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Investigating the employment of British aircraft against German submarines during the final years of the First World War, this new book places anti-submarine campaigns from the air in the wider history of the First World War. The Royal Naval Air Service invested heavily in aircraft of all types—aeroplanes, seaplanes, airships, and kite balloons—in order to counter the German U-boats. Under the Royal Air Force, the air campaign against U-boats continued uninterrupted. Aircraft bombed German U-boat bases in Flanders, conducted area and ‘hunting’ patrols around the coasts of Britain, and escorted merchant convoys to safety. Despite the fact that aircraft acting alone destroyed only one U-boat during the war, the overall contribution of naval aviation to foiling U-boat attacks was significant. Only five merchant vessels succumbed to submarine attack when convoyed by a combined air and surface escort during World War I. This book examines aircraft and weapons technology, aircrew training, and the aircraft production issues that shaped this campaign. Then, a close examination of anti-submarine operations—bombing, patrols, and escort—yields a significantly different judgment from existing interpretations of these operations. This study is the first to take an objective look at the writing and publication of the naval and air official histories as they told the story of naval aviation during the Great War. The author also examines the German view of aircraft effectiveness, through German actions, prisoner interrogations, official histories, and memoirs, to provide a comparative judgment. The conclusion closes with a brief narrative of post-war air anti-submarine developments and a summary of findings. Overall, the author concludes that despite the challenges of organization, training, and production the employment of aircraft against U-boats was largely successful during the Great War. This book will be of interest to historians of naval and air power history, as well as students of World War I and military history in general.
World War I was the crucible of antisubmarine warfare (ASW), and the years of trial and error between 1914 and 1918 gave rise to the weapons and tactics used by today's ASW forces. With this study, military historian Dwight Messimer examines the weapons, tactics, and organization used by all the belligerents during the war and provides some surprising findings. Because he draws heavily from personal accounts as well as from official records, his book will appeal to both serious readers seeking hard facts and to general readers who like stories about war at sea. Messimer tells the story from both sides. German survivors who escaped from sunken U-boats explain what it was like to face the newly developed ASW weapons beneath the surface, and pilots tell what it was like from above. The author describes the German's well-organized and efficient ASW organization in the Baltic and the Helgoland Bight. He also discusses the weapons developed during the war that proved to be largely ineffective or outright failures. While his evaluations of the contributions made by aircraft and Q-ships put them in the category of only marginally effective, his analysis of the effectiveness of politics deems that ASW "weapon" the most effective of all. Solidly grounded in the best primary sources available in England, the United States, and Germany, this book is the first to address the ASW of all World War I belligerents.
The submarine was undoubtedly the most potent purely naval weapon of the twentieth century. In two world wars, enemy underwater campaigns were very nearly successful in thwarting Allied hopes of victory - indeed, annihilation of Japanese shipping by US Navy submarines is an indicator of what might have been. That the submarine was usually defeated is a hugely important story in naval history, yet this is the first book to treat the subject as a whole in a readable and accessible manner. It concerns individual heroism and devotion to duty, but also ingenuity, technical advances and originality of tactical thought. What developed was an endless battle between forces above and below the surface, where a successful innovation by one side eventually produces a counter-measure by the other in a lethal struggle for supremacy. Development was not a straight line: wrong ideas and assumptions led to defeat and disaster.
In this book, Michael Glynn explores a journey through the history of more than one hundred years of aerial sub hunting. From the Great War, through the Battle of the Atlantic in World War II and on to the secret confrontations of the Cold War, the reader will witness the parallel evolution of both aircraft and submarine as each side tries to gain supremacy over the other. In so doing, Glynn distills complicated oceanography, operations analysis, and technical theory into easily digested concepts, helping the reader understand how complex weapons and sensors function. By reviewing the steps of a submarine hunting flight, the reader can quickly understand how theory and practice fit together and how aviators set out to achieve their goal of detecting their submarine targets. Airborne Anti-Submarine Warfare is a thrilling read for those seeking a glimpse into an arcane and high-stakes world.
An in-depth reference to the naval weapons used by Britain, Germany, the US, and the other combatants in the Great War, with photos: “Superb…invaluable.”—History of War Although the Great War might be regarded as the heyday of the big-gun at sea, it also saw the maturing of underwater weapons, the mine and torpedo, as well as the first signs of the future potency of air power. Between 1914 and 1918 weapons development was both rapid and complex, so this book has two functions: on the one hand it details all the guns, torpedoes, mines, aerial bombs and anti-submarine systems employed during that period; but it also seeks to explain the background to their evolution: how the weapons were perceived at the time and how they were actually used. This involves a discussion of tactics and emphasizes the key enabling technology of fire control and gun mountings. In this respect, the book treats the war as a transition from naval weapons which were essentially experimental at its outbreak to a state where they pointed directly to what would be used in World War II. Based largely on original research, this sophisticated book is more than a catalogue of the weapons, offering insight into some of the most important technical and operational factors influencing the war at sea.
"The author details the challenges of communal life aboard ship and explains the intense loyalty that bonds crew members for life. Ultimately, Williamson offers a portrait of himself, an inexperienced naval officer who, having come of age in Alabama during the Depression, rose to become the most successful WW II antisubmarine warfare officer in the Pacific."--Jacket.
Beginning with anti-U-Boat efforts during the Battle of the Atlantic of World War II and ending with newly-developed tactics of the 21st Century, the authors examine the many facets of anti-submarine warfare.
Winston Churchill famously claimed that the submarine war in the Atlantic was the only campaign of the Second World War that really frightened him. If the lifeline to north America had been cut, Britain would never have survived; there could have been no build-up of US and Commonwealth forces, no D-Day landings, and no victory in western Europe. Furthermore, the battle raged from the first day of the war until the final German surrender, making it the longest and arguably hardest-fought campaign of the whole war. The ships, technology and tactics employed by the Allies form the subject of this book. Beginning with the lessons apparently learned from the First World War, the author outlines inter-war developments in technology and training, and describes the later preparations for the second global conflict. When the war came the balance of advantage was to see-saw between U-boats and escorts, with new weapons and sensors introduced at a rapid rate. For the defending navies, the prime requirement was numbers, and the most pressing problem was to improve capability without sacrificing simplicity and speed of construction. The author analyses the resulting designs of sloops, frigates, corvettes and destroyer escorts and attempts to determine their relative effectiveness.