Decisive Weapons S02E04 - U-Boat Killer: The Anti-Submarine Warship

England 1940 in the skies over Kent RAF fighters take on and drive back wave after wave of German bombers the dramatic defeat of the Luftwaffe ended at a stroke Hitler's plans for a full-scale invasion did mark the beginning of a longer and more ruthless battle for Britain a desperate battle fought over 22 million square miles of the Atlantic Ocean Hitler would wage this war with his deadliest weapon yet one that struck from beneath the waves the u-boat the aim was to cut Britain's vital supply line to starve the country into submission Britain's survival depended on the Merchant Navy and the warships protecting the job were so very very important in that the supplies of raw materials were coming in even though there was only half of a convoy load that got to these shores we had to have these and this amount of stuff coming in all the time otherwise the war would have been lost the purpose was not to sink warships if that was possible it was done but the main aim the main target was the the Merchant Navy the battle against the submarine was one of the bitterest struggles of the war using the latest electronic technology and support from the air it would take the Allied navies three long years of setbacks near defeat to win back the Atlantic with this the world's first truly modern anti-submarine warship this is the story of how what started as the u-boats war ended up belonging to the submarine kill British problem after the fall of France was they only had one place to get supplies from that was North America in the short term and they needed 55 million tons of imports per year it all came by sea and the main connection was from North America to Britain three thousand miles of the North Atlantic and this was the obvious target for their u-boats and that was their strategy to try and cut the transatlantic lifeline or at least to strangle it sufficiently to prevent the British from being able to carry on fighting at the heart of the Admiralty's defensive strategy with a convoys huge flotillas of merchant ships often over 50 strong sailing in close formation they would be accompanied by a naval escort the ideal ships for convoy protection work were destroyers and sloops both are fast and well-armed principally with depth charges 250 pound drums of high-explosive which was set to detonator the u-boats estimating death but destroyers and sloops whirring critically short supply and the Admiralty was forced to rely on a makeshift warship based on an old design in the last days of peace they cast about for a suitable substitute escort and they came up with a type of ship which is actually derived from a Whaler a Corvette and so these Corvettes stood in for the missing higher-performance escorts and did a magnificent job which they were never designed to do just a usual story of improvisation in wartime life onboard a Corvette was pretty rugged you have no idea how they rolled and pitched continuously in the early Corvettes the decks were always wash there was an open bridge there was no shelter many men were frostbitten there was no Arctic clothing like there is today you had a duffle coat and if it got wet you might not be able to drive for days the men slept under the short fo'c'sle slung in hammocks and very often was soaking before they got on watch so life was fairly hard but worse than the misery of the Atlantic weather for the Corvette cruise was the feeling of impotence when facing the enemy you're a sitting duck absolutely a sitting duck in the case of one particular convoy c7 they were out there rejoin that convoy incoming from Nova Scotia and it was absolutely loaded about 30 ships and we ended up with only 16 the first notification we had that there was one in the vicinity one or more wasn't that there'd be the so that was sound of a torpedoes striking the side of a merchant ship within seconds the alarm bells would ring and would be closed up in action stations you could safely say meant on many occasions that the u-boats were not port starboard or anywhere and away from the convoys they were in of them to convoy they'd be sinking them and over this and you couldn't do a thing about it if we did cite a u-boat which was very very rarely we couldn't fire at it because we'd be hitting some of the motion ships so we were there to pick up survivors basically and we acknowledged that especially in the Corvettes in the case of tanker the torpedo of the sea was one mass of flame instructions were always given to the crews of nursing planets to swim beneath flame because there's an endpoint well now who who in that state could think about those things at that time so therefore they were very badly burned in many cases and you do love their arms and the skin would burn it would just come off you see and they usually died very early they were the ones who did die earlier well the British and the Germans the fundamental problem was finding each other in the vastness of the Atlantic both sides use a primitive device called a hydrofoil to listen for the enemy's propeller noise but the hydrophone was useless against a u-boat already lying in wait with its engines off what they really wanted was an active method of detecting submarines where you would actually search the ocean floor and just at the very very end of the first world war they developed something called a stick which worked by sending two beams down below the hull of the ship and when you sent out the beams you got a ping back an echo from a submerged object you would approach him and try to gauge what his speed was and what steps might be and then you would go straight for him at maximum speed that was maximum speed for a Corvette which would be 60 knots if he did cube actual speed when you dropped your depth charge as you blew your Stern off so you made sure he did maximum speed will you always lost contact with in the last 200 yards the last 200 yards was guesswork so it was crude as dick represented the Navy's first tentative step into a new world of electronic warfare but it had serious limitations although I gave range and compass bearing as they couldn't determine the u-boats death and since depth charges were only effective within 25 feet of the targets attacking a u-boat was still a hit-and-miss affair but just occasionally the Corvette's would get the chance to turn the tables on their underwater enemy the sound of the air stick was terrifying