Quote:
Originally Posted by 1Patriotofmany
How many of the unexplained sinkings were blue on blue? How did surface craft discriminate our subs from jap or german subs?
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Only confirmed ones I am aware of was the USS Seawolf SS-197 in Pacific and USS Dorado SS-248.
Seawolf was apparently sunk via depth charges from friendly destroyers, mistaken identity. Dorado was bombed off Panama by a patrol plane at night, mistaking Dorado for a German U boat.
Blinker lamps were used There were set of recognition signals or codes if will, that were exchanged to confirm identity of vessels. Flares could be used but a lot of skippers did not like to use them as could be mistaken as gunfire by eager patrol crews (happened a few times if I recall). They could also apparently use radar to exchange recognition signals.
Submerged I believe they could launch buoys or use radio and sonar (pings) but were not always reliable.
There were also areas were friendlies were not suppose to be, in Dorado's case the patrol plane had the zone mixed up and thought Dorado was in a free fire area. Later that night same plane found another surfaced submarine, attempting to communicate via blinker and the sub fired upon the plane, this was surely a German U boat.
The wiki gives an accurate description of what happened to Seawolf. Sad case of mistaken identity. They were in a "safety lane" but the CO of the DE disregarded this, having just lost a DE from the Task Group to a Japanese submarine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Seawolf_(SS-197)