In January 1943, the commander of the fascist submarine fleet, Rear Admiral K. Denitz, was in excellent spirits. His superior, the commander-in-chief of the fleet, Gross Admiral Raeder, was in big trouble in his service. At a meeting on December 30, Hitler called the battleships and cruisers fostered by the Grand Admiral as worthless vessels, demanded that the main caliber artillery be removed from them and transferred to the coastal defense.
Vice-Admiral Kranke, who replaced Raeder, hastened to assure the Fuhrer that large surface ships do not defend themselves in protected bases, but are actively fighting on communications. Just now, the battleship Luttsov, the heavy cruiser Admiral Hipper and six destroyers are preparing to strike at the convoy heading for the USSR. Hearing this, Hitler relented, but not for long. The very next day, British radio informed the world that the convoy had arrived safely in Murmansk, and the German ships were in difficulty. The heavy cruiser is damaged and one destroyer is sunk.
Hitler, already inflamed by the position of Paulus's army in Stalingrad, ordered the withdrawal of all large ships from the fleet and summoned Raeder. On January 6, Raeder, after listening to the Fuhrer's reasoning about how to fight at sea, handed Hitler a letter of resignation. Now there was every reason to expect that the post of commander-in-chief would be offered to Dennits, who was doing well.
Expectations did not disappoint Dennits: on January 30, 1943, he received the rank of Grand Admiral and the post of Commander-in-Chief of the Fleet. And already on April 11, at a meeting with Hitler, he, pointing out the threatening increase in the loss of submarines, demanded a sharp increase in their release. And two weeks after the meeting, events broke out that put an end to the so-called third phase of the submarine war in the Atlantic.
Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz
Western historians call the third phase the period from spring 1942 to March 1943 - the period of record successes of fascist submariners. For 13 months, they sank 1,221 vehicles with a total displacement of 6, 65 million tons - half a million tons per month! This is more than double the corresponding figure for the second period (June 1940 - February 1942) and more than ten times the first (September 1939 - May 1940). New boats were also intensively built - an average of 20 units per month. In the second and first phases: 13, 8 and 1, 8, respectively. But for all these successes, Dennits was worried about the growth of losses. If in the first two phases his submariners lost 2, 5 and 2, 3 boats monthly, then in the third - 9, 2.
Even in the pre-war years, sailors learned about the new British sonar "Asdik", capable of detecting boats. The British press claimed that this device completely deprives the submarine of its main means of defense (stealth) and makes submarine warfare hopeless.
Dennitz then only chuckled: the experiments carried out by the Germans with a similar device - the device "S", as it was called, said that the accuracy of the Asdik dropped sharply when the boat went deep, and besides, the device did not detect a floating boat. This led Dennitz to think about night attacks from the surface. A few years later, the conditions prevailing in the second phase of the submarine war in the Atlantic facilitated the practical implementation of the notorious "packs of wolves."
Let me explain. The surface speeds of the then diesel-electric boats are quite high: 16-18 knots, while the underwater ones are half as much as 7-9 knots. Going under water, the boat could not catch up with even the slowest transport, and this was the basis for the organization of convoys by the Allies. The group of transport workers, moving faster than submarines under water, were not threatened by attacks from the aft corners. The enemy could attack them only from the front, and it was here that the escort was concentrated with depth charges, sound direction finders and "asdics".
And then the fascist submariners switched to the tactics of the "wolf pack". Stretching out along the intended line of the convoy at intervals of 25-30 miles, ten to fifteen submarines awaited the appearance of the target. The boat, which was the first to spot the convoy, notifying the command and the neighboring boats of its appearance, continued to observe the target with them - waiting for darkness, with the onset of which all the submarines surfaced and immediately became invisible to the Asdiks, and rushed at high speed to the prey. Attacking from all directions, coordinating their actions with the help of radio, the "wolves" forced the escort forces to disperse and fired torpedoes and artillery at the transports with impunity.
