With that statement, Churchill was declaring the vital importance of winning the War in the Atlantic, and the crucial role Allied shipping would play for the war to succeed. For six long years the Royal Canadian Navy and the Merchant Marine, as well as the Royal Canadian Air Force, were to play a pivotal role in what would become known as the Battle of the Atlantic. Convoys were the life-blood that sustained not only the war effort but the survival of the British people themselves.

Without the determination of the merchant convoys and their naval escorts, the massive materiel superiority which the Allies used to such advantage against the Germans could never have been amassed. The enormous Allied Armies could not have been fed and Britain, starved and alone in Europe, would have faced a disastrous fate.