War on the Atlantic, Not Battle of: Misconceptions & Clarifications - Dr. John Kuehn

all right um hi my name is Joey and I'm a member of the student Advisory Board here at the Dole Institute of politics um welcome to the Dole Institute and thank you for attending today's presentation the Dole student Advisory Board is composed of K students committed to working to the Dole Institute we attend regular meetings assistant events like this and plan an Sab sponsored event every semester members of the Sab receive great opportunities to network with our special guests um if you're a student and would like to join please contact the ad Institute the ad Institute would like to hear from you if you enjoy today's program please let us know by contacting us on Facebook Twitter or through our website email if you prefer to write us a note there will be a notepad and pins on the table as you exit the building and your attendance and feedback help shape the future of this programming so it's really important to us before we begin today I'd like to remind you to please turn off your cell phones after the interview we will have some time for the audience questions and answers if you have have a question please raise your hand and a student helper with a microphone will come to you please ask just one brief question and now I'm pleased to welcome Bill Lacy the uh director of the ad Institute of politics that's okay you're not required to applaud you are required to applaud for our guest speaker though so I'll make that very clear on the front end um I think everybody knows of the Delight that I have to have the opportunity to work with the historians at Fort lenworth and U this is a second series that they put on Jim willbanks came to us uh back a couple years ago proposed a a series on the Cold War it was great uh I said as soon as that one concluded how about another one came back proposed one on World War II and we're off to a wonderful start so uh they're especially uh terrific because the quality of the presentations is is extraordinarily high and because uh your support and the community support of the program has been so uh so excellent so welcome to all of you thanks for being a part of it thanks for your support of the Dole Institute of politics John tun is an associate professor of military history and has served on the faculty of the US Army command and general staff College since July of 200000 a formal Navy AV a formal Naval aviator he has completed numerous Cru es aboard four different aircraft carriers he flew reconnaissance and combat missions during the last decade of the Cold War and the first Gulf War among others and a member of the audience was just sharing a few moments ago that he made 200 arrested Landings on carriers during his career is that correct more than 200 200 yeah okay very good very good walked on the water yes all right very good uh Dr C is also an adjunct professor for the naval war College Fleet seminar program program and with the ma in military history and Ma in history programs at Norwich University please welcome to the do Institute of politics Dr John C well thank you Bill um Allison took my picture earlier and she goes boy you're you're wearing the wrong colors today I I just want to say this was not intentional uh my wife bought me some new purple ties uh and some purple shirts uh because she thinks I look good in them so I so I don't mean to offend anybody but it's not maou colors so I think we'll be okay right all right okay well today we're going to talk about the the uh and let me go back here so you guys can see the the title we're going to talk about the uh what's more often than not called the battle of the Atlantic for a battle it sure did last a long time so I've always kind of been one of these guys that kind of goes around and tries to get people to change their language about these things because uh the battle start started uh in September 1939 and it went all the way to May 1945 so in terms of battles it was either the longest Battle in History or maybe it wasn't a battle maybe it was a a campaign or several campaigns or just a war uh it was uh kind of a disesteemed war because it was fought with uh sort of weapons that people uh don't normally think of you know they think of Top Gun and aircraft carriers and papy Boon and and you know or the HBO Pacific spefic series you know going ashore with the Marines and all that kind of thing and this thing was fought with uh with four four kinds of of platforms three of them ships uh UB boats submarines uh hot smelly submersible torpedo boats is what they are uh destroyers which is over here in the uh you see be on your left side and then up top uh with Merchant ships uh and the key the key platform here are the merchant ships that's what they want want to get that's what the uh that's what the Allies need to support the war effort against the axis and that's what uh the Axis powers particularly Germany need to sink enough of in order to cause Britain to starve so that's that's the uh that's the goal though there's a fourth platform it's not flying by but uh Patrol uh Aviation uh Naval Aviation uh and for that part uh aviation in general and I'll talk about some of the different airplanes that were involved in the campaign so so you can get a feel for those so uh but generally not the not the sexy stuff not the f-14s not the f6s not the f4fs not the Spitfires but uh low and slow and and uh and that kind of level you know here I was and then an hour later I was still right there you know droning along so so that's what we'll take a look at all right well the uh the overall agenda will be to uh we'll take a look at the database uh there's a really wonderful book called ubot Wars by A Great British historian named John terrain and he treats he treats the submarine campaign as one big war and he starts it in 1914 and he goes all the way to 1945 and he treats the inter War period as a uh as a as a truce as a as a ceasefire um so we'll take a look at the Great War database because most of the things that you need to know about fighting submarines we learned in World War I and then we had to relearn those lessons again in World War II so we'll talk about that uh we'll take a look at the impact of peace and Naval treaties this is appropriate for the Dole Center uh you know we're we're kind of given a military history or a Naval History pitch here but but uh but diplomatic history is very very important it's political history on the large stage on the international stage and that's really an area that I like to talk about and it has a huge impact on the preparation for the war on both sides uh and we'll take a little bit of look at planning I won't spend too much time on that then we'll take a look at the actual War itself and it divides into into pretty much three phases you kind of get the first happy time the second happy time and then the no longer happy time so that that's what it is so the first happy time is is early in the war the second happy time comes about after the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor and then the uh the later uh period of the war the phase of the war where the Germans are clearly losing is from about 1943 until 1945 so we'll take a look at those and uh we end up with the G Damar room there with the Germans well one thing to remember about war at Sea is it's war in four dimensions and this occurred this is actually a World War I Fleet at se it's actually the British Grand Fleet at se uh actually probably prior to the Battle of Jutland and uh it's in in in four different dimensions the the slide kind of excur it a little bit but the the the classic Dimension is on the surface and that's where we're going to see our destroyers and our Merchant ships for the most part uh and then two New Dimensions uh air you'll have Platforms in the air and you'll have platforms under the water so World War I is sort of a a dimensional Revolution for Warfare because you go from the surface into the air and under the water so we haven't seen that in Warfare very much prior to uh World War I and then there's a fourth dimension we always forget about and that's with the invention of Telegraph and radar and and and uh all these electronic things have a big impact and and we see them already in World War I with signal intelligence and you know intercepting German Fleet Communications and that kind of thing will go on again in World War II so so uh anti-submarine Warfare submarine warfare is really Warfare in four dimensions well lessons not learn I've I've already talked about that uh one of the things that comes out of World War I is this question about the battleship what should be the coin of the realm for Naval power should it be battleships or should it be aircraft carriers or and everybody kind of forgets