But in the early spring of 1942, submarine commanders operating in the Biyskay Bay began to receive reports (and more and more often) of strange events. There, at night, when the boats that surfaced to charge the batteries were seemingly completely safe, they were suddenly bombarded and bombarded. According to the testimony of the few survivors, the impression was that from the planes the boats were visible in the darkness of the night, as during the day.
It was clear that the Allies were using radar. But how did the British manage to squeeze the bulky station onto the plane?
Soon, in the wreckage of a downed British plane, an ASV radar station was found - shortwave, and therefore compact. Germany, which abandoned short waves in radar back in the pre-war years, brought out old developments, after which the allies had to be surprised: the number of submarine radar notches dropped sharply. Allied radars were practically blinded - until a phenomenon was discovered that made it possible to find a clue. Namely, the pilots, who spotted the submarine in time and attacked it, noticed that as the plane approached the boat, the echo disappeared from the radar screen. Consequently, the boat commander also somehow saw the plane and managed to take his measures. What did you see? Not only as a device capable of detecting radio emission with a wavelength of 1, 2 m, on which British radars worked.
And so it was. But in May 1943, the German search receivers "Fu-MG" ceased to detect the work of British radars. This month, the number of submarines sunk reached an unprecedented figure - 41, and by the end of the year, losses amounted to 237 boats - almost three times more than in 1942.
German specialists were exhausted, unraveling the new secret of British anti-submarine defense. At first it was decided that the British had used infrared detection equipment. Then the Germans considered that the Allies had created a device that detects the weak radiation of the Fu-MG receiver itself, which displays an anti-submarine aircraft like a beacon. And experiments seemed to confirm this. A frantic search was launched for such a receiver that would detect approaching aircraft without giving itself away. Suddenly, the Germans managed to shoot down an English plane over Rotterdam, the radar of which worked on a wave of only 9 centimeters.
This made a stunning impression in Germany: it turned out that German physicists, who declared the wavelength range below 20 cm technically unsuitable, made a major mistake.
Ten years later, American specialists, analyzing the operations of submarine forces in the Atlantic, unconditionally ascribed to radars a decisive role in the destruction of the fascist submarine fleet. Paradoxically, the idea of the technical superiority of the allies also played into the hands of the former fascist submariners, who were able to write off their own miscalculations on the short-sightedness of industrial leaders and the mediocrity of Reich scientists and engineers. "The technical superiority of the Allies both in increasing the production of aircraft and in equipping them with radar devices," wrote the German Rear Admiral E. Godt after the war, "decided the outcome of the struggle." He was echoed by Fleet Admiral W. Marshall: "The enemy's planes and radars nullified the successes of the German submarine fleet." Even more categorically in favor of the decisive role of the radar in underwater warfare and justifying his impotence, Dennitz himself spoke out: “With the help of radar, the enemy deprived submarines of their main quality - surprise. By these methods, the threat of submarines was eliminated. The Allies won the success in submarine war not by superior strategy or tactics, but by superior technology."
Without denying the great role of radar technology in the search and destruction of submarines on the surface, let us think whether it is possible to explain the success of the Allies in anti-submarine warfare by superiority in radar alone.
Doubt that radars played the main role in anti-submarine warfare was one of the first to express in the book “The Submarine Fleet of the Third Reich. German submarines in a war that was almost won. 1939-1945 former fascist submariner H. Bush. He pointed to the immense importance of radio direction-finding stations stretching from the Azores to Greenland and from the US east coast to England. With the help of these stations, the Allies could not only intercept virtually all submarine communications between themselves and with the coastal command, but also determine the location of each submarine in the ocean.
However, during the war, the fascist command was calm for this side of the matter: German naval codes were considered unsolved. And there were very good reasons for such conviction. But more on that in the next part.
References:
Bush H. Submarine fleet of the Third Reich. German submarines in a war that was almost won. 1939-1945
Dennitz K. Ten years and twenty days.
Ivanov S. U-boot. War under water // War at sea. No. 7.
Smirnov G. History of technology // Inventor-rationalizer. 1990. No. 3.
Blair K. Hitler's Submarine War (1939-1942). "Hunters".
Rover Y. Submarines that bring death. Victory of the submarines of the countries of the Hitler Axis.
