>Battle of the Caribbean
Barely anybody talks or even knows about this one. Around a dozen long-range German and Italian submarines were able to inflict considerable damage with targeted attacks on vessels carrying cargo from two critical industries: bauxite produced in the Guianas and petroleum refining in the Dutch Antilles and Trinidad. Both were vital sources of these important materials for the US and UK, especially bauxite, which the US was heavily dependent on for aluminum production. So many ore carriers and tankers were getting sunk that the American brass were starting to get nervous:

>The U-boats in the Caribbean made a severe dent in the annual shipments of one million tons of bauxite to ALCOA and ALCAN in the United States and Canada in 1942–43. US Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall in May 1942 sent Admiral Ernest J. King his assessment of the situation: the [U-boats] had destroyed 22 per cent of the Allied bauxite fleet, one out of every four Army ships sent to reinforce the Caribbean theater, and 3.5 per cent of Allied tanker tonnage per month. “Our entire war effort,” he warned the Commander in Chief US Fleet, was now “threatened.” Over the first six months, the German raiders dispatched 965,000 tons of Allied shipping in the Caribbean, of which an alarming 57 per cent were tankers. King at times suspended sailings into the area. The US Navy calculated that the sinking of three average ships was equivalent to the damage inflicted by 3,000 successful Luftwaffe bombing sorties.

During this critical shortage of bauxite and aluminum, US aircraft production was projected to only reach 48,000 in 1942 instead of the planned 60,000. It's entirely possible that the mere handful of Axis submarines that operated in the Caribbean that year prevented as many as 12,000 aircraft from rolling out of American factories.

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What are the most overrated and underrated campaigns/battles of WW2?