Donald McIntyre on hydrophones
 

I've just read Donald McIntyre's "U-Boat Killer" and there's one fragment that I found very surprising. On pages 234-235, describing difficulties while working with base personnel, author gives a following example of just how uninformed was land-based staff regarding ASW tactics:

"Another illustration of this was given me when, in visiting the underground headquarters at Plymouth to make my report on a patrol, I happened to meet a very senior officer who asked me how things were going. On explaining the difficulties we were experiencing in the use of asdic in the Channel owing to the great number of submerged obstructions (...) this venerable character nodded. "Ah yes," he said, "but of course you have your hydrophones to help you". There was little point in trying to enlighten him, though hydrophones had not been used to hunt submarines since the early days of the 1914-18 War!".

Emphasis mine. I have little reason to believe McIntyre, who spent entire war hunting U-Boats, would be wrong on this subject. Yet in all U-Boat simulations I ever played escorts seem to use hydrophones extensively, we have all these silent running tactics and such... is this something that all subsim designers got completely wrong? And if not, what could he mean by this sentence?

it sounds like Brit humor to me. the senior officer was taking the mickey out on the junior officer.
or
the senior officer was a ditz who hadn't served in either subs or convoy duty and had no notion of underwater sound physics.

i suppose you can take your pick as to which is true.

what is important is that YOU know the difference between hydrophones and ASDIC (sonar).:03:

:Kaleun_Salute:

I do know, and I also understand that hydrophones are, by necessity, part of any asdic set (you need a device to receive reflections of sound waves you've sent after all). I just wondered what he meant by that. It maybe just Brit humour that non-Brits like me don't get, or perhaps (that crossed my mind) they relied on active pinging around in hopes of getting a solid asdic echo instead of using receiver to listen for screw sounds. Maybe the second method was simply very ineffective by comparison so they skipped listening part and just pinged around?

But I'm no expert on asdic procedures so it's just my wild guessing :)

Yes. :) Except for AOD. SH3 is especially bad in this regard (hydrophone use/requirement).
I too have mentioned this (his comments) before. Including that they pinged with asdic all the time, not just when they suspected a target was around.
He (rightly) considered hydrophones as archiac, obsolete technology.