The Battle of Britain Five Months That Changed History, May—October 1940 by James Holland (z-lib.org).epub

200, or Condor, as it was known – which were now operating from the
French Atlantic coast. Not only were they proving superb ship and convoy
spotters, but they could also attack shipping too. The Condors managed to
sink a further fifteen vessels worth 53,283 tons during August. Against
them, Britain had almost nothing – not until 16 August was a U-boat
damaged by an aerial depth charge dropped by a Coastal Command aircraft.
Günther Prien and U-47 had left Kiel on 27 August for their ninth
combat patrol, and, although they had not been at sea since July, were soon
back to their successful best, sinking a 7,000-ton ship on 2 September,
another one two days later and three ships on 7 September. It augured well
for another bumper month, for getting ready to join U-47 and U-65 already
out in the Atlantic were twelve more U-boats, including seven now based at
Lorient in France, which meant saving a week’s sailing time to reach the
Atlantic, which in turn enabled the U-boats to remain hunting out at sea for
longer.
Admiral Dönitz’s delight at his U-boats’ continued success was,
however, tempered by his frustration at the still small numbers of oceangoing
submarines. ‘The results we could have obtained during these months
had we had more boats,’ he wrote, ‘are obvious.’ Hitler had vowed to build
hundreds of U-boats but these had been empty promises. The army and
Luftwaffe, especially, had taken precedence over the navy when it came to
supplies of steel and other materials. It was soul-destroying for Dönitz.
Typical of the kind of production bottlenecks that were hampering all areas
of German war production, twenty-three ocean-going U-boats had been
delayed because of a shortage of torpedo tubes. Dönitz remained absolutely
convinced that his U-boats could bring Britain to her knees, but he
envisaged being able to send a hundred or more U-boats into the Atlantic at
any one time, rather than between nine and twelve, the best he could
manage at present.
In fact, had Dönitz been able to send triple or even double the amounts
of U-boats into the Atlantic, the inevitable losses would have been hard to
sustain. As it was, they were sinking more ships than were being newly
produced by British shipyards. ‘Losses have been very heavy,’ it was
soberly reported in the War Cabinet’s weekly review on 29 August. The
next evening, Churchill confessed to Jock Colville that one of the things
that was really beginning to worry him was the ‘startling shipping losses in
the North-West Approaches, where lay the seeds of something that “might