[5] The vast majority of Allied warships lost in the Atlantic and close coasts were small warships averaging around 1,000 tons such as frigates, destroyer escorts, sloops, submarine chasers, or corvettes, but losses also included one battleship (Royal Oak), one battlecruiser (Hood), two aircraft carriers (Glorious and Courageous), three escort carriers (Dasher, Audacity, and Nabob), and seven cruisers (Curlew, Curacoa, Dunedin, Edinburgh, Charybdis, Trinidad, and Effingham). Over 40.000 These problems were solved by about March 1941, making the torpedo a formidable weapon. The ships were crewed by sailors from all over the British Empire, including some 25% from India and China, and 5% from the West Indies, Middle East and Africa. She has previously written for The Boston Globe, PolicyMic and Interview Magazine. However, it also caused problems for the Germans, as it sometimes detected stray radar emissions from distant ships or planes, causing U-boats to submerge when they were not in actual danger, preventing them from recharging batteries or using their surfaced speed. These forces were aided by ships and aircraft of the United States beginning September 13, 1941. Dnitz calculated 300 of the latest Atlantic Boats (the Type VII), would create enough havoc among Allied shipping that Britain would be knocked out of the war. Convoys, coming mainly from North America and predominantly going to the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union, were protected for the most part by the British and Canadian navies and air forces. The last actions in American waters took place on May 56, 1945, which saw the sinking of the steamer Black Point and the destruction of U-853 and U-881 in separate incidents. The Condor was a converted civilian airlinera stop-gap solution for Fliegerfhrer Atlantik. In 1939, it was generally believed at the British Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park that naval Enigma could not be broken. According to German sources, only six aircraft were shot down by U-flaks in six missions (three by U-441, one each by U-256, U-621 and U-953). In July 1942, Hans-Rudolf Rsing was appointed as FdU West (Fhrer der Unterseeboote West). [52] HF/DF let an operator determine the direction of a radio signal, regardless of whether the content could be read. War had come too early for the German naval expansion project Plan Z. Battleships powerful enough to destroy any convoy escort, with escorts able to annihilate the convoy, were never achieved. WebHe left Lorient, France on 19 Jan and nearly month later on 16 Feb 1942 sank 1 ship, the British steam tanker Oranjestad and damaged two more off Aruba. When one boat sighted a convoy, it would report the sighting to U-boat headquarters, shadowing and continuing to report as needed until other boats arrived, typically at night. After the German occupation of Denmark and Norway, Britain occupied Iceland and the Faroe Islands, establishing bases there and preventing a German takeover. [18] Churchill claimed to have coined the phrase "Battle of the Atlantic" shortly before Alexander's speech,[19] but there are several examples of earlier usage. The intention was to lay a 'pattern' like an elongated diamond, hopefully with the submarine somewhere inside it. Faced with disaster, Dnitz called off operations in the North Atlantic, saying, "We had lost the Battle of the Atlantic".[76]. From June until October 1940, over 270 Allied ships were sunk: this period was referred to by U-boat crews as "the Happy Time" ("Die Glckliche Zeit"). The Leigh Light enabled attacks on U-boats recharging their batteries on the surface at night. Before the war, Norway's Merchant Navy was the fourth largest in the world and its ships were the most modern. The US did not have enough ships to cover all the gaps; the U-boats continued to operate freely during the Battle of the Caribbean and throughout the Gulf of Mexico (where they effectively closed several US ports) until July, when the British-loaned escorts began arriving. On May 21, SSRobin Moor, an American vessel carrying no military supplies, was stopped by U-69 750 nautical miles (1,390km) west of Freetown, Sierra Leone. Ahntastic Adventures in Silicon Valley In 1939, the Kriegsmarine lacked the strength to challenge the combined British Royal Navy and French Navy (Marine Nationale) for command of the sea. In October, the slow convoy SC 7, with an escort of two sloops and two corvettes, was overwhelmed, losing 59% of its ships. WebThe Battle of the Atlantic, New York: Dial Press,1977. As an island country, the United Kingdom was highly dependent on imported goods. These sets were common items of equipment by the spring of 1943. Developed by RAF officer H. Leigh, it was a powerful and controllable searchlight mounted primarily to Wellington bombers and B-24 Liberators. ", O'Connor, Jerome M, "FDR's Undeclared War", WWW.Historyarticles.com, This page was last edited on 13 February 2023, at 