The Battle of the Atlantic: U-boats and how to sink them

hello now in an earlier video i talked about western approaches which was a command center in liverpool uh from which the british ran the battle of the atlantic in world war ii now in this video which has been sponsored by my friends at the great courses plus more of them later i'm going to be talking mainly about the kit the equipment the detection equipment and the various weaponry used by the two sides during that battle now the first thing i want to say is that this battle really was terribly important uh if britain had been starved into submission which was completely possible uh by being cut off from her suppliers from around the world then she would perhaps have had to bow out of world war ii and then what would have happened um would the rest of the commonwealth have carried on without her it's possible and some speculate that maybe uh the australians and the new zealanders and the volunteers from india might have congregated in south africa and then somehow made their way up the entire height of africa it couldn't have gone round the coast presumably by sea because the british would have lost the battle of the atlantic and so that would have been a tremendously dangerous way of doing it so then when you get to north africa then what you do you go east and then around the eastern mediterranean up and join the russians and fight to liberate the world from the east in collaboration with the russians or do you go perhaps to spain and then through spain which would then presumably bring spain into the war in franco on the axis side well i wasn't expecting actually to get quite so sidetracked so early on but the point is that it mattered uh 30 000 allied uh servicemen lost their lives in the battle of the atlantic 2 603 merchant vessels sank to the bottom of the ocean sometimes with all hands 175 naval vessels allied naval vessels were sunk and on the german side uh losses were staggering too of the 1156 u-boats that the germans built during world war ii in the battle of the atlantic 784 of them got sunk and 75 of the crewmen who were uh volunteers by the way of the volunteer crewmen of u-boats died yes that's right if you're a u-boat uh crewman in world war ii you have a one-in-four chance of seeing the end of world war ii it was staggeringly high casualty rate and i should say that um the merchant seaman uh british merchant seaman had something like a one in four or one in five chance of dying which was a much much higher chance than if you were serving in the navy or the army or the raf which was a bit of a shame uh for several reasons obviously one to death but also they weren't being given medals uh like the the people in the other service uh services were being given and they weren't given the honours and the kudos so for instance when you're ashore off duty and you go to the pub and people look at that raf man over there in your smart raf uniform does he look smart and he's clearly doing his bit but look at those shirkers over there they're in fact merchant seaman doing a more dangerous job with longer hours than that raf guy but they didn't have a smart uniform to wear when they were off duty in the pub so they didn't get the kudos and they didn't get the medals well i'm glad to be able to report that recently that sort of been put right in that a few memorials been put up and some medals have been dished out to elderly surviving veterans of the merchant sea uh campaign in such things as the much of the battle of the atlantic and i've been sidetracked twice so now there was something called the mid-atlantic gap this was also called the black pit this was that area of the mid-atlantic that could not be covered by aircraft so aircraft might take off from uh britain on one side of atlantic or newfoundland on the other and they go a little way out to sea escorting the uh the the convoys and keeping them safe seeing off any uh german aircraft that might threaten it and spotting u-boats that might threaten it but then they would get low on fuel and they would have to turn around and fly back to their bases on land leaving the convoys to carry on across the great black pit at the mercy of the german u-boats um now the crossing of this black pit was extremely dangerous at certain times during the war there was for instance uh the happy time which since there was a second happy time later became called the first happy time and that's the name given to it by u-boat commanders because though uber u-boats were being lost they were sinking several ships for every loss of a u-boat they they were really winning at this point uh so uh the british had a tremendous problem to deal with their ships in these convoys are going down and they have to come up with some way of dealing with this u-boat menace now the u-boats fortunately were not tremendously numerous in fact right at the very start of the war there were only typically five u-boats on any one given day on patrol out in the mid-atlantic only five and typically dernitz admiral dernitz who was the commander the german commander of the of the battle of the atlantic he would have them strung out in a line uh looking for convoys and if one of them spotted a convoy it was his job to tell admiral dernitz and to tell all the others uh where this convoy was and then to converge on it and then start sinking ships and you wouldn't just launch off a torpedo okay job done you would stay with that convoy there'll be a running battle and several u-boats acting in this way together it would be like a pack of wolves carrying a load of deer so they were referred to as wolf packs so a wolf pack would fight a running battle with a convoy so what did the uh what did the allies have to deal with this threat well um something that came in after a while was the vlr the very long range aircraft essentially you get a you get a plane and just adapt it for very long range use but they they still only had a practical patrol distance of about a thousand miles because um that you could go a thousand miles out to sea and then you had to turn around and fly a thousand miles back and land before you ran out of fuel over the cold mid-atlantic um so they were still not able to close the gap completely but vlr was still very useful for instance the germans were operating uh out of western france quite a lot because after the fall of france the entire atlantic seaboard of france became uh prime spots to put u-boat pens u-boat bases down that coast that could then go straight out to sea um and uh and take on the british without having to navigate over denmark and through the english channel or get past um iceland so uh the the the u-berts are having a much easier