It was the year 1942. World War II was reaching its peak tension. After the Japanese’s attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the U.S was then directly involved in the war, in support of the Allies, especially the British.
U.S Navy at the time, was busy assembling their fleets to conduct counter-attacks against the Japanese Imperial Navy, the main focus of the U.S Navy was on the Pacific warfare. This posed a significant problem. As the U.S moved most of their best ships to the Pacific, there were not a lot experienced commanders stationed in the Atlantic, which was the only route through which the U.S had been sending supplies to the U.K.
This information reached Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, who increased activities of U-Boats in the area. U-Boats – a very small and highly-effective submarine produced by the Germans during World War II, were the nightmare for British warships. Their crew members were highly trained to fight from under water, and the submarines seemed to use lots of stealth tactics, helping them to remain unseen after attacking supply ships between the U.S and Europe.
In such settings, WATU (Western Approaches Tactical Unit) was assembled. In simple language, WATU was a group of people who were professionally trained to play.. board-games. Not just any board-game, but war games. The concept was that WATU would play their specially-made sea war game, planning out possible scenarios which might happen in the real battle, and find out how to solve problems. War-gaming strategies were nothing new as it had been done for ages, but WATU’s perspective on the Atlantic warfare was different: The people who played this game earlier mainly focused on how they can defeat the Germans from the view of a British ship, but rarely paid attention to how a captain on a U-boat see the battle.
With this in mind, WATU analyzed battle reports extremely carefully, reading between the lines, and they came up with a theory. In earlier battles with U-Boats, whenever a ship in the middle of the fleet was hit with a torpedo (under water rocket), the conclusion was the a U-Boat had spotted the ships from far away, and stayed at a safe position from which it could shoot and destroy the ships. Therefore, the fleet’s commander would order escort ships to spread out and search for the hiding U-boat. However, WATU claimed that this was not the case. Instead, the U-boats were more likely to “hide among the ships”. And when they said “among the ships”, they meant it. As underwater radars could not pick up any signals from submarines, this would mean that the U-boats had to be on the surface. Since most attacks are done during the night, with thick fog setting in, the U-boats remained undetected. They then fired their torpedoes, caused panic attack among the ships, then dived and retreated to a safe position to reload. Therefore, if the British Navy arranged one or two ships that followed the fleet but kept a distance of about 1 mile, they could spot these submarines that retreated.
Another interesting report that came in to WATU was that everytime a U-boat attack was going on, the British ships could spot one U-boat from far away. This particular U-boat did not attack, and instead just sat there doing nothing. Whenever a British ship ran towards this U-boat, it dived to escape and popped up at another spot. This was thought by WATU to be a ‘commanding’ U-boat, and their solution was to have a ship to go NEAR, enough to make that U-boat think that it might be seen, so that it would dive instead of running away. Then the ship would turn around, went on top of where the U-boat was last spot, and dropped a depth-charge (an explosive device that would sink to a designed depth and explode).
Of course this was all war-gaming, and there was no way that WATU could simply theorize such strategies and have them applied on the battlefield. So they brought in the naval commander Max Horton – who was extremely experienced in submarine tactics, and was quite skeptical about the whole WATU project, to test it out. He got to play as a U-boat commander, and WATU was commanding the British fleets. They played for five rounds, and in every round, Horton was commanding his submarines when he got depth-charged and defeated. Horton was so furious that he demanded to see who was behind the British fleet. To his surprise, it was an 18-year-old Janet Okell, a female officer from the WATU crew. It took a few minutes for him to put aside his ego (obviously because he just lost to an inexperienced female subordinate), and decided that the plan should be carried out in the real world.
All the fleets in the Atlantic were signaled with a new plan, and Operation Raspberry was commenced. As some of the escort ships were behind the convoy by a distance, they finally picked up signals from the U-boats. The first depth-charge that was dropped into the cold ocean was a confirmed kill. The tides have turned, both literally and figuratively. And from then on, the Atlantic warfare turned into a submarine massacre. As the war went on, radar technology was developed, and air-crafts launched from carrier ships could now scan areas of Atlantic that they previously could not. Towards the end of the Atlantic battle, U-boat detonation rate was nearly 75%, making the job of being a U-boat crewman one of the most dangerous job in World War II. That was how a group of war-gamers somewhere in Liverpool won a war.
Special thanks to #Lindybeige for providing us with ideas on the subject. Please check out his channel in the link below where he also covers this topic in his 40-minute video:
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