Is Alan Turing's effort code-breaking effort to the war exaggerated?

The offensive Enigma messages had also an insignificant importance ;it seems that certain people think that the U Boat war was a video game where some one in BP decoded a message and ordered an aircraft to sink a U Boat .

I have already asked the question and the BP lobby kept mum .

I will ask the question again (but the answer will be the same ) :in 1941 24 U Boats were lost,of which 13 only by aircraft/ships/A and S : how many of these 13 were lost as result of a Enigma message ?

 

Exactly that is the point: victory at Atlantic was won by: overhelmingly larger navy, air supremacy, development of radar, development of sonar has enabled fine adjustments of depth detonators. Contribution of decyphering was important too but it is largely exaggerated.

 

The Allies always had air supremacy, surface radar from 1941, SONAR was developped in WW1.
Code breaking was one of the game changers, escort carriers, long range bombers, Huff-Duff and Hedgehog were more important.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Type_XIV_submarine
"Ultra intercepts provided information concerning sailing and routing, and this, coupled with improved Allied radar and air coverage in the North Atlantic, eliminated most of them during 1943. "

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra
"On 1 February 1942, Enigma U-boat traffic became unreadable because of the introduction of a different 4-Rotor Enigma-machine. This situation persisted until December 1942.."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Happy_Time

 

Air supremacy in 1941 was less important than Göring's obstinacy.

How is it possible to "largely exaggerate", when the efforts to develop and improve all of these (radar, sonar, HF/DF, hedgehogs, foxer, the production of cruisers and destroyers, VLR air assets, and decrypt assets) were all based on meeting a threat that first wanted to starve Britain into submission, and when that failed, tried to prevent the force build-up in the UK, and when that failed, just continued out of pure futility?

 

And,what was the result of the absence of Enigma in 1942? The result was that Britain importe much more oil than in 1941,when Enigma was working : 1941:13.13 million of tons, 1942 :16.28 millions of tons .

The whole war was a Happy Time for ...the Allied navies .

On 1 september 1939 British and British controlled merchant shipping was (in GRT ) 17.784 million, on 31 december 1941 it was 20.693 million .More than 2 years of U Boat war had resulted in a failure for Germany : Britain had more GRT and Germany had lost a lot of U Boats . This is the reality .

Britain was,for supplies,never in danger . The U Boats failed . Totally .

Source = The Hunters Plate 6 .

Every time Adolf invaded a country, the British merchant navy become stronger .

 

It appears that in the first four years of the war western allies were not primarily preocupated with protecting own transportation routes but something else: suffocating the continental Europe by sealing it at Atlantic and the Mediterranean - even though they, according to their own words, entered the war to protect Poland. Ironically, it was uncle Joe who has done that instead of the western allies.

 

Nothing ironic about Stalin's actions concerning Poland...
Slaughter or deport those you don't want, and install into positions of power those you do. Stalin wanted Poland and he got it, at least for several decades.

Churchill wanted and kept trying to get the Allies into Eastern Europe, but the Americans were having none of that.

 

So...British imports of petroleum rose by 30% from 1941 to 1942. Yet, the import of all other strategic materials fell by about 45%, and the import of major foodstuffs fell by about 33% during the same time period.

 

Explanation is very simple : when the war broke out, Britain DECIDED(= was not forced by U Boat danger ) to import less and to increase the home production .During the war, Britain was less dependent on imports than before the war .

The fact remains that the result of the so-called Happy Time was that Britain was able to import more oil,what proves that operation Drumbeat was a mistake and a failure .The tanker losses during peration Drumbeat did not hurt Britain . And Britain was the only who could be hurt by the U Boats .

 

Kindly desist from shouting.



I pull out a gun, and start loading it, while declaring my intention to shoot you.
You decide to put on a bulletproof vest, helmet, and dive for cover.

Entirely voluntary on your part, of course.
You decided to eat dirt.

Had they decided to wait until necessity forced the issue, it would've been what is known in technical language as "too bloody late".

 

Happy Time of the U Boats did not exist : the Allies always were winning,because their shipping production was bigger than what they lost by the U Boats .

There is no reason to label the second semester of 1940 as a Happy Time ;while in that period 341 merchant ships were lost,the losses in the first semester of 1943 were 407 ships , and no one will say that that period was a Happy Time .

In 1942 /1 628 ships were lost and in 1942/2 694 ships were lost .

Thus ..the Happy Times story is meaningless .

 

Sounds like someone who hates the use of 'hindsight' now finds it perfectly acceptable. Who would have thunk it?

 

what hindsights ?

 

I'm sorry, but I just realized, don't you post as "ljadw" on Axis History Forum?

