VE-Day 75: Rare pictures of the Royal Navy in the Second World War

The war at sea had begun only hours after the declaration of hostilities in September 1939, when a German U-boat fired on the SS Athenia, a British liner en route to Montreal. Some 112 lives were lost.

A war over supplies ensued as, with food supplies from occupied Europe cut off, Germany attempted to starve Britain into surrender.

British losses were heavy, its ships at risk both from U-boats hunting in packs and from German surface ships. The battleship Graf Spee sank nine ships in the last three months of 1939 alone.

She was sunk that December but it was not until May 1941, when 16 British ships hunted down and sank the German battleship Bismarck, that a significant, morale-boosting victory could be reported.

The arrival of the Americans at the end of the year, and the ramping up of naval production, provided more encouragement but there was to be no quick victory in the Atlantic.

By the beginning of 1943, the German Navy had a fleet of more than 200 U-boats, a five-fold increase on the number at the beginning of the war, and British supplies were running perilously low.

It was the arrival of American B-24 Liberator aircraft, which gave shipping convoys air support across the entire Atlantic, that finally turned the tide. In the spring and summer of 1943, 103 U-boats were destroyed by Allied attacks. Their eventual withdrawal from the North Atlantic convoy routes gave the Allies free passage to stockpile supplies for the coming D-Day.

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