Battle of the Atlantic Statistics

Statistics re Allied losses of men and ships in the Battle of the Atlantic vary widely. We include data from various sources below.

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Hughes, Terry and Costello, John. The Battle of the Atlantic, New York: Dial Press,1977

The Atlantic war was over. It had been costly to the Allies. No fewer than 2,603 merchant ships had been sunk, totalling over 13. 5 million tons, as well as 175 Allied Naval vessels. . . . On the Allied side 30,248 merchant seamen died, as were as thousands of men from the Royal Navy and RAF.

It was the one campaign of the Second World War that lasted from the first day to the last.

Casualties to Personnel of British merchant Ships 1939-1945

*Crew includes D. E. M. S. -- British gunners equivalent of U. S. Naval Armed Guard

Year	Ships lost by U-boat	Ships lost all enemy causes	No. of Crew* Lost by u-boat	No. of Crew* Lost all causes
1939	50	95	260	495
1940	225	511	3,375	5,622
1941	288	568	5,632	7,838
1942	452	590	8,413	9,736
1943	203	266	3,826	4,606
1944	67	102	1,163	1,512
1945	30	45	229	323
Total	1,315	2,177	22,898	30,132

 

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Albion, Robert Greenhalgh and Pope, Jennie Barnes. Sea Lanes in Wartime - The American Experience 1775-1945, 2nd edition, Archon Books, 1968

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Terraine, John. Business in Great Waters: The U-Boat Wars, 1916-1945, London: Leo Cooper, 1989

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Miller, Nathan. War at Sea - A Naval History of World War II, New York: Scribner, 1995

 

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Hitler's U-Boat War: The Hunters, 1939-1942, Clay Blair, New York: Random House, 1996

Hitler's U-Boat War: The Hunted. 1942-1945, Clay Blair, New York: Random House, 1998

 

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British Merchant Navy at War 1939-1945

http://www.british-merchant-navy.co.uk/

Often sailing on out dated and sometimes barely seaworthy ships, these men although civilians were at the forefront of the biggest survival battle Britain has ever seen. Men who if lucky enough to survive a sinking had their pay stopped before their ship settled to it's final resting place. Men who after enduring the reality and fear of the U-boats, mines, air attacks, E-boats, and the might of the German naval fleet, not to mention the the perils of the sea itself, were looked upon with distaste by people at home, simply because they wore no official uniform which would identify them with any of the armed services.

Over 30,000 men of the British Merchant Navy were lost between 1939-1945. To the Merchant sailors there was no phony war the people of Britain lived through in the early days of WWII. On September 3rd 1939, a few hours after war had been declared against Germany the first shipping casualty occurred in the sinking of the Donaldson Line passenger ship Athenia with the loss of 112 passengers and crew. For almost six years there was barely a day went by without the loss of merchant ships and their crews.

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Keegan, John. The Second World War, New York: Penguin Books, 1989

The 30,000 men of the British Merchant Navy (one-fifth of its pre-war strength) who fell victim to the U-boats between 1939 and 1945, the majority drowned or killed by exposure on the cruel North Atlantic sea, were quite as certainly front-line warriors as the guardsmen and fighter pilots to whom they ferried the necessities of combat. Neither they nor their American, Dutch, Norwegian or Greek fellow mariners wore uniform and few have any memorial. They stood nevertheless between the Wehrmacht and the domination of the world.

Allied Merchant Ship Losses 1939 to 1943 Press Release, Office of War Information, Nov. 28, 1944

Merchant Marine in World War II
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6/14/03 revised 1/20/05

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