A few new ideas

[derstosstrupp]

Originally Posted by Fidd

I would suspect that it was only used when under fire, or when the "warnings of the numbers of u-boats in your area" warranted it. Once per half hour would provide little or no protection via ruining torpedo solutions, and would only serve to increase the track miles of the convoy.

The idea wasn’t to foil solutions, it was to make tracking the convoy by a shadowing U-boat difficult. If you recall, a U-boat (typically the first to sight it) was designated the “contact holder” and could not attack until BdU knew he had sufficient boats in contact. That took many many hours. It needed to provide contact reports at intervals and often they lost contact because they could not follow the convoy’s movements effectively or were driven off by roving escorts. The zigzag patterns would typically be very complex, making it difficult to predict the base course and assemble boats effectively. That was the whole idea. Again, you can’t expect a glorified gaggle of civilian ships to execute the precision needed at 8-minute intervals without collisions happening (they happened as it was even with infrequent zigs). Nor did it happen for that reason in danger areas of U-boats. A recipe for loss of coordination and scattering. And unlike in Wolfpack, in real life the scatter meant absolute failure of the convoy commander and easy pickings for U-boats.