Major Naval blunders of WW2; kept secret

[Como83]

Recently I happened to read a book which set my old antenna bristling. So, with the 70th anniversary of WW2 coming up shortly - I thought younger and also more erudite members of this great Website might be interested if a new Topic on the above was started, using a major blunder by the British Admiralty as a starter.

Most people have no idea of how, during the war, the lower deck of the Royal Navy was ‘insulated’ from information. On where you were going, on duration of trip, on enemy threats, enemy sinkings, how the war was going and so on.
This naturally led to rumours or ‘buzzes’ being widespread on the ship; dependant on the skipper you might get some scrap to cheer you up, or usually get no information at all.
There was good reason for this; but later when one came into contact with the USN, there seemed a vast difference in attitude between the Navies, on dissemination of information.

After two experiences in 1941 of the North Atlantic, I spent over two years out ‘East’;
experienced attack by the Japanese Pearl Harbor carrier force then after hospital time spending months in Colombo. Little came to us of the overseas struggle, but we knew ships were being sunk because mail was so pathetic, also goods like tea piled up in the warehouses on Colombo docks – because so few ships came to collect them.

I faintly remember a New Year in Colombo in 1942, somehow we met a few Merchant Navy types drinking ‘Toddy’ in a dive. Maybe grog brought to the surface their defeatist attitude, a strong feeling that ‘they wouldn’t see Liverpool again, they had had it.’
They spoke of a North Atlantic convoy disaster (must have been in 1942) where their ship had survived by fleeing; after this someone in authority on their ship reckoned that ‘Gerry’ always knew where their convoy was, there was treachery somewhere!
In May 1943 I experienced something of what they had been through, when along with other FAA technicians plus a few true blue Navy types, we were ’chosen’ as Deck and Guns crew for an old steamer requisitioned by the Navy. Laden with all those goods waiting from the godowns of Calcutta, we struggled on for 3 months enroute to the UK .

Several times during WW2, I wondered how ‘they’ seemed to come almost directly to us. How did they seem to ‘know where we were.’ Of course you were careful to keep these thoughts to yourself, only maybe whisper them to a mate; such thoughts could have you ostracised or even brought up on a serious charge.

The book that brought this all back was ‘The Interrogator’, by Andrew Williams published in 2009 by John Murray. It’s a fictionalized account of the secret war behind the Battle of the Atlantic, sympathetic to those on the sharp end at sea, not so to those in high places ashore.
It’s hero, if we can call him that, is half-German who, after his ship is sunk, interrogates U-boat officers; he suspects codes are being broken but is told to shut up, then threatened. The book as far as I can see gives fair treatment to both sides.

In the same vein that we were taught to think of our struggle as maybe desperate but ultimately victorious, if we ever thought of our codes, we just assumed them inviolate; just like our secret Radar, Jet Fighters & Proximity Fuses. As we were told, we were always way ahead of those poor old stupid Gerry’s.

At the end of his book was the Quote below…

In the autumn of 1945 Commander Tighe of the Admiralty Signals Division submitted a report on German code breaking efforts during the Second World War to the Director of Naval Intelligence.
The report was considered `So disturbing and important' that only three copies were made. In it, Tighe detailed the success of German cryptographers in repeatedly breaking both Royal and Merchant Navy codes and suggested that their efforts were responsible for many of the U-boat's greatest successes in the Battle of the Atlantic. Royal Navy codes were changed a number of times but the German B-Dienst was able to break into them again and again, often within a few weeks. Admiralty was slow to recognise and interpret evidence that its codes were compromised and carry out the necessary investigation.

After the war, the success of the cryptographers at Bletchlev Park in breaking the German Enigma ciphers helped to shield the Royal Navy from critical scrutiny over the failure of its own codes.
In his report, Commander Tighe concluded that British code security was so disastrously lax that it cost the country dearly in men and ships and `Very nearly lost us the war'..”

