Read Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War for Free Online

game of knowing one’s enemy. Nowhere did this seem more important than in the Battle of the Atlantic. For the U-boatsto know where the convoys were, or for the Allied navies to glean the disposition of the U-boats, made an utterly critical difference. Small wonder that the code breakers at Bletchley Park included a substantial naval intelligence section reporting directly to the Admiralty, or that Doenitz relied so heavily upon his invaluable B-Dienst.
    Nonetheless, the warding off of a submarine attack and the destruction of the attackers had to be done through technology, that is, by defensive and offensive weapons platforms. It was true, obviously, in all theaters of war and at all times, but it is astonishing how much the exigencies of total war, and the terrible importance of winning the Battle of the Atlantic to both sides, led in the single year of 1943 to a staggering increase in the number of new ways of detecting an enemy and of deploying new weapons to kill him. This conflict was, more than any other battle for the seas, a scientists’ war.
    But the acquisition of newer technologies to detect and beat off, or to pursue and destroy, called in turn for their most efficient application—for significant improvements in tactics and training, both by individual submarines, surface escorts, and aircraft and (especially) by groups of them working together. Here the U-boats had an early advantage. They had all-volunteer crews, with some of their commanders remarkably young yet very capable, and saw themselves as an elite branch. They had a single operational task—to sink, and keep sinking, Allied merchantmen, and then avoid being sunk themselves. For a long time they enjoyed the tactical benefit of Doenitz’s switching their mode of attack to nighttime surface encounters. They also possessed a very robust wireless communications system, so if one U-boat spotted a convoy, the other members of the wolf pack would very swiftly know about it and adjust their locations accordingly. Finally, the targets in question were usually very slow-moving and thus offered repeated chances for attack, so even if the submarines waited until the convoys were in the mid-Atlantic air gap, they still had lots of time.
    Against such a strong hand the Allies had initially very few trumps. What limited number of aircraft carriers the Royal Navy possessed (often as few as only three or four) had to be deployed for aerial cover of the battle fleets and the Mediterranean convoys. Those same high-profile tasks also consumed the energies of the flotillas of the speedy fleet destroyers. The convoys were thus protected by a tiny group ofsmaller, slower, and often nearly obsolete craft, lacking aerial protection in the middle stretches, most of them lacking detection equipment, and armed with what were essentially weapons of the First World War. A U-boat could actually outrun most of the early Allied escorts, at least on the surface, if its commander was willing to accept the risk of being spotted—though of course neither hunter nor hunted could go at full speed in the massive Atlantic storms. Much-improved equipment was promised, and some was in the pipeline, but could it be gotten to Liverpool and Halifax and the air squadrons in time?
    Two other inestimably important factors at play in battles of such strain, anxiety, and loss as the convoy shoot-outs were leadership and morale. As we shall see below, the element of morale did turn significantly to one side’s favor later in the Atlantic campaign, after mid-1943, but on the whole the bodies of combatants were fairly evenly matched in this dimension. Doenitz and Horton were worthy opponents, and the latter received a great reinforcement when Air Marshal Sir John Slessor took over as C in C of RAF Coastal Command in February 1943: Slessor was dedicated to defeating the U-boats and a firm advocate of air-sea cooperation even if it involved frequent fights with Harris at Bomber Command over the