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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. These are steel meshes supported by buoys.
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.
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.
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. With a typically terrestrial mindset, Hitler did not catch from the beginning the
importance of the war in the sea.
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.
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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Minesweepers clear the access to German docks. Hitler, who had a fundamentally "terrestrial" mindset, was rather uninterested by
naval warfare, even if he knew its strategic importance.
The German heavy cruiser Admiral Graf Spee burns on the River Plate after being scuttled by her own
crew to prevent her capture by the British cruiser squadron. The sinking of this famed corsair ship in December 1939 was the
first of the many setbacks that Germany would suffer during the conflict. Knowing the weakness of the Kriegsmarine in comparison
with the Royal Navy, Germany choose to play an unorthodox sea warfare based in submarines and corsairs.
A view of the British naval base at Scapa Flow, located in the northern end of Scotland and key element in the naval
strategy against Germany; from this remote place the Royal Navy could dominate the access to the North Sea and the rest of
the Atlantic. To protect the base from submarine intrusions, the British took advantage of the many German warships which
had been scuttled, after the First World War, in the waters next to the base. Only in one occasion a German submarine
managed to pass inside the base across an open spot, thanks to the information obtained by a very skilled German spy who lived
for years in the village next to the base.
A German Type IX A submarine while stationed for maintenance on a dry dock. Germany entrusted the
largest part of its effort in naval warfare to the submarine weapon in order to cut any supplies that could arrive to
England, following so a strategy of siege that was not very far from achieving its goals.
Training of German submariners: simulated exit from a sunken ship.
A dramatic document of the war in the Atlantic: an armed merchant ship in route to England burning after a German attack.
A cargo ship in route towards England is persuaded to stop by warning shots from a German corsair warship. The unorthodox war
that the Kriegsmarine fought in the Atlantic included the utilization of corsair ships, which disguised as neutral cargo ships,
would have little difficulties on sinking or looting their targets.
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