 

1940; Germany lost 24 U-boats over the year (16 U-boats destroyed in the first 6 months, vs 8 in the final 6 months), vs 563 merchants.
1941; Germany lost 35 U-boats over the year (12 in the first six months, vs 23 in the last 6 months (10 in December!), vs 501 merchants
1942 Germany lost 84 U-boats vs 1322 merchants
1943; Germany lost 244 U-boats over the year, vs 582 merchants.

Yet this story does not reveal the crisis of the repairs; with British dockyards prioritizing Naval vessels, in Feb 1941 two thirds of the British dry cargo vessels were classified as immobilized awaiting repairs. This means they were unable to unload and needed 7 or more days to repair. Making workers available for repairs, reduced the pace of new construction. The British pace of Merchant ship dry cargo construction prior to the US entry of the war for '40 and '41 was only equivalent to roughly 30% of the losses.

Thus, when viewed in terms of a cumulative effect, it is seen that the crisis was indeed real, until US manufacturing, and technical innovations allowed the destruction of the U-boat threat (1943).

 

Do we have a wolfpack here... with LJAd as the main target? But, essentially, he is right about the theme of this conversation. What the most of you others do is dragging the theme in of-topic muddy waters. I don't know, but this is how I see this conversation.

 

Yes

 

Most of the wolfpacks had not much results :the number of ships lost by wolfpacks was, compared to the total, not very great .

Wolfpacks were temporarily ad hoc formations,who lasted only a short time, normally a U Boat was sailing independently .

in a lot of cases, no wolfpacks were formed, because the convoy was to fast, to heavily protected, the individual ships being to far away,etc ...

In nature, wolfs were moving in a group,a wolfpack, submarines moved individually .

 

I don't know of a person who can make more wrong statements then you LJAD. But out in the Atlantic, U-boats took their toll. Between June and November 1940, 1.6 million tons of shipping was sunk – a loss rate that Britain could not sustain. Grouped into wolf-packs, these U-boats sank vast numbers of merchant ships in the Atlantic. This peaked in 1942. U-boat captains quickly realised that a night attack made them all but invisible to an escort to the merchant ships. ASDIC was designed for underwater detection – U-boats on the surface were safe from this. At night the silhouette of a surfaced U-boat was barely visible. Kretschmer actually took his U-boat into a convoy at night as he believed that no escort commander would ever believe that a U-boat would ever deliberately go into a convoy to attack. Wolf-pack attacks were aided in their success by Focke-Wolf Condor reconnaissance planes which found where a convoy was and relayed all the relevant information back to U-boat headquarters. http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/world-war-two/war-in-the-atlantic/u-boats/ the term happy times was made up by the Uboat captains during their successful times.

 

I know such a person : you .

You pick an arbitrary period(june-november 1940) and use it as an argument :,out of context : while merchant ship losses by U Boats in 1940 were 563 ships (some 2.7 millin of GRT ) OTOH, these losses were compensate, more than compensated by

British shipping production

the arrival of the greatest part of the Norwegian, Danish, Belgian and Dutch merchant fleet

the capture of a Big part of the Italian merchant fleet

About the importance of the wolfpacks, I have looked at the figures (I am not interested in the European Football Championship) and these are

1939 : ONE wolfpack with 6 U Boats: result : loss of 7 merchant ships,and 3 U Boats;during that period 166 merchant ships were lost of which 25 in convoy ,and 9 U Boats

1940 :2 wolfpacks(12 U Boats),result : loss of 9 merchant ships, no U Boats;during that period 563 merchant ships were lost ,of which 304 in convoy and 24 U Boats

1941 :26 wolfpacks (224 U Boats ),result :loss of 102 merchant ships and 10 U Boats;but in the same period 501 merchant ships were lost and 35 U Boats .

There were much more wolfpacks in 1941 than in 1940 and the result was

a) total loss of merchant ships was LOWER than in 1940

the efficiency of the wolfpacks was the same : 4 merchant ships per wolfpacks

c ) the efficiency of the participating U Boats was lower : in 1940 :0.75 merchant ship per participating U Boat, in 1941 0.5 merchant ship per participating U Boat

d ) wolfpacks were more dangerous for the U Boats than independently sailing : in 1941 the wolfpacks were good for 20 % of the merchant ship losses ,but 30 % of the U Boat losses .

e ) to have the same return as in 1940, bigger wolfpacks were needed


These points are confirmed by what happened in 1942:the number of U Boats used in wolfpacks almost quadrupled (they were now 835),but the return was going up only by 250 %:from 102 to 258,and while in 1941 the wolfpacks were good for 20 % of the merchant ship losses, it remained the same in 1942 ,but at the same time the % of the U Boats that were lost in wolfpack attacks increased : from 28 % in 1941 to 34 % in 1942.

Conclusion : the belief that the wolfpacks were the wonderweapon of Dönitz and were defeated by the wonderweapon of the Allies (Enigma ) is good for the writers of popular novels, but this belief does not resist a serious investigation .