about the submarine uh but uh right after World War I the ASW committee at the Washington Naval conference looked at how many battleships had been sunk during the war and it figured out that they'd all been either sunk by the the majority of battleships sunk in World War I had been sunk with either mines or by submarines with Torpedoes so uh so this the submarine has a role to play it has a role to play uh the other thing is that the submarine really threaten the British the submarine campaign during World War I was really really short uh after the Lucitania was sunk which was really an accident it wasn't unrestricted submarine warfare at that point uh the uh the Germans stopped unrestricted submarine warfare for for almost 15 months and then when they started it up again in 18 months they sank as many ships now not as much tonnage we'll talk about that you've got ships smaller ships in World War I time frame larger ships in World War II but the Germans in 18 months sank uh sank far more ships at a more alarming rate than they did in World War II so the German submarine campaign in World War I was was the second most effective submarine campaign in history okay does anybody know the most effective submarine campaign in history by the way war against jaanese yeah the American submarine campaign against the Japanese is still the most effective submarine campaign in history all right and that was that was us using pretty much the same tactics that the Germans used in World War I okay uh well how do you solve the submarine problem you outlaw the submarine uh or you outlaw the submarine for the one nation that has shown a proclivity to use it in an illegal and criminal manner so uh that's where we get into the issue of treaties um at Versailles the uh the German submarine is uh the Germans are not allowed to build submarines uh they're not allowed to own submarines uh and it and the British and the Americans and and pretty much everybody else thinks that the problem of unrestricted submarine warfare is something that's been taken care of with international law international law prohibits it so now we don't have to worry about it anymore and everybody signs the conventions including the Germans that come after there are many many other uh submarine protocols that get signed at Washington in 1922 and then again at London in 1930 however by 1935 Germany is beginning to rearm under Adolf Hitler and Great Britain Ides as sort of an act of of reproach and good faith really to show the Germans that there's no hard feelings about World War one they go into a negotiation with the Germans and they decide well if the Germans are going to rearm let's sign a treaty with them so that they'll tie their Fleet numbers to our Fleet numbers and so the British allow the Germans to build submarines again but you know the the the caveat to that is of course you won't use them to attack shipping without warning you'll you'll adhere to what's called Cruiser rules and those Cruiser rules are the submarine is on the surface it notifies the merchant ship that it's going to be boarded they're going to look for embargoed cargo and they either put a prize crew on the ship or they make sure of the safety of the crew and then syn the ship submarines are very poorly suited to do any of those things but the Germans agree to do all that the British let them and the British say okay well you can build up to 40% of the number of submarines that the Royal Navy has okay and that's quite a few submarines that that's actually about 40 or 50 submarines that the Germans can build but they haven't built any submarines yet so Versailles has had had an an effect the Germans don't really have any submarines what the Germans have is Smart Guys and what they do is they build torpedo boats and they practice Wolfpack tactics with torpedo boats in the Baltic a guy named Carl duritz is a a flotilla half flotilla Capitan and he practices Mass because he he found that the Convoy defeated the submarine in World War I so he's going to defeat the Convoy with essentially convoys of submarines in World War II so he's going to meet Mass with mass the other thing that he does is he sends his uh Naval engineers and Naval Architects to places like Sweden and Holland and there they designed submarines for the swedes and for for the Dutch and they have the blueprints and they're allowed to keep the blueprints so that once they are allowed to rearm they can build the British also put a caveat in the treaty that they signed with Germany the the the Anglo German Naval treaty that if Germany notifies great Britain Germany can build up to 100% submarines but everybody's thinking about submarines as a as a part of the fleet their job is going to be to be out in front of the Feet Fleet as the eyes and ears of the fleet to kind of detect where the enemy is if they get a chance to sink a battleship sync a battleship and at trite the fleet it's the same Doctrine the Americans have it's the same Doctrine the Japanese have so everybody's thinking that the submarines are going to support the battle Fleet whatever that looks like and for everybody in 1935 and 1936 that means a big Fleet of battleships maybe with a couple of aircraft carriers providing air cover against Billy Mitchell and his bombers right so so that's what they're thinking about all right the Germans are also authorized to build aircraft that had been prohibited at Versa and they're also allowed to build carriers and battleships uh and the reason I bring this up is when we talk about the Battle of the Atlantic we usually focus on the submarine we forget about the fact that the Germans can sync ships with airplanes and they will and they can sync ship with battleships Cruisers disguised Merchant Raiders and they will so the Germans come up with this plan after Munich called the Z plan and this is a plan by Grand Admiral Eric Raider and I'll show you a picture of him later and this is a plan not to sync Britain's Fleet it's a plan to choke Britain's sea Communications so that if they ever go to war with Great Britain again God forbid according to the German Navy they will choke off the uh they'll choke off British Commerce and I'll kind of show you real quick how the plan is supposed to work but it's what we call a combined arms plan by a balanced Fleet it's not a fleet that's all battle ships all aircraft carriers and all submarines it's got pieces and parts of all of these things to force the British to kind of spread their effort and I'll talk about that uh the completion date for it is supposed to be 1948 so this plan is going to be dead on arrival once Hitler goes to war at 1939 and when that happens Hitler will actually give the Navy early in 193 9 priority for resources makes the uh Army hopping mad because it wants artillery and tanks right and we talk about the blitz cre one of the reasons the Germans only have 10% of their army with tanks and mechanized stuff in in 1939 is the German Navy gets the balance of Steel and resources coming from Sweden so so the uh so Hitler gives priority to the Navy and then when war is actually declared they go with the all Battleship all submarine plan in other words they kind of go to war with the fleet they have and then Hitler says well okay we'll build the battleships and we'll build the submarines but everything else will kind of kind of hold off on and go with that approach by the way the German Admirals are not happy about the decision for war they're very very unhappy not because they're peaceloving people but because they're not going to be ready to defeat Britain until 1948 or so so they they want to be able to win if they go to war uh we talked about that I'll let me kind of go over the the uh the map here the idea is we'll have some old battleships to include some old battle Cruisers like the scarn horse and the N now which are actually fairly new ships and they'll tie down the British home Fleet in the North Sea and that's up on the right there then we'll form these small raiding groups built around super battleships and cruisers bismar turits with Prim oan hipper some of the pocket battleships and will raid British sea line so they'll have to kind of take away from the home Fleet to kind of Honor these raids that are going to occur we'll also have airplanes attacking and submarines attacking and uh a couple times during the war the Germans are going to make make this work pretty effectively but again it's sort of too little too late because they just don't have enough to do what they'd like to do but the whole idea is to kind of put a full-court press on British Sea lines of communication uh to strangle them and so bleed off those destroyers that would normally escort convoys uh to uh to escort Battle groups uh the big weakness here is German Naval Aviation doesn't