for anti-shipping warfare, limiting their effectiveness.