The Battle Of The Atlantic

[Sailor Steve]

The Asdic Myth

The faithful effort has relieved us of our great danger...that our methods are now so efficient that we will need fewer destroyers in the North Sea and the Mediterranean.
-Winston Churchill, 1936

So important is the development of Asdic that the submarine should never again be able to present us with the problem we were faced with in 1917...one destroyer could do the work of a whole flotilla.
-Admiralty Report

What I didn't know before was that early Asdic sets didn't even have screens. It was up to the skill of the operator to interpret the time between signal and return, and estimate the range to the target. Also, echoes were obtained from schools of fish, whales, wrecks, the sea bed or even different layers of water. We know that thermal layers could be useful, but the fact appears to be that Asdic was not nearly as reliable as the escorts would have liked. Also, in September 1939 only about 1 in 10 destroyers had it at all.

[mookiemookie]

I just bought it from Amazon. I had just finished "Torpedoes in the Gulf" and I've been without a book for a couple of days. It was torture.

And I also resisted the urge to add to my order the "banana hammock" thong that Amazon always advertises on the forum banner ads. :rotfl:

[Jimbuna]

I just started reading this fine book yesterday, The Battle of the Atlantic: The First Complete Account of the Origins and Outcome of the Longest and Most Crucial Campaign of World War II; by Terry Hughes and John Costello. Even though it was published thirty years ago, I'm still learning new things.

Your bang on the money there Steve
IMHO the best Allied account and equalled only by Clay Blair 'Hitler's U-Boat War' for the German perspective and same author 'Silent Victory' for the US in the Pacific

[Sailor Steve]

Harbor Raiding

The Scapa flow raid came about because Admiral Doenitz (sorry, the library's keyboard doesn't do umlauts) had been studying intelligence photographs of nets, minefields and blockships, and discovered the hole in the blockship barrier in Holm Sound. He decided that a u-boat could get through and asked Gunther Prien if he wanted the job. Together they planned the attack, and Prien was lucky enough to get in one day before the British brought in a fourth blockship and sealed the hole.

Winston Churchill called the sinking of the Royal Oak "A magnificent feat of arms".

No other British naval base was ever raided by a u-boat.

[Sailor Steve]

Originally Posted by Sailor Steve

No other British naval base was ever raided by a u-boat.

Regular harbors were another story. When Operation Neuland (a companion to Paukenschlag, with u-boats attacking tankers in the Caribbean) U-156 raided Curacao, to find it defended by nothing but a converted Dutch whaleboat. Hartenstein sank two tankers and used his deck gun on the oil storage tanks. Three other u-boats sank another seven tankers.