And it consistently understates the role of the Brazilian fishermen. Three men, working coastal fishing grounds near Salinópolis, spotted an odd shape on the horizon and investigated. They pulled a Chinese man off a wooden raft. They took him to Belém. Their intervention is the act without which none of the subsequent recognition, documentation, or remembrance would have been possible. Their names are not preserved in the available English-language record. Their contribution is real.
## The War That Ended and the Life That Continued
By the time Poon Lim received his British Empire Medal at the Seamen’s Church Institute in New York in July 1943, the Battle of the Atlantic had already turned. The same month — May 1943 — that he was recovering in hospital, the sustained Allied campaign against German U-boat operations had produced what became known as “Black May” for the German submarine service: forty-one U-boats sunk in a single month, at a loss rate that Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz could not sustain. Dönitz temporarily withdrew his submarines from the North Atlantic in late May 1943. The U-boat campaign would continue, but it never regained the strategic effectiveness of 1942.
The shipping routes that had been so deadly in the year of the Benlomond’s sinking progressively became safer as the war continued. Escort carriers — smaller, mass-producible versions of the fleet carriers that could be deployed specifically to protect convoy routes — closed the mid-Atlantic air coverage gap that U-boats had exploited. Improved sonar, radar, and depth charge technology increased the rate at which located submarines were sunk. The human intelligence work represented by the breaking of Enigma codes, combined with the operational analysis conducted by the Operational Research sections of Allied anti-submarine commands, produced increasingly effective routing and interception.