Adie Roberts continues his inspirations to help inspire modellers of all abilities to work out of their comfort zone building dioramas or just trying new builds. 

With the fall of France, the German high command became convinced that blockading the United Kingdom out of supplies would force the only country that stood between them and total victory in Europe into capitulation. With the British Isles already cut off from the rest of the continent, controlling the Atlantic shipping lanes that kept Britain supplied from overseas would deliver the final stranglehold.  But the Germans feared a full naval confrontation with Britain. The so-called Plan Z, supposed to produce a powerful surface fleet capable of challenging the Royal Navy, had never fully materialised. And so Germany’s meagre surface fleet spent the course of the war overstretched,  repairing in port or, as it were, at the bottom of the sea.

They did however soon embrace unrestricted submarine warfare as a means of controlling the crucial Atlantic shipping lanes. Because of the lack of an effective surface fleet, attacking merchant shipping while remaining undetected soon became the cornerstone of Germany’s strategy in the Atlantic. To realise this strategy, they commissioned a terrifying 1250 U-booten in the Kriegsmarine during the course of the war. And to use them with maximum effect,  they built 5 submarine bases on France’s Atlantic coast: In Brest, St.Nazaire, La Rochelle, Bordeaux, and the largest of them all, the Keroman Base in Lorient: a beastly mountain of concrete capable of sheltering 30 submarines. The dramatic naval confrontation that ensued was to become the longest ongoing operation of the war. It became known as the Battle of the Atlantic.