The most recommended books on the Battle of the Atlantic

Morrison, the winner of two Bancroft Prizes and Two Pulitzer Prizes (likely the most by anyone in history) was a close friend of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. 

He was given the rank of Admiral, in the Reserves and went to the Pacific, where he had full access to all naval reports and correspondence. Morrison’s 15 volumes are extremely well written and unsurpassed for their accuracy in describing the incredible struggle that began on December 7, 1941 and finally ended in August in Tokyo Bay.  

Morrison is particularly interested in the naval battles, and no one could tell them better than Morrison. He is particularly good at the incredible orders that Admiral Halsey gave to Admirals Scott and Callaghan, full well knowing that they were going to their deaths; with light cruisers and destroyers, they pitched into a battle with a far superior Japanese naval force, losing most of their… show more.

The majority of books written about the German U-boat naval campaign in the Second World War focus on the Battle of the Atlantic.

A new approach by Lawrence Paterson challenges this narrative and makes the argument that the German U-boat Wolfpacks fought a truly global naval campaign, one that occurred during the entire wartime period 1939-1945.

Paterson also makes the argument that the operations by the U-Boats were not separate from the activities of other German service branches, but in concert with them to attain larger strategic goals.

He concludes that the ultimate failure of the U-Boats was due to this overreaching global strategy, combined with the impact of overpowering Allied anti-submarine warfare resources directed against them.

This book is a gritty, realistic fiction novel about a WWII German U-boat captain and crew facing immense challenges from the elements and the enemy while attempting to sink as many allied merchant ships as possible before running out of torpedoes or being destroyed. I particularly appreciated a view of war from “the other side” and details of life aboard a cramped submarine in wartime. The book is a timeless exploration of the privations faced by seamen who dare to wage war at sea. The tragic ending mirrors reality and adds irony and pathos to the story. I found this to be a page-turner that was very hard to put down once started.      

I love this book because it’s the best book I’ve ever read about love at a time of war.

Put simply, this is the story of an escort ship during the Battle of the Atlantic in WW2, but there’s nothing simple about it. Montserrat uses the sea and the ever-present danger of the U-boats as a monstrous vice to squeeze blood onto the page.

All the hopes and fears of his characters, their passions and guilts, their love of life, and of their male comrades and the women they leave behind them. It’s all there under the magnifying lens of the war at sea, and of all five books, this is the best about the sea itself, the all-pervasive, relentless leviathan that rages and roars and rampages across every page.

One of the official histories of the war at sea, Roskill was a distinguished naval officer and a brilliant historian.

This is history that is written with an eye to post-war British politics in which the Royal Navy was struggling for funds to meet the Soviet submarine menace. He also in his writings maintained the wall of secrecy around ultra-derived intelligence. This is a landmark history but one that has the added interest of being shaped by the exigencies of the Cold War.

North Atlantic Run was the first hard assessment of the Royal Canadian Navy’s campaign in the North Atlantic shepherding supply convoys to Britain.

Milner’s understanding of the naval war and Canadian naval policy is unsurpassed. His descriptions of Canada’s corvettes and destroyers going to sea with hastily trained crews and often inferior technology help us realize just how hard the men’s tasks were in the face of experienced U-boat crews.

The navy was stretched very thinly, and it is sobering that many convoys under Canadian protection suffered grievous losses in the desperate years 1942-43 when compared to those escorted primarily by British forces that benefitted from the latest submarine detection equipment. But the tide turned in 1943 and the Canadians played a massive role in ensuring that it stayed that way until war’s end.

After almost 80 years you might think that there was nothing new to say about the Battle of the Atlantic.  This volume shows the scholarship remains vigorous and ongoing. 

It highlights the multi-faceted nature and complexity of the Atlantic campaign the understanding of which goes well beyond traditional images of U-Boats hunting convoys in the mid-Atlantic. The team of scholars writing for this study provides fresh perspective on the Battle and the struggle for control of Britain’s sealines of communication between 1939 and 1945

Just a great overall, concise, single-volume study of the Battle of the Atlantic and one that is written from a mid-Atlantic perspective (Milner is a Canadian academic). Great writing Milner conveys the challenges at the heart of the Battle of the Atlantic in which fortunes fluctuated considerably from 1939 to 1945. 

During the Battle of the Atlantic, it was the Merchant Seamen of many nations that kept the flow of supplies running across the Atlantic despite attacks from ship, submarine, and aircraft, together with all the normal hazards of storm and sea.

Civilians from diverse backgrounds, multi-ethnic, multi-national, and multi-faith they came together as crews to fight their ships through. This is a sympathetic study that takes us into their world to understand why and how, by dogged determination, they withstood the constant dangers to bring their cargo home.

The Battle of the Atlantic (or the Atlantic Campaign) was the longest and one of the deadliest battles of the Second World War. Of the 40,000 men who served in the German U-boats, 30,000 of them lie at the bottom of the ocean, while over 70,000 Allied naval and merchant marine personnel lost their lives. Blair, in what could have been a cold, impersonal recounting of facts and figures, puts a very human face on the confrontations between the U-boats and their prey – the Allied merchant ships and their naval escorts – in the battle that both sides desperately wanted to win, as whoever lost would lose the war.