Between 1939 and 1945, more than 36,000 Allied sailors and navy airmen and 36,000 merchant seamen lost their lives in perhaps the least-known major battle of World War II, the Battle of the Atlantic. All the tanks, planes, bombs, and other vital supplies that the U.S. used to fight in Europe -- as well as the American troops themselves -- crossed the Atlantic aboard ship, a journey made perilous by the German U-boats that prowled the seas. In author and maritime journalist David Fairbank White gives us a masterful, authoritative account of how these American, Canadian, and British air and sea forces fought the Germans and prevailed -- at a terrible cost.