The Battle of the Atlantic
The longest continuous campaign of the war, fought over six years for the sea lanes on which Britain lived — and the only campaign Churchill admitted had frightened him.
It began on the first day of the war and ended on the last. Everything Britain needed to keep fighting — oil, food, ammunition, and eventually the American armies themselves — had to cross the Atlantic, and Germany spent six years trying to stop it: first with surface raiders sent out to hunt merchantmen, then with the U-boats that came close to succeeding.
The ships collected here are the two halves of that fight. On one side the raiders, from the pocket battleship cornered off Montevideo in December 1939 to the battleship that spent two years hiding in a Norwegian fjord and tying down the Home Fleet by simply existing. On the other, the hunters — and the obsolete-looking biplane that crippled the most famous of them all.
