GWX diffuculty

[Marcello]

Originally Posted by GoldenRivet

dont forget das flugzeug

i think they are too easily spotted at night by the watch crew in SH3. In mid to late war, generally the first indication that an airplane had you dead to rights was the bright Leigh light beaming down on you, followed seconds later by a barrage of depth charges or bombs or rockets from which there was often no escape.

quite a ruthless foe really

piercing the night with radar, you cant see, and cant detect well even with the often faulty detectors...

it sees you though, from many miles away.

it dives in - engines idling. You cant hear it over the wind and waves yet still it comes down in the dark.

then in the last seconds, the light illuminates. and if the intense 50,000,000 candlepower light shined down on a German U-boat, the bombardier toggled a spread of bombs or depth charges.

from that little U-boat all you could do was hope against hope and often times that burst of adrenalin, that moment of fear and panic... that was the last thing you ever experienced in this world.

Airplanes were deadly, but with a correctly employed snorkel it was possible to escape detection, most of the time at least. Surface warships however had the advantage of superior staying power, as they could attack, attack and then attack some more.

[GoldenRivet]

for the sake of suppressing a u-boat thats true, but i think it bears mentioning that the number of u-boats sunk by ships is virtually equal to the number sunk by aircraft.

additionally - the raised snorkel was useless in rough seas... in calm seas it was somewhat easy to detect with radar.

[Marcello]

The snorkel was no panacea, but it was anything but easy to detect, according to this report

The sweep width is then about 1/10 of a mile, only about I per cent of the value on a surfaced U-boat. In operations, therefore, Schnorchel has been very successful in countering radar detection. In the daytime, when visual sightings are also possible, its immunity from contact is not quite so great. The sweep width has been estimated at 0.6 mile

From what I recall the plan in case the XXIs were to be encountered in numbers was to essentially give up most patrol areas and massing the aircrafts to carry out overlapping searches in the path ahead of convoys. Surface escorts armed with forward throwing A/S mortars on the other hand retained most of their value against snorkel boats.

[Jimbuna]

A slightly differing set of information:

Finally, allied radar was still sensitive enough to be able to detect an object as small as a snorkel head. Although this was much more difficult compared to a surfaced U-boat, allied reports indicated that a surfaced U-boat could be detected up to a distance of 10km, whereas a snorkel head could be detected at only about 5km. Later, snorkel heads were coated with radar absorbing materials known as Tarnmatte. It was claimed that this reduced radar signature by up to 90 percent, although there were no definitive tests.

http://www.uboataces.com/snorkel.shtml