[Aktungbby]

Originally Posted by derstosstrupp

Neal’s spot on with German doctrine - single shots below 1000 if at all possible, otherwise spreads. Eels are expensive!

indeed, "one eel, one ship" as 'Silent Otto' put it. Sink or cripple with one eel! then finish with the deck gun when safe to do so. Penetrating inside the convoy, the range to the ship columns is under 1000 meters and that, in conjunction with steam eels set on high-40 knots- practically insures a hit at 5-600 meters and a even a miss will often hit a overlap vessel in the adjoing ship column. NOTE: It is also
exceedingly feasible to get ahead of a convoy as Onkel suggests, and approach it dead on, allowing the convoy to pass overhead. Rise to periscope depth when under the convoy and wreak havok from within, expending all eels: then again finish off the crips and reload when the convoy moves on. EDIT:

https://time.com/5772665/uboat-wargames/ <REQUIRED READING!

THIS JUST IN TODAY'S WSJ LITERARY SECTION: THE INVENTION OF THE RASPBERY(MANEUVER) A GAME OF BIRDS AND WOLVES 309 PGS. IN A NUTSHELLL>

 

On a freezing morning in 1942, a 19-year-old naval recruit named Janet Okell showed up for her first day of work at Derby House, an office complex in war-torn Liverpool. She was led into a vast room that looked like a cross between a gymnasium and a children’s nursery. The floor, covered with brown linoleum, was divided into squares by white grid lines and strewn with pieces of chalk and balls of string. Young women in white shirts, ties and trousers, their sleeves rolled up, were down on their knees moving wooden models of ships and submarines around the floor. It was like a giant chess game.
Actually it was more a game of Battleship. The floor represented the Atlantic Ocean and the players, working in teams, were re-enacting sea battles as a training exercise for convoy officers, showing them how to sight German U-boats. Canvas sheets were hung about the room, and the officers stood behind them, observing the proceedings through peepholes that simulated a distant perspective. The players took turns firing torpedoes and dropping depth charges, the U-boats diving and surfacing to make their attacks as the escort ships wheeled around in great arcs. Decoders at Bletchley Park provided the game with up-to-date information on the location of enemy craft.
The German submarine fleet was operating in “wolf packs,” a strategy devised by Adm. Karl Dönitz that had become a lethal threat to merchant ships bringing vital supplies of oil, raw materials and food across the Atlantic. The U-boat terror, Winston Churchill wrote later, was “the only thing that ever frightened me.” At the end of 1941 he called an emergency meeting and asked a retired navigational strategist, Capt. Gilbert Roberts, to create a new department named the Western Approaches Tactical Unit. Roberts quickly assembled a team of inexperienced, bright and very young Wrens (members of the Women’s Royal Naval Service) to work with him at Derby House. Women were not particularly welcome in the navy and some of the officers coming in for training sessions resented being told what to do by girls barely out of school who had probably never even been to sea. They were to change their minds.
Roberts wondered how, if the U-boats had been firing from outside the convoy, they’d managed to sink ships at the center. His team ran a new game to find out. They concluded that the submarines were entering convoys from behind at night, unobserved. Once they were inside they would torpedo a ship and then dive down to the bottom.
With the help of two Wrens, Roberts plotted a new counterattack: pinpoint the submerged U-boat by triangulated sonar and destroy it with depth charges. Janet Okell, playing a convoy escort, scored a direct hit. Her fellow player, Jean Laidlaw, named this maneuver the Raspberry (a “razz of contempt aimed at Hitler”). It was to prove its worth over and over.
IN SHORT, ADM DÖNITZ'S WOLFPACKS....OUTDONE... & LAID LOW IF U WILL! BY 'RAZZIE WRËNS!'
Roberts wondered how, if the U-boats had been firing from outside the convoy, they’d managed to sink ships at the center. His team ran a new game to find out. They concluded that the submarines were entering convoys from behind at night, unobserved. Once they were inside they would torpedo a ship and then dive down to the bottom.
With the help of two Wrens, Roberts plotted a new counterattack: pinpoint the submerged U-boat by triangulated sonar and destroy it with depth charges. Janet Okell, playing a convoy escort, scored a direct hit. Her fellow player, Jean Laidlaw, named this maneuver the Raspberry (a “razz of contempt aimed at Hitler”). It was to prove its worth over and over. Simon Parkin, a contributing writer to the New Yorker and the author of “Death by Video Game: Danger, Pleasure, and Obsession on the Virtual Frontline” (2015), has written a thoroughly absorbing book, drawing upon archives and oral histories. It reads like a thriller, with its accounts of nerve-wracking battles, extreme weather, icebergs, and ships sunk in a matter of minutes. (DreamWorks, Steven Spielberg’s company, has optioned the film rights.) Mr. Parkin brings into focus the heroic lives of Wrens whose arduous work was not only overlooked but also kept an “official secret” for 50 years. The women who played the game might never have boarded a ship, but their work saved the lives of countless who did.
I was interested to learn that one of the officers training at Derby House was Cmdr. Nicholas Monsarrat, whose bestselling war novel “The Cruel Sea” (1951) gave me childhood nightmares. Mr. Parkin writes that it was seven years after the war before Monsarrat could bring himself to touch the water with his toes when he went to the beach. For him, and thousands of sailors on both sides of the conflict, the sea was a lethal monster.