Another officer found out only after the war the extent to which codes had been broken. Captain Raymond Dreyer, deputy staff signals officer at Western Approaches, the British HQ for the Battle of the Atlantic in Liverpool said; "Some of their most successful U-boat pack attacks on our convoys were based on information obtained by breaking our ciphers."

My comment…
What a tragic blunder by several high placed people at Admiralty and Bletchley Park.
How many men and even worse women and children, died horribly in this blunder – which was to
be kept secret; covered up for so many years after the war.

[Bgile]

Yes, it seems that we were breaking much of each other's message traffic. Only the Japanese seem not to have benefited from this sort of thing, but of course much of their records have been lost.

[Dave Saxton]

I must say Como that I consider it an honor to profit from the input, knowlege, and insights of somebody like you. Your input is of immense value.

One of the more interesting aspects of the German code breaking of Allied naval codes, was the failure of the Germans to fully duduce from this that their own Enigma wasn't secure. On more than one occasion B-Dienst told the OKM, and specifically Doenitz as the head of the U-boat arm, that they suspected from intercepted Allied messages (re-directing convoys and directing anti-sub forces) that the Allies must surely have broken Enigma. Doenitz always refered to the Abwer to check it out, and everytime the Abwer replied that it simply wasn't possible. Of course the head of the Abwer was a double agent for the British.

[Dave Saxton]

They spoke of a North Atlantic convoy disaster (must have been in 1942) where their ship had survived by fleeing; after this someone in authority on their ship reckoned that ‘Gerry’ always knew where their convoy was, there was treachery somewhere....

......In the same vein that we were taught to think of our struggle as maybe desperate but ultimately victorious, if we ever thought of our codes, we just assumed them inviolate; just like our secret Radar, Jet Fighters & Proximity Fuses. As we were told, we were always way ahead of those poor old stupid Gerry’s.
.

Several histories of the Battle of the Atlantic refer to 1942 as the 2nd happy time for the U-boats. Much of their success is attributed to the breaking of Allied naval codes during this period and the lax attitudes by the Allied navies concerning the security of their own codes. British use of radio communications was at times unbelievably sloppy. In early 1941, the pocket battleship Scheer slipped away from a superior force of multiple British battle groups (including a carrier) near Madagascar through the B-Dienst group on Scheer carefully monitoring British radio communications. Some sloppy refrences in the messages let Krancke (the Scheer's skipper) know of the locations and destinations of the British warships.

Concerning radar, jet fighters, and proximity fuzes; I have found that just about everybody thought they had something or a capability that the other guy did not have. When the Graf Spee was scuttled in shallow water they left the radar mattress conspicuously mounted on the foretop range finder. When a scientist named Bainbridge-Bell, who was sent to investigate it, reported that it was indeed radar, and a very good radar too, the Admiralty refused to believe it and basically went into denial. When British coastal convoys started coming under very accurate long range gunfire in the dark of night during the fall of 1940, the Admiralty sent another scientist down to Dover to investigate. He reported that it was radar operating at 80cm wave length. Once again the Admiralty refused to believe it. Some factions did take this seriously though and began to develop a noise jammer to be used against the German 80cm radar. In Feb 1941 one of the scientists was at the Dover station late one night, when a coastal convoy was just getting hammered by long range German coastal artillery. Several ships had been hit and he suggested they try the jammer. The fire immediantly ceased. The Germans immediantly modified their radar to quickly change frequency though.

The Germans did have proximity fuses too, in fact they started to develop theirs before the Allies. However, they were much more secretive about it. We know from scrapps of a burnt Luftwaffe KTB recovered after the war that they had operational proximity fuzes late war.

[Bgile]

If they had operational proximity fuses, why didn't their flak do better against the huge bomber raids?