time of it thanks to the fact that they could be based in these western french ports um bomber command did have a go at these ports but never succeeded they tried several times dropping bigger and bigger bombs on them to try to destroy the u-boat pens but the uber pens had incredibly thick concrete lids on them and very little damage was actually done from the air so that meant that these u-boats had to be tackled in the open sea so uh b-24s uh it was actually an american craft the british called them the liberator uh the b-24 liberator was an american bomber that actually the british rejected for use as a bomber over europe they decided that it was a little bit delicate for that sort of work but it could be adapted to a vlr craft so a lot of the early vlr craft were liberated bombers then later on as um other things like wellingtons and halifaxes i became cast offs from bomber command then coastal command got those bigger four-engined longer-ranged planes that could carry a bit more of a payload in terms of electrical generators radio equipment and of course depth charges and torpedoes and rockets and bombs and all the rest of it u-boat destroying equipment and a lot of u-boats were destroyed uh quite close to the western coast of france because of these aircraft i've looked at a list of the fate of every single u-boat during its long list uh during world war ii and a broad pattern i noticed is that early on in the war u-boats that are sunk tend to be sunk by a ship and later on they tend to be sunk by aircraft so the effectiveness of aircraft ramped up and up during the war i did actually notice a few kills early on in the war from british submarines and i don't actually know how a submarine kills another submarine in this period and there were some u-boat losses from accidental collisions with other u-boats or other german surface vessels whoops anyway so the vlr craft helped and they didn't actually have to attack anything to help because they are just very useful spotter planes as well to to keep a convoy uh safe you just have to uh convince perhaps uh a u-boat that you have spotted that it's been spotted and then it just has to dive if it dives it can't catch up a fleet because u-boats something you have to understand about u-boats they're actually surface vessels they are boats they're not really true submarines they can't spend all their time like a modern submarine under the water traveling quickly and silently under the water no they are surface vessels that use diesel engines that needed access to an atmosphere they needed to vent their exhausts and so forth they had very limited oxygen supply and very limited battery life under the water and if you went below periscope deck that depth in those days under the water you were blind you couldn't see anything and even at periscope depth you've got you've got that to look through um and in foul weather if the if the waves are coming up you won't see a thing to have any chance of spotting anything um from any distance you really have to be on the surface so they they have a flat deck uh sometimes with an anti-aircraft gun on it they are like a surface vessel that can occasionally go underwater for short while but underwater it's slow which means that it can't catch up a convoy so if you can just force them under water then they will fall behind and you've sort of done the job to some degree so that was one great use of the vlr now the vlrs were equipped later on with asv this was a air-to-surface vessel uh it was a detection equipment a radar if you like that could pick up a u-boat at 12 miles away so this was pretty useful um but an interesting limitation is that it couldn't pick up a u-boat that was 500 yards away so you would pick it up at say 12 miles you would then fly towards it and the radar operator on board the aircraft would then as he get closer to it he'd have to alter the resolution of the picture to stay in contact with the the sighted u-boat so he'd be changing hurts rates and frequencies okay that's the same thing um the ping rates and and the frequencies in order to change the resolution but it gets the point when you're within a mile the resolution on the screen is such is that you're picking up every single wave and when you're very close to the u-boat you can't actually pick it up on an asv system but of course you might be able to pick it up with say a search light if you're at night you could point some search lights in that direction but yeah you can imagine what the drawback of that is if it's on the surface and they've got anyone um keeping watch with any degree of vigilance they'll just see the searchlights and they'll dive you'll never find them but if you had a combination of a big aircraft that could carry a decent amount of ordnance depth charges and torpedoes and what have you in bombs um and it had some sort of uh asv detection system and a new invention the lay light then suddenly you've got a tremendously deadly combination the lay light enormously increased the deadliness of coastal command's aircraft the kill rate against uh u-boats shot up so what was the lay light well i'm glad you asked a lay light was a pair of um very large very powerful searchlights mounted under the wings of a quite large aircraft you needed a large aircraft obviously because it needed to be able to hold these two quite large uh searchlights also they're very powerful searchlights which means you needed a massive uh and unfortunately heavy well that's what massive means um electrical generator so you needed uh that aboard the aircraft as well and on top of that you needed to be able to still have big heavy depth charges and bombs and what have you to knock out the um the target so you needed the big aircraft the clever thing about the laylight is that it could be guided by the asv the the the twin searchlights could look at the the detected u-boat and here's the really clever bit this meant that you didn't have to switch the lights on so you could fly towards your detected uh u-boat with your lights off and then when you're very close to it but you're heading pretty accurately at it you're actually already starting your bombing run so it's not as though um you you get lucky and you notice ah look over there there's there's there's the u-boat but then you've got to fly around in a circle and then commence your bombing around and by the time you've done all that it's it's dived and you've lost it no you're flying towards a signal low over the water it's gonna be difficult for them to see you this is very often at night by the way difficult for them to see you and difficult for them to hear you until you get quite close then you switch on your lights after you've lost them