ping hit your hull and you could hear it throughout the board it had one has to admit that a disconcerting effect also on the crew because underwater you are defenseless you can't do a thing the first thing to do was to install complete silence on on the u-boat and em if possible to go deeper and there you set and you heard MD astok and they think that you and they through that's charge and it was a simple question of who could stay longer where to be better nerves and the most impedance submarine commanders had the best nerves of the old Navy unlike modern submarines u-boats was slow in the water and could only stay submerged for a maximum of 18 hours it was on the surface that they were most deadly and the surface was precisely where they could not be detected by a snake Lavanya in zoo - of the state hunter it's karma Zion convoy in indecent zoo - a nine iron board had infested Santa paid Satan on the unearned border and so few women hazard in July so in Zeke's become than virus Sunnis most merciless mailing of Mumbai tiger and guy from Cobra litter on counter order niched the most horrible time for the convoy would normally be morning Twilight or evening Twilight the you Berta would have got in position and it is very hard to detect visually anything on the surface at that time he have our support sent minor Anglophone uber vasa by nazca farm without dog keep this machine the Merkley skies an entry demand rifle desire and or among men less civilian finding a light so he Lyons zackin or none Goffman mitten him glide so and they get this ravine the move described novice enshrined in store there's man own gesundheit that between July and November 1940 u-boats sank one and a half million tons of Allied shipping u-boat crews call it their happy time like the Luftwaffe the u-boat fleet was an elite force and it too had its aces they and their commander-in-chief Calder nets were apparently succeeding where Goering and his Air Force had failed as dick alone was not enough to thwart the marauding u-boats as well as he is the escorts needed electronic eyes the solution laying the Great British innovation that had worked so well in the Battle of Britain radar but using radar at sea proved extremely difficult the problem with radar is that the closer to the surface of the earth or the sea that you wish to use it the more precise it has to be a primitive first radar sets of the kind used in the Battle of Britain were obviously pointed at sky and could not really be used to look for objects on the surface of the sea partly because the wavelength metric was very long and that meant it was very imprecise and partly because an object as small as the conning tower of a u-boat was invisible to primitive radar that had to wait for a second generation called centimetric radar where the wavelength was reduced sufficiently in fact 10 centimetres to be able to pick out an object of that size the range of 7,000 yards how that would of course a tactical transformation of the first importance the fact that you could now locate a u-boat on the surface at night or in day especially at night unknown to him gave you a totally new weapon on a totally new dimension if for example you might locate him for a 5 miles away later you could do better than that but you knew where he was that you went straight for him suddenly out of the darkness was coming and an escort vessel to attack him and he didn't quite know how this could be happening and made all the difference Bandhan especially combined with the a stick if he dived you know where you dived the fact that you were had located the farm object unknown to him gave a totally new weapon so you knew where he was you could attack him immediately but just as Royal Navy tactics and technology were improving the u-bolt building program began to gather pace doughnuts now had enough boats begin using the Wolfpack tactic sending 15 or more u boats against a single convoy even with azdak and radar the defenders found themselves over stretched the Admiralty had to rely on deciphered German radio messages to try to steer convoys around the assembled wolf pack's Clyde losses rose during 1941 but so did the number of u-boats something the uneasy stalemate was broken by the entry into the war of the United States if the Allies thought this alone would market earning their fortunes they were in for a rude awakening one of the great ironies of the Second World War is that when America entered it the short-term cost to the Allied cause as it then became in full was enormously high there was America with this virtually infinite industrial mussel huge reserves of manpower enormous wealth huge Navy and all the rest of it and you'd think our problem solved but not so the Americans made a fundamental error at this point they took the view that an inadequate escort was worse than none so they took the trouble of assembling all these ships and when they got into American waters they were unprotected and the u-boats couldn't believe their luck and for six months from in the first half of 1942 effectively me Germans had an operation drumbeat as they call it or thunder clap you can translated either way pal concealed arc in which they had a second happy time bargain lockers and causes aboard when vast fabulous day inter eager to swoon x-men in Hassan season thus far as a dove Zia and fulfill own survival behavior of honor of the American our season The Fairly on trend yet Barton India India Z along ela shiver on disapper Bardia Ferguson East my fatness meze course on all of easi call by July 1942 the Americans were at last providing convoy escorts thus ending the German second happy time in the meantime the Allies had made further advances in convoy protection along with azdak and radar escort ships now had high-frequency Direction finding equipment which could locate a u-boat from its radio transmissions as much as fifty miles away and they had a new weapon the Hedgehog 24 mortars fired in a tighter pattern more precise than depth charges they will explode on contact with a u-boat hole the news really started to tighten with the coordinated use of aircraft like the warships they use radar and in addition to bombs depth charges but the Allied aircraft had limited range and durn it simply responded by funneling his u-boats into a 300 mile stretch of ocean known as the Greenland air gap British sailors called it torpedo Junction even as late as March 43 we were losing merchant