DAMN THE TORPEDOES. DAMN THEM, I SAY!

Blog number 257 **** 15 December 2008

During most of WW 2, Germany was very reticent about using her submarines indiscriminately because of fear of pissing off the neutral countries, especially the United States. Late in the war, however, things were going so bad for her that she decided to begin unrestricted submarine warfare. It was a huge success. Besides sinking merchant ships, it also caused other merchant ships not to sail under fear of being sunk. Britain was beginning to starve. Britain was beginning to lose the war.

The subs were very vulnerable on the surface, but once they submerged they could not be found. They could travel 80 miles underwater and no one knew where she was likely to surface. Destroyers were about the only weapon available to the Allies for sub sinking, but there weren't enough of them and they had to be taken from other duties, leaving those areas in danger from subs.

One of the typical methods the Germans used was to surface by a merchant ship, wait until the crew got off, then place demolition charges in the holds, thus saving their expensive torpedoes for more valuable targets. This method however gave the English a counter method, which was to send "Q-ships".

Q-ships were reconstructed disguised merchant ships which had hidden guns that were brought out when the submarine surfaced. One ingenious Q-ship had a telephone line and a tow cable tied to a submerged sub. When the ship, flying a British flag enticed a German sub to surface, the British sub would be alert via the telephone line whereupon it would torpedo the German sub.

When the German sub, U-40 was sunk in this manner, the rescued captain complained bitterly that his sub had been sunk by a "dirty trick."

The crews of the Q-ships were all volunteer naval officers and seamen disguised as civilians who learned to mimic the appearance and crisis behavior of a freighter's crew. They would hurriedly tumble into lifeboats and row away, leaving the gun crews hidden until the sub surfaced and came within ranger of the four inch guns.

While awaiting a submarine captain finding them through his periscope, the very disciplined crew grew their hair long, grew beards, slouched about with their hands in their pockets and generally acted like ordinary merchant seamen. One man wore a blond wig posing as a Scandinavian seaman. Garbage was dumped carelessly over the sides - anathema in a man-of-war.

More on this later. Mine energy esta kaput.