ABSTRACT
Winston Churchill, who had returned to the Admiralty at the outset of war, shared that opinion and devoted unremitting efforts to try and eliminate the threat posed by them whenever they emerged from their home bases on a raiding mission. Although a heightened state of alert was present wherever units of the Marine Nationale and Royal Navy were clustered around the globe, the overwhelming focus of attention in the early months of the war lay in the seas off Northwestern Europe. Instead of the worst-case scenario of a global war on several fronts involving the Italians, Japanese, Soviets, and Spanish, the Royal Navy and the Marine Nationale were initially confronted by a Kriegsmarine that was still several years away from performing at optimum capacity. As a naval force, the Soviet navy was a mixture of the obsolescent and the modern.
