First Battle of the Atlantic

Known to Wikipedia by its formal name, the Atlantic U-boat campaign of World War I, and commonly called the First Battle of the Atlantic to distinguish it from the better-known Second World War campaign of the same name, this was the prolonged naval conflict between German submarines and the Allied navies in Atlantic waters, the North Sea, the seas around the British Isles and the coast of France, from 8 August 1914 to 20 October 1918. Imperial Germany fielded U-boats against Allied and, from 1915, neutral shipping, escalating in 1917 to unrestricted submarine warfare in an attempt to starve Britain out of the war before the United States, provoked by the campaign itself, could fully mobilize. The Allies eventually countered with convoys, depth charges, and the Q-ship and hydrophone, ending the war with the campaign broadly recognized as an Allied victory: Germany lost 178 U-boats and roughly 5,000 submariners, while the Allies lost around 4,000 ships and 8 million tons of shipping, two-thirds of all Allied tonnage sunk in the entire war.