Sarah Paine

But the German commerce rating was also very effective.

The Germans almost sank...

a terminal quantity of British trade.

It's close because Britain is dependent not only on oil imports, resources, but about half of its food supply.

So the Germans tried and came close.

And then you go, well, the counter-commerce rating strategy did work,

but there was touch and go back and forth, and it required a lot of things that had to be coordinated.

You needed the intelligence.

It really helps reading other people's mail.

You needed a whole set of new ship classes.

You need to be able to construct adequate quantities of naval hulls, merchant hulls.

You need to coordinate with allies.

You gotta get food and other things to Britain

There are a lot of things going on here.

You need air cover, the planes that are capable of doing it.

So there are a lot of things going on.

Remove any one of them and the outcome may have been different.

All right, so that's it on the commerce rating.

So once you command the Atlantic, which means that a sustainable amount of traffic is going to get through from the Allied powers, then you can start thinking about peripheral theaters.

Okay, what's a peripheral theater?