Hello,
from what i read, there should be no more than one, seldomly two encounters a day, with one plane, in the North Sea. Maybe a bit more during the british/french/polish attempt to land troops near Narvik, during the Norway invasion.
This certainly changed towards the end of the war, but lots of boats still managed to get through the North Sea to the Atlantic surfaced, in 1944, with occasional crash dives. After february 1945, any radar warning device would sing out all the time nerve-wrecking the crews, so they would rather prefer to use the snorkel, until reaching the open Atlantic.
Even if it sounds like a bad idea, if the boat chose to remain surfaced, most planes held their distance from the AA guns, until the boat obviously tried to dive, in which case they would go in asap, and bomb/rocket the boat.
Diving in time is certainly the better idea, especially when destroyers were being called in, but then you had to see those tiny spots in time, and not confuse them with mews - which seems to have happened regularly ..
Greetings,
Catfish
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