21:47. This new key could not be read by codebreakers; the Allies no longer knew where the U-boat patrol lines were. On 1 December, seven German and three Italian submarines caught HX 90, sinking 10ships and damaging three others. The more advanced installations had Squid linked to the latest ASDIC sets so that Squid was fired automatically. [citation needed] Information obtained by British agents regarding German shipping movements led Canada to conscript all its merchant vessels two weeks before actually declaring war, with the Royal Canadian Navy taking control of all shipping August 26, 1939. The first such receiver, named Metox after its French manufacturer, was capable of picking up the metric radar bands used by the early radars. [68], The Leigh Light enabled the British to attack enemy subs on the surface at night, forcing German and Italian commanders to remain underwater especially when coming into port at sub bases in the Bay of Biscay. Following some early experience in support of the war at sea during Operation Weserbung, the Luftwaffe began to take a toll of merchant ships. The success of pack tactics against these convoys encouraged Admiral Dnitz to adopt the wolf pack as his primary tactic. Many Animals, Including the Platypus, Lost Their Stomachs. This was thought to be safe as the radio messages were encrypted using the Enigma cipher machine, which the Germans considered unbreakable. Depth charges were dropped over the stern and thrown to the side of a warship travelling at speed. Although Allied warships failed to sink U-boats in large numbers, most convoys evaded attack completely. A few moments later, a white flag and a similarly coloured board were displayed. It was to be many months before these ships contributed to the campaign. There are fears more than 100 people, including children, have died after their boat sank off southern Italy. With the change of range, the radar doubled its pulse repetition frequency and as a result, the Metox beeping frequency also doubled, warning the commander that he had been detected and that the approaching aircraft was at that point 9 miles away. In the Battle of the Denmark Strait, the battlecruiser HMSHood was blown up and sunk, but Bismarck was damaged and had to run to France. [83] After a series of attacks on merchant vessels off the Brazilian coast by U-507,[83] Brazil officially entered the war on 22 August 1942, offering an important addition to the Allied strategic position in the South Atlantic. The U-boat surfaced again, a number of crewmen appeared on deck, and Thompson engaged them with his aircraft's guns. The sole pocket battleship raider, Admiral Graf Spee, had been stopped at the Battle of the River Plate by an inferior and outgunned British squadron. [13] The Germans were joined by submarines of the Italian Regia Marina (Royal Navy) after Germany's Axis ally Italy entered the war on June 10, 1940. He was ignored. Because hedgehog only exploded if it hit the submarine, if the target was missed, there was no disturbed water to make tracking difficultand contact had not been lost in the first place. The battle for HX 79 in the following days was in many ways worse for the escorts than for SC7. More than 2,400 British ships were sunk. By December 1942, Enigma decrypts were again disclosing U-boat patrol positions, and shipping losses declined dramatically once more. Some British naval officials, particularly the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, sought a more 'offensive' strategy. [54] The rotors were changed every other day using a system of key sheets and the message settings were different for every message and determined from "bigram tables" that were issued to operators. Third, and unlike the Allies, the Germans were never able to mount a comprehensive blockade of Britain. Then on October 30, crewmen from HMSPetard salvaged Enigma material from German submarineU-559 as she foundered off Port Said. Norwegian Nazi puppet leader Vidkun Quisling ordered all Norwegian ships to sail to German, Italian or neutral ports. Li Zhou is the digital editorial intern for Smithsonian.com. U-boat losses also climbed. Throughout the summer and autumn of 1941, Enigma intercepts (combined with HF/DF) enabled the British to plot the positions of U-boat patrol lines and route convoys around them. Many U-boat attacks were suppressed and submarines sunk in this waya good example of the great difference apparently minor aspects of technology could make to the battle. Following the Lusitania tragedy, Wilson issued three strongly worded declarations to Germany regarding U-boat warfare, after which submarine attacks on merchants subsided significantly in the Atlantic and shifted to the Mediterranean to assist the Austrians and Turks. The situation was so bad that the British considered abandoning convoys entirely. On July 3, 1942, one of these trawlers, HMS Le Tigre proved her worth by picking up 31 survivors from the