24. The U-boats were driven out of the South Atlantic the same year
The defense of the convoys in the South Atlantic was coordinated by the United States Navy and the small but effective Brazilian Navy and Air Force. The Brazilians escorted more than 600 convoys during the war, with a loss rate of 0.1%. More than 16,000,000 tons of supplies and equipment reached their destination safely under Brazilian escort, though submarine attacks by the Germans and Italians were common. American and Brazilian long-range aircraft, mostly B-24 Liberators, attacked enemy U-boats and reported their positions to surface ships which drove them off or destroyed them.
The Italians and the Germans both lost submarines in the waters patrolled by the Brazilians, who had entered the war partly in response to U-boats’ sinking ships off their coast. Between January and September 1943, German U-boats were sunk at a rate of more than one per month in Brazilian waters. For the Germans, they were irreplaceable by that stage of the war. The Allied bombing of German industries made construction of newer and more effective submarines difficult. In September, 1943, Doenitz launched a final attempt to defeat the Allies in the North Atlantic with U-boats. They sank 14 Allied ships (six of them warships) at a cost of 39 U-boats.