uh on your radar dish so you're losing them we're losing them losing lights on click the lights are pointing straight at it they illuminate it uh the the lookouts on the conning tower just what what the hell there they were in the middle of the ocean minding their own business at night and some lights come on pointing straight at them how the hell is that possible and you're already on your bombing run and you can use up uh we're a little bit uh too low oh we're a little bit too high here and yep when the the the lights converge on the surface of the water you know you're at your ideal bombing height so you can use these lights to get your ideal bombing height during your very short bombing run and then drop the ordnance and kaboom far uh all really quickly far faster than they that they've got to to organize diving kaboom so the lay light hugely increased uh the uh the kill rate of uh vlr craft now the germans however did have a counter to asv and that was called metox metox doesn't sound like a very german term does it that's because it wasn't mettox was a french system developed in 1942 thanks guys uh that the germans decided to install on their u-boats metox was a detector detection system it detected asv so you had your metox uh constantly scanning for asv signals and it would tell you ah we've picked up an asv asv signal someone in this area is ewing using asv trying to detect stuff but metox was much more sophisticated and clever than that because if you remember as they lock onto you and come towards you they the british now um have to change their their ping rates and their frequencies and so forth to to keep the resolution uh suitable for whatever scale they're operating at so metox picked up on that so methox didn't just say to you oh there's someone using asv somewhere in the area but whether they found us or not we don't know it would say there's someone using asv in the area oh now they're heading towards you oh now they've changed frequency oh oh yeah they've definitely seen you you need to do something about it so it was a really effective early warning system which didn't give you false positives and this uh of course was a very effective counter against asv but fortunately the germans were only using it from 1942 to august 1943 when uh an edict from high command came out saying everyone is to switch off their metox systems the germans had lost confidence in metox completely and the reason that they'd lost confidence in it is that they couldn't explain the vast number of sinkings that were happening quite often uh unreported they would just lose mysteriously contact with with one of their u-boats and they're thinking how is this possible how is this possible oh right yes we've got a detector detector so they've developed a detector detector the raf have now put something which detects metals and because metox has to be operating all the time that means we're giving away our position all the time to the raf turn off metox thank goodness they did because in fact the british weren't detecting the metoc system uh but it was reasonable for uh the germans to think that they were because of the staggering rise in the number of ships that were suddenly surprised in in their supposedly secret locations somewhere in the atlantic now there's another part of this equation that is of course enigma you've probably heard of enigma uh it was a spectacularly uh high-tech and impressive encryption system used by the germans during world war ii for sending commands hither and you had a machine that was about the size of a typewriter and when you pressed uh one of the letters it turned various cogs inside um which then altered lots of uh settings inside so if you press the e key for instance it would be changed to let's say a w but if you press the e again this time it will come out as r and the only way of predicting what letter would be the next one is if you knew exactly where all the cogs were but of course the cogs had an initial setting and there were trillions of combinations of settings which was brilliant because that meant that the code was literally uncrackable that is to say using the state of technology uh available uh to humanity it was uncrackable unfortunately technology moves on what happened was the british um invented the first electronic computers they they're using a combination of uh polish bomber technology and more of their own they were able to come up with machines that could crack this now the germans thought it doesn't matter it's an uncrackable code it can't be correct because um even if the the british get hold of an enigma machine and they haven't they had uh we would then know about it they didn't um and uh even then it doesn't matter if they've got one of these machines they'd have to know that that day's settings and there are trillions of combinations so even if they had one of these machines and they knew the settings those settings would go out of date in a day and it would probably take them more than a day to work out how to use the machine anyway and even if they did decrypt anything it would be old news by the time they did so it's completely useless even if they get a an enigma machine we're fine it's an uncrackable code the thing is that the british had actually cracked it you've probably heard of bletchley park i hope you haven't seen that awful film the ima the the the imitation the imitation game terrible film i think it's a terrible film with benedict cumberbatch of course because i use it everyone thinks it's bleeding marvelous but um no i when i saw that film i i thought it was such an insult to bletchley park and indeed i ended up coming up with my my own my own name for it which was five idiots squabbling in a shed is what i call that film um it it it didn't give you any idea that film of the scale of operations bletchley park was not a wooden shed it was a massive country estate with a big uh beautiful brick house and there were ten thousand people yes i'm gonna say that again ten thousand people worked at bletchley park a huge number of people taking in messages from all around the world and transcribing them transliterating them decrypting them in lots of different stages a lot of the people there were very very diligently translating a load of gobbledygook into more gobbledygooks they didn't really know exactly what these messages were but they were sure that they were part of something big and important and they did their job and they kept it secret for 30 years it's an absolutely staggering example of what humans can do when they get organized 10 000 clever dedicated people worked at bletchley park and it wasn't five idiots squabbling in a shed which is what the imitation game would