American merchant Alexander Macomb. In June, General Arnold suggested the Navy assume responsibility for ASW operations. After a refit, U-570 was commissioned into the Royal Navy as HMSGraph. At the same time, the British were working on a number of technical developments which would address the German submarine superiority. The biggest challenge for the U-boats was to find the convoys in the vastness of the ocean. . Most British naval spending, and many of the best officers, went into the battlefleet. Dnitz promptly planned to attack shipping off the American East Coast. Dnitz had lost his three leading aces: Kretschmer, Prien, and Schepke. "[This quote needs a citation]. Esri Metox provided the U-boat commander with an advantage that had not been anticipated by the British. The resulting concentration near Gibraltar resulted in a series of battles around the Gibraltar and Sierra Leone convoys. Due to ongoing friction between the Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine, the primary source of convoy sightings was the U-boats themselves. Despite their success, U-boats were still not recognised as the foremost threat to the North Atlantic convoys. [28] Similar problems plagued the US Navy's Mark 14 torpedo, but it ignored the reports of German problems.[29]. In an attempt to justify the devastating attack, Germany later cited the 173 tons of war munitions the ship had also been carrying. On the Allied side 30,248 merchant seamen died, as were as thousands of men from the Royal Navy and RAF. Operation Drumbeat had one other effect. After Convoy ON 154, winter weather provided a brief respite from the fighting in January before convoys SC 118 and ON 166 in February 1943, but in the spring, convoy battles started up again with the same ferocity. [67], Detection by radar-equipped aircraft could suppress U-boat activity over a wide area, but an aircraft attack could only be successful with good visibility. Victory was achieved at a huge cost: between 1939 and 1945, 3,500 Allied merchant ships (totalling 14.5million gross tons) and 175 Allied warships were sunk and some 72,200 Allied naval and merchant seamen died. It is maintained by G. H. Persall[97] that "the Germans were close" to economically starving England, but they "failed to capitalize" on their early war successes. In the South Atlantic, British forces were stretched by the cruise of Admiral Graf Spee, which sank nine merchant ships of 50,000GRT in the South Atlantic and Indian Ocean during the first three months of war. Allied air forces developed tactics and technology to make the Bay of Biscay, the main route for France-based U-boats, very dangerous to submarines. The U-boat fleet, which was to dominate so much of the Battle of the Atlantic, was small at the beginning of the war; many of the 57available U-boats were the small and short-range Type IIs, useful primarily for minelaying and operations in British coastal waters. UNITED STATES NAVAL SHIPS SUNK OR DAMAGED BY ENEMY TORPEDO, BOMBS, OR GUNFIRE. After its passengers and crew were allowed thirty minutes to board lifeboats, U-69 torpedoed, shelled, and sank the ship. In particular, this was because most of the ships sunk by U-boats were not in convoys, but sailing alone, or having become separated from convoys. On July 19, 1942, he ordered the last boats to withdraw from the United States Atlantic coast; by the end of July 1942 he had shifted his attention back to the North Atlantic, where allied aircraft could not provide coveri.e. They were unable to co-operate in wolf pack tactics or even reliably report contacts or weather conditions, and their area of operation was moved away from those of the Germans. Cookie Settings, Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania, contraband cargo could be captured, boarded and escorted, fair notice to its rivals by declaring unrestricted submarine warfare, sunk 39 ships and lost only three U-boats in the process, 5,000 ships and resulting in the loss of 15,000 lives. The Lusitania attack put increased public pressure on the Wilson administration to reconsider United States involvement in World War I, leading up to an official declaration of war in 1917. Two months later, on July 8, 1942, the tanker J. At the end of the war in 1945, the Norwegian merchant fleet was estimated at 1,378ships. German success in sinking Courageous was surpassed a month later when Gnther Prien in U-47 penetrated the British base at Scapa Flow and sank the old battleship HMSRoyal Oak at anchor,[27] immediately becoming a hero in Germany. Five times in a row Okell and Laidlaw sank the submarine of Admiral Horton, the commander-in chief of Western Approaches.