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The Battle of the Atlantic was one of the longest and most decisive campaigns of World War II. From 1939 to 1945, Germany attempted to cut off the sea routes that supplied Great Britain and later allowed the transport of vast quantities of American troops, fuel, food, and armaments to Europe. The Kriegsmarine, particularly with its U-boat submarines, aimed to sink enough merchant ships to economically strangle Great Britain and hamper any future Allied offensive on the continent. For Winston Churchill, the submarine threat became one of the greatest threats to British survival during the war.

The supreme commander of German submarine warfare, Admiral Karl Dönitz, devised the coordinated use of U-boat groups known as "wolf packs." When a submarine detected an Allied convoy, it would transmit its position, and other U-boats would proceed to the area to attack, usually at night. Particularly dangerous periods in 1940–41 and the first months of 1942 were when German U-boats managed to sink vast amounts of Allied tonnage. After the United States entered the war, U-boats also intensively attacked maritime traffic off the American coast and in the Caribbean, initially exploiting weaknesses in anti-ship defenses.

However, the Allies developed increasingly effective responses. Improvements in radar, sonar, depth charges, radio intelligence, and long-range air cover gradually transformed the Atlantic into a much more dangerous place for German submarines. Escort carriers helped seal off areas of the ocean previously beyond the reach of land-based aircraft, while specialized escort groups began actively hunting U-boats. Intelligence gained from breaking German ciphers also allowed, at various times, corrections to convoy routes and predictions of enemy movements. By the spring of 1943, the situation had decisively shifted in the Allies' favor, and German submarine losses had risen to unsustainable levels.

The Germans never managed to completely cut off British sea communications, and from mid-1943, Allied industrial, technological, and air superiority finally tipped the scales of the battle. Convoys continued to traverse the ocean and enabled the accumulation in Britain of the men and materials necessary for operations such as the Normandy landings. The Kriegsmarine continued to fight until the final days of the war and commissioned more advanced submarines, but too late to change the outcome. The Battle of the Atlantic proved that World War II was not decided solely by massive land battles: for years, the quiet underwater struggle would determine whether the Allies could keep the sea route open between North America and Europe.