have you believe and the the characters they got all bonkers wrong with it alan turing for instance uh benedict cumberbatch plays him as though he was some weird autistic guy no he was a sociable humorous guy who had lots of friends he wasn't like that at all but um anyway actually if you do want to see a film about um just stay there sorry about this got it got it got it yeah um enigma uh enigma now oh now i've supposed to paint myself in a bit of a corner here because i'm not going to say this is a terrifically good film uh but it is a decent film it's a problem it's a decent high budget proper impression it's got kate winslet in it uh playing roughly the equivalent of the keira knightley park from the imitation game uh she's meant to be a plain jane and you could say that well keira knightley is not a plain jane but she makes a more convincing uh plain jane than kira flipping nightly anyway okay so i'm not going to say that you should hurtle out of your way to see this film it's not a spectacularly excellent film but at least it's decent at least it goes some way to showing you the scale of operations and it wasn't just five idiots squabbling in a shed now i've lost my place again um so uh to metox oh yeah so enigma right now um if you are in a u-boat in the middle of the atlantic say um you have your aerial up this is right because without your aerial up you can't send and receive messages um so you've got your aerial up and how how did that happen when you surface obviously and you undo the inside of the airlock and you climb into the airlock and then you undo the outer hatch and then you climb out into the conning tower and then someone else climbs into the airlock and then someone passes him the aerial and he passes the aerial up to you and then you start setting it up on the conning tower with all the other bits and pieces and then the cables are passed up to you and you plug them all in and the power comes from the batteries down below it's got to be pretty substantial power you've got to broadcast all the way back to to france and germany from somewhere in the atlantic maybe even you know right way across atlantic um and of course and the top secret guy with the with the enigma machine he's in a sealed room down there so it's all kept nice and secret so that's all happening down in the bowels of the craft and you then see an aircraft coming at you ah should we dive let's imagine that aircraft is coming so it's it's a lay light a pair of laylights can suddenly you're transfixed okay what do you do well option one is you describe to the guy shouting down the hatch i can see uh guy that the two uh lay light i think it's a single craft i'm guessing it's a four engine bomber it's coming at us from this and you start shouting all the details down and then that's relayed somehow to the guy with the morse code and he then stops doing what he was doing and starts sending out a message to the command in in western france somewhere ruan or wherever um uh detailing what's going on you could do that or you could just dive because if you don't die you're going to die so what they tended to do was just take down the aerial shove it down the hatch unclip all the cables and shove those down the hatch then shut the hatches and then dive significant delay you can't just dive straight away because the wires to the radio equipment went through the hatches you couldn't close the hatches until you dismantle it now i suppose you could perhaps disconnect or just cut the cables and drop them down but then all your radio equipment would then get smashed uh when you went under the under the water so the next time you came to the surface you wouldn't be able to broadcast or or receive anything so you'd be fairly useless so high command back in germany is just hearing that oh we've lost touch with this other u-boat it's just gone and they don't know how it happened so that's the thing with uncrackable codes if you're completely convinced that it's uncrackable you start drawing the wrong conclusions so that was uh perhaps the reason that the the order went out ah they must be homing in on metox tell them to turn metox off this was a problem for the allies as well because if you've cracked the enemy's uncrackable code you really don't want the enemy to twig that you've cracked its uncrackable code so if you've got some other excuse uh that that's that's always great um one excuse that the the allies had in italy and north africa when the germans were fighting alongside italian units uh was the italians because the germans would perhaps think it's bizarre isn't it the british always seem to know exactly what we're going to do it's almost as though they're intercepting our messages which are written in an uncrackable code and then somehow cracking them so quickly sometimes faster than we can do it and then able to act on them during a battle which is clearly impossible so what other possible oh yeah yeah of course the italians they're um their securities just notoriously lacks yeah it's probably the italian security's rubbish so they always had the italians to blame uh which was extremely handy for the british um uh anyway so uh admiral doughnut of course was always demanding constant updates from his u-boats well you would wouldn't you um because you're trying to coordinate your string of ubers to converge on allied convoys so you need to be able to send out orders to all your various uh u-boats to head in various directions and converge so you need to know where where they all are so if you are sending a message to a high command in germany from a u-boat uh you've got to say who you are and where you are otherwise everything else you say is pretty much useless if you say the weather is fine i've sighted a convoy ten miles north of me great what use is that to anyone who sent that where are they ten miles north of where the weather is fine where okay so you need to say this is u-boat u-562 and we are at this coordinates the weather is fine we have seen a convoy 10 miles north of us heading east then it becomes a useful message which you can then take and coordinate with all your various other u-boats and then come up with an idea and then you send out those orders back to all the u-boats who then have to be listening for that signal to come back which means they have to be on the surface with their aerials up you can see where i'm going with this so um if you've got an enigma decryption system which can actually tell a plane that's in the air right now that there is a u-boat at this particular coordinate right now because you have been able to intercept and here's the important bit decrypt uh that message intercepting is not difficult the germans are