Overview

Between 1914 and 1918, Germany deployed beneath the surface of the Atlantic a weapon that the world had never seen used at strategic scale - and came closer than any subsequent history has fully acknowledged to winning the war with it. At its peak in April 1917, the U-boat campaign was sinking Allied and neutral shipping faster than the combined shipyards of Britain, the United States, and the neutral world could replace it. The island that had fed itself through a century of maritime empire was approaching the arithmetic of starvation. The solution, when it finally came, arrived two years late and at a cost measured in thousands of ships and tens of thousands of lives. Shadows Beneath the Atlantic is the full history of that campaign - from the first dreams of underwater navigation in antiquity to the surrender of the U-boat fleet in November 1918, from the technological revolution that made modern submarine warfare possible to the legal and moral collapse that unrestricted submarine warfare produced, from the aces who built their reputations on the systematic destruction of merchant shipping to the officers who developed, against institutional resistance and under operational emergency, the countermeasures that turned the campaign's tide. This is not a book about the romance of the submarine or the spectacle of individual patrols. It is a book about how a single weapon transformed the nature of naval conflict, dissolved the international law that governed it, forced the world's greatest neutral power into the war, and established the strategic principles on which all subsequent undersea warfare has been built. The shadows it describes have never left the sea. They are still there.

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