immediately after the war, ‘a heartening effect on the British public’. The political advantage apparently justified the damage caused to truth.5 Arguably, had the full miserable extent of the Allied performance in the Battle of the Atlantic to date been fully known, it may have had an invigorating effect on the coordination of efforts to find an urgent solution. The author of the inquiry, Admiral V. Lt. Godfrey* concluded, however, that Britain ‘never came quite clean about the progress of the war at sea’.
