Murdock's War

"The only thing that ever frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril."- Winston Churchill.

The Battle of the Atlantic was the most pivotal battle of WWII, for it was the battle to keep Britain above starvation. One in which the Royal Canadian Navy played a decisive part. It was a titanic clash, a war not against battleships but against people. It was a fight they had to win, for if Germany ended up masters of the North Atlantic, the blockade would be finished, Britain and Europe cut off, and Britain itself open to invasion. By winning, it enabled "the new world with all its power and might to step forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old," to quote Churchill.

So, to win the total war at sea, they had to bring all the Allies together or fall apart, all the while pairing the lab coat with the uniform by not only developing strategies to kill the U-boats but also to develop new tactics like escort ships as hunter-killer groups and weaponry such as asdic/sonar, etc.

Although the Germans developed technologies like a snorkel to recharge their batteries submerged and the electric & acoustic torpedoes, they never succeeded as the Western Allies did because of political meddling and refusing to innovate, like believing their enigma codes were unbroken.

Today, almost 80 years after the end of the Battle of the Atlantic, the very last veterans are mostly, of course, long dead, and those who remain are in their 90s or 100s. For example, the man for whom this book was titled, Murdock Gerald Maguire, would be 100 years old in 2024. But he tragically passed away of alcoholism, and the knock-on aftereffects of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder aged 48 and a half in 1972. So it's thus now more important than ever to re-tell the story of the Battle of the Atlantic as soon, the last veterans will be gone, leaving nothing behind them but a memory of history.