exist Herman garring basically expropriates all the German aircraft so anytime the German Navy goes to Sea and needs fighter cover or needs to use uh Naval or Aviation to attack shipping they have to coordinate with the with the Air Force and just like in the United States or any other country the Navy and the Air Force have a hard time coordinating with each other and the Navy doesn't own their own Air Force and this is sort of a an argument that the Americans uh and the Japanese had done it correctly by separating out the Naval Aviation and leaving it with the Navy so that's the plan we're going to choke off Britain British Sea lines of communication and starve them for resources and food so that's the overall design this is the one thing that worries Churchill more than anything remember Church Hill fought World War I and he was the uh first he was the first Lord of the admiralty which is basically the secret AR of the Navy in World War I so he knew the problems of of getting food stuffs and resources to Britain and he says that in in World War World War II this is uh this is his Achilles Hill it's the only thing he says that ever really frightened him I'll let you kind of read that but he's a little you know the we we see these quotations and we think boy that Churchill was one smart guy right we think he was one smart guy uh on the other hand he denies resources to the effort to protect British Sea lines and we don't see that often and and this quotation I think if we have it now I got rid of it he actually denies the British uh Navy Naval Aviation resources including longrange bombers and so they bomb the French Countryside and German Countryside uh at night with bombers not hitting any Targets for almost two years when those long range bombers could have been used against OTS and on ubo patrols so so Churchill does get some things wrong well culture in the submarine war is a big deal the the Royal Navy is the Navy of Nelson and what Nelson's Navy does is they hunt the enemy they hunt the enemy and uh so you go out on patrols you find the submarines and you kill them right and you don't waste time assigning ships to escort convoys and doing that kind of thing and in World War I that almost killed the British Navy there was this culture of disesteem about that and it was almost the 11th Hour when they finally realized wait a second if we want to find the submarines all we have to do is put all the merchant ships together in a convoy and the submarines have to come to the Convoy and then we wait for them to show up it's a little bit like counterinsurgency today where you where you put the people in a secure environment now if the terrorists or the or the insurgents want to try to convince people to support them they have to come to the people so the Germans have to come to the convoys if the German submarines go out and don't sink any Merchant ships who's going to win Britain Britain's going to win Britain's going to win the Allies are going to win but the culture in the Royal Navy kind of goes back to its default setting of let's hunt the Germans and initially the way the war starts the Germans follow Cruiser rules so the first year the ru war is really about hunting down German Merchant Cruisers and hunting German battleships that are raing British sea lines and trying to hunt submarines and the Germans are following the rules so it seems like the British are being very successful the other thing for the British is AIC that stands for an anti-submarine Warfare detection committee uh something close to that but what it means is sonar and the British think that they have a tool with which to hunt the submarine which is sonar but anybody who's ever worked with sonar and I've worked with sonar um and uh uh on on ships I've actually been in a combat information center when we used sonar to track passive sonar to track a Soviet submarine the uh the sonar is only good to a certain uh range it's not what we would call a an open ocean Search tool it's really a tool that you use after you know that there's a submarine there it's not a tool that you use to go out and find submarines in the middle of the haystack uh you can keep them on as you're going on with the Convoy but you have to be very careful you get too much noise in the water so the the British aren't convoying at first because they don't need to and you lose a lot of money it's less efficient to Convoy so they're not convoying like they did in World War I and they're hunting submarines with sonar and they they they think their things are working but what sonar really does it gives them a false sense of security that if the Germans really start to have success they can hunt the Germans with the sonar and find the Germans as it turns out sonar is real good of letting them know that a German is about ready to Lucid torpedo at them it's more like a radar warning device like oh we've got a submarine oh there's a merchant ship blowing up over here that's about the time time uh period for that okay so uh so so it's a Panacea that doesn't seem to work out uh the Germans uh for culture the Germans uh are uh their culture is also a warrior culture and but they are the hunters so they're much more Well Suited culturally for this fight than the British are the British have to be protectors they have to be Shepherds that's not their culture for the Germans they're the hunters okay and so that fits their culture more but there are weaknesses for the Germans to do this thing they're going to have to they're going to have to transmit targets to the submarines the submarines will have to come to the surface and that's when the submarine is most vulnerable they can't stay below the surface in definitely they can only stay as long as their batteries are good and then they have to charge so normally what the German submarines will do is they'll they'll they'll only submerge when they're approaching a danger situation or a Target and uh but ideally they would like to uh be on the surface at night or they would like to be able to surface at night and charge their batteries so the German submarine is a part-time submarine for most of the war it's a submarine that spends most of its time on the surface not under the water the only time it's under the water is when it's in combat or when it is being attacked okay so normally the German submarine is hardly ever under water it's trying to stay on the surface as much as it can all right to be effective all right that's about the Germans um duret is controlling everything back in h Germany with centralized thing and the way he's got it so that the Allies can't figure out what's going on how he controls the submarines is he has an encryption device called Enigma and the Navy doesn't trust the Army the Army's got an enigma device that's super super secret and unbreakable and the polls steal one and bring it to Britain before the war even starts so already and this is called the ultra secret it's completely changed how we write about history in World War II but essentially the British can read the German mail but the naval Enigma has got an extra component an extra wheel to encrypt so the British cannot break that encryption so it's going to be sort of a war to kind of figure out how can we break the German encryption and uh until they do that the German command and control for their submarines is going to be very very effective in bringing all the submarines together to attack convoys one other thing to understand about the Germans is they only have about 30 operational submarines when the war starts so when the war starts they they uh they don't really have that many submarines they still have to build most of the submarines that we'll see during the war so Versailles does keep their submarine Force down the other thing is Hitler does not want to alienate the British he figures if he can beat the polls beat the French the British will go okay let's sign a peace treaty okay and the way to avoid antagonizing the British is to do like you did in World War I and S all their merchant traffic so initially Hitler follows Cruiser rules he tells the submarines to behave and for the first year of the war we don't see the sort of crazy ASW war that that that we saw in World War I we see the Germans kind of following the rules trying to appease the British and keep the British from from from rejecting German peace terms those peace terms are rejected in August and that's when the first Happy Time begins here's the Atlantic Ocean the first uh area of the campaign is going to take place right where it did in World War I in the North Sea and in the western approaches uh you see Ireland there those are the Western approaches and the German submarines that have been built and optimized for that area are the type seven Charlie ubot they're not