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Originally Posted by neotekgeek
I'm reading the reports from: http://www.subvetpaul.com/52BoatsIndex.htm. Very often it's indicated that a radio transmission was sent to a sub, requesting it give status. Sometimes ordering it to respond, it would seem. Given the nature of a sub having little to no contact during radio silence, being submerged or other various reasons; how is it they receive the message? Was the message rebroadcast at intervals or relayed from other ships?
If it was simply rebroadcast, who was privy to the information? I can only imagine the hit morale would take if you kept receiving radio traffic for another sub to make contact. |
Neo,
Welcome! I think there should be some sort of prize for a "Stump the Chump" question on your first post! Communications was a little outside my area of expertise and information on this subject is rather fragmentary. If anyone else can answer this question more completely, please contribute.
As I understand it, there was a regular encoded broadcast called the Fox sent out containing information for all boats at sea. The Fox sched was repeated several times a day in case a boat was at deep submergence and could not receive. Each boat had a four digit call sign. The radiomen would tune their gear to the proper frequency at the proper time and listen for their call sign. After taking down the letter groups, they would decode it and get the message to the captain for action. Any replies were encoded and sent out as soon as possible.
With the volume of traffic on each Fox broadcast, it was not feasible for the radiomen to decode the entire broadcast. They listened for their call sign and passed on the rest. Radiomen however, are kind of a tight bunch and they usually knew each other's call sign. Repeated calls to a certain boat were usually the first sign that there was a problem. Most of the time, though, the first you knew of a missing boat was when you returned to port.
Not responding to a message was not necessarily a bad sign. Radio antennas and aerials were kind of fragile and were easily damaged by depth charges or bad weather. Many times the Radiomen had to make jury-rigged repairs to their gear at sea and sometimes the boats lost all comms and could not report in until they reached port. For this reason, unless some sort of independent confirmation was received ahead of time (which was rare) no official word was put out until the boat was several days overdue in returning.
The above info is based in part on educated guesses. If anyone has more or better info, please contribute.