The Invisible Enemy

[Fisherking]

Same here. We are already doing what we can to keep going.

I would like to see the carrier come back to the rear where we can keep a better eye on it but beyond that we will just keep up maximum effort until the other ships arrive.

[Franconicus]

Course?

[Fisherking]

Current Location?

Under the circumstance more frequent zigzags and course changes are in order but losing the pack is unlikely. They need to be damaged or sunk and setting a course to intersect with the reinforcements is the best bet.

Do you think we can get away with launching and recovering aircraft at night with snowflakes?

This should work. Also subs are more likely to operate on the surface at night which would make them more vulnerable to air attack. Launching a few random snowflakes might silhouette a sub or two and we could reduce their numbers and force them under.

Not to mention the effect ships guns would have on them.

[Franconicus]

Location: CF64

Could you please explain your ideas about using planes at night and snowflakes?

[King Kurt]

I am not sure about lauching planes at night - The Fleet Air arm did do it, but it would highlight the carrier and make it a target. Better to aggressively patrol and use dummy attacks to lure U Boats to that area.

[Fisherking]

We need to use snowflakes occasionally to try to spot surfaced subs.

The pilot only needs to see up and down at take off and landings. An escort near the carrier launches snowflake when a plane need to take off or land.

The planes are the best weapon against surfaced subs that we have.

[Franconicus]

Chapter 12 – from noon until dusk, 20 of December

Walker calls the carrier back to the rear of the convoy, close to the "Stork". He also sends instructions to the other escort ships, so that they know how to behave during night. Walker tells them to use the snowflakes more aggressively and especially to use the Martlets also at night. As expected, Mac Kendrick protests. He argues, that it is much too risky to start and land during night and that he has only got four planes and that the stress is too much. Walker ignores him and soon the Audacity is on her way to the rear of the convoy.
If Walker thought the next raid would come at night, he is wrong. At 13:48 the Martlet patrol reports of two unidentified planes, coming straight to the convoy. Walker immediately alarms the escorts and a second Martlet gets off. The gunners sit at their anti aircraft guns, ready to repel any air raid. However, only the humming of engines shows that there is something going on above the clouds. Then a four engine bomber dives through the clouds. First it seems as if the plane would go straight in to the convoy, but then it falls straight into the sea. A quarter of an hour, the two Martlets return. Brown, one of the pilots, flies twice across the convoy, shaking his wings. When he finally got down, he reports that he shot down two German Condors.
Walker sends a report to the WAC. He also receives two radio messages. First one is telling him that the reinforcements will arrive next afternoon. Second one is telling him, that the United States are now at war with Germany.

[Fisherking]

Have the planes concentrate on scouting the forward area of the convoy until near dark and then concentrate on the rear area from dusk until dawn. Making occasional sweeps all around.

If searchlights and snowflakes don’t turn up a sub in the night, perhaps they will give themselves away with smoking on deck or the conning tower or show a light through the hatches. We can only hope. The pilots may get lucky.

We should use more active ASDIC until dark. In the night they will mostly be on the surface anyway, charging batteries and making surface approaches.

[King Kurt]

I am still not sure about using the planes at night. With only 4, we can't afford to loose any. Also we have to think about the effect on the pilots - they can't work 24/7 . Perhaps we should do it for tonight - we know the U boats are close - and stop from tomorrow as reinforcements are on the way. We should certainly think about a mock attack when the plane is landing.

I agree with Fischer's search paterns. I also think we should do a violent course change a couple of hours after dark - turn to the west, sail for 4 hours , no Zig Zag then resume standard course. if we could combine that with a mock attack - say to the east, we may throw them off tonight, especially as we have not done this before.

Our HF/DF hasn't come up with anything yet - perhaps we should concentrate on that at night

[Fisherking]

It was never my though to keep using the planes every night.

But this night they will not be expecting it and it may pay big dividends.

Once we have more escorts we will have more options but for now we are too few to hunt and kill them any other way.

Without their own searchlights the planes will not be highly effective in finding the enemy but for now we are desperate enough to try it.

Even if we get one sub this way it is worthwhile and they will not have faced aircraft at night before.

The course change is not a bad idea but I think the mock attack would better be left for some other time.

more lights will not be much of a distraction under these circumstances and pooling the escorts away from the convoy is too risky at the moment.