broadcasting very powerful signals to get back to uh get back to base so the british are able to listen in but it's encrypted but they're able to decrypt it in english bletchley park um so that was how we were able to to spot uh individual sometimes individual locations of individual u-boats but also how we could we could track where they were concentrating where they were being sent so which convoy would be threatened so the information war was actually being won mainly by the allies because of enigma decryptions um now the germans came up with a number of countermeasures one thing they they came up with was uh you don't want to be able to be triangulated with a long broadcast so if you're on the surface uh no no let's imagine you're you're on a british escort vessel and you hear you hear oh wait a minute i've got a signal it's coming from over there and it's someone going sending all these details it might send it take him several minutes to send out this complicated message and meanwhile your ship is moving so as you okay they were there but now they're there so let's get the charts out and you can triangulate their position but the germans thought now what we do is we record the whole message onto a magnetic wire bit like a cassette tape it's a magnetic system and then we play that really really fast in a sudden burst just two and a half seconds the whole message is broadcast and then at the other end they can re-record it then play it much more slowly get some guy to um write it out and then they can decrypt it it'll be fine it takes a little bit longer but this is good because whilst we're broadcasting we can't be triangulated so they thought but what they hadn't reckoned on was that the uh the coastal command that western approaches that the the british and their allies were so organized on such a scale they had uh y-section why service listening stations on iceland in newfound london and various places and of course they had these people on ships and in aircraft as well and these were noting down everything and raiding it all back so there you are um on a ship and you you just get this blip okay it's no idea what what the message was it was too quick uh you and you but you you can note down the time oh it's 11 15 and 20 seconds and we are here and it came from over there no idea what it was um can't record it can't triangulate anything but i just report it and then someone else in iceland does the same and then someone else in a liberator aircraft does the same and all these pieces of information just think how many there would be come into a a central collection date and people are then starting looking for patterns oh look all within two minutes these reports came in uh of a two second burst broadcast and he was there hang on let's look at this he was there i said it was in that direction he was there and said it was in that direction he was there and said it was in that direction ah is probably somewhere in that triangle they had so many people listening and reporting and so many people collating the information that it was possible to triangulate the position of a u-boat even when it broadcast for only two and a half seconds and that level of organization was something the germans didn't realize that the british had so even that system which was quite clever i think you'll admit didn't save them um now um i think it's probably time that i talked to you about my sponsor because i've been wobbling on for goodness knows how long and that is the great courses plus what is the great courses plus people who are unfamiliar with my channel may be asking well the great courses plus is an enormous website which has on it lots of videos and the videos are of academic lectures on all sorts of topics including military history but all sorts of other stuff as well how to do stuff how um accountancy and photography and oh just all sorts of other things go to the site and you'll see um and you can get if you type in www.thegreatcoursesplus.comstrokelindypage or much easier you just click the uh the link that's in the description beneath uh you can go and get a free trial period uh in the site you can go there and you and look at the lectures for free for a bit and if you just uh decided that it's great you can subscribe and then you'll have time to watch all sorts of lectures on all sorts of topics now when i started um getting sponsorship from the great courses plus i was saying they have 6 000 lectures well it's now 10 000 lectures so it's extremely likely that there'll be a lecture on some topic that will be of of interest to you and as i say there's no harm in looking at the free trial now some people have uh found it a little bit difficult to pay using certain payment methods depending particularly on where they are i'm happy to be able to say that it is now optimized for australia and the uk so if you're from the australia the uk or america uh that is the usa uh you should find it very easy to uh pay uh although admittedly um some of our friends in europe may still have a little bit of difficulty but you still get the free trial period so hey you know you can you can still take advantage of that now at this point i normally draw your attention to a particular course that has caught my attention but this time instead rather than looking at a course i'm going to point out that you can do a search there's a search engine within the site and you can type in some topic and it will return to you individual lectures that perhaps touch on that topic so you could you could type in naval warfare for example and even if you didn't want to watch the whole of a course on just naval warfare or even if they didn't have a course on naval warfare you can find naval battles talked about in other courses so for instance the battle of midway is talked about in a general history of the world of world war ii and the battle of midway comes up again in another course which is on decisive battles of history um and so you can get two perspectives on the battle of midway should you so wish um and in the in the course of military blunders i see there's one of the um the blunders made by the royal navy during world war ii all right they couldn't get everything right all the time um and um uh there's another one uh the 1905 battle for instance of uh tsushima uh which is perhaps a battle you don't even know about it so there you go there's a lecture on that so you can you can pick and mix from different courses and a great thing about it is there are no exams because you remember you can remember what it was like at school you know so much of the fun gets sucked out of learning if you know you're going to be examined on something but with the great courses plus you