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World War II was not decided only by battles.
It was decided by whether ships could cross the ocean faster than they could be destroyed.
In this episode of Extremes of War, we examine one of the most extreme moments of the entire conflict:
the passage of 110 Allied merchant ships into the North Atlantic in March 1943, during the height of the Battle of the Atlantic.
Between March 16 and March 20, 1943, two major convoys — Convoy HX-229 and Convoy SC-122 — entered the same operational area at the same time.
Together, they formed the largest concentration of merchant shipping ever assembled in a single contested zone during World War II.
The numbers were stark:
• ~110 merchant ships
• 7,000–8,000 civilian sailors
• Fewer than 20 escort vessels
• Zero aircraft coverage across the mid-Atlantic air gap
• More than 40 German U-boats directed against them
• At least 22 ships sunk in less than five days
German submarine operations were coordinated under Karl Dönitz, whose wolf-pack doctrine reached its statistical peak during this period.
For the Allied convoys, protection no longer meant safety.
It meant calculation.
Convoy doctrine accepted a brutal reality:
ships would be lost, sailors would die, and the formation would continue moving — because stopping meant annihilation.
This episode explores:
• Why convoys had to grow to extreme size
• How escort forces became mathematically insufficient
• Why air cover absence changed everything
• How loss was absorbed as a requirement, not a failure
This was not a victory.
It was not a defeat.
It was endurance under arithmetic pressure.
Extremes of War is part of Moments Before, a documentary series examining the most disproportionate and revealing moments of World War II — moments where scale itself becomes the story.


All figures and claims in this episode are based on established naval history and consensus research:
• Imperial War Museums — Battle of the Atlantic
• Encyclopaedia Britannica — Convoy system & U-boat campaign
• National WWII Museum — March 1943: The Atlantic Crisis
• Clay Blair, Hitler’s U-Boat War
• Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich at War

World War II
World War 2
Battle of the Atlantic
110 ships Atlantic
Convoy HX-229
Convoy SC-122
March 1943 Atlantic
WWII convoys
WWII naval warfare
U-boat wolf pack
Karl Donitz
WWII merchant navy
Naval logistics WWII
Extremes of War
Moments Before
Historical documentary