[King Kurt]

Lets go with just the course change and the air attack then

[Franconicus]

I think it is time to end this game officially. I must declare the Germans as winners.
The game did not run as good as I hoped it would, but I learned a lot more about the sub warfare in WW2 and I hope you had some fun.

[ELITEofWARMANGINGERYBREADMEN88]

You being bias !

Don't worry Fran, it is always pleasure playing in one of your IH's!

[King Kurt]

Fran

As you can imagine, I have enjoyed this immensely and am sad it has finished. I thought the idea was a good one, but it is difficult to manage an IH which involves submarine warfare I think. The mix of long periods of nothing happening mixed with short sharp periods of frantic action is difficult to simulate.

[Franconicus]

The game ended some time ago, but I guess I still owe you a kind of summery about the tactics from the other side.

Although the game was very bumpy, I have to say that I learned a lot about the warfare in the Atlantic.
One thing that really surprised me was, that the Germans in reality knew very little about the abilities on the other side, while the Brits had a rather clear picture. The reason for this is simple, the allies were able to take prisoners - even if there were only few - and later they were even able to capture subs. Germans did not have a chance to capture a corvette or to take prisoners.
Although the allies had a rather good knowledge about the subs, in the time of our game they underrated the ability of the German sound locater. It was able to detect the direction of an acoustic source over a long distance with high accuracy and could identify the source as a warship or merchant. In real life walker tried to simulate a battle behind the convoy to lure the subs from it. This had to fail, obviously, because the Germans could easily identify the movement of the warships. As a result, Audacity was sunk.
However, in reality, the German made some terrible tactical mistakes, cause by their ignorance of the other side. First of all, their common defensive maneuvre once they had been detected, was to dive as deep as possible, moove slowly and silently with surprising turns. If the crew on the Asdic was well trained and if the Escort ship had enough time, this tactic usually failed. In the beginning of the war, the ash cans were set on a maximum depth. The subs were able to dive even deeper so they could escape easily. However, the Brits changed the setting quickly and were then able to attack subs at any depth. Furthermore, the Asdic worked very well in the depth, so depth was no shelter for the Germans. However, the Asdic had a weak spot, which was right below the surface. Here refelxions disturbed the signal and the device had a minimum angle. Germans never learned about that during the whole war.
So now to our game. I tried to recruit a team of experienced submarine veterans and therefore looked at the German forum of Silent Hunter. In the beginning this worked rather good, although it seemed to be hard to explain the concept of the interactive. Nevertheless, there were some high skilled players, burning to change the way history went and to teach the Tommis a lesson abouzt naval warfare. Then things went out of control (I guess it was when the Gestapo interfered). The players blamed me to be someone from their forum, who tried to mess around with several identities and tried to fool the rest of the players. It ended when the mod attacked me and demanded me to lay open the link to the other team. At this point I decided to make a break. I stopped the game and asked the most motivated and engaged player if he wants to go on alone.
He did a rather good job. He set up his strategy on what is known about the technologies today.
In the beginning he set three ships to a line west of Gibraltar. They had to be under water all the time to listen for any allied ships. They only came up during night to load their batteries and to send messanges. During this, the Germans tried to get as many boats to the expected combat zone as possible.
The Germans detected the convoy - or rather said the two convoys which left Gib almost at the same time. They also decided to attack the bigger one, yours!
In the beginnig, they where still waiting for reinforcements, so they kept quiet in the distance, still under water all day long, coming to the surface only for some time at night.
Then they finally attacked. The subs had the order to follow the convoy under water during day with a rather big distance - no chance to detect them with planes. When night came, the submarines came up and got into the right position to start their attack. The boat where devided into two packs, so they could attack from both sides. The attack itself was done right below the surface of the sea. So the boats could not be seen nor detected by the Ascdic. It would have taken a lot of luck to get one of the boats into the range of the ASDIC. So the could penetrate the convoy, attack and disappear.
For me it was interesting to see that the countermeasures - using planes at night, more light etc. - where not appropriate for this tactic. It was obviously that the Allies had not noticed the way the Germans changed their tactics and therefore were not able to react. Maybe it would have been wise to rescue some of the German sailors from a sunk sub. Humanity always pays!

[King Kurt]

Thanks for the feedback Franc.