can watch to your heart's content find it tremendously interesting and at the end forget the whole lot and it doesn't matter no one's going to think any less of you for it so uh click on the link in the in the description go to the great courses plus i fear i have i know not fear i feel that i have now said enough on that so uh on we go so um uh now then there was another uh um uh weapon in the arsenal of detection as used by the allies that was called azdek that's anti-submarine detection ick they like to put eck on the end of it so something that used faster than lights faster than the faster than sound might be supersonics well this was as dicks so they put ic or x on the end it doesn't stand for anything so this was your classic sonar this was that sound that you hear in the war movies so they would ping out an audio signal out the front of a ship it had to be pretty loud so that the very faint reflection would still be strong enough and it reached the ship to be detected and you could work out the distance and bearing of a target such as a u-boat now it went ping out the front of a ship which had a disadvantage which meant that uh you were blind when you were dropping your death charge you see the death charges were dropped off the back of a ship they had to be because if you drop the depth charge off the front of the ship the side effect is you blow yourself up so they would uh the the the the enemy sub is there old u-boat and you're here you ping you pick up the signal you think great is over there you turn you then head over it and you're now pinging over there where the submarine no longer is and your stern goes over where you hope the submarine is and then the u-boat and then you drop depth charge on it and bang but of course the u-boat may have moved in that time so you were shooting blind so depth charges didn't have a very very high hit rate but they were able to develop forward firing stuff like the hedgehog for instance which fired a very large number of very small bomblets forwards far enough uh forwards that the ship was safe ship itself launching them was safe some commanders didn't like these systems because they sometimes had to replace the main gun turret uh on a craft which they would like for for engaging surface vessels but anyway uh this enormously increased the the kill rate 10 times in fact 10 times more uh subs were destroyed per attack using hedgehog than with the older depth charges so that would send out this this this pattern of a large number of small bomblets but because they were small the u-boat had to be quite close to the surface to be destroyed by the bombs there was another weapon called squid same sort of idea multiple barrels and it launched larger and usually three or four depth charge like things forwards in a line and that again was uh more effective than conventional depth charges oh you might be uh wondering by the way how depth charges work um because you're familiar presumably with an artillery shell an artillery shell has a load of explosives which are solid and they suddenly turn into gas inside the hard metal casing which then cracks under the pressure shatters and those shards fly around and kill personnel in that field that the shell landed in but underwater how does that work because the the shell of the depth charge cracks open and it's then being pushed through water and the water's surely going to slow it down really really quickly and then it's hitting the outer shell of a submarine u-boat which is pretty substantial so a bit of metal going clunk it's not gonna do a huge amount of damage uh to a u-boat well you'd be right and in fact the outer casing uh whilst it's useful for um keeping the weather out and uh of course continuing the explosion so you get a good bang in the first place it's not actually the splinters of that shell that do any harm at all what happens the depth charge goes off so the the u-boats here say the depth charge goes off here it goes bang and that explosion explosive those explosives turn into gas and expand very rapidly creating this great this underwater air bubble if you like and then what does air do on the water it rises it rises pretty rapidly and then you've got a huge amount of water here and a huge amount of water here which is the other side of the submarine u-boat uh rushing in to that void and water's really heavy so when you've got a huge weight many times the weight of the u-boat rushing sideways suddenly um that strain that it puts on the uh on the the casing of the u-boat can sometimes snap it in two but of course it only has to just rupture it and you've got to kill and that huge load of gas rising up very quickly to the surface of course creates that huge great giza spume of uh usually white uh water that you've seen in the movies uh shooting out of the water uh and if it is white that often indicates that you you've missed uh but if it's black uh then that is a strong indicator that you've uh prematurely ended the careers of quite a few german submariners um so that was uh that was depth charges and uh and hedgehogs and squid and now another thing they developed was the can craft the cam craft cam that's catapult aircraft merchantman so this is before they had um aircraft carriers enough to to put aircraft carriers in escorting fleets so they had to get some sort of air air cover so what they did is they would get a sort of girder-like thing and stick that on the front of a merchantman that's not not dead ahead at a slight angle and on that they'd put a trolley and a couple of pins in it to stop it moving and on that they would put a hurricane hurricanes are fighter pilot uh fighters um they're fighter planes they are single-seater um they're very high-tech expensive piece of military hardware and this was a one-shot weapon because there's no deck to land on you're not an aircraft carrier so you launch and these things would fly around then they'd have to ditch in the sea so it was a very big decision where whether when uh when and whether to launch the one hurricane that you had there will be two pilots uh on duty on the on the ship in in rotation and if the decision was made uh that it was time to launch the hurricane uh the the the poor chap would have they're all volunteers uh by the way i looked at the the pilot names for all the launches and they were different every single time so uh no one ever had to do this twice you did it once and then you done your bit so you climb into the aircraft and then you would adopt the brace position because it's a very very high g-force uh launch and uh then some guy would then pull the pins out of the trolley and show you the pins and you can you know okay right so you're now on a free free moving