The wargamers who won a real war

a lot of people who watch my videos are really into military history and others are war gamers and it could be that these two constituencies do not realize just how interrelated these two things are and in the context of the battles of Atlantic in world war two that's what I'm going to be talking about in this video which has been sponsored by audible more of that later now wargaming actually has a practical purpose so it's not just for Luck's you know the warring civilized nations of the world had professional war gamers and these people would create scenarios of possible future Wars and then war gained them out and so develop plans so that we will be ready for those possible future Wars so you can imagine that when World War 2 started the the Royal Navy had loads of excellent plans all ready to go because these had been war gamed out in advance unfortunately not really no because there was a major failure of imagination on the part of those war gamers you see they hadn't imagined that France would just go there in a couple of weeks and fall they had imagined that Germany would be so fighting pretty much as it was in World War one you know with the great long lines of land battle somewhere across Europe and the German fleets would have to go out the top of Germany and go all the way around Denmark and just missed Norway and then they'd have to go either south through the English Channel or north across the North Sea and get round Scotland in order to get into the Atlantic but no they didn't because the France fell and the Germans then had access to loads of ports all the way down the west side of France that led straight out into the Atlantic and that changed the situation completely and so all the various clever plans that they've come up with we're not really all that handy but it's alright because we had allies didn't we in the Americans so perhaps the American war gamers would have would come in and save the day well America had spotted that it was quite likely that it would end up fighting major naval campaigns against the Japanese in the Pacific and so they wargame doubt many scenarios simulating possible future wars with the Japanese there and of course they didn't ignore the North Atlantic oh no they knew that of course they could be fighting there too so fought out many scenarios simulating a possible future war with the British yeah yeah they they hadn't wargames out fighting with Germans of getting convoys across to Britain they imagined that they would be fighting the British yeah oh well anyway so the American War gamers and planners didn't actually come up with anything very useful either but during the war a new unit called wha - that's the Western Approaches tactical unit was formed at the Western Approaches which was in the exchange building in Liverpool and there's a museum there today you can you can go and visit it and in fact I've I've made a video all about that so you can you can watch the video in case you haven't and who should they employ as the commander of this well they found an excellent chap he was commander Gilbert Roberts and here he is and what made him such an excellent chap well you can see coach I mean just loo look at that look at hair look at that - go ahead a pursuit you can imagine it he was he was a here's a perfect gentleman well yes he was also though a very experienced naval officer and crucially had tuberculosis why is that crucial well it meant that he couldn't serve at sea and yet here he was this very able officer they need you to give him a a responsible job so we want you to put together wha - you reckon they're up to it well he said he was and you imagine that they such an important thing is that the planning of this massive and incredibly important a battle in the Atlantic they would give him the top stuff but they didn't it was a rather experimental unit putting this this unit together he got a few people with some experience but most of his staff were raw recruit Rams yeah these young women had been recruited largely because they were good at maths which I think actually is probably a pretty sensible recruitment criterion if you are very good at maths then you're probably reasonably intelligent overall and you can be taught things like naval navigation reasonably quickly and this is a war gaming unit and you can imagine if you know bit about wargaming that you know generally being someone of a mathematical bent yeah that might be the sort of person you'd want but these women knew nothing about Gaming when they were recruited and they knew nothing about naval warfare either now here's a photograph of the fledgling unit and you can see that one of the members it was rather unusual in that she had a red circle around her head that's Jean Laidlaw now the story about her goes that a couple of Royal Marines dragged her in front of the commander on the day when she first turned up to report for duty still wearing her school uniform and when she was told by the commander what she'd be doing what she would be doing for the rest of the war she burst into tears but it ends well because she pulled herself together and over the course of the next two years she became one of the most effective military analysts of World War two now they had to come up pretty quickly with a set of walking rules and they did unfortunately so far as I can tell what those rules were exactly have been lost in the mists of time but we do