Another Career Down the Drain. (lesson to be learned!)

[Kaptlt.Endrass]

Back after a long break and wanted to share this tidbit.

Going home to Lorient after a relatively unsuccessful patrol in the Gibraltar approaches. My trusty VIIC/41 is plowing through pouring rain and high seas off of Portugal, late at night in fall of 1942. My inner kaluen is thinking this thunderstorm may well turn into a hurricane.

Not to mention the uneasy feeling.

We go to 70 meters and kill the engines, running an acoustic check. I change the watch to the more experienced crew and man the hydrophones. Nothing. After a good hour, we surface and hit the radar on. I don't want to take any chances, despite being less than 15 kilometers from neutral shores.

Theoreticaly, there should be minimal, if any, traffic, and mostly people NOT out to kill us. Hence the reason we choose this route on the way home with a damaged sub, having been escorted from a convoy by some lively English chaps who shared my love of things that go BOOM.

But I digress. The thunderstorm is really whipping up, with 28 knot winds and waves crashing over the deck. The officers agree that we should take cover in a neutral port, and a course is laid in for the nearest inlet: El Ferrol, I believe.

36 minutes later, we are 2 kilometers away when a shape rises out of the gloom. The bloody Nelson and Rodney are sitting five hundred+ meters away. As far as I can tell, their escorts had their radar and recievers off and we had been at a perfect angle to slip in between them.

I don't care about medals, tonnage or promotions. That inner kaluen is taking over as 18 VERY BIG cannons point at us as the radar finally picks up 14 contacts. One carrier and 11 DDs. Sadly, a single volley is all it takes.

My u-boat is lost with all her gallant crew.

And the only Bernard I can blame is in the radar factory. The only thing I can think:

Murphy's Law of Combat 75(?): Radar tends to fail at night and in bad weather, and especially during both.

[WilhelmSchulz.]

Well the faulty radar is actuly a bug. In high sea states the radar dosent turn back on after being washed over.

[maillemaker]

I find radar in general to be pretty much a waste of time in SH3.

As was pointed out, in foul weather, when you need it most, it keeps cutting out when water hits it.

But with map contacts turned off, it's next to useless. It's very difficult to get a contact to show on the oscilloscope when you actually have visual contact of the target. I don't think I was ever able to use the radar manually successfully in a combat environment. I think by the time you got it to work you'd have broadcast your position many times over.

The Type XXI is supposed to have a PPI indicator (like this: ) but it still has the old style oscilloscope display.

Steve

[Hinrich Schwab]

Historically, German radar was not that great and notoriously unreliable. The infamous METOX system also had a nasty habit of telling everyone where you were at. The radar bug in SH3 accidentally emulates the poor reliability of German radar. I never use it. It is easier for me to go deep and go silent while relying on hydrophones and instinct, risking detection rather than go on the surface blind in a storm.

[UKönig]

I have read that over the course of the war, the Germans tried several different things to improve the low U-boat visibility problem.
As you sit so low in the water your range is limited to the horizon, or roughly 16km from surface level. Which is a laughably small area when compared to the total size of the Atlantic and the places that a convoy can hide.
Radar was intended to give the crew visibility beyond the level of the horizon. Also in response to the allied improvements to convoy defense. With radar, theoretically, you could spot the ships electronically and plot your intercept course without having to get close enough to risk detection by any escorts who may be on sweep patrol.
But it was unreliable. The field of micro electronics had be largely overlooked in Germany, while the allies put it to great effect. The Germans were always playing 'catch up' in the arms race. All these measures were done to extend the life of the U-boats currently in service, when they should have just built a better boat. Essentially they were fixing all the wrong problems.
The early sets were big bulky things rigidly attached the the structure of the conning tower. But the search area is still too small. What like, +-15 degrees on each side of 0. In order to scan a full circle, you'd have to sail the boat around the same. A time consuming process under normal conditions, impossible to perform during battle. Later sets, equipped with rotating antennas solved some of these problems, but it was still a crapshoot.
At other times, they resorted to strapping a luckless bosun into a chair and strapped said chair to the periscope mast, in an attempt to get more visual range. And the Bachstelze or 'water-wagtail'. A sort of kite/gyrocopter towed behind the surfaced uboat, with a man with binoculars to scan, up in the air. The main drawback to these is that crash diving is not possible without sacrificing the crewman in question. These alternate methods of extending u-boat visibility only met with minor success and were not done on more than 2 or 3 occasions. The cons simply outweighed the pros. Fortunately, they stayed with the electronic detection method.

[maillemaker]

I'm just surprised that they Germans did not invest more in radar decoys in the Bay of Biscay to keep the air patrols on a goose chase.

I know they tried the hydrogen foil balloons cut lose from subs, but I'm surprised they did not just routinely air-drop thousands of them into the Bay of Biscay. Watch the Allies swoop down on nothing all day and night long.

Steve

[Aktungbby]

From a previous post: any mods for this gizmo? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thetis_(decoy) Several U-boats carried several of these each (12 or more) and actually deployed them "The first time the Allies knew about the "Thetis" was in a coded radio message to all U-boats transmitted on 11 January 1944. "Thetis" was introduced in January, when large numbers were released into the Bay of Biscay in July to simulate U-boat patrols during the Battle of Normandy." Some assembly was required in the conning tower! I just gotta have a Thetis

[UKönig]

Here is what Herbert Werner had to say about the new anti-radar system, "Aphrodite"...