[65]. WebHow many American ships did U-boats sink? By 1945 the USN was able to wipe out a wolf-pack suspected of carrying V-weapons in the mid-Atlantic, with little difficulty. At its core was the Allied naval blockade of Germany, announced the day after the declaration of war, and Germany's subsequent counter-blockade. Obviously this subdivision of the data ignores many other defensive measures the Allies developed during the war, so interpretation must be constrained. In 1941, American intelligence informed Rear Admiral John Henry Godfrey that the UK naval codes could be broken. Instead, German naval strategy relied on commerce raiding using capital ships, armed merchant cruisers, submarines and aircraft. Since a submarine's bridge was very close to the water, their range of visual detection was quite limited. Our function was to close those gaps just before the convoys were due. The radio technology behind direction finding was simple and well understood by both sides, but the technology commonly used before the war used a manually-rotated aerial to fix the direction of the transmitter. One example was the sinking of U-199 in July 1943, by a coordinated action of Brazilian and American aircraft. [84] On 22 May 1942, the first Brazilian attack (although unsuccessful) was carried out by Brazilian Air Force aircraft on the Italian submarineBarbarigo. In addition, the Kriegsmarine used much more secure operating procedures than the Heer (Army) or Luftwaffe (Air Force). It enabled the U-boat to change position with impunity. [66], Squid was an improvement on 'Hedgehog' introduced in late 1943. From August 1940, a flotilla of 27 Italian submarines operated from the BETASOM base in Bordeaux to attack Allied shipping in the Atlantic, initially under the command of Rear Admiral Angelo Parona, then of Rear Admiral Romolo Polacchini and finally of Ship-of-the-Line Captain Enzo Grossi. It immediately and accurately illuminated the enemy, giving U-boat commanders less than 25seconds to react before they were attacked with depth charges. But the new U-boat blockade nearly succeeded and between February and April King has been criticised for this decision, but his defenders argue the United States destroyer fleet was limited (partly because of the sale of 50 old destroyers to Britain earlier in the war), and King claimed it was far more important that destroyers protect Allied troop transports than merchant shipping. British forces occupied Iceland when Denmark fell to the Germans in 1940; the US was persuaded to provide forces to relieve British troops on the island. "[71] The code breakers of Bletchley Park assigned only two people to evaluate whether the Germans broke the code. Eighty percent of the Admiralty messages from March, 1942 to June 1943 were read by the Germans. Britain required more than a million tons of imported material per week in order to survive and fight. Not a single British warship was sunk by a U-boat in more than 20attacks. Much of the early German anti-shipping activity involved minelaying by destroyers, aircraft and U-boats off British ports. This gave them much greater tactical flexibility, allowing them to detach ships to hunt submarines spotted by reconnaissance or picked up by HF/DF. WebSix days later, 128 Americans lost their lives when the British passenger liner Lusitania was sunk by German U-Boats. Greater co-operation with supporting aircraft was also achieved. [44] Bismarck nearly reached her destination, but was disabled by an airstrike from the carrier Ark Royal, and then sunk by the Home Fleet the next day. Janet Okell and Jean Laidlaw played the role of the escorts. This was delicate work, took quite a time to accomplish to any degree of accuracy, and since it only revealed the line along which the transmission originated a single set could not determine if the transmission was from the true direction or its reciprocal 180degrees in the opposite direction. Merchant ship losses dropped by over two-thirds in July 1941, and the losses remained low until November. With this there was hardly any need to triangulatethe escort could just run down the precise bearing provided, estimating range from the signal strength, and use either efficient look-outs or radar for final positioning. Several ships searching together would be used in a line, 11.5mi (1.62.4km) apart. The use of submarines led to a merciless form of warfare that increased thesinking of merchant and civilian ships such as the Lusitania. This allowed the codebreakers to break TRITON, a feat credited to Alan Turing. For the Allies, the situation was serious but not critical throughout much of 1942. The Condors also bombed convoys that were beyond land-based fighter cover and thus defenceless. [100] Coupled with a series of major convoy battles in the space of a month, it undermined confidence in the convoy system in March 1943, to the point Britain considered abandoning it,[101][102] not realising the U-boat had already effectively been defeated. Over the next five days, five U-boats were sunk (four by Walker's group), despite the loss of Audacity after two days. [40], Amongst the more successful Italian submarine commanders who operated in the Atlantic were Carlo Fecia di Cossato, commander of the submarine Enrico Tazzoli, and Gianfranco Gazzana-Priaroggia, commander of Archimede and then of Leonardo da Vinci.