have quite a number of photographs here's a photograph for instance you can see that there's a large room this is the top floor of the Exchange Building in Liverpool and you can see that there's a large floor with chalk marks on it little markers representing ships and around that there's a big screen and on the inside of the screen you can see shelves with boxes on and in the screen you can see little slits okay now that the shelves I imagine we're just convenient for putting things on the boxes here I'm conjecturing okay I'm conjecturing I don't know this but I'm just looking at what I see there I know that they had two-minute terms and that the officers who were commanding the the the the fleet who were outside the screen would write orders on little chits and I'm guessing that they would open the door on their side of the screen and post the chit's into that box and then someone on the inside would open then and take it out I think that was probably how it done but you could of course just screw into a ball and throw it over but that's not as dignified now the slits the slits I dunno something or anything about so I'd read I've been doing research for this quite some while ago and didn't really understand the slit at all until I found this extra bit of information and okay right so there than the slits in those screens and the commander's playing the commanders of the convoy could look through those slits and see the markers on the floor representing their convoy little white ships for the escort and there was a sort of movement tray thing for the the convoy itself a rectangle of cloth with lots of markers representing the ships of the convoy and as these move their paths will be marked on the floor with white chalk but in front of the slits were some sort of gauze I don't exactly what this this gauze was but it had the effect of filtering out to the color brown the little markers for the u-boats were painted brown and they used brown chalk on the floor to mark the path of the u-boats so looking through the slit you could see where all your ships were but you couldn't see the u-boats if you were the other side of the screen not looking through the cause then you could see both sides so that's roughly how the the game worked and they trained up loads of people using this system throughout the war in fact about 5,000 officers went through the way to course they would come in they'll just be there for a short while a couple of weeks maybe and then they'd be sent out to command some ships having understood what y2 was about and what the people at work who were doing in the foot in the book the cruel sea by Nicolas Montserrat there is a description of this Nicolas Montserrat the author of the book was himself a naval commander fighting in the Battle of the Atlantic now the only person I know who's still alive who took this course in fact in 1942 we actually ran the course for a few weeks you know of one person he has many names an unusually large number of names some people for instance call him and Phil the Greek but he's also known as the Prince Consort and the Duke of Edinburgh yes he's married to due to queen elizabeth ii so far as I know he's the only person still alive who took the course maybe showing emotion to him asked for an interview anyway fairly unlikely so 5,000 of officers from all sorts of places it wasn't just British officers it was South Africans and Canadians and New Zealanders it was poles it was free French it was Norwegians but not Americans not a single American officer ever took the latter course because Admiral King who was running the show in America who famously hated the British didn't let them he wasn't going to cooperate the stupid way too he had no faith in it it seems but it was effective now what do you do you you look at the situation and you wargame it out and you try to think of new ways that the enemy might behave to to put our fleets in danger and then you think well maybe that's what they are actually doing you can you can guess at what they're doing by wargaming out things that work and if they work in the war game then maybe that's what they're actually doing in real life and this solved one of the big problems that the British had the Royal Navy was acting on an incorrect assumption now where does the first torpedo get launched from in an attack by u-boats on a convoy well what are the advantages that a u-boat has was stealth obviously and range you can be standing off quite some distance you can be under the water so you can't be seen and if you were out to the site if the convoy was coming past you like that you would see the sight you see the broad side of every single ship coming past you so really big targets and if you missed one you're quite likely to hit another and then if you're way off to the side you can be gone yeah that's that's the obvious place isn't it to be off to the side shooting but they weren't the British just weren't finding a lot of them except a ship would explode but quick there must be a u-boat out there and it's in desc Scott anything there's nothing on as dick which is a the sonar machine that that picked things up underwater and well the war gamers looked at the reports and try to puzzle it out and they came to a number of conclusions one conclusion was the reason that we're not picking up anything on a stick is that they're not underwater they're on the surface okay so why are we picking them up on radar you're not picking