Sarah Paine

And then the Lend-Lease Act, also before U.S.

belligerency, there's pieces of it which say the United States is going to take over British bases in Iceland and set up bases in Greenland.

Why do we care about those locations?

They're really important if you're going to send convoys.

back and forth across the Atlantic, both to attack and to defend.

So that's what we're up to.

But even so, the Axis visits a real nightmare in the Battle of the Atlantic.

A lot of things are going down.

So how does that all work?

So before the United States gets in at the very beginning, these U-boats turn the North Sea into a kill zone, and then Britain is losing an awful lot of stuff off of its shores and also off the shores of Africa.

And the Germans get really good at commerce raiding really fast.

And there's also the fall of France, which is a mess, because prior to the fall of France, Britain is only convoying just beyond Ireland.

Once you get the fall of France and all of those submarines on French territory, then the

400 miles further west, and they've lost an awful lot of destroyers between the fall of Norway and then the Dunkirk evacuation.

So they haven't got enough ships to convoy properly.

And then the Germans are really creative.

Admiral Dunitz, who runs the submarine service at this point, he uses wolfpack tactics where you concentrate a whole bunch of submarines on a convoy, tack it at night, and bad things happen to the convoy overnight.

Also, the Germans have captured some of the British codes, so they have a sense of where the convoys are.

And they're sinking almost a terminal tonnage of this traffic.

850,000 tons of Allied shipping is going down.