VICTORY in the Battle of the Atlantic is traditionally commemorated in May.
It is not May 1945 which the sailors, merchantmen and Coastal Command veterans remember, but May 1943, when Allied leaders could say with some certainty that the U-boat had been defeated, and when their ruthless opponent and advocate of all-out submarine warfare, Grossadmiral Karl Dönitz, reluctantly called off the battle.

But victory in May 1943 was only a temporary victory. Dönitz vowed to resume the Atlantic campaign "with new and more powerful weapons. We will not rest. Where the opportunity presents itself, we will strike and strike and fight on with greater determination and resolution. Then we will be victorious."

It never came to pass, thanks to the devotion of thousands of sailors, aircrew, shipwrights, engineers, scientists, factory works, a national effort, an imperial effort, an international effort.

But the U-boat campaign continued to the very end of the war; it was no less merciless, no less unforgiving in May 1945 than in September 1939.

Germany’s hopes rested in particular upon the new boats slowly being phased into service - the fast Type XXI - large, ocean-going - and Type XXIII - small, coastal - ‘electro’ boats, and the ‘schnorchel’ which permitted existed boats to recharge their batteries while still submerged by raising a ‘breathing’ mast.
The Type XXI simply never reached the front-line in sufficient numbers, while the schnorchel boats remained vulnerable to Allied counter-measures.

There remained the Type VII, which had borne the brunt of the Battle of the Atlantic. For all the boat’s increasing obsolescence, a skilful commander could still achieve singular successes.

On the morning of April 6 1945, the 11,420-ton freighter Cuba slipped out of Portsmouth harbour accompanied by other ships in a small convoy hugging the British coast.

Bottomed in the approaches to the Solent was Ernst Cordes and his U1195. Cordes had sailed from Bergen six weeks previously with orders to run amok off one of Britain’s principal Channel ports.

It took him four weeks to reach the world’s busiest shipping lane. Having crippled a Liberty Ship off Wales, he had sailed around to the Solent waiting for a suitable target.

When Cuba presented herself, she was sent to the bottom - the largest ship lost to a German submarine in 1945.

Unfortunately for Cordes, the convoy’s escorts easily found the U-boat in the shallow coastal waters. HMS Watchman provided the coup-de-grace with a hedgehog attack.

As the Solent rapidly filled Cordes’ boat, he gave the order for a submerged escape; 18 of U1195’s 49 crew were plucked out of the water by Watchman. Ernst Cordes was not among them.

U1195 was just one of 50 German submarines lost to Allied naval and air power in April 1945; 24 went down with all hands. Despite such crippling loses, Royal Naval interrogators were amazed to find that the few survivors plucked from the stricken U-boats were not downhearted. The foe remained "determined and courageous" Senior Service intelligence analysts noted.

"There may be a fair proportion of fanatical Nazis among the officers and it is probable that some of them may prefer to sacrifice themselves in a desperate attack rather than survive to suffer the defeat that is now generally accepted as inevitable."

Signs of fanaticism were hardly surprising. As Germany’s position grew ever more grave in the spring of 1945, so the exhortations from Karl Dönitz grew ever more desperate. "Our honour demands that we fight to the end. Necessity, duty, honour and pride bid us to fight to the last if necessary."

On March 20: "Let us sow hatred of our enemies, imbue our soldiers with passion, so that they will feel superior to the enemy."

Seven days later, the grossadmiral admonished his sailors again. "Let us prove to our enemies that the destruction of Germany will demand a greater price in blood and toil and take longer than they are prepared to afford."

And on April 11 1945, another hysterical decree: "The honour of our flag is sacred to us. No-one shall think about surrendering his ship. Rather, go down with honour. The Kriegsmarine will fight to the end."

Joseph Goebbels, Germany’s propaganda minister, was equally bloodthirsty in his exhortations to the nation. "Every civilian, every man and woman and boy and girl must fight with unequaled fanaticism," he urged in one of his final proclamations barely a week before his suicide.

"As long as we are determined to resist at all costs, we cannot be beaten, and for us not being beaten means to be victorious. It may sound improbable today, but it is nonetheless so: Final victory will be ours. It will come through tears and blood, but it will justify all the sacrifices we have made."

Ten days before Germany’s unconditional surrender, Erich Topp was summoned one last time by his grossadmiral.

Topp was a wily character and an outstanding U-bootmann. Only four submariners had sunk more enemy shipping; in all 34 vessels rested on the seabed - 185,000 tonnes of shipping - because of Erich Topp’s audacity, skill and ruthlessness. But now Topp could see the writing was on the wall.

He was already thinking a world post-war, a world without Karl Dönitz, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, and the rest of criminal clique taking Germany to her destruction.

"He still believes that proper fighting spirit can do wonders against tanks and aircraft," Topp recorded with bewilderment in his diary.

"Dönitz had retreated behind a veil of unconvincing moral considerations and irrational arguments to justify his actions, even though he cannot have believed in them deeply."

The admiral ordered his ‘ace’ to sail for Norway immediately with his U2513, a Type XXI U-boat in which the Nazis had invested so much hope. Topp disobeyed the order for half a day. Other boats left Kiel bound for Norwegian waters and were promptly mauled by fighter-bombers prowling the Skagerrak. U2513 entered Oslofjord unmolested.

Erich Topp arrived in Norwegian waters on May 2. That same day U2359 succumbed to air attack; only 12 men survived. On the third, U1210, 2521, 3032, 3502, 3505. On the fourth, U711 and U2338. By the time the act of surrender came into force on May 8, 124 U-boats had been lost in 1945 alone. Of the 4,352 men who had sailed with them, just 440 survived - a 90 per cent casualty rate.

And to what end? The Admiralty was convinced it had the measure of the U-boat in the dying days of World War II. "We have been able to keep everything satisfactorily under control and severe losses have been inflicted on U-boats whilst our shipping losses have been no worse than moderate."

Winston Churchill famously wrote that the U-boat menace was "the only thing that ever really frightened me ... our worst evil". The Battle of the Atlantic had been "the dominating factor" upon which the Empire’s rise or fall had depended.
But with hindsight, the U-boats never came close to defeating the combined might of the Allies.

Between 1943 and the end of the war, 40,124 merchant ships sailed in transatlantic convoys. Fewer than 200 ships failed to reach their destination because of U-boat attacks.

And for their efforts from 1943-45, the Germans lost 713 U-boats, 32,085 men.
JOINING these stricken boats on the bottom of the Atlantic, North Sea, Mediterranean and Arctic, 14 million tons of Allied and neutral shipping, each one loaded with weapons, ammunition, foodstuffs, the goods of life and war. They never reached their destinations.

"It’s the futility of the whole aspect of war at sea," said Lt ‘Dick’ Dykes, a veteran of the campaigns in the Atlantic and Arctic in Flower class corvettes HMS Honeysuckle and Tintagel Castle.

"You see the aircraft and the tanks and lorries which are on the upper deck sliding off into the sea, amongst the survivors, as it sinks, as it turns over.

"It seems so pointless that people have patiently grown wheat in Canada or America, only for it to be lost at sea, by some man firing a torpedo into the ship. It all seems to be such a terrible waste of time."