Quote:
Originally Posted by Rconch
Secure my communications.
When it became quite obvious that the enigma had been broken by the Brits.
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I'm with you, but I'm not so sure it would have helped very much. Advances in sonar, HF/DF, and radar pretty much assured that even if you perfectly secured your communications, as Doenitz could have done by various means and methods*, you are still going to lose badly without major upgrades to the fleet, and you have to do that as quick or quicker than new tech is introduced by the other side. Basically, you're screwed, because it's faster and cheaper to develop a new radar, or new ASW weapon, then to develop a whole new class of boat.
You can keep the Allies from reading your messages, but they will DF them, and via that and traffic analysis they'd be able to get a pretty good picture of what was going on. Not necessarily precise enough to target hunter/killer groups to individual boats, like the Allies did, but good enough to route traffic out of the area.
The problem is that the boats have to transmit in order to be coordinated effectively by BdU, and that means those boats can be located. You have to have a completely different paradigm, one that might not be possible given the technology back then.
Once you get in contact with the enemy, though, it doesn't really matter how well your communications are secured. If he's got overwhelming technology, you're screwed.
*
Some possibilities: Every few months, at a pre-arranged time or on a pre-arranged signal, all the radio techs pull the rotors for the Enigma machines and rewire them according to a diagram. Or, get a bunch of slave labor to generate one time pads, which are perfectly secure when used properly. No amount of cryptanalysis can break them when used correctly.