:: PHOTOGRAPH GALLERY ::

~ THE WAR IN THE ATLANTIC ~

I

Freighter sinking during firing training
A merchant ship sinking after being hit by German artillery. These are maneuvers, but the corsair ships of the Third Reich sank this way a large number of merchant ships.

Deployment of anti-submarine nets
Deployment of anti-submarine nets. These are steel meshes supported by buoys.

Mariners of the Admiral Graf Spee
Mariners from the Admiral Graf Spee take away the provisions of a merchant ship before sinking it. Those were the "happy" times of the war, when the German corsairs captured the enemy vessels without spilling any blood.

German U-Boot at berthing
A squadron of U-Boot anchored in a base of the Kriegsmarine. Germany tried to counter the superiority of the Royal Navy over the Kriegsmarine by launching hundreds of submarines which would fight some kind of marine guerrilla war against the enemy warships and transport convoys. This method was very effective at first, but in successive years the proliferation of anti-submarine countermeasures deployed by the British sea and air forces rendered almost useless and very dangerous the campaigns of the German submarines.

German anti-aircraft position in Norway
On the summer of 1940 the personnel of German anti-aircraft defenses watches the interior of one of many fiords located in the Norwegian coast.

Immersion test of a German submarine
Immersion test of a German submarine. With a typically terrestrial mindset, Hitler did not catch from the beginning the importance of the war in the sea.

British machine gunner
A British machine gunner, onboard a escort vessel on a convoy following the Atlantic route, watches the sky sector assigned to him. However, the biggest threat were the U-Boot.

British convoy navigating on the Atlantic
A British convoy navigating on the Atlantic. The U-Boot sank over 14 millions of tonnes of Allied merchant ships during the war. The submarine threat was the most feared by England, which lived one of the most critical periods on its history.

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