[Dave Saxton]

The percentage of bombers destroyed by German flak was very good. USAAF studies during the war reported that Wuerzburg directed flak was taking a overly big chunk out of the bombers both day and night, and especially at night. In order to accomplish some of the big night raids the British found it necessary to counter the Wuerzburgs with "window". The bomber offensive was expensive to the Allies in terms of blood and treasure. More than 50,000 RAF airmen lost their lives in this offensive (thats more than losses of the U-boat arm and equal to the US KIA losses in all of the Vietnam war). It was a gruelling war of attrition that only the numbers advantages of the Allies made tenable. However specifically to the point of operational German proximity fuzes we don't know when this occured.

The KTB refrences to operational proximity fuzes is from early 1945 and by then the bomber offensive had done its work. Another factor is that proximity fuzes were not the panacea we mistakenly think of them today. After the war Royal Navy assessments of the effectiveness of proximity fuzes were not that positive:

" While no one had any doubts that a radar could be designed which could achieve the desired performance, there were many in the Navy who doubted whether conventional AA guns could ever deal effectively with aircraft attacks even with proximity fuzes. During the war proximity fuzes had been quite ineffective at long range..."

Late war, the USN found that proximity fuzes were only very effective if the shell could be put within about 20 meters of the target, something the USN flak directing radars and their associated directors could not do. The only flak directing radars capable of such accuracy late war were the US Army's SCR584 (which was used against the buzz bombs) and some of the late war German radars.

This was why the guided missile became the next big developmental item on everybodies agenda.

[tommy303]

The majority of the approximately 45 proximity fuze projects undertaken by the Germans before the war ended were intended for use in missiles. One exception to this was Rheinmetall-Borsig's Kühglockchen. This was an electrostatic fuze for AA use. One interesting development was the result of a study done by Dr Voss of the Reichsluftministerium. When guns began to be used against aircraft back in WW1, one of the problems was how to get a shell on target. With the aiming devices of the day this was nearly impossible, so time fuzes were incorporated in an effort to at least detonate a shell close to an airplane. Between the wars and during WW2 Flak fire control had improved greatly, as had the introduction of better fuzes. Still, the results were not as good as one could hope, so Voss concentrated on the two areas where errors occurred. One was in the fuze, where even a very tiny error in fuze time could cause a shell to burst too far from a plane to do lethal damage; the second was in the computing and fuze setting which could have its own errors and the inevitable delay between setting and firing.

Voss reasoned that since the Flak directors and computing machines were capable of at least getting a shell into the zone of an approaching bomber, if one substituted impact fuzes for the time ones, you could increase the rate of fire and raise the chances of scoring a direct hit. Voss presented his conclusions in a paper in 1944 and showed that, in theory at least, the impact fuze was superior to the time fuze. It took some doing, but eventually the Luftwaffe undertook trials and the results showed that if anything, Voss had been understating his case. In January 1945 a number of Flak batteries were ordered to try using impact fuzes only in engaging bomber formations and the results were highly promising. In March orders finally went out to abandon time fuzes altogether.

[Bgile]

Dave,

To read your post about allied losses one would think German fighters had nothing to do with it. It's VERY misleading.

[Dave Saxton]

VERY misleading ? How so? Is it pointing out that proximity fuzes were actually less effective than generally thought, or is it pointing out that German flak was more effective than it is generally given credit for? Those RAF bomber crew losses are from their night bombing campaign. While night fighters certainly carried their share of the burden, it goes without saying that radar directed flak was a primary and major cause of many of these rather severe losses.

[Bgile]

VERY misleading ? How so? Is it pointing out that proximity fuzes were actually less effective than generally thought, or is it pointing out that German flak was more effective than it is generally given credit for? Those RAF bomber crew losses are from their night bombing campaign. While night fighters certainly carried their share of the burden, it goes without saying that radar directed flak was a primary and major cause of many of these rather severe losses.

Mainly I said that because you didn't mention fighter losses at all, and I believe USA bomber losses to fighters were by far the greater of the types of losses they experienced, at least until the Merlin powered P-51s arrived in great numbers. With respect to RAF losses I don't know how bad their losses to night fighters were, but I suspect they were proportionately less due to the difficulty of finding the bombers.