[41]. More than 70 Canadian merchant vessels were lost. After Convoy ON 154, winter weather provided a brief respite from the fighting in January before convoys SC 118 and ON 166 in February 1943, but in the spring, convoy battles started up again with the same ferocity. U-boat crews became heroes in Germany. British efforts were helped by a gradual increase in the number of escort vessels available as the old ex-American destroyers and the new British- and Canadian-built Flower-class corvettes were now coming into service in numbers. [20], Following the use of unrestricted submarine warfare by Germany in the First World War, countries tried to limit or abolish submarines. At the outbreak of the war, Canada possessed 38 ocean-going merchant vessels. After suffering damage in the subsequent action, she took shelter in neutral Montevideo harbour and was scuttled on 17 December 1939. No German war vessel can get her or near her.. During May 1943, the US Navy began using a 4-rotor bombe machines used drums for the Enigma rotors at 34 times the speed of the early British bombe machines. A three-barrelled mortar, it projected 100lb (45kg) charges ahead or abeam; the charges' firing pistols were automatically set just prior to launch. The ordinary seamen were issued with an 'MNCanada' badge to wear on their lapel when on leave, to indicate their service. U-30 sank the ocean liner SSAthenia within hours of the declaration of warin breach of her orders not to sink passenger ships. The Italian submarines had been designed to operate in a different way than U-boats, and they had a number of flaws that needed to be corrected (for example huge conning towers, slow speed when surfaced, lack of modern torpedo fire control), which meant that they were ill-suited for convoy attacks, and performed better when hunting down isolated merchantmen on distant seas, taking advantage of their superior range and living standards. | READ MORE. Destructive 'Super Pigs' From Canada Threaten the Northern U.S. Where regular escorts would have to break off and stay with their convoy, the support group ships could keep hunting a U-boat for many hours. This was true in the Kriegsmarine as well; Raeder successfully lobbied for the money to be spent on capital ships instead. In August, 1942, the UK Admiralty was informed. To effectively disable a submarine, a depth charge had to explode within about 20ft (6.1m). This was initially very effective, but the Allies quickly developed counter-measures, both tactical ("Step-Aside") and technical ("Foxer"). In the course of events in the Atlantic alone, German U-boats sank almost 5,000 ships with nearly 13 million gross register tonnage, losing 178 boats and about 5,000 men in combat.U-boat campaign. Nortraship's modern ships, especially its tankers, were extremely important to the Allies. The early wartime Royal Navy procedure was to sweep the ASDIC in an arc from one side of the escort's course to the other, stopping the transducer every few degrees to send out a signal. Believing this to still be the case, German U-boat radio operators considered themselves fairly safe if they kept messages short. In early March, Prien in U-47 failed to return from patrol. A. Moffett was sunk in the Florida Keys, about 5 miles south of Duck Key. The Germans received help from their allies. However, the standard approach of anti-submarine warships was immediately to "run-down" the bearing of a detected signal, hoping to spot the U-boat on the surface and make an immediate attack. Should the U-boat dive, the aircraft would attack. Did an Ancient Magnetic Field Reversal Cause Chaos for Life on Earth 42,000 Years Ago? It worked simply with a crossed pair of conventional and fixed directional aerials, the oscilloscope display showing the relative received strength from each aerial as an elongated ellipse showing the line relative to the ship. Before the U-boats The survivors then drifted without rescue or detection for up to eighteen days. Webhow many ships did u boats sunk in ww1magicycle accessories how many ships did u boats sunk in ww1 [107] It believed that the convoy would be a waste of ships that they could not afford, considering they might be needed in battle. Damaged ships might survive but could be out of commission for long periods. In all, during the Atlantic campaign only 10% of transatlantic convoys that sailed were attacked, and of those attacked only 10% on average of the ships were lost. Critically, the British expected, as in the First World War, German submarines would be coastal craft and only threaten harbour approaches. Shortly after, Le Tigre managed to hunt down the U-boat U-215 that had torpedoed the merchant ship, which was then sunk by HMSVeteran; credit was awarded to Le Tigre. Only the head of the German Naval Section, Frank Birch, and the mathematician Alan Turing believed otherwise.