long range and they're really optimized to work there so that's where the first phase of the war is going to take place and uh again we I already talked about this uh this particular uh phase of the operation where we haven't really uh haven't really started unrestricted submarine warfare there's some minor victories by both the British and the Germans but the Germans are not really stressing the British Sea lines of communication during this period and and everybody it's not a case of the Germans are breaking the laws of war yet uh key point is Iceland and that Northern Atlantic route that's the major route for merchant traffic in and out of Britain and you kind of see that little fuzzy pink area around Great Britain that's where most of the activity is going to take place in this period okay now the Germans get a huge windfall shortly after the war starts they uh they capture Norway and Denmark and then they capture uh France when they do that they they the real estate that they have that they can base submarines is all of a sudden a completely different game than the British had in World War I and so now the British are going to have to patrol all the way from uh Spain all the way to the north to look for German submarines coming out of their bases in World War I it was very easy all you had to do was Focus right there where Denmark is and in the North Sea but now they're going to have to do that uh and so uh so that so that really changes the whole idea to the British start the Convoy in World War I convoying alone defeated the submarine okay and the Germans don't have enough submarines yet to go with the wolf back even so it's called the first happy time uh if you remember the Battle of Britain uh that's when the Germans uh that's when the Germans uh launched their fullscale assault on Great Britain with bombers and Fighters and and at the same time they Unleashed their uots and the uboat captains called it the happy time because they were just able to sink ships at will the problem is the Germans only had still about 30 operational uots because the ones that have been operational early in the year some of them been Su some of them needed to go into the yards and get maintenance and so the submarines were really operating in onesies and twoes not in wolf packs yet but even so the Germans shocked the British with the numbers of ships that they sank and the British reacted by forming convoys the Germans also were extremely effective with air power with the ful wolf 200 Condor but Garing refused to build any more of these airplanes and we'll see over time they became neutralized by the Allies okay uh the Wolfpack concept is March to the sound of the guns you'll get a line of submarines out in the Atlantic and their job is to and you'll have several lines picket ships and when one of them sees a convoy they'll radio back to duret duret at com Central Command his staff officers will plot the Convoy then they'll relay that position out to all the submarines the and they'll do that in what they call a submarine broadcast and they'll do that on a periodic basis so and they do that so the British won't know uh the British will go well we just got a submarine broadcast we don't know what it means because it's encrypted but we know that they're broadcasting to the submarines but they're doing it every two hours or every three hours or every 12 hours so it's hard to do what we call Traffic analysis and say oh they're broadcasting because they're getting ready to attack all right so the Germans are being very very clever about it in the meantime all the uots get together and then they'll concentrate and they'll attack the Convoy and when this hits the British the first couple times in 1941 it's a shock the British are not ready for it and the big thing is the Destroyers they just don't have enough destroyers to escort these convoys uh and and the real hero in 1941 is the Royal Canadian Navy the Royal Canadian Navy puts to sea with anything that it can get and they end up uh performing uh amazing uh work uh escorting these convoys in some cases with you know essentially sailboats in some cases or motorized sailboats tugboats they're using tugboats they're using anything that they can get their hands on to escort these convoys because the British simply don't have enough destroyers they didn't build destroyers they thought they needed to build battleships in the in war period in fact the Americans have to give them 50 old Destroyers I don't know if you've ever heard of the old four stackers they have to give them 50 and that's part of Len lease is to give them those 50 four stacker destroyers because the British are so hard up for that and that kind of stabilized this thing for a while also remember the Germans are specializing in attacking at night they can go faster at night con move about about 15 nautical miles 13 to 15 nautical miles if the German OTS are submerged they only get one shot but if they're on the surface they can run a little faster 15 16 maybe even 17 knots for some of them and so they can reposition for a re attack on the Convoy so you're going to see nighttime attacks take place and there's almost no tactics to deal with these nighttime German wolfback attacks they're they're very very dangerous and so 1941 is when Churchill really starts to lose sleep well the Navy goes to him and says you have to give us aircraft to get out there so that we can attack these submarines detect these submarines reroute the submarines and at first Churchill kind of tells them no I think we're in good shape the Air Force the Royal Air Force needs these bombers to bomb Germany because that's going to end the war but event and the bomber uh bomber Harris the commander of the British Air Force says he refuses to give these uh planes to uh the Royal Navy finally it gets so critical that Churchill orders the Air Force to give some of the bombers to uh to go hunt German German submarines and to help the convoys because the convoys need any kind of help they can get the second uh the second it's a very busy side slide but I'm going to kind of talk through it a little bit the second happy time comes when the Americans come in when the Americans come in by this point the the the battle has kind of stabilized the Canadians have come forth Churchill's Cut Loose uh some uh some uh bombers to help the the the Royal Navy they get those American destroyers and so they've kind of stabilized the patient right the patient is an extremist they're in the ICU but they're stabilized but they're not out of the dark yet okay and and so the other thing that they have to do is they have to ramp up ship production yeah and I'll show you a chart later to kind of show you all that works in the meantime we have to figure out how to kill these German ful wolves uh they only have 90 of these things at the beginning of the war but they're actually in the first year and a half of the war they're sinking as many ships as the submarine sink uh so what they'll do is they'll put what they call a cam out there that's a catapult aircraft Merchant they'll put a an airplane and he'll launch off of a catapult on a merchant ship and then uh he'll ditch the airplane or parachute out of the airplane and they'll pick him up that's kind of like a throwaway airplane and they use that to attack these ful wolves they also use what they call Max uh Merchant aircraft they'll put a flight deck on a merchant ship and they'll put two or three airplanes on there and that's enough to kind of solve the problem the other thing they do is they go you know what the submarines have to transmit when they find the convoys when they do that we can get them we can start to detect their bearing via hfdf high frequency Direction finding and they start to build what they call huffduffer and they were all over the world in masawa and in in Spain in Diego Garcia and Guam and a lot of these things were left over from World War II because with they the British and the Americans start to build all of these uh hfdf stations with these antennas and they start to figure out okay where are the submarines so they start to used the Germans uh requirement to transmit against them kind of electronic warfare kind of thing also we start to get radar and lights remember what when do the German submarines attack what time of the day nighttime so that's when the Germans are at their most dangerous and the Allies at their most vulnerable so they start to equip the ships with search lights they start to tie durables to the back of ships and put search lights on them and they start to work on making radar small enough so that they can put it on airplanes and eventually they will be able to put Radars uh cband xand Radars on airplanes so that airplanes can look at night for submarines okay initially uh