Germans could start building U-boat bunkers sooner.
At least it's better than building an Autobahn that never got used until post-WW2.
All that damn concrete...
How many tires does it take to cover a submarine?Buy more rubber from say Malaya?See a problem here about secrecy?
Anechoic tiles are too immature a tech for WW2.
Low grade distillate to fuel a medium speed diesel suitable for a sub in ww2 or earlier.Nope.
Suggestion only.
Radio silence while on patrol.......then how do you gather your patrol line into a wolf pack.
Most boats won't be working in packs. And you do it the same way the Pac Fleet did: contact reports re-radiated by
BdU, & by ops orders. Boats on a patrol line aren't deaf, either, so they're likely to read & copy a contact report from nearby boats. (Co-ordination of packmates once contact is made, to avoid fraticide, is harder.) Nobody's saying U-boats should be silenced entirely under any circumstances, just stopped from the stupid, pointless, suicidal, codebreaker-enhancing levels of traffic of OTL.
More patrol aircraft means more Hurricanes on cam ships earlier.
Fair point.
Radar on subs means you can be detected before you can target.
I'm unaware Allied escorts had RWR. (Once it's clear U-boats have FC radar, that will change...) More to the point, if you're using it for firecontrol, not search, you don't advertise, you "ping range" & shut off.
Targeting just lone ships will convince the ship owners sooner that this convoy thing is a good idea.
Except it didn't OTL, or there wouldn't have been so many singletons sunk. How much harder would they have to be hit for that to change? IDK.
Sealed orders with navigational position KILLBOX assignments and start patrol lines, the same procedure as Lockwood and staff did for Philippine Sea.
As I'm reading the intent, it presumed silence entire, from sighting to first attack. Patrol lines still have to co-ordinate, but by the time DF (even ship-borne) has that, contact is already made.
Special synthetic diesel? If your going to make synthetic oil why stop there?
That sounds good. Can it be done without sacrificing something else?
A special signal word that's changed every 2 weeks, followed by coordinate. Radio silence otherwise.
More/less, yes. The report itself is likely to be detected by DF, & convoy ordered to change course, but that was true OTL, too.
I frankly don't know if a codeword is essential. A report formatted as a contact report would, AIUI, have a particular
signal message header {making the codeword moot}, & would be little more than "ships in Box AA". It would be signed by the originating boat, & any boats on a patrol line would very likely be listening for such
signals messages {I have to stop calling them signals...
), even without alerts from Lorient.
Now that all the merchants are in one place, send a cruiser or 2 to disperse the escorts and scatter the merchants. It's showtime.
That would be ideal.
Diverting RN heavies to escort duty...
Truth is, tho, if you're attacking the average slow convoy, you only face 3-4 corvettes, so don't overstate the risk from escorts. Besides, the goal is to improve sinkings of single ships, too, not just from convoys.
Given convoy escorts have to be better, doesn't that mean Canada will have to have domestic gyrocompass production (which didn't obtain OTL
) to make Hedgehog work? Does it also mean Canada will be building RWRs as well as (instead of?) domestic-designed radars (which weren't as good)? (A facility in Newfoundland, rather than needing to go all the way to Halifax, to upgrade with better Brit-standard radar would be good, too.) This, however, is for the "How to make the German job harder" thread...
Come to think of it, if the *Type IX has higher surfaced speed, have we butterflied the OTL corvette entirely? It would be too slow... What replaces it? An
Egret variant? (They'd have to have recip engines to be built in Canada, I think...)
