Churchill famously said that the only thing he was really afraid of was the U-Boat menace. If German submarines and surface raiders could destroy the Allied convoys bringing vital supplies across the Atlantic to Britain, then the nation would eventually be unable to fight, it was the Germans who first realised that air power had a significant role to play in the Battle of the Atlantic from 1940 to 1942, but the British soon caught on. Now RAF Coastal Command began to actively hunt down the submarines and raiders and take an ever more lethal toll.
—W A Mckibben