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TORONTO - It's an oft-overshadowed battle that brought the Second World War to Canada's very shores, and very nearly cost the Allies the war.

The Battle of the Atlantic defined Canada's naval identity for the decades that followed and left its brave survivors with harrowing memories of destruction on the water. Their stories are featured in the documentary series, "Convoy: War For the Atlantic," starting Sunday on History Television as part of a slate of Remembrance Day programming planned for the coming week.

In the scope of Canada's wartime contribution, nothing compares to the naval efforts put forth from 1939 to 1945, says historian Marc Milner, who is interviewed in the documentary. He notes that although rudimentary at the time, Canadian ships escorted vital supplies to Britain across a vast ocean infested with deadly German U-Boats.

"The North Atlantic becomes something of a Canadian lake by 1944," explains Milner, director of the Military and Strategic Studies program at the University of New Brunswick.

"We become a big player in the Atlantic war, and arguably we are more important to the outcome of the Atlantic war than Canadian contributions are to any other Allied campaign."

The Atlantic was considered a vital lifeline throughout the six-year campaign -- securing the region was crucial to ensuring that men, fuel, raw material and supplies could make their way to the war front overseas.

Intent on choking the shipping lanes that linked Britain to its Canadian and U.S. allies, Germany employed one of the most feared weapons of the war, deadly U-Boats that proved remarkably efficient at destroying merchant ships.

Toronto veteran Geoff Smith, a sonar operator who escorted supply convoys across the Atlantic, recalls that, at times, it seemed the subs were everywhere.

"You wouldn't expect to have them up in Labrador, you wouldn't expect to have them in the straits of Belle Isle but they were all over the place," says Smith, now 88.

"And they were very, very efficient ships. They ...(had) the latest equipment and they were big. They could spend quite a bit of time at sea so they were quite a threat."

A devastating blow would come in 1942, when German U-boats snuck into the Gulf of St. Lawrence unleashing a barrage of destruction on Canadian shores.

Smith recalls the deafening boom of hearing an underwater torpedo make contact.

"It's a memory that you maintain as long as you're alive. All that's terrifying, to see a ship blow up," he says.

He adds that many seamen were lost as they were tossed overboard by blasts, and often there was little that the escorts could do to help.

"Nine times out of 10, ships didn't stop. It was forbidden, in fact, to stop because you just became a target and if you lost an escort that made the convoy all the more vulnerable. But my skipper was a seaman's seaman and he did what he could when he could," said Smith.

"I pulled the guys out of the waters, I did on many occasions, and had to treat them. We're not nurses or doctors and we'd have to tear the skin off of them sometimes and treat their wounds. But we did the best we could."

History Television's four-part documentary "Convoy," a Canada/U.K. co-production, airs Sunday through Wednesday. Other Remembrance Day programming on the channel includes documentaries on Vimy Ridge and the battle of Passchendaele.

Saturday on CTV, "W5" remembers Newfoundland under attack in the Second World War.

Over on PBS, the documentary "The Way We Get By," profiles a trio of senior citizens who have greeted more than 900,000 American troops at a tiny airport in Bangor, Maine.

Vision TV's schedule includes several programs about the Holocaust, including Tuesday's broadcast of the Oscar-winning documentary "Into the Arms of Strangers," about a British mission to rescue more than 10,000 children from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia prior to the Second World War.

Â鶹ӰÊÓ Channel will mark Nov. 11 with coverage from the National War Memorial in Ottawa.