Building for Battle

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The only thing that ever really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril - Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Churchill, as a former First Lord of the Admiralty, was well versed in the importance of Britain protecting itself at sea. In the opening years of the Second World War, Germany's U-boat (submarine) fleet was tasked with attacking and destroying the supply ships that Britain depended upon for its survival. The U-boats were under the command of Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz who, for much of the war, effectively guided that strategy. There was a very real possibility that the British people would starve if the U-boats succeeded in their campaign. When France fell to the German forces in 1940, Hitler's Ubootwaffe gained a significant asset in five important ports along the Brittany coast - Brest, Lorient, St. Nazaire, La Palace and Bordeaux. The use of these ports put Germany's submarine force hundreds of miles closer to the action in the North Atlantic, the routes of the Allied supply convoys whi