Free Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War by Paul Kennedy Page A

proposed by the leader of Western Approaches Command, Max Horton, who swiftly gained the backing of his superiors at the Admiralty. The conclusion drawn from the grim experience of the SC 122 and HX 229 convoys being attacked on all sides, as the First Sea Lord, Sir Dudley Pound, put it to the cabinet committee on antisubmarine warfare in late March, was that “we can no longer rely on evading the U-boat packs and, hence, we shall have to fight the convoys through them.” 20 In retrospect, this may be the single most important statement made regarding the Battle of the Atlantic. Without perhaps even the First Sea Lord himself fully appreciating it, the decision that the convoys were going to be defended much more vigorously, in a recognizable life-and-death struggle for control of the sea-lanes, gave the Allied side a much clearer focus than before. d
Newer Elements Enter the Fight
    Admiral Pound’s statement was not just one of those romantic and archaic calls to fortitude in dire times. There certainly would be fortitude in the months to come, but now the convoys would be protected by defending forces that steadily enjoyed vastly improved tools of war, and many more of them, than they had possessed previously. These new resources worked to the Allies’ advantage and blunted Doenitz’s strategy,despite the great increase in the number of U-boats at his disposal. This chapter’s narrative is therefore quite different from that concerning the struggle for command of the air over Germany ( chapter 2 ), where the introduction of a single weapons system was manifestly seen to turn the tide, or that concerning the war in the Pacific ( chapter 5 ), where a remarkable succession of breakthroughs—U.S. Marine Corps amphibious warfare, U.S. Navy fast carrier groups, Seabees construction teams, and B-29 bombers—gave America the upper hand. And although the change in fortunes between the German and Allied navies in the Battle of the Atlantic occurred much earlier in the war than did the shift in those campaigns, the Atlantic story is far messier. The improvements did not arrive according to a grand incremental plan from Max Horton’s office; rather, they entered the Royal Navy’s tool kit episodically, and some of these newer systems took months before they properly fitted in the whole. Yet the commander of a U-boat that had been sent south in late March 1943 to wreak havoc off Freetown would have been completely disconcerted by what he saw when he arrived back at his base in Brest in July.
    That U-boat commander would have learned of a large and growing list of Allied improvements. Aerial support from RAF and Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) Coastal Command squadrons was rising fast, if unevenly, as additional squadrons arrived. New escort carriers were beginning to appear, some of them joined by recently formed groups of the newer corvettes and frigates. In addition, a couple of support groups consisting of very fast destroyers had been released from the Grand Fleet, due to the total inactivity of the German heavy warships based in Norway. Newer or vastly improved detection
and
killing equipment was at last making its way to the escort vessels. More and more HF-DF masts appeared even on small Allied escorts, and a fabulous 10-centimeter radar had also arrived. Wellington and Catalina bombers with the powerful spotlights known as Leigh Lights made the Bay of Biscay dangerous for U-boats on the surface. The Hedgehog grenades, together with much more powerful and better-set depth charges and aerial homing torpedoes, were all arriving on the scene. And the intelligence battle between B-Dienst and Bletchley Park’s code breakers was turning in favor of the Allies. In sum, while the U-boatcommander and his crew were enjoying easy kills to the south, things had gone badly wrong in the North Atlantic.
    Interestingly, the poor weather in the north had obscured for a while the many improvements on the Allied side. The record storms of