trolley on this girl that's taking out the front of a a merchant ship in the middle of the atlantic somewhere oh what could go wrong and then other people would then have to decide yet we're definitely doing it we're definitely going to launch a blue flag might be waved from the right hand side of the bridge because um one of the reasons it was at an angle so that the flame didn't go straight head on to the bridge and we'd go over there to the left but let's all stand over to the right because the back flame of the rockets that are attached to the trolley were quite substantial um and then you would turn the whole ship into the wind because you want to launch your aircraft into the wind okay that would take a bit and yeah enemy aircraft still up there right and then perhaps you would go in to a trough in the ocean it's a big ship so you know everything happens slowly and uh the uh pilots perhaps at this point wondering why did he volunteer for this why did i volunteer for this and you would put 30 degrees of flaps in in the wings and uh one third to the right rudder to counteract the the slightly skew whiff launch and they would wait for the front of the ship to lift and get to the top of a wave and then they would ignite the rockets and extremely high g-forces they would launch the hurricane into the air so all a bit makeshift did it work yes it very definitely did um there was actually a one-to-one kill for every launch they shot down one enemy plane and don't forget the enemy planes were condors typically that's a fock walls 200 and they would typically have a crew of five and this is a single seater fighter so you're risking one guy to take out five of theirs so in terms of personnel it was definitely a profit and not only did they shoot down um one enemy aircraft per launch uh they also damaged quite a few more aircraft and of course it's difficult to know what their fate was they flew off damage did they make it back you don't know and they saw off an awful lot more and just seeing them off is is very important because of course then they can't report your position and so you they make you uh much safer they don't just not attack you the u-boats don't know where you are either um and what were the losses to the raf very very slight they lost one man who was killed whilst bailing out um one man almost drowned but he didn't drown they got to him in time another man was wounded but he got better again um so they just they just lost one pilot they lost all but one of the aircraft one of the aircraft was so close to russia presumably this must have been one of the moments moments convoys um that he was able to fly his aircraft after doing his job and land in russia uh so for the loss of just one man they managed to keep an awful lot of uh shipping safe now you may think how is it possible that these hurricanes did so flipping well they're often going up against several enemy aircraft and it's just one fighter well one reason is i think they were particularly heavily armed i think it's a short-range fighter they're only going to use it once just stick rockets cannons but give it everything loads of ammo but the main reason i think is that when they were launched they were the only fighter around because these are the germans very long ranged aircraft the condor was actually if you look at it here uh you can see that it was uh designed as an airliner it's got the airliner look about it it was designed as a long-range passenger aircraft and certainly it wasn't designed for dog-fighting hurricanes um so when the hurricane went up into the air it was usually the only one it was it was always the only fighter in the air and it was really it could outclass what it was put up against because of what it was um so that's why they were able to shoot down quite so many aircraft of the enemy so the cam craft this was one of the things which helped uh win the battle against the the the first lucky period that the first happy time um another uh war again a weapon that was developed against u-boat was the sonar boy or buoy as the americans would call it um the sunnah boy uh sometimes by the british called haiti it was their code name for it because you dropped it from a plane and you're dunking it in the ocean so these were little devices that you would drop onto the ocean uh they would then float and they had microphones on them and they would listen so it's a passive thing you're not sending out a it's a passive system you're not giving away the position and you're listening for the german u-boat so you have reason to believe that the german u-boat is around there yeah we saw a conning tower it's disappeared now but it's somewhere around there you could fly over drop a load of sona boys and these would listen in but of course it's not completely passive because they then have to report to the aircraft um and if the the enemy then picks up the reports broadcast back up to the aircraft then the game's given away but they couldn't because the sonar boys were broadcasting using uh spread spectrum broadcasting rather than broadcasting the whole message clearly on a single frequency that message was broken up among many different frequencies so listening in on any one frequency you would just hear a tiny bit of static with that little bit of crackle and otherwise just shh you wouldn't hear the little bit of of information as being part of a message but with the decoding equipment that was aboard the the liberator craft or whatever it was uh they would be able to hear the message loud and clear and this would give them uh distance and bearing and then they could drop the depth charges and the germans what they thought we weren't yeah we were cheating how how the hell did they know we were here they must have thought uh shortly before dying um so um the yeah so they go the high tea was another another of the um the the weapons that we used successfully against the u-boats now i it's true that the the the allies got better and better and better at taking out u-boats but i don't want to give the impression that it was all one way um the condors for instance condors and other aircraft germans were using largely condors sank 365 000 tons of allied shipping so it the germans were still having significant success but overall they ended up losing now the first um happy period came to an end the cam craft the vlrs came in all these these systems i've been talking about oh actually the sona boys came later they weren't around until 1944. um but these systems were coming in and making the uh the royal navy and the raf so much more efficient at dealing with the u-boat menace and so if you if you plot a graph of uh merchant shipping being sunk uh it rises the