Like you, despite having a great interest in naval matters, I have learnt a lot about the warfare that made up the Battle of the Atlantic. As an aside, it is interesting that there is not a greater interest in the Battle of the Atlantic in the UK. The battle was arguebly as important, if not more so, than the Battle of Britain, but our interest in it - me included - is nothing like that shown for the air battles of 1940 or say El Alamein. I knew of Walker, but not much detail, so it was good to find out more about him.

As to the german tactics - they seem sound. However I wondered how they managed to keep such a good contact with the convoy when they spent so much time underwater? My thinking was always guided that the U boats needed to spend most of their time on the surface to have the speed to keep in contact with the convoy, especially as we changed directions a lot and used the storm to mask our movements as well.

However, overall, it was great fun and you did a great job of keeping the IH moving - especially after the german Silent Hunter forum had you down as some sort of Warman 8 clone!! i felt the only dissapointment was that only a few people - mainly me and Fischer - kept the faith with it. Your efforts deserved more.

So well done - perhaps we will have another one one day.

[Fisherking]

It is likely I know much more about the U-boats than the escorts.

I felt like a sitting duck during the whole game. However, I think KK is right. The subs had to stay on the surface during the day to keep up with the convoy. While they could locate them at long distance staying in contact and getting a shot was not quite so easy. Following on the surface or running a head and occasionally submerging to get bearings were the tactics.

Daylight attacks meant getting in the path of the oncoming convoy and waiting. Night attacks could be made on the surface, running in for some quick shots and back to safety.

Aircraft made shadowing the convoy much more difficult and kept the boats farther away from their targets. Planes at night and star shells would have been a real damper on their preferred hunting methods.

If there were aircraft they could usually be seen a periscope depth even in the North Atlantic. Other seas they could usually be seen at much greater depths. Walkers tag team approach with his escorts meant that they were more able to maintain a contact, as the ship attacking lost the ping as they passed over the sub.

One way or another we should have been able to detect something when they were in the area but this never seemed to happen. No radar or sonar contacts to speak of.

Also in rough seas sound contacts were lost because of the wave action and contacts needed to be maintained visually. The smoke of the convoy could be seen at about 25 miles in clear weather but in storms it was no easy task.

I am sure that Kurt was as disappointed as I was when it ended just as we were receiving some reinforcements.

[Franconicus]

Thanks for the feedback Franc.

Like you, despite having a great interest in naval matters, I have learnt a lot about the warfare that made up the Battle of the Atlantic. As an aside, it is interesting that there is not a greater interest in the Battle of the Atlantic in the UK. The battle was arguebly as important, if not more so, than the Battle of Britain, but our interest in it - me included - is nothing like that shown for the air battles of 1940 or say El Alamein. I knew of Walker, but not much detail, so it was good to find out more about him.

As to the german tactics - they seem sound. However I wondered how they managed to keep such a good contact with the convoy when they spent so much time underwater? My thinking was always guided that the U boats needed to spend most of their time on the surface to have the speed to keep in contact with the convoy, especially as we changed directions a lot and used the storm to mask our movements as well.

However, overall, it was great fun and you did a great job of keeping the IH moving - especially after the german Silent Hunter forum had you down as some sort of Warman 8 clone!! i felt the only dissapointment was that only a few people - mainly me and Fischer - kept the faith with it. Your efforts deserved more.

So well done - perhaps we will have another one one day.

About the importance of the Battle of the Atlantic: I guess it was the most important one of the British. The Battle of Britain was great, of course, but I never had the impression that the Germans had the slightest chance to win it. So, although the Brits fought bravely, in my eyes it wasn't that important. We also discussed El Alamein and I already made my resons that the Germans would not have won, if Rommel broke through. German lines were too stretched and most of the German troops were in the East. However, if the Germans had won in the Atlantic, Britain would have had to give in, maybe not surrendered, but a cease fire. Time enough for the Germans to invade Russia.

About the Germans keeping contact: the microphones were able to locate the convoy for hundreds of miles. So there was no chance to hide it. The subs followed the convoy out of the air patrols. Remember, that it was December, long nights, enough to get in front of the convoy and to attack.

[Franconicus]

Fisherking, I guess you would enjoy to discuss the battle with your German opponent. I guess you know some German and if you like to, I can give you the contact, now that the game is over.