though that takes a while the other thing is they still haven't broken the ultra so they still are not reading the communications so they're they're only exploiting them for direction finding purposes uh the Americans enter the war and dur it decid Ides you know what the Americans are ripe for an attack they're ripe for an attack and uh Admiral Ernest King is the chief of Naval operations and he says the east coast of the United States is simply too far away for a German type seven submarine to get there and they don't have enough type nines and the type nines are these long range submarines that the Germans have Germans only have about eight or9 Type n submarines so he says we don't have to Convoy we don't have to worry about the Germans it's a huge error because what the Germans do is they take all of their type n submarines that are operational and deploy them and they tell them don't attack on your way over ignore any Targets get in position off the United States and then wait for the signal and attack all right and then they take a couple type sevens and they rip all kind of stuff out of these things and they modify a couple of them so that they can operate up around Halifax and that see where Bermuda is Halifax is up north in that blue circle and they push those guys attack and this is called operation pulen schlock drum beat operate operation drumbeat then they send the signal out and the second Happy Time begins and these are not wolf packs these are signal submarines and you if you've ever seen the uh some of the some of you I don't know you may have been children during World War II see the see the merchantmen on fire off the coast that was that was Operation drum beat and that's the second uh second happy time it's a really really critical campaign one because it's so unexpected and two because they go after oil tankers they go if we sink the oil tankers the Brits are not going to be able to make Aviation gasoline and bombas they're not going to be able to provide Power we're going to starve them for fuel so the Germans go after these oil tankers and they actually get submarines down and around the gulf and Bermuda and they sink just an incredible number of tankers and that's really that's our that's our Achilles heel and so all of a sudden we have to start building oil tankers because the Germans have sunk so many now it's we we should have figured this was going to happen because we do the same thing to the Japanese with their oil tankers about a year later we do it but uh but it was the same concept so this is the German second happy time uh but it doesn't really solve the German problem which is starve Great Britain for resources yes they get oil shortages yes there's some problems but they can get oil from the Suez Canal and from the Persian Gulf as well as from the United States and actually what this does is it's the British start to develop their infrastructure in Iraq and and and Iran and and and flow more oil from the Persian Gulf so it's a delayed reaction but it also helps them get that going and in some sense uh as we can see today that you know kind of if you want to look to when when the British really started to develop the infrastructure and the Persian Gulf for producing oil it was during World War II and operation drum beat was one of the reasons that they had to do that well here are here they are um up in the corner is a type seven very short range there's a destroyer uh the Allies rely very heavily on something called the uh the pby Catalina uh and eventually we'll put Radars on the catalinas and these things will Patrol millions and millions of miles of ocean looking for submarines now if you C I remember one time when I was doing this kind of thing in the nav I was I F I flew land base aircraft and I switched over to carrier base aircraft and I was in p3s and I remember I came back one day and he said well what' you find well we didn't find anything and they go well that's good what do you mean why is that good he goes well that's where we know the enemy isn't that's where we'll go okay because we don't have to worry about them being there so it's as important to know where the submarines aren't when you're routing convoys so these guys would look through the ocean and they sanitize areas and they escort the convoys they could use them as what we call a sledg camera to fly out and drop mines or or M or or depth charges on the submarines and so uh very very important and as the war goes on we build Base After Base After Base After Base and all of these bases become very very important after the war during the Cold War when we had to kind of do the same thing with the Soviet Union here's what a convoy looks like keeping an eye on the time here U again uh they can only go about a Max of 159 knots or seven knots how do we figure out how fast the Convoy goes slow as ship okay does the Convoy stop no you don't stop to look for S which is almost countercultural for Navy people Man Overboard stop everything let's do see a rescue right not with the Convoy those guys are going to have to figure it out on their own maybe the next Convoy through won't be under an attack and can look for them and the pby catalinas this is one something that they do they call them Dumbo missions they go go around looking for uh for down for uh both down aviators as well as uh crewmen that are in the water but many of the men who die are going to perish at Sea from exposure uh or from uh or from or from starvation or more likely dying of thirst in the seawater so uh the Convoy keeps moving the dark blue dots are the uh escorts and as the war goes on the Germans will learn to attack the escorts kill the Shepherds then go after the Sheep kill the Shepherds and go after the Sheep the war is a war of action counteraction counter counteraction or another way to say it is measure Convoy countermeasure Wolfpack counter countermeasure lots of escorts and airplanes and so it's this kind of back and forth and as the Germans develop their tactics so do the Allies this guy is Captain Johnny Walker he develops this he's very very famous he's a very very successful and he says you know we can fight these guys we don't have to just kind of go along and wait for them to kill us we can be very active and and the creeper tactic is a tactic where they can where they can uh uh kill a ubot and and he comes up with uh charts and graphs and here's where numbers start to really come to play a big game and you start to get mathematicians involved in figuring out okay how can we increase our probability of detecting subin and killing submarines and then guys like Commodore Walker will Design these tactics and this is this is the creeper tactic where where the uh where the uh they're dropping all those little gray boxes are are depth charges and it's their way of of getting the OT they always they always like to know where is the uboat and uh and usually they will detect the ubo if they're lucky with sonar before he gets inside the Convoy or they'll see what they call flaming datam a flaming datam a datam is a location of a submarine a flaming datam is a location of the submarine where his Target was so you know he's somewhere within two to three thousand yards of his Target and then you go there so it's a very complicated it's kind of like watching paint dry do this stuff but it's extremely important because if these convoys don't get to Europe you're you're not going to be able to feed all the gis who need to invade for D-Day never mind run the British factories and keep everybody in the fight who else are we keeping in the fight with the with these Merchant ships Russia yeah the Soviet Union is a huge factor and here I'm going to talk a little about one of the most uh one of the most effective uh now there's uh operation drum beat no uots lost not a single uboat is lost in this campaign the the US does not have the assets out there they sink a million and a half tons of shipping a million and a half tons however by the time the the end of the war arrives the Amer the Americans and the British can replace that tonnage in three months talked about that pq17 this is one of the lendle convoys to the Soviet Union if you remember July 1942 the Germans are driving on Stalingrad so this is the key year of the war for the Russians all right and uh a a lendle convoy is going north to bring uh War material to the Soviet Union mostly studabaker trucks and trains okay uh and including some rail stock okay but they're bringing uh as well as ammunition and and other wartime stuff um and so they're coming around the North Cape of Norway when it's the warm weather and they can get into Archangel or merat the Germans still have one super Battleship left the tpet and here's where signals intelligence can really mess you up by this time the Allies