With respect to the accuracy of USN heavy flak, I agree that US FC probably couldn't consistently come within 20 yds of the target, but if you fire several thousand rounds some of them are going to do so. Otherwise, there wouldn't be any losses to 5" flak at all, and there were.

[Dave Saxton]

Thanks Steve,

I took it as common knowlege that the RAF conducted their bombing campaign at night, and that flak can only destroy a % of bombers at any given time. Obviously proximity fuzes improve ones chances of destroying or damaging an attacking aircraft compared to non-variabley timed fuzes, but I'm trying to point out that the difference between using proximity fuzes and not using proximity fuzes wasn't really that great. Therefore we can't expect to find a large statistical difference between the German use of proximity fuzes and prior. It's interesting that the studies reported by Thomas of just using impact fuzes with accurate firecontrol did result in a noticable improvement.

American studies and reports during the war are most interesting. From a 1944 report on the effectiveness of Wuerzburg directed Flak:

"To give the Devil his due, the Germans have developed a first rate system for anti-aircraft firecontrol -for which Allied bomber crews have developed a healthy respect for, and for good reason. Too often they have watched it punch substantial holes into their formations-night or day, clear or cloudy. This consistent accuracy under both seen and unseen conditions is the handiwork of radar, most notiably the small Wuerzburg. It is standard equipment for all German AA positions and it is effective equipment. Angular accuracy is high, in one test of a captured set it was within 0.2* 80% of the time and within 0.1* 60% of the time, and at elevations above 17* it is equally good. Effectiveness of the Wuerzburg is further bolstered by plenty of practice on the part of their crews and by the very multiplicity of them. The Wuerzburg seeing eye is good enough to pickup a single heavy bomber at 35km and transmit continuous range, bearing, and elevation data, automatically to the firecontrol computors........"

I know from other tests that range accuracy was exceptional.


The accuracy of Wuerzburg may have been in part why the Germans took a lax attitude toward proximity fuzes for AA shells. On the other hand the accuracy may have made using them more worthwhile.

[Dave Saxton]

I looked up some numbers on flak losses and the effectiveness of Wuerzburg concerning the British night bombing campaigns.

In 1941 30% of all losses of night bombers was attributed to flak. I was quite surprized by this, as this is a very high percentage and this was before Wuerzburg D and before the development of the more comprehensive AA firecontrol systems built around Wuerzburg D, and when the flak gun emplacements themselves were still relatively sparce and weak. Wuerzburg C was around but it was essentially used for putting search lights on target.

After the beginning of the dedicated bombing campaign began in 1943 the losses are presented in percentage of bombers lost per mission. The numbers are staggering at 15% or more. To put this into perspective the Schwienfurt (sp?) mission diasters that brought a temporary halt to the daytime deep penetration raids and created congressional hearings in the US was 11% losses. These were unsustainable losses. With the introduction of Window on 24th-25th of July 1943 the losses dropped to 2.8% per mission for a few weeks. This indicates that the Wuerzburg was the key componant in the overall defensive system and was very effective. Please understand that Wuerzburg wasn't only critical to the flak but also to the night fighters direction system. However, the German counter counter measures rapidly restored the effectiveness of Wuerzburg, and by Sept 1943 the losses had once again ballooned to 14% per mission.

Other numbers are staggering too. More than 500,000 German civilians lost their lives to the night bombing campaign. A ratio of about 10-1 civilians for the losses of the RAF airmen. Even after the introductuion of H2S and H2X radar bombing, the accuracy was terrible. The bombers often missed their targets by measures of kilometers, and this lead to area bombing as oppossed to precision bombing. The expected hit on German morale had the oppossite effect just as did the London Blitz of 1940. In 1944, the industrial production of several key armaments actually increased. However, it is estimated that without the day/night bombing, that most production would have been about 30% greater than it actually was. Additionally, it is thought that the Germans were forced to committ several key systems to defence of the Riech, and that this probably kept radar advances from being supplied to the various fronts and to the KM in larger numbers.