ships at the rate of 145 per month which was significantly greater than the combined Allied forces were able to build and replacement so we were losing the u-boat war and there were voices in the Admiralty was the effectiveness questioning the effectiveness of the convoy system should it be discontinued so they were all very worried even until the end of March 43 there was only one bomber with the effective range to provide full air cover for the convoys that was the b-24 Liberator the Allies knew they had to do whatever it took to close the air gap and at the end of March 1943 they began diverting 200 liberators from bombing raids over Germany to airfields in Newfoundland Iceland and Northern Ireland the dreaded air gap was finally closed the Allied navies now had the specialist electronics and the weapons they needed and three years on they at last had the right ship the frigate frigates were as maneuverable and quick to build as a Corvette but with the ocean-going strength and offensive capacity of a destroyer the contrast between what a seasoned convoys sailor would have seen in 1939-1940 and what was going on three or four years later must been quite staggering but originally you would have probably a couple of rusty destroyers and a Corvette or two rolling around helplessly almost in bad weather not really coordinated you would watch your ships being decimated by determined u-boat captains aces and then in 1943 you would be surrounded by small purpose-built anti-submarine warfare frigates equipped with radar able to whistle up air support sophisticated azdak operators working in pairs the contrast was absolutely astounding and by 1943 or so you actually had your anti-submarine ship for the first time and that was nearly half a century after the submarine was invented the 38 merchant ships of convoy s c-130 set sail for England on May the 11th 1943 with a complete anti-submarine defense force around them although no one yet realized it the turning point in the war against the u-boat had arrived at the head of the escort ships was the destroyer HMS Duncan and her commander Peter Gretton whenever a new breed of determined anti-submarine specialists my father was a real professional and that was in a world at a time when the business he was in of anti-submarine warfare and particular convoy protection was not very fashionable people had done very little work on that between the wars it was considered a secondary business to do he tried to professionalize it and I think succeeded and certainly amongst his colleagues had a tremendous reputation for ruthless efficiency and professionalism he used to leave the loud speaker for the azdak on in his cabin when he was so-called meant to be sleeping and resting and quite often he'd be the first person to here that vital ping change of tone which indicated the possibility of a submarine in the vicinity during its deployed 21 new boats in the path of the convoy but grettings escorts now had the early warning systems the experience and the armaments to keep the u-bolts out of range of the merchant ships the convoy was further reinforced on the 19th of May with another five warships which had sailed from Newfoundland two frigates HMS Jed and Senan made an immediate impact sinking u9 54 of the rear of the convoy donuts his own son Peter was among those killed the next kill was from the air a Hudson bomber spotted a u-boat on the surface 10 miles away from the height of 50 feet the pilot scored a direct hit with four depth charges you 273 sank without having fired a single torpedo the following day a liberator from 120 squadron found a u-boat on the surface and it's act this was the first time in my opinion that the aircraft cover was probably decisive they spotted the wolf pack's waiting we knew exactly where they were so you had a case of you birds being sung 50 to 100 miles ahead of us nothing came near the convoy convoy SC 130 had passed through the u-boat killing grounds unharmed it's safe arrival signaled victory in the Battle of the Atlantic one of the features of the s C 130 story is the way in which the escorts prevented a u-boats from getting a strike in against their charges the merchant ships and there's an added bonus they sank or with the help of their friends in the aircraft they sank through u-boat so that that is that is actually a triumph to bring the entire convoy without a scratch on its paintwork right the way across the Atlantic somewhat ahead of time sinking three u-boats on the way it's it's extraordinary contrast with what was happening in March in the month of May 1943 the Allies lost 34 merchant ships but they sank 41 u-bolts they're destroyed one-third of the German operational fleet in a matter of weeks just as Goering had been forced to call off the Luftwaffe three years earlier now during it said to withdraw his u-boats during its had reached a point where the combination of forces against him was now devastating and inescapable no matter where the u-boats were they will be met by a strong escort an integrated escort an extremely well equipped escort on the surface and on top of that there will be a patrols overhead and on top of that these aircraft had teeth they were now able to kill submarines very effectively with a combination of radar and depth charges now it was the Allies turn to celebrate and with victory in the Atlantic attention could be turned toward Europe culmination of the war was d-day in June 1944 but the build-up to that was at least 18 months and just imagine millions of tons of munitions Canadian Army as well as the American army all piling into the South of England ready for the invasion of u-boats have been able to strike effectively at that lifeline which was now a great fatty artery compared what it had been before the results would have been horrendous they had to solve the problem of the u-boat and what's more they had to have a at least a year clear run to build up their supplies for Normandy and that's what the victory in spring 1943 actually meant it meant that victory became possible tomorrow decisive weapons continues with the Springfield rifle this fast and accurate firearm made its definitive mark at Gettysburg in July 1863 decisive weapons seven o'clock tomorrow

Channel: erana19

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Keywords: decisive weapons, u-boat

Id: jyRLJPLTCGA

Length: 26min 16sec (1576 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 25 2016