have a pretty good idea of breaking the code for the German Naval stuff and they break the code that says sorty the tpet to attack the Convoy now this is what the Z plan was meant to do okay if the battleship comes out the convoys got to break up because the Convoy is absolutely not going to be able to defend itself against the battleship so the best defense is to scatter right to scatter um well the tpit doesn't go out but the Convoy scatters when the Convoy scatters the Germans laot launch ju88 Stuka dive bombers and their their their submarines from Norway and they destroy the Convoy that's a ju88 destroying one of the tankers there and the British end convoys for a short time to Russia because of this huge disaster so this is a huge German Victory and again if the German Admirals had gotten their way you can imagine this happening every two weeks or so under the z plant it would have been very bad for the Allies indeed so we have to thank Hitler for attacking in 1939 and not giving the Germans a chance to do this on a large scale later in the war with a later start uh another concept and I don't know if you guys care about theory is the idea of a fleet and being a fleet and being is a fleet that's always a threat and the tpet kind of fulfills that role shortcoming of signals intelligence sometimes the intelligence you get is is erroneous okay they order the tpet to see the tpet calls back and says we can't get underway we have a propulsion casualty they cancel the order but the Allies don't pick that up and the Convoy scatters and gets destroyed 22 ships of 33 are destroyed it's a disaster well phase three it it seems like the Germans are having all their own way but it's really become a war of attrition a war of exhaustion a protracted War almost like a gorilla War it seemed with these convoys going back and forth and uh as the as the uh as the war goes on the Germans start to lose more and more of their best submarine crews to attrition and so the guys that come out are a little bit less trained than the guys that came out before uh the other thing is the Allies are putting Radars on airplanes and there's this huge gap right in the middle of all those blue circles called the air gap and 1943 is the last year that that Gap is in is not filled by airplanes by the summer of 1943 the Allies can almost always get a B24 or a pby or some longrange aircraft in there at night with the radar and the first couple times the Germans are just happy you know fat dumb and happy on the surface going to attack in the Wolfpack some Convoy and out of nowhere a a depth charge uh or or a mine or something gets dropped on them or even a bomb and they get sunk and they realize airplanes are out there and they go how are they finding us and they go oh it's radar so they put radar detection devices on there now it's good for them in terms of survivability but it's bad for them because they lose the surface they lose the night they have they they pick up uh uh the radar for the bad guys they have to go under the water and hide and now the Convoy steams pass on attack and so the last great Convoy battles uh occur in May of 1943 and the Germans have some wild successes but on the way home a lot of the submarines get sunk a lot of the submarines get sunk also the Allies have broken their code now the Germans are changing their codes monthly but the Germans are no longer uh can they send these signals and rely on the fact that the Allies aren't reading them and oh by the way the Germans don't know that they don't know that uh there's a submarine everybody to Chicago museum of science that that submarine is that's the one where we got the Enigma machine and and we're able to break that to uh to do that the other thing that kills the Germans is uh escort carriers we see one down here there's a long range Liberator with a C centimeter radar uh and these things fill in the Gap and they start to escort the convoys and every Convoy's got air with it now and this becomes really difficult for the Germans now remember measure countermeasure the Germans move down south of the Azor and start to operate out of there uh where the Allies have less and and the war sort of comes full circle with things called hun killer groups before I do that though in the fall of 1943 see this thing called phto it's the mark 24 M what it really is is a fire and forget weapon delivered by an airplane and late in the summer of 1943 durit his submarines start to disappear and he has no idea how they're disappearing well what's happening is these airplanes are coming out and one of them will detect the submarine and another one will get the location and come in from a different angle drop one of these and forget phyto mines and if even if the submarine has submerged to avoid detection from the radar the mine circles does a helical search and blows it up so the it's kind of like the movie Aliens everybody's dying but they don't know what's killing them that's what goes on and derit calls a halt to the submarine campaign he ends the submarine campaign for a couple months to try to figure out what's going on and come up with new tactics well he can't come up with new tactics so he moves to the C Atlantic and starts to kind of do raids against the sea lines at this point the the campaign is lost he's really lost the campaign uh the numbers of sinkings go down the numbers of sunk Subs go up and then this new thing called the hunter killer group a couple destroyers and an escort carrier they start to hunt the submarines in the sanctuary in the central Atlantic there's one up there in the corner that's a hunter killer group that's an escort an American escort carrier with a destroyer the way the attack works is an airplane will fly out he'll detect a submarine the submarine will dive uh they'll bring in a destroyer with a sonar he'll search for the submarine and then it'll blow it up but it makes for all kinds of great Hollywood movies doesn't it where you see these battles but usually the guys finding these things first are the aviators on the escort carriers that find these and then they Vector the Destroyers in to kill them occasionally they'll catch one that's unawares and they'll be able to kill them with the airplane and a and a bomb or a mine if you get the feel that this is a very complicated battle you would be right the other thing that uh results in Victory is the Liberty ship uh the Americans and the Canadians uh put fullscale production and one reason we build them in Canada is we don't have the labor laws in Canada so a lot of ships get built in Canada as well as in the United States and so you start to build at a rate of one ship a day by the time you get to 1943 there's one liberty ship coming coming off the ways every day so as the ship numbers go up the sub numbers go down you can see that it's going to win it doesn't mean that people still don't have to fight that uh it's still not dangerous Dy Duty being on a merchant Convoy but but the you can see the light at the end of the tunnel in 1943 here's the race to build the race to build and the race to snc all right and the uh the red are ships built in the US and Canada the black are sh ship sunk all right uh they I think they start the war with 6 and5 million tons the Germans never get to the point where uh where the Allies don't have enough to at least avoid starvation in Great Britain and in 1942 as you can see the numbers of built ships goes up and then see 1943 where the phto starts to kill all those submarines all right and then and then they go down at this point the Germans can't train the crews anymore they're being bombed in their bit pens you've seen probably seen boot there's just no way so they bomb their sanctuaries they bomb their pens they can't train uh and it's only late in the war the Germans finally produce a true submarine the type 23 with the snorkel but it's too little too late they just they can't build enough of them and there's no way that they're going to be able to overcome the Allies clear advantage in numbers of merchant ships okay we'll wind it up I can talk a little bit about that during the thing there's the final score highest losses of any service of Any Nation in the war the German OTS lost surrendered total okay Allied Shipping uh total total tons loss 14.6 but you had 54 million remaining so you started out with more or you end up with more than you started out with okay by the way the American submarines sink uh somewhere between six and seven million tons in the Pacific for the Japanese and I'm ready for questions yes ma'am let me get my water you talked about the pho but the uh Q ship came out about the same time as the pho and I was wondering if that's part of the factoring with the ships that were camouflaged as merchantmen that were really uh armed ships that