The US had sent food and military supplies to Britain across the Atlantic Ocean since the outbreak of war. In just six months in 1940, German U-boats (submarines) sank over three million tonnes of Allied shipping, with great loss of life. From 1941, the US navy shared the guarding of Atlantic shipping and added resources, men and supplies to the war effort.
New radar and sonar technology helped, as did the evolving art of codebreaking. The German navy used the Enigma code to communicate with its U-boats; once this code was cracked, Allied ships knew where the U-boats would be and could avoid or attack them.
DID YOU KNOW?
The British government recruited mathematicians, translators, chess players and people gifted at solving cryptic crosswords to do top-secret work as codebreakers. At Bletchley Park outside London, the mathematician Alan Turing designed a machine to help decipher the Enigma code. By early 1945, some 10,000 people worked there (75% were women) reading up to 4,000 coded messages a day.
This 1941 German painting shows a U-boat crew watching a torpedoed British cargo ship as it sinks CHECKPOINT!
1. What happened at Pearl Harbor and what effect did it have? 2. Who was the US President at this time? 3. What was the Battle of the Atlantic? 4. What was the impact of the US entering the war?
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I can explain why the US entered World War II and the impact that it had.
