I Hate Single Ship Contacts!!!!

[Puster Bill]

Originally Posted by Hartmann

i like single ships contacts because is a distraction while you are looking for convoys, also you have to do a decission about intercept or not the repport.
then a intercept plotting in the map and the chase .

FW condors and inteligence agents made report contacts for me.

More likely it would have been Wilhelm Tranow's people at the Beobachtungs-Dienst ("Observation Service", commonly called B-Dienst for short). That was the service that intercepted, decoded, and distributed solutions of such things as the British Naval Cypher (which, by the way, was a code, not a cipher). They also broke the 'BAMS' code, the code the British used to coordinate shipping movements globally. At least, up until the British were able to change it to a more secure code after they figured out the Germans were reading their mail by breaking the Naval Enigma.

An example, given in David Kahn's book "Nazi Spies" says that on October 30th, 1942 B-Dienst decrypted a British message stating that convoy SC107 would steer a course of 45 degrees from it's then current location off of the tip of Newfoundland. Information like that would have even been transmitted for some of the individual ships sailing, since you have to coordinate your shipping to have it arrive at the proper port at the proper time in order to minimize bottlenecks.

The B-Dienst was reading that code well into 1943. So I just assume when I get a contact report on a map it came from B-Dienst. Of course, I might be biased towards assuming it was a SIGINT report, I was a dittybopper (Morse Interceptor) years ago. Also, since I haven't survived past November of 1942 yet, it hasn't been an issue for me

[Puster Bill]

I should also have mentioned that you don't need to actually break the other guy's codes to get this sort of information. You can get it from basic traffic analysis and HF/DF. Here is how it would work.

Admiral Goodbloke (He really is a good bloke!) on the SS Feathersword* sends a message in code at 19:00Z. Several German DF stations get bearings on it, and the position is gridsquare XYZ. Then, 8 hours later, he sends another message. He is then DFed in gridsquare XMQ. We know it is the same ship because we have studied the British callsign system. Gridsquare XMQ happens to be approximately 54 nautical miles southwest of XYZ. We now know the approximate course (Southwest), and the approximate speed ( 54 NM / 8 hours = 6.75 knots), along with his approximate current location.

You don't even have to know the actual callsign rota, as every morse operator has a distinctive way of sending, known as a 'fist'. A good dittybopper can recognize this and know that a particular operator didn't teleport from one ship to another in the space of a few hours. The 'fingerprinting' of individual transmitters was also known in WWII, and is another way to tell who is who, although I am not sure if the Germans did that or not.

The information that you would get from this kind of intelligence almost exactly tracks what you see in SHIII, as DFing is rarely precise enough to give you exact locations, so that "Slow, Medium, Fast" is appropriate speed-wise, as are general compass directions instead of precise numeric headings.

*Give me a break, I have a toddler at home.