would drop their uh side panels and you know heavy guns for the most part dep charges and take those after the subs too yeah let's talk about the Q ships Q Ships Come Out World War I Q ship is also illegal but the British win the war so they don't Outlaw the Q ship um although during the protocols in the inter War period it's recognized that the Q ship is not Kosher it's not it's not Marcus of Queensbury rules uh and but the Q ship is a great ship to go after individual submarines It's a Wonderful ship but when a q ship is in a convoy it's just another escort it's just another escort but early in the war they the British immediately resort to Q ships and and the Germans and what's the German response to that don't give any warning just sync everything classify by ordinance right classified by ordinance yes sir oh well she described them very well I'll describe them again for a q ship is a merchantman that's dis it's it's a it's a warship disguised as a merchantman in other words let me go back to kind of show you a liberty ship here G to do this it looks like a normal although Liberty ships are armed all of them have arm but it's a normal merchant ship but it's actually got Sailors on board who who have depth charges and have guns but it's all hidden so it's it's a ruse it's a ruse of war is the idea and the Q ships were really big in World War I they really gave the Germans fits in World War I they once the once the Germans started unrestricted submarine warfare in World War II the Q ships essentially just became uh escorts uh the Germans did the same thing with Merchant ships they raided far a field with these with h they had six Merchant Raiders that they had disguised as merchant ships and one of them actually sank an Australian Cruiser in the Indian Ocean the I think it was the penguin uh was it the Sydney s anyway I mean and these things had hidden guns and you know you'd sail up to one of these things and you go oh where are you going and they drop the canvas and they'd have a 6in gun and they'd blow hole in your ship uh but the Germans only had only had uh uh six that were purpose built and they did some that they kind of innovated to create some more uh again under the Z plan they were supposed to have a couple dozen of these things running around but they gave the British fits and it tied up a lot of Naval assets chasing these guys around yeah questions this I've really been interested in hearing this because my son was on a submarine uh in the 80s and so it wasn't during war time but I I can't help but think about all of the the Suns on all the submarines in the war and any of the other ships too but it was really interesting to hear what you're saying about so much about the submarine fighting so thank you well it's still a big deal today submarine warfare uh the uh probably the most U effective growing and modern part of all the Navies today are their submarine forces uh and my particular opinion is that that submarine warfare is not going away anytime soon that the uh the Chinese have a huge submarine force uh the Japanese have a huge submarine have a large respectable submarine Force the Australians do it's it's sort of the weapon of choice now uh for everybody except the really really big Naval Powers um in fact I think it's great the Chinese are building an aircraft carryer fewer submarines that they can build if they build that thing okay so I I respect a submarine and I respect your son than thanks for his service yeah well it was the Cold War it could get a little dicey those guys were off bumping Soviet submarines up there in the North Sea yeah uh thank you for coming uh what altitude would the aircraft operate at usually in pursuing submarines well you had this classic uh dilemma between we don't want to be too low because we won't have the line of sight uh now if you don't have a radar you you can be lower and so you can react quicker uh also we tend to think of radio being such a perfect instrument of war in World War II it's pretty iffy so sometimes it was hard to get a hold of these guys um but generally around a thousand feet is a good altitude to operate at if you're not using your radar if you're using your radar you really want to be up there you want to be up at two 3,000 feet it's still pretty bumpy down that low though um so these guys were pretty Hardy guys I mean driving around for 10 hours at a th000 feet over the water is is it you're pretty tired when you land uh and again the the uh the pressure changes are much more lower than they are higher up and so it's a it's harder on your ears too did I answer your question guess it's about 2000 well 2,000 feet with a radar a th000 feet or lower without a radar but you wanted to be able to to hear from the ship right so you couldn't go solo because if the ship if you lost line of sight with the ship you could couldn't get Communications with the ship so you always wanted to make sure you had Communications uh they also a lot of them carried High Fox and so you don't need line aside for HF but again HF is a kind of an iffy thing and sometimes the uh some a lot of these guys they get out there we used to have the same problem in our airplanes in the 80s you know where we had these HF couplers and they'd burn out and we'd lose HF com so it was pretty common I can imagine in World War II they used to carry extra HF couplers with them you know we burned out another one throw it in you know so we can talk to uh to headquarters y yes ma'am oh back there okay other than uh delay the outcome of the war what could the Germans have done to improve their uh potential outcome well my own position with the Germans is uh the most single and most important thing they could have done was to have given the German Navy its own Naval Aviation Garing said if it flies it belongs to me and so he controlled all the acquisition programs uh the Germans had two Torpedoes the in fact the LTV of torpedo was a much better torpedo than the Cs Marine torpedo but uh the Navy had to go to the Air Force and coordinate at a very very high level to get assets and support so I think that would have made them more effective uh durett said after the war that if you'd had a thousand submarines at the beginning of the war the war would have you know it would have ended uh right then with Great Britain but that's kind of hindsight one the Germans there's no way they were going to build a thousand submarines by the beginning of the war they were building them as quickly as they possibly could at the time uh so my position is Naval Aviation if they had their own Naval Aviation if Hitler had started the war a little bit later but then he wouldn't have been Hitler would he uh so that's hard uh given all of those challenges the the Germans do a pretty good job with what they have they you know efficient Germans you know but uh but their material resources were so limited uh and again they they did very well to get France and to get Norway was a huge coup for them that really was a game Cher for the German Navy and if they'd had that big zpl Navy with the French coast and the Norwegian Coast that would have proved a really really big problem for the Allies the other thing they didn't do is they never really developed their uh aircraft carrier they built one aircraft carrier but they never put an airwing on it again because the Luft Fafa wouldn't provide the resources and and the training and everything um and uh the the German historian of the war a guy named Admiral Friedrich ruga who later HED the bundus Marine during the Cold War he was rl's Naval Aid during D-Day he said uh if the Germans had had an aircraft carrier and used it during the inter War period they would have seen the value and built more of them so so those are a couple couple points for you on that yeah yes sir radar Radars radar well they were significant from the moment they were used operationally it's just they weren't in the numbers and the big problem with radar at the beginning of the war is to make one small enough to put on an airplane uh the Germans eventually put Radars on the submarines but uh but that didn't do much for them immediately uh and any of sort of the advantages they would have gotten with radar by the time uh they could have fielded those things it it's probably too late anyway but radar became significant in 1943 194 43 is when it became the most significant of course the Allies had it too they had their they had their centimeter Radars and everything on their on their ship so if a German submarine was on the surface at night and a destroyer had radar he' he' he'd pick up he'd pick the submarine up with radar before he' pick him up with sonar yes sir this I it just went past me but um how close was the Germans to the United States where and like how many miles oh yeah they they could