[55]. In February, the old battleship HMSRamillies deterred an attack on HX 106. Initially, the new escort groups consisted of two or three destroyers and half a dozen corvettes. Ships Sunk or Damaged 1939 to 1941 due to war causes Chronological List of U.S. [74] That month saw the battles of convoys UGS 6, HX 228, SC 121, SC 122 and HX 229. All Norwegian ships decided to serve at the disposal of the Allies. In 1943 and 1944 the Allies transported some 3 million American and Allied servicemen across the Atlantic without significant loss. The British codebreakers needed to know the wiring of the special naval Enigma rotors, and the destruction of U-33 by HMSGleaner (J83) in February 1940 provided this information. This strategy was deeply flawed because a U-boat, with its tiny silhouette, was always likely to spot the surface warships and submerge long before it was sighted. What they didnt count on was inadvertently inciting American wrath with the attack of a civilian ship. In November 1942, at the height of the Atlantic campaign, the US Navy escorted the Operation Torch invasion fleet 3,000mi (4,800km) across the Atlantic without hindrance, or even being detected. We could sometimes deduce when and how they would take advantage of the gaps in our U-boat dispositions. WebIn the course of events in the Atlantic alone, German U-boats sank almost 5,000 ships with nearly 13 million gross register tonnage, losing 178 boats and about 5,000 men in A stop-gap measure was instituted by fitting ramps to the front of some of the cargo ships known as catapult aircraft merchantmen (CAM ships), equipped with a lone expendable Hurricane fighter aircraft. However, many passengers adopted Turners skeptical attitude given the over 200 transatlantic trips the ship had previously made and its reputation as a speedy Greyhound of the sea. The British, however, ignored the fact that arming merchantmen, as they did from the start of the war, removed them from the protection of the "cruiser rules",[25] and that anti-submarine trials with ASDIC had been conducted in ideal conditions.[32]. On 18 March 1943, Roosevelt ordered King to transfer 60 Liberators from the Pacific theatre to the Atlantic to combat German U-boats; one of only two direct orders he gave to his military commanders in WWII (the other was regarding Operation Torch). Although Allied warships failed to return from patrol read by codebreakers ; the Allies, the situation was bad! Deck, and many of the best officers, went into the battlefleet 1945, old! Hours of the Admiralty messages from March, 1942, Hans-Rudolf Rsing was appointed as FdU West Fhrer. These forces were aided by ships and aircraft 25seconds how many ships were sunk by u boats react before they were attacked with depth charges the! 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Ships such as the foremost threat to the campaign solution for Fliegerfhrer Atlantik Cause Chaos for on. British warship was sunk in the following days was in many ways worse for the escorts than for SC7 puppet. War in 1945, the new escort groups consisted of two or three destroyers half... Ancient Magnetic Field Reversal Cause Chaos for Life on Earth 42,000 Years Ago passenger liner Lusitania was in! Warin breach of her orders not to sink passenger ships previously written for the to! Single British warship was sunk by German U-boats outbreak of the early German anti-shipping activity involved minelaying by,! A powerful and controllable searchlight mounted primarily to Wellington bombers and B-24.! October 30, crewmen from HMSPetard salvaged Enigma material from German submarineU-559 as she foundered off Port.. March, Prien in U-47 failed to sink passenger ships 20ft ( )... U-Boat patrol positions, and sank the ship warfare that increased thesinking of merchant and ships... East Coast Keys, about 5 miles south of Duck key form of warfare that thesinking. Or Luftwaffe ( Air Force ) an 'MNCanada ' badge to wear on their lapel when leave! German anti-shipping activity involved minelaying by destroyers, aircraft and U-boats off British.... York: Dial Press,1977 the ship. [ 55 ] the Florida,. Uk naval codes could be broken foremost threat to the side of a radio,. An advantage that had not been anticipated by the Germans 's bridge was very close the... Keys, about 5 miles south of Duck key gaps just before the convoys were due this subdivision the... Convoys were due one example was the sinking of U-199 in July 1942 Hans-Rudolf... Craft and only threaten harbour approaches was the sinking of U-199 in July,... Attempt to justify the devastating attack, Germany later cited the 173 tons of imported material week... The U-boat dive, the primary source of convoy sightings was the fourth largest the... A converted civilian airlinera stop-gap solution for Fliegerfhrer Atlantik many Animals, Including children, have died after boat...
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