The Unknown

As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.

We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know
We don’t know.

—Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing

I believe it was in the UK where Bomber Command was not amused by shifting priority to submarine patrol. Bomber Harris was not a man easily amused anyway. He hardly had bombers to spare, wasn’t having much success in using them, and realized current bombers were not well suited to submarine patrol.

But imperfect patrol planes were better than none.

My usage may wrong. To me search and reconnaissance planes gather information but avoid engagement. A patrol planes task is to search and engage.

The great value of the radar patrol planes was not in directly guarding convoys but in hampering submarine movement anywhere, even far from convoys. Diesel/electric submarines were essentially static when submerged – slow and without range – and had little chance of acquiring a target.

In order to be effective far out into the Atlantic the submarines simply had to run on the surface for hours. Radar stopped them.

Churchill’s accounts contain a surprising amount of technostategic analysis about the late thirties and the earlier years of the war. Some readers know that. But others may harbor the vague idea that the old dinosaur just made inspiring speeches. Not so.

Clay Blair points out something very interesting relative to air patrolling.

The US Navy was against it at first. Heavy bombers were the enemy to the Navy and a feared competitor in the 20’s and 30’s in terms of funding. This ultimately was a good thing, because it made the Navy develop better fighters in order to keep up with the AAF bombers. In the mid-30’s the Navy found itself in the embarrassing position of having fighters that were slower than the early B-17’s

The USAAF was for it, and had the first B-24’s equipped with air to surface radar. But they did not know how to do it, had not trained the crews in ASW, and never tried to master convoy escort techniques, where the aircraft hung around the convoys that were the targets. Aside from that, conventional bombs were all but useless against U-boats and the depth charges of that time could not be set to explode at a depth shallow enough to sink a surfaced U-boat.

The Battle of Midway changed the USN’s view on heavy bombers. The PBY’s they used for scouting spent much of their time running away from Japanese aircraft, ANY Japanese aircraft, not just Zeros but even bombers. The USAAF B-17’s not only located the Japanese fleet but overflew it with near impunity. Initially the USN even put Navy observers in USAAF bombers. Then the USN started acquiring B-24’s and eventually extensively modified it into the PB4Y-2 patrol aircraft.

But at a less abstract level the U-boats could only hamper supplies. As someone said we supplied Russia mostly from Alaska. If the North Atlantic had been cut by U-boats and England had fallen we would have shifted South to stretch their logistics. The South Atlantic across to Africa would have been a larger theatre of war.

At some point German logistics were certain to fail. They had at best, what, four million soldiers? And occupying large territories ties down large garrisons.

I don’t think anyone mentioned how much air patrolling hurt the U-boats. At the beginning of the war there were few long range patrol planes. None had radar.

The deficiency received high priority. The B-24 was the ideal platform. It could fly low and slow for thousands of miles. Radar kept the U-boats from running on the surface at night to recharge batteries and move to new positions.

Advocates of heavy bombers resented, for a time, the priority given to patrol planes. Good judgment prevailed. The allies paid more attention to operations research than the Axis.

Herr Schickelgruber needed aircraft carriers and extra long range heavy bombers. Lacking those, the increased tonnage of allied shipping sunk by U-boats was emotionally gratifying to Germans, disturbing to the Allies but largely irrelevant. More shiiping was being built unmolested and with that came counter-measures that soon made U-Boat duty much more hazardous than convoy duty.

I’m not saying you’re wrong, mind you, I’m asking what you mean by that phrase. I can’t discuss an argument or point I don’t understand.

“by that time, though , the trends being tracked in the Tracking Room showed clearly that the U-boats couldn’t win in the long term.”
No one disputes that fact. By 1943 it was clear that the Allies were winning. What a difference a year makes.

To that end, I’d like to point you to two sources which I do consider trustworthy. One is a now-rather-old book, probably hard to find, called VERY SPECIAL INTELLIGENCE by Patrick Beesly. Beesly is as primary a source as you can get: he worked in the British Admiralty’s U-boat Tracking Room during the war, and VERY SPECIAL INTELLIGENCE is basically his personal memoir of the Operational Intelligence Centre and its work. The second is BLACK MAY by Michael Gannon, a study of the critical months of the battle of the Atlantic, including but not limited to May 1943, when the Allied navies wiped out a third of the operational U-boat fleet in thirty days. Gannon went back to the primary sources for his research, including freshly-declassified material that earlier historians never had access to.

Both authors agree that the conventional picture of ravening U-boat hordes nearly cutting the North Atlantic convoy lanes is wrong. There was never any real chance of it happening. The peak of the U-boats’ success was March 1943; by that time, though , the trends being tracked in the Tracking Room showed clearly that the U-boats couldn’t win in the long term. Ships were being built faster than U-boats could sink them, escorts were gaining steadily in ASW expertise, and U-boats — and more importantly, experienced U-boat crews — were being lost faster than Doenitz could replace them. Black May was not a miracle; it was simply inevitable.

Tipping my hat to you as a fellow 49er fan. Probably to the general public Taylor’s catch looms larger now because it was in the Super Bowl, but anyone who rooted for the 49ers before Walsh/Montana/Lott/deBartolo knows that “the Catch” was the real defining moment.