Sarah Paine

So you look at new ships, as soon as the United States gets in the war, new ship rates go up, up and away.

But the losses are really high through mid-1943.

And then it's in mid-1943 that you can see the big divergence between construction and what's being destroyed.

And the Germans just can't keep up with this.

There is just way too much stuff out there for them to sink.

All right, so Admiral Dunitz did get one thing right.

His boss there, Admiral Rader, who's the head of the Navy, had said that pocket battleships were the thing to use for commerce raiding, and Dunitz proves him wrong, that U-boats are the way to go.

And Hitler agrees, so he cashiers Rader, makes Dunitz the head of the...

the Navy.

And then Sittler goes one step further.

He scraps his surface fleet because it's useless to him in this war.

You cannot deploy it in this kind of high stakes war, something that countries like China, surrounded by narrow seas, ought to think about.

All right.

So if you look at why the Battle of the Atlantic turned out the way it did, is Germany and Britain have very different geographies.

And arguably, Germany bought the wrong navy before the war.

It should have bought a lot of U-boats and forget the surface, minimize the surface boats that you're buying.

And so Britain could do things that Germany just plain couldn't.

That's just part of the geography.

So the effects of the blockade were really significant.

You're really straining the German economy.