[Dave Saxton]

To bring this more back to the topic of the original post; it's pretty hard to keep major naval blunders (Diepe) under wraps, but some blunders have hardly been reported on, making no more than a foot note in the history books, but deserve discussion nonetheless. Some obscure blunders I can think of:

*The sinking of the German destroyers Leberecht Maas and Max Schultz by the Luftwaffe. (lots of friendly fire accidents in all theaters of war by all parties I'm sure)
*The unfettered mining of major British Isle ports by German destroyers resulting in the destruction of 76 merchant ships for virtually no German losses.
*The Convoy SLS64 disaster
*The German Navy torpedo failures
*The USN torpedo failures
*The British Admiralty's assumption that changing the Naval cyphers again in June 1943 made them secure for the duration.
*The German naval authorities ashore failure to pass on cruicial radar recon data and radio intelligence to Adm Bey aboard the Scharnhorst in a timely fashion. There's a good chance Scharnhorst would not have been cornered if this had been done.
*The USN defective armor plates and resulting congressional hearings.
*The run in with German S-bootes by a group practicing for Overlord that cost several hundred lives.

Lots more I'm sure.........

[Como83]

Dave, thanks for bringing this back on thread. That’s a balanced list of not well known blunders committed by both sides.

I have just written these comments below to cover some previous replies.
In this, I don’t want to diminish the work of Allied scientists and I certainly don’t want to diminish or impugn the bravery of those Allied servicemen. If anything their bravery is enhanced to me at least by advantages the enemy often enjoyed, through their good weapons, equipment, training and morale. Advantages that we found out only in action.
Look at the RAF bomber crews being hacked down nightly, no one warned them of Shrage Musik; they were told aircraft going down in flames were ‘Scarecrows’, just an enemy trick. Then those brave Fortress crews that first encountered R4M rockets fired broadside into their formations.

Professor A.V. Jones wrote the first coverage of Wartime radar, ours and theirs - in 1978
in ‘Most Secret War.’ This is a good read from Jones, who rose from a humble start to become Churchill’s protégé. It confirms that in the early days at least, against the German professional British research was amateurish; Germany was ahead on infra-red for example, which we had not even considered touching.
Their research was conducted on a broad front, covering science that could or might be useful to the armed forces. Much of their research was way ahead of Allied research at the time; although some went to the extreme.
Initially, only confusion over Germany’s long term war intentions aided by inter-feuding, delayed or upset military introduction of potentially useful weapons.
Later, Allied bombing, especially daylight attacks by the USAAF, upset introduction.

The list of ‘Enemy Surprise Weapons’ was long, starting with the Magnetic Mine and ending with ‘V’ Weapons, the Me262 and rocket fighters.
My own Dad was Electrical officer on board ‘HMS Euryalus’ at Salerno when Warspite was hit by the new anti-ship missile (This had just sunk the ‘Roma’). He was commended for devising a crude jamming device that upset their guidance. We met in UK in 1944 when I told him how our convoy had been attacked over two weeks before Salerno, by a first tryout of that missile in the Bay of Biscay.
Back in UK in 1946, I remember buying ‘Flight’ magazine. This had extensive coverage of the ‘futuristic aviation designs’ discovered in Germany, nearly all a great surprise to the West. Some designs like the transonic swept wing with engine pods slung under, have become standard today, look our modern jetliners.

[Paul L]

Como83

I'm impressed with your writing and make the assumption that you, like my father was in the war. He sometimes speaks of his experiences but since he has spent most of the decades blocking out his memories, they are no where near as detailed.

Thank you for sharing this with us.

I'm intrigued by the extent to which the Germans did break naval codes. I was aware of this early in the war but was unaware it went on. Can any one point me to an decent history of German code beaking even if its in the context of code beaking during the war in general.