see the lights of Philadelphia they could see the lights of New York in some cases they were they were within two or three miles of the beach yeah and there's some very deep water uh close to the United States so they they their submarines were able to come pretty close uh they they used to sink Ships coming out of the New York Harbor there was this one German submarine he like lit up he like lit up half a dozen uh ships uh in just a couple days just coming out of New York Harbor and he could see them he was on the he he was on it was a moonless night and he used the lights of the city to silhouette the ships as they came out and he just picked them off as they came out so they stopped sorting ships at night uh they started they said well we'll we'll keep them but uh the Americans were a little slow to react but once the Americans started to Convoy and do air patrols operation drum beat ended but they didn't destroy a single German submarine it was a unprecedented campaign yes over here the your topic but the Battle of Britain the air war on the part of the German against the British could they conceivably have won that and why didn't they well that that battle started out with the lft vafa attacking ships uh if you've ever seen the great movie with Michael Kane and Trevor Howard and all those guys you know the first scene when the Germans are coming for Adler taga you know which is sort of D-Day uh is uh uh they're in the they're in the they're in the main control seven Center for 11 Group which is The Fighter Group that's going to protect Southern Britain and he goes do we have any convoys out there which is he's asking him are the German air force attacking convoys uh so um and as far as the Battle of Britain goes that you know it was it was synchronized with the first happy time so it was a full-court press from the air and from the sea against Great Britain and the maritime component we usually study the maritime component over here and the Battle of Britain air component over here and there really needs to be a synchronized study of the whole campaign I think John bra did one uh but again it's not one that's well known uh but there needs to be a new scholarship on that to kind of synchronize that because uh duret and Raider were very very coordinated about that fight yep uh John with regard to uh the relief of Admiral Raider and the appointment Ascension of jets what was what was behind that you know I was you would ask me that I I was looking that up cuz because I was I was I've got a primary source called the F Naval conferences and and what happened was uh it was it was not because durit was fighting the war uh incorrectly he was very very angry about the way resources were being directed to the German Navy and uh and uh Hitler had kind of cut him out of some of the planning um and uh so I forget the exact occasion for when he kind of stormed off and and resigned uh because he wasn't really fired he he kind of saidwell I don't want to play anymore and you know he picked up his his his Dice and and left uh and so it's kind of a myth that Hitler fired him but it wasn't because he wasn't Prosecuting the submarine war effectively and that's another myth that that's kind of out there well he he wouldn't underwrite dnets to fight this submarine he wanted to fight a mahanian no that's not it it was a it was really about strategic resources and it was a it was an argument with with that off h and Hitler wasn't providing the resources that Raider thought the Navy needed and he says well okay if you know if you're not going to listen to me maybe you'll listen to durit and this whole idea of duret and Raider being enemies is kind of a post-war construction because in in point of fact they sort of did become enemies after the war Raider Raider never admitted any guilt he said he was against the war and but he did his duty like a sailor and he went to prison for 20 years duret on the other hand said well we were bad we were criminals and they let him out 10 years in advance and actually he lived till a ripe old age in in Germany yeah okay I I one of the photographs I noticed um there's a ship and there's a blimp attached to the ship what is this blimp used for again remember we're looking for line of sight to pick up submarines and so with with the blimps you'd actually have either uh you usually have observers in in the blimp and they'd either have well they didn't really have radar on the blimp so we don't get aerosats until much much later in the war but you'd have a guy up there usually with a landline or a sound powerered phone and a search light and so he's looking for submarines he's it's the ultimate Crows Nest um and these things are used all the way through the war this guy Archie Mills I don't know if you any guys know Archie Mills he was a pby driver at the Battle of Midway uh attacked the Japanese Fleet and they they they hit a Japanese tanker and then also was at gual Canal when he left the Pacific he came over to the Atlantic and he was on an on a on an escort carrier that was a blimp carrier that kind of serviced and and ran these blimps around uh out of uh what's the name of that place in New Jersey yeah Lakers so he was so he was out he was out of Earl New Jersey on these escort carriers with blimps so they actually had blimp carriers which is something I never knew about till I talked to Archie yeah yeah line of side Crow's Nest yes you haven't mentioned any uh us submarines in the Atlantic did it have any effect well the the US submarines um again most of the US submarine effort is in the Pacific under uh I forget who the Admiral was prior to Lockwood but he dies and then Admiral Lockwood in subpac in so so the guys that are the that are going to hunt enemy because we were the Germans don't really have any Seaborn traffic to attack so the submarines that are in the for the American submarines that are in the Atlantic and in the Mediterranean are supporting the operations of the fleet and supporting the amphibious operations torch husky uh and all these operations and actually we've got these submarines called v-class submarines they're essential in the invasion of French North Africa and they provide navigation and one of them actually I never knew this had infrared markers for the ships to to use to line up for approaches for The Invasion uh places like Casablanca and some of these other places so but they were mostly in support of regular Naval operations or doing special you know special ops you know putting guys ashore getting guys back Intel collection stuff like that uh we really didn't use them to attack the German submarines it was much more effective to use destroyers now does that mean that they weren't given orders that if you come across a German submarine you're to go after it yeah they had those orders but normally uh they weren't used in a sort of a structured planned fashion uh to go after German submarines they were in support of amphibious Landings in the fleet okay so we see them D-Day and and torch and husky husky the invasion of sis okay I'm right here how did your uh phto there find its Target or was it just luck oh no no phto uh phto actually had a homing device it had it had a it had a a very sort of weak uh uh I I forget whether it was a hydrophone or a sonar but it homed in on the sound of the submarine so uh and it did a helical search but it was very very attenuated in its range but you didn't need to have much range because this thing the search pattern that it did covered enough ground that if you had a fairly accurate data for the submarine it would it would kill it would kill the submarine and you know but it was most effectively used with two airplanes one is a one is the delivery mechanism and the other one carrying the radar so they' kind of do a hand am H hammer and Anvil thing so the because the Germans put Direction finding on their radar uh warning receivers so they'd see the air coming over there they'd go down and then this other guy'd come in and drop on them um you know it's a probability thing you know the P3 I don't know if we any P3 aviators out here you know this is something that they love to talk about I mean they'll they'll spend all night you know son boy patterns and everything but it had it had a sensor it had a sensor it's either a hydrophone or a sonar um but I'd have to get back to you on that which what kind of sensor it was yes sir well thank you so those are great questions I appreciate it

Channel: The Dole Institute of Politics

Views: 92,742

Keywords: 2013, Dole Institute of Politics, Ft Leavenworth Series, Dole Institute, Battle of the Atlantic, Dr. John Kuehn, John Kuehn, KU, University of Kansas, Fort Leavenworth, WWII

Id: M3lV5Iyc98g

Length: 71min 56sec (4316 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 07 2013