"Just after we had left our escort, our new radar detector picked up its first contact, but instead of diving right away, we kept on at high speed, put our AA weapons on alert and started up a new diversionary tactic, that we had been told would be very effective. Chief Riedel, in charge of this setup, filled a rubber balloon with helium gas, stored in bottles, fixed to the railing. Then he attached a string of aluminum foils to the balloon, the loose end to a float, and then threw the whole thing over the side. It came to rest on the surface while the balloon rose up and stretched the string with the foils until it stood up like an unfurled artificial christmas tree. The decoy rapidly fell astern into the inky blackness of night. Five minutes later, Riedel did it again, and a second 'tree' floated up over the Bay. These aluminum 'trees' were supposed to produce a stronger image on the pilot's radar screen, something stronger than a U-boat conning tower, allowing us to escape into a woods of our own making. Sadly, two more balloons got tangled with the railings and three more blew up when being filled with gas, and in the confusion, the snarled foils made our position amply clear. While Riedel fought with the foils and balloons, we slipped into a large French fishing fleet, which gave us better protection than the foils or the guns. In fact, we discarded the aluminum trees and never used them again. They were more hindrance than help."

[BigWalleye]

Originally Posted by maillemaker

I'm just surprised that they Germans did not invest more in radar decoys in the Bay of Biscay to keep the air patrols on a goose chase.

I know they tried the hydrogen foil balloons cut lose from subs, but I'm surprised they did not just routinely air-drop thousands of them into the Bay of Biscay. Watch the Allies swoop down on nothing all day and night long.

Steve

I think the quote from Werner above is a partial answer; It is much easier to to make a working prototype (of anything) than to scale it up to an operationally practical device.

A second partial answer: Which part of the over-stretched German economy should have been diverted to making the decoys? What non-essential item should have been taken out of production? Was the German economy already producing thousands of children's toy balloons and thousands of yards of kitchen foil, which could be easily converted to decoys? What about the raw materials? Balloons are made of rubber, which was in short supply, and the reflectors are made of metal foil, generally aluminum. Should the Germans have diverted some of the production of rubber tires? Or aircraft skins? How long would it take to retool to produce the decoys?

This was an unproved technology, and, as Werner points out, the early operational trials were not a stunning success. The decoys were one of dozens of unproven ideas, any one of which might work in practice. But if the Germans had pursued them all to find out which, if any, actually made a difference, their economy could not have taken the strain and defeat would just have come much sooner.

It all seems so simple in hindsight. But Clausewitz's comment was as true in WW2 as it ever was.

[maillemaker]

Yeah, I've read Werner's book, which was why I mentioned the balloons.

How expensive would it have been to deploy decoys in the Bay of Biscay?

How expensive was it to keep losing u-boats and crews?

Of course hindsight is 20-20, but given how they were getting their asses handed to them in the bay and they knew it, and they knew that AAA was ineffective, you think they would have put more effort into the decoys.

I did not know about the Thetis device, though - thanks for the link.

Steve

[BigWalleye]

Originally Posted by maillemaker

Yeah, I've read Werner's book, which was why I mentioned the balloons.

How expensive would it have been to deploy decoys in the Bay of Biscay?

How expensive was it to keep losing u-boats and crews?

Of course hindsight is 20-20, but given how they were getting their asses handed to them in the bay and they knew it, and they knew that AAA was ineffective, you think they would have put more effort into the decoys.

I did not know about the Thetis device, though - thanks for the link.

Steve

It's not about the expense. It's about industry working at full capacity 24/7 trying to make enough tires to meet the needs of the Wehrmacht. Then someone stands up in a meeting and says: "We should cut back on some of those tires and make balloons instead. We've got this really great idea which we are pretty sure will work." Uh huh.

[Zosimus]

Fascism is a bad system. It's all top down. No one has freedom to try, to risk, or to innovate. It's all just do as you are told and shut up about it.

[WilhelmSchulz.]

Originally Posted by Zosimus

Fascism is a bad system. It's all top down. No one has freedom to try, to risk, or to innovate. It's all just do as you are told and shut up about it.

Not as bad as the Soviets where. Read up on some of there subs. A total disgrace.

[BigWalleye]

Originally Posted by Zosimus

Fascism is a bad system. It's all top down. No one has freedom to try, to risk, or to innovate. It's all just do as you are told and shut up about it.

I would be the last person to argue in favor of a command economy, whether Fascist, Communist, or some other flavor. But during WW2, every belligerent's economy was pretty much centrally controlled. In the US, we had the War Production Board (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Production_Board) with a half-dozen or so sub-boards. They made all major production decisions, allocated resources (including labor), and coordinated transportation. The UK had the same system under a different name. It was all "voluntary" of course, and no one was shot for refusing to participate. But there was a lot of social and political pressure to "do your part."

[Kaptlt.Endrass]

Thank you all for your help. I'll keep from wholly trusting my radar from now on.

I read Jimbuna's message today about the community, and I couldn't agree more. Since I've gotten here, I have ALWAYS had questions answered, suggestions and comments given, and a sense of camaradrie rarely found on the web.

Live long, Subsim. Live long.