Recommended: Russia's Next Big Military Sale - To Mexico? Air Force That Never Built the B-52 Bomber Though these had a slower rate of fire of eighty rounds a minute, each shell individually weighed five times as much and was more likely to inflict critical damage. Even more effective were thirty-seven-millimeter guns. Twin twenty-millimeter gun mounts were already becoming standard U-Boat armaments in 1942, but submarines additionally received quadruple Flakvierling mounts with a gun shield. The Kriegsmarine’s solution was more guns and bigger ones. The heavy machine guns or the twenty-millimeter cannon installed on the rear platform of a U-Boat’s conning tower-the “Wintergarten”-simply weren’t punch enough.
Worse, anti-submarine planes had to fly low and slow over their targets to accurately pickle their depth charges, and would often circle around multiple times-making them an easy target.īut there was a problem-large aircraft could take a lot of a punishment. Maritime patrol planes were the perfect target: mostly huge, relatively slow aircraft typically derived from high-altitude bombers that would ordinarily never fly low enough to be hit by short-range flak. These reliably inflicted heavy losses against armored dive bombers and fast-moving fighter-bombers-and would continue to do so even against hi-tech jets during the Vietnam War. Short-range, rapid-fire flak guns were one of the most cost-effective weapons of World War II. However, there was a certain logic to Dönitz’s directive. But why would he deliberately pit his submarines against the bombers? After all, the patrol planes wanted the submarines to remain surfaced so they could be engaged and destroyed. In April 1943, U-Boat losses skyrocketed to disastrous levels, prompting Dönitz’s order.
A final key advancement was a decision by President Roosevelt to deploy long-range B-24 Liberator maritime patrol planes to the Battle of the Atlantic that could give convoys air cover even over the dreaded “mid-Atlantic Gap.” These were supplemented by small escort- and merchant aircraft carriers. However, in the spring of 1943 Allied aircraft began sporting new centimetric surface-search radars that did not set off Metox.
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