them up on radar because they're being a lot more audacious than we realized they're actually in the convoy at night on the surface and u-boats go much faster on the surface so they could actually catch a convoy up on the surface but they couldn't underwater because they'd be much slower on the surface if you get in the convoy you don't get picked up on radar but on the radar shore they would pick you up okay imagine you're a radar operator looking at a radar image of all the ships in a fleet a hundred ships let's say and oh they're not clear sharp things the radar just sweeps round once every now and then and you get these vague images that are mixed together and there are waves and so forth and some ships shield others and if there were on one pass a hundred little blips and on the next paths one hundred and one would you notice necessarily all these vague shifting shapes you could hide in the fleet and that's what the Germans were doing and they would shoot off some torpedoes and then they would drop back reload and then get in again repeat so if that is what they are doing and of course the war gamers didn't know that they were just conjecturing based on what the war game suggests worked and what information they've been given from the field if that is what they're doing then what tactics would work against it well they came up with a new tactic and that was you don't go hurtling off left and right trying to find that that's non-existent you bow that's out there somewhere what you do is you drop back let the fleet carry on ahead of you drop back quite a long way and then you trawl forwards you go words like this pinging your ass dick and checking the radar and what you should find is the u-boats that had dropped back to reload and then go in again and you know they did it actually worked and Jean Laidlaw so the story goes was asked what what what should we call this new tactic because he got to have a code name for a new tactic and she said well how about through to Hitler and everybody laughed but there was a problem there was a problem because there there is no Morse code for so they spelt it raspberry so this became the raspberry tactic and at this start of the tradition later tactics were called pineapple strawberry apricot and peach and so forth right so they had a new tactic which they tried out and they actually started picking up these these submarines is u-boats and of course now that they know that they are often at night on the surface in amongst the fleet they knew more what to look for and so the efficiency of the escort vessels went up and the convoy casualties went down so let's think of another example of how this wargaming could be put into action well there was something else which had been noticed quite often which was that very often there was one u-boat that's out there but it never attacks now you might think that's a little bit odd but most of the time you're not thinking oh that's odd because you're being attacked by a wolf pack of u-boats and that's your priority that one we have to worry about one for some reason that's not doing anything I don't know maybe they've broken down or they've run out of ammunition or something never mind them Oh boom something's just gone back you've got an immediate situation which you've got to get to grips with and that's what you focus on which was perhaps a mistake because the way two people started coming up with conjectures of why is there this one hanging off and they thought well maybe what the Germans do is they they get one u-boat that the first yearbook that finds the convoy doesn't make an attack much better to assemble a Wolf Pack now the wolf pack and I had to come quite some distance so you don't want to get knocked out before the wolf pack is assembled so you you keep good safe distance out they out of that the range of or anything that the Royal Navy can throw at you and you with your ditz and your dad are does you coordinate the attack and since you have been shadowing the fleet for longest you're the one who knows most about the fleet you've been observing it as it comes past you and you've caught it up again it comes past you and you've counted the ships and you've looked at at the behavior of the escorts and you are actually in the best position to coordinate the attack rather than the u-boats that have just shown up so that seems to be the tack be the procedure that the Germans were using the first person to spot it becomes if you like the coordinator and then the others congregate and actually do the killing which means that if you can take out that command one well you can do it early enough you might not actually get much of a wolf pack together but even if the attacks going on if you can take out the command 1 then what attacks are going on will then suddenly lose their coordination and be much less deadly lives will be saved so maybe our priority should be the one that's actually not attacking us ok so what do you do well a new tactic was devised what you do is you pretend that you haven't seen them so that that ship that you bow that's out there you don't go charging straight at it because if you do it'll really like oh we've been seen little dive and it'll just go away for a bit it's very likely to be able to find the convoy again and then it'll pop up and start signaling again you won't really have achieved very much now what you actually do is you go off not straight out of it but just near enough to