beginning of the happy time and then it comes down really quite steeply the british were winning but then the graph turns round and goes shooting up again at a very very steep angle at the beginning of what became known to the germans as the second happy time so the happy time presumably got renamed the first happy time the second happy time came after 1941 1941 you remember pearl harbor happened and the americans entered the war so the americans then start sending a lot of ships right the way across the atlantic uh from their eastern seaboard and uh the americans were commanded in the atlantic that is by admiral king now i have not independently researched this but every source i've consulted says the same thing about admiral king which is that he couldn't stand the british those limeys with whom he absolutely refused to cooperate even when they sent him when why service for instance would send uh admiral king precise information we've got this we know where these u-boats are going and when and what they're there to do um he would not act on the information given to them stubbornly and though the british told him right from the start you must use convoys the bigger the convoy the better convoys are much much safer than individual ships he would still insist on sending ships out one at a time and the germans would then torpedo them one at a time the the british asked him could you please at least turn off all the lights in all your lighthouses and could you get rid of all your marker boys because they are making it really easy for the germans to navigate up the east coast of america and for goodness sake will you organize blackouts in the eastern seaboard cities because what was happening was that a german uber could sit off new york and wait for a ship to come out of new york which you would see at night perfectly silhouetted against the manhattan lights the the the lit up against manhattan that this huge lit up beacon of a city you could see the silhouette they would torpedo it they couldn't be seen that their backdrop is is the knight and the atlantic so they're in no danger they can just wait for the next ship and torpedo that it was like it was like shooting little little tin ducks in in a fairground uh alley and this was also known to the germans as the american shooting season and uh it's quite staggering the amount of uh american shipping that went down very close to the eastern seaboard of the usa um and why was there not a huge outcry you can imagine there must have been there must have been debates in the senate and and and marches in the streets and all the newspapers clamoring for why are we not blacking out our cities why are we not switching off our lighthouses why is not something being done this is happening right on our doorstep well it didn't happen there was no uh outcry because it was all very efficiently and successfully hushed up any any fishermen for instance any civilians who'd seen what went on when they report it were told in no uncertain terms that it was a state secret and they were to keep their mouths shut and so it went on in uh in fact in just a few months of operation drumbeat which was the that's a translation of the the german operation on the eastern seaboard uh one quarter of all the uh shipping sunk by submarines in world war two went to the bottom of the sea in that operation just off the american coast eventually admiral king did start cooperating with the british but it was a year later uh to it took to establish that relationship so the second happy time made the first happy time look really just mildly jovial they were sinking twice as many ships um the u-boats were again threatening to starve uh britain into submission um i'm happy to say that uh that well you know don't you you know that the british eventually won the war of the atlantic so um you know that the second happy time would come to an end and i'm going to make another video which is going to concentrate largely on just why the second happy time came to an end uh but i'm going to make um just two more statements as one is that coastal command particularly between 1942 and 1943 expanded massively yes they never got their hands on the crown jewels the avro lancaster the best bomber in the world but uh they got uh significantly more big four-engine bombers and they got more personnel and they got more more escort vessels and they were able to organize themselves better and better and they they took the fight to the enemy thinking more and more u-boats um for instance they had support groups these were like escorts so you'd have a load of escorts escorting a convoy and you'd have a support group a similar size as the escorts but not assigned to any particular convoy when we knew which convoy was under threat that support group would then join that convoy immediately doubling its defense and by taking the fight to uh the germans to the u-boats the the kill rate went up again and there's one other reason that uh the germans lost the battle of atlantic and that is that hitler was great i mean he was one of the really great thing about hitler was that he was a strategic genius in his own tiny mind he was completely convinced that he was strategic genius i mean the fall of france absolutely proved to to everyone uh without a doubt that he was a strategic genius the thing is though that he wasn't he wasn't a strategic genius but he was a man convinced that he was a strategic genius and such men make huge blunders it was uh hitler who decided where the industrial might of germany would invest its resources what gets built where the money and the steel goes and he did not realize how important the battle of the atlantic was and as i say at the start of the war uh they only had a tiny number of u-boats and though it's true that they did enormously increase the production of u-boats they they made um over 1100 of them in the end uh if he'd put a significant amount of germany's resources into u-boats right from the start then i think it's quite likely that the um that the allies would have lost the battle of the atlantic so thanks hitler for being an idiot you

Channel: Lindybeige

Views: 1,167,832

Keywords: u boat, u-boat, atlantic, ww2, wwii, history, ocean, britain, british, canada, america, germany, conflict, spies, radio, radar, asdic, hedgehog, squid, asv, metox, enigma, bletchley park, the imitation game, code, breaking, decypher, detection, convoy, merchantmen, navy, air force, airforce, raf, coastal, command, submarine, pens, france, first happy time, second happy time, happy time, sinking, tonnage, shipping, escort, signalling, morse

Id: pEm4FK9Osjo

Length: 54min 3sec (3243 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 29 2018