it to worry it near enough to make them think we better we better a dive now because if we don't they will see us you don't you don't fire at them you don't flashlights at them you don't do any of that you don't give away that you spotted them so they go under the water thinking that they're safe but they're not and you double back and then using the the drone of the engines of all the rest of the convoy is it chugs forwards you hide amongst your own convoy and go back to where you think they are and then you chop depth charges on them and this new tactic was devised by jato Cal I have a one picture which I believe is of danto Cal there she was 18 years old yes I know she looks about 36 in this picture but - they got people who told her in those days I think she must be at a fancy dress party anyway can you imagine how satisfying it must have been when this new tactic was was was put into into into use and the very first depth charge was a kill so you can imagine massive feather in the cap up until that point there was still a lot of doubt as to whether whatas work was really all that worth listening to now max Horton Admiral max Horton who was running Western Approaches was himself quite skeptical and there is a famous story which I little bit skeptical about I think broadly it's true but I imagine it's one those things that's been retold so many times that the the current version of it is a rather polished and neat convenient version but anyway the story is that he being skeptical said I'm not sure that this tactics gonna work at all all right then I'll be the commander of the submarine and we'll see how well you do against me and so he played the game and after a while someone had to very politely sound and turban or so but you're being dead charged all right well you're lucky the first time right on this play the game I think I know what I did wrong and he lost again and then again and then again and then again he lost five times so they say and then he thought himself okay right I really did try everything and whatever I did they seemed to get me okay I don't understand what's going on but whoever I was up against clearly knows his stuff so that command out we need him on a ship and we need him out there and doing this too the enemy because this works so who was it then who was I up against who was the other side of the screen and he was then she really introduced to the 18 year old Janet Oh Kel who was a rating yeah you see officers shouldn't wargame with non officers it's banned in just about all armies around the world because it's can you imagine if the rating wins what damage that does to discipline and morale it's not good doesn't look good and this was this was an admiral this was a guy who was enormously experienced he wasn't popular he wasn't loved but he was definitely respected he had a reputation for absolutely crushing people with the power of his experience he could say I've been there I've done it I've been doing this since decades before you were born Sonny and so don't you tell me I know my stuff get out of here he was a very decorated naval commander from World War one this man had won the DSO the Distinguished Service Order three times three times now you could say that you could win the DSO once by just being in the wrong place at the wrong time you're right and think of it in the summer oh you survived and got away with it goodness Lord didn't he do well give him a medal that's one way to get a DSO but you don't you don't win the DSO three times that way this guy had proven himself so steam came out of it metaphorical steam came out of his ears but he masked himself and said ok right this tactic works signal all the fleet's we're putting it into action and it did work now then I suppose I really should be telling a little bit more about my sponsors audible now in case you don't know audible is a massive website online that has on it a staggeringly vast collection of audio books all thoughts of topics are dealt with and if you're interested there's an offer you can offer you can look at in the description there there are things you can click or if you like typing stuff you can go to www.hsn s on a device of some sort well you can you can SMS the word Linda beige to 500 500 yes that's Linda beige to 500 500 and you get the same sort of result so what's on offer well you can get a free audiobook may as well get one of the reason the expensive ones I mean why not one that lasts hours and hours and hours and there was a time when they had to record audio books long on vinyl and tape and so forth and it's really big and heavy but now with computers it weighs nothing and so you can have a 13-hour narrated book or whatever to just download it in a trice so that's what they can get a free audiobook which is yours to keep forever and you can even share with a friend but there's more if you are an Amazon Prime customer and you get your skates on because there's a deadline here 31st of July you've got to do this before the 31st of July don't say I didn't warn you then you can get three months at the bargain price of four dollars 95 which is something like a third of normal normal price which the monthly fee and you normally get turn whether you monthly for you get one free download and other stuff cheaper anyway so there's an offer don't you w w dot all that will calm stroke Linda beige and you can take advantage of that clicking I don't want typing just thinking that in the in the description is so much quicker now the the audiobook that caught my eye was won by Alistair MacLean it's HMS Ulysses it's quite it's quite pertinent I would say to this sir particular video because it's a about naval actions in World War two now Alistair MacLean first novel was this and I think it's actually his best and they have lots of other Alistair McClain's available on all will sure you like them and I would say that as a rule of thumb a general of thumb the colder the climate his books are setting the better they are okay I'm just I'm just just giving out as it has it as a tip Aegis Ulysses it's a novel but it's sort of historical in that what he did is he took lots of actual things that happened to actual ships and and put them all in the the slightly fictional setting of this particular ship on one of the convoys that went over the top of Norway taking munitions to Murmansk I bought my father a copy of this book for Christmas once and I said have you read it these at all oh yeah I felt physically cold reading that the descriptions of the cold and the effects of cold everything getting covered in ice and and men dying in all sorts of cold ways it right it stinks the way don't don't watch it don't read it don't listen to it if you want the jolliest of tales but if you want if you like a grim tale of a war then I could recommend HMS Ulysses now I think we should get back to the main topic of this video which if you remember is wargaming at Western Approaches against the German u-boat menace now because it had been so successful they got more and more cooperation and of course it also I didn't hurt that a number of the Ren's working at watu had now got boyfriends who are sailing out there and so they had an extra reason for for communicating but now that way to had proven it's worth it tactics worked when the people were asked to report anything unusual or new they were quite happy and keen to do so so one thing that got reported for instance was an escort commander who saw a sub German u-boat and he was popping up and he was going down it was popping up it was going in popping him it was almost as though he was something whew I'm here come and get me but him he was an escort commander so he thought well it is my job to do me right I'll go and get it so he was charging at it when his Stern blew up that was unexpected think about the report that dit dit da da that went through - - wha - another report came from one naval officer who was actually engaged to one of the way to team and he said funny thing happened one of the ships had been torpedoed there were loads of men in the water and my escort vessel went over to pick them up we thrown the net so where they were scrambling up we were picking them up and even though it was quite foggy we could see there was a u-boat you yeah you there's another one over there's another one over there the three u-boats clearly in it but they could have attacked up a bit they're not attacking us he was thinking what we're gonna have to break off the rescue attempt and I'm gonna have to leave these men in the water because there are you most they're gonna be attacking only the u-boats didn't attack you thought that was strange so that got reported now it's like a puzzle for you alright let's imagine okay so you were at a two and you get these two observations you don't necessarily know that they're connected even but I'm just going to tell you yes they are what conclusion would you come to now if you've worked it out already then well done give yourself a base point and a hearty slap on the back for being a clever clogs but just in case you haven't well I'll tell you the Germans were to conjectured that they didn't know it was just a guess had developed the T 5 or the NAT actually I really only one source has told me that it was ever called the NAT so I'm not entirely sure but the T 5 was an actual torpedo that the Germans actually had developed that was acoustically guided so this was a new torpedo that the Germans had had had tested on this poor commander who had gone out and had his stern law widely stern law his Stern blew up because the the torpedo which has launched not straight at him but a little off to one side had detected the sound of his propellers that noisy bit of the ship and had gone near crash and hit him in the stern that's why his Stern blew up despite the fact that the the u-boat that he was chasing was in front of him and the guy who was picking up the the guys from the water why did they attack he wasn't making any noise he was stationary in the water if they were loaded with acoustic torpedoes and he's stationary they can't get him if you're stationary they can't get you oh ok so they didn't know this but they conjectured that there was a new torpedo and this would also perhaps to some degree explain why they seem to be going for the escort vessels more than the the convoy vessels at least taking out the escort vessels first rather than going for the convoys first all right so they got on the phone they talked to all the boffins they could they could talk to about how an acoustic torpedo might possibly work what sort of limitations might it have and they had the boffins gave them their best guess and then a new tactic that was actually not named after a fruit it was called step aside was developed so if you remember before you pretended not to have seen them well with step aside you go completely the other way you make absolutely sure that they know that you have seen them you fire a star shell over the top and you will illuminate them and you set off towards them well what are they going to do if they stay on the surface you're a warship you'll blow them up so you forced them to dive but you don't actually charge at them what you do is you step aside so if the convoy is going this way you go 90 degrees to it about a mile away so why are you doing that well what they conjectured was that these acoustic torpedoes probably didn't take in sound from 360 degrees if you're trying to fire at a convoy and he got friendly ships a friendly u-boats as well in the water with you it'll just pick up everything and you've no idea where they where it will go so what do a target and then you launch the top you alter the torpedo near it so they can swerve into just that I reckon they reckon about 60 degrees will be about optimum if you have to narrow an angle that it's listening for then it doesn't really make it much more useful than an ordinary torpedo and it make it too too wide then it's more likely to get confused by other signals so about 60 degrees they reckoned would be the optimum and this turned out later to be pretty close up close to the truth so if you head north you can get out of as this diagram makes clear you can get out of that 60-degree arc of danger so as you charge it and it's going away and it could launch an acoustic piste torpedo at you out of its rear they had torpedoes in the rear as well tube you're in 2010 jure but if you go straight at 90 degrees to the fleet you should be safe in theory but you can imagine how nerve-racking it would be to to test that really am I going to be safe we're also away from all our friends on our own there can be more u-boats out there it must be pretty nerve-racking to just take someone's word for it where we think this will probably work and then what you do is you predict where that now dived u-boat is going to end up now u-boats underwater couldn't actually go all that fast and they had quite a big turning circle and tactically when they're trying to attack a convoy they've only got so many options so it was reasonably predictable where they would pop up next and that's what they put into action and you know what it's turned out that step aside worked as well now how well by the way and a bit of a sidetrack now but some people very kindly wrote in to me after watching my last video about you boasted how to sink them and to give me some more details about hedgehogs and squids they were anxious that I let you know that the balm it's as I called them launched from the Hedgehog were not actually depth charges a depth charge sinks until it reaches a setting a depth setting that you've given it and then he goes bang whether it hit anything or not the hedgehogs there those little bomblets would just sink and sink and sink until they physically hit something and then they would explode in contact with it they were smaller than a death charge but they were definitely big enough to blow a big hole a big fatal hole in a u-boat so that was something I neglected to mention about the Hedgehog and someone else wrote in to me to say that the British it seems had really missed a trick and that right nearly the beginning of the war they actually had loads of hedgehogs and loads of ammunition for them but they didn't realise how effective it was didn't realise well the great weapon they had and so they didn't train everyone in the use of them and a lot of people were it skeptical about their effectiveness didn't even train didn't tell the crews how to use it properly and they even neglected the weapon and I've heard of them going rusty when they were inspected no not when inspected on being inspected were found to have gone rusty is what they meant to say but you knew that your very discerning person we should have lunch sometime anyway so that was another detail about that on the squid by the way the the tubes are slightly at an angle like that so that the three bombs landed in a triangle and if you had two squids you could make a sort of star or circle shape with them so the middle details that people write in and so thank you very much I want to encourage people to write in with a little extra little bit of details around of course if I get something wrong you would tell me wouldn't you because you know you wouldn't want me to carry on being wrong that would be awful so anyway so I do appreciate people who write in with little extra tidbits like that so oh right no sorry to interrupt though I know I normally get these all in one take and I've ruined it but stupidly at this point I forgot to say something which I think I wash I will say now because I think it's genuinely interesting and really worthwhile saying I always forget stuff but I didn't want to miss this out now these war games were actually informing battles that were happening at the time it was happening in what you might call real time normally war gamers planned stuff out in advance they come up with conjectural scenarios and it's all thinking long in the future but these battles across the Atlantic lasted for many days it takes time to assert her to to gather a Wolfpack to attack a convoy and they don't just shoot one torpedo and Scarpa these these u-boats typically had 14 torpedoes and getting into position to launch one and then getting the position to launch another one can take a long time they didn't want to die they had to make every torpedo count so it would take a long time for them to to do their Wolf's pakery so the battle would happen going across the Atlantic over many days but radio is really quick so after the first clash and the observations of what's going on could be sent to Western Approaches and watu could then have people wargaming through the night bleary-eyed trying to work out the best way to to counter the particular situation that these captains out on the cold sea found themselves in and then they could send instructions based on their findings back and those that could be acted on during the next bit of that same battle so uatu was actually wargaming stuff out and being able to advise people in the field actually during the battle and I just thought that was something which you'd like to hit okay carry on thank you how effective was about to well let's look at the graph because we all love graphs which I'm cuckoo I'm gonna say I took go over there now or just created more more work for me right so as you can see this line represents the number the amount of tonnage of shipping being sunk by the German u-boats during the Battle of Atlantic and you can see that they start off sinking ships and they think more and more and more and more and this is the first happy time and an awful lot of Allied shipping is going to the bottom of the the ocean but then then the British get their act together they they they get more coordinated they introduce the cam ships and the vlr aircraft and and so forth and they get their act together and you can see that yes the tide is now turning against the Germans they're the the British have the upper hand but then the Americans enter the war and things change quite dramatically and the second happy time then starts and you can see that the line goes up and up and up and keeps going up my goodness does it go up until it gets to this terrifying point which is significant because this is the point in the bath of Atlantic when whatas tactics start to be implemented so let's see what happens to the graph now whoa that's a sudden downturn and a steep downturn and a downturn that just keeps going down and down and down on that slope on the way down are other things too for instance the introduction of aircraft carriers that were used as escort vessels and I'm sure they helped a great deal I'm short loads of the the new tactics and weapons and so forth helped but why twos influence appears I mean unless it's just a stupendous coincidence to have really made a huge difference and though the Germans put more and more u-boats out there they were never able to turn the line to go upwards again not not at all and then the war ended so against what opposition were the British fighting let's have a look at another line or bar chopped or something I'm not sure how I'm going to show it and this is the number of u-boats that are actively on patrol in the Antarctic so you imagine that at first I've had quite a lot and then after a while when things are going badly they're obviously you don't know it's the other way around they were building u-boats like crazy putting more and more of them out there there are more in the later part of the war than at the start and yet they're sinking less and less shipping oh but wait wait until you see how many of them are being sunk okay so now now you're seeing the number of u-boats going to the bottom of the sea and yeah you see that by the end of the war the Royal Navy in the RAF were just murdering u-boats you do not want to be a u-boat crewman you have a 75 percent chance of being killed don't get in a world war two u-boat that's my advice to you Time Traveller's so the the difference was enormous now did the Duke of Wellington win the Battle of Waterloo yeah he did yeah yeah the Duke Wellington he won the Battle of Waterloo but yeah he did but he had help there were several people with him at the time he didn't do it all on his own but you could say he couldn't you D the Duke of Wellington he won about the Waterloo well in order for the battle for the Atlantic to be won an awful lot of brave men had to go out over those cold gray unforgiving cruel seas and they had to engage with the enemy they had to spend hours upon hours gazing at radar screens trying to stay alert and pick out that one little clue that's going to make the difference they had to put out the fires that started on their ships they had to risk all the dangers and in Britain all the people I had to dig the coal in vast quantities and refine the steel and make aircraft carriers and then all the aircraft carrier crewmen have to be recruited and trained and take the risk to go out there and actually do the job of defeating the enemy yes all of that is quite definitely and obviously true but in a similar way to the way and you could say that the Duke of Wellington won the Battle of Waterloo you could say that the the battle for the Atlantic was won by a dozen war gamers in a block of flats in Liverpool [Music] the man you

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Keywords: battle, atlantic, uboat, u boat, u-boat, navy, wargaming, wargamers, gamers, simulation, tactics, convoys, wolfpack, sea, ocean, vessels, cargo, ships, captains, watu, western approaches, command, commanders, wrens, horton, prince philip, strategy, escort, escorts, carriers, modelling, modeling

Id: fVet82IUAqQ

Length: 41min 5sec (2465 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 22 2018