Wolfpack (naval tactic)
The wolfpack was a mass-attack tactic against convoys used by German U-boats of the Kriegsmarine during the Battle of the Atlantic. Karl Dönitz called his strategy of submarine warfare Rudeltaktik, which translates as "tactics of a pack" of animals, it has become known in English as an accurate metaphor, but not a literal translation. U-boat movements were controlled by the Befehlshaber der Unterseeboote much more than American submarines, which were given tremendous independence once on patrol. Accordingly, U-boats patrolled separately strung out in co-ordinated lines across convoy routes, only being ordered to congregate after one located a convoy and alerted the BdU, so a Rudel consisted of as many U-boats as could reach the scene of the attack. With the exception of the orders given by the BdU, U-Boat commanders could attack; the U-Boat commanders were given a probable number of U-Boats that would show up, when they were in contact with the convoy, make call signs to see how many had arrived.
If their number were sufficiently high compared to the expected threat of the escorts, they would attack. Although the wolfpacks proved a serious threat to Allied shipping, the Allies developed countermeasures to turn the U-boat organization against itself. Most notably was the fact that wolfpacks required extensive radio communication to coordinate the attacks; this left the U-boats vulnerable to a device called the High Frequency Direction Finder, which allowed Allied naval forces to determine the location of the enemy boats transmitting and attack them. Effective air cover, both long-range planes with radar, escort carriers and blimps, allowed U-boats to be spotted as they shadowed a convoy. American wolfpacks called coordinated attack groups comprised three boats that patrolled in close company and organized before they left port under the command of the senior captain of the three. "Swede" Momsen devised the tactics and led the first American wolfpack – composed of Cero and Grayback – from Midway on 1 October 1943.
Wolfpacks fell out of use during the Cold War. Instead, the United States Navy deploys its attack submarines on individual patrols, with the exception of one or two attack submarines in each carrier strike group. American ballistic missile submarines have always operated alone, while Soviet ballistic missile submarines operated in well-protected bastions. With the opening shots of the Iraq War in March, 2003, the term "wolfpack" was brought back into use to describe the fleet of American and British nuclear submarines which operated together in the Red Sea, firing Tomahawk missiles at Iraqi targets. USS Providence was the first boat to fire its entire load of missiles and earn the nickname "Big Dog of the Red Sea Wolf Pack." The phrase "wolfpack" has been applied to possible Iranian missile boat tactics in the event of a hypothetical clash with the U. S. Navy; such attacks allow the possibility of effective sacrificial boat deployment. List of wolfpacks of World War II Convoy SC 7 for an account of one of the first Allied convoys to suffer a wolfpack attack Peter Maas, The Terrible Hours: The Man Behind the Greatest Submarine Rescue in History E. B. Potter and Chester W. Nimitz, eds.
Horst von Schroeter
Horst von Schroeter was a German U-boat commander during World War II. He was a recipient of the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross of Nazi Germany. After World War II he joined the West German Navy and from 1976 to 1979 held the position of Commander of the NATO Naval forces in the Baltic Sea Approaches; as commander of U-123 Horst von Schroeter is credited with the sinking of six merchant ships for a total of 31,557 gross register tons, a warship of 683 GRT, damaging a ship of 7,068 GRT. Iron Cross 2nd Class & 1st Class U-boat War Badge U-boat Front Clasp in Silver Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross on 1 June 1944 as Oberleutnant zur See and commander of U-123 Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany
The Guardian
The Guardian is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as The Manchester Guardian, changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers The Observer and The Guardian Weekly, the Guardian is part of the Guardian Media Group, owned by the Scott Trust; the trust was created in 1936 to "secure the financial and editorial independence of the Guardian in perpetuity and to safeguard the journalistic freedom and liberal values of the Guardian free from commercial or political interference". The trust was converted into a limited company in 2008, with a constitution written so as to maintain for The Guardian the same protections as were built into the structure of the Scott Trust by its creators. Profits are reinvested in journalism rather than distributed to shareholders; the current editor is Katharine Viner: she succeeded Alan Rusbridger in 2015. Since 2018, the paper's main newsprint sections have been published in tabloid format; as of November that year, its print edition had a daily circulation of 136,834.
The newspaper has an online edition, TheGuardian.com, as well as two international websites, Guardian Australia and Guardian US. The paper's readership is on the mainstream left of British political opinion, its reputation as a platform for liberal and left-wing editorial has led to the use of the "Guardian reader" and "Guardianista" as often-pejorative epithets for those of left-leaning or "politically correct" tendencies. Frequent typographical errors in the paper led Private Eye magazine to dub it the "Grauniad" in the 1960s, a nickname still used today. In an Ipsos MORI research poll in September 2018 designed to interrogate the public's trust of specific titles online, The Guardian scored highest for digital-content news, with 84% of readers agreeing that they "trust what see in it". A December 2018 report of a poll by the Publishers Audience Measurement Company stated that the paper's print edition was found to be the most trusted in the UK in the period from October 2017 to September 2018.
It was reported to be the most-read of the UK's "quality newsbrands", including digital editions. While The Guardian's print circulation is in decline, the report indicated that news from The Guardian, including that reported online, reaches more than 23 million UK adults each month. Chief among the notable "scoops" obtained by the paper was the 2011 News International phone-hacking scandal—and in particular the hacking of the murdered English teenager Milly Dowler's phone; the investigation led to the closure of the News of the World, the UK's best-selling Sunday newspaper and one of the highest-circulation newspapers in history. In June 2013, The Guardian broke news of the secret collection by the Obama administration of Verizon telephone records, subsequently revealed the existence of the surveillance program PRISM after knowledge of it was leaked to the paper by the whistleblower and former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. In 2016, The Guardian led an investigation into the Panama Papers, exposing then-Prime Minister David Cameron's links to offshore bank accounts.
It has been named "newspaper of the year" four times at the annual British Press Awards: most in 2014, for its reporting on government surveillance. The Manchester Guardian was founded in Manchester in 1821 by cotton merchant John Edward Taylor with backing from the Little Circle, a group of non-conformist businessmen, they launched their paper after the police closure of the more radical Manchester Observer, a paper that had championed the cause of the Peterloo Massacre protesters. Taylor had been hostile to the radical reformers, writing: "They have appealed not to the reason but the passions and the suffering of their abused and credulous fellow-countrymen, from whose ill-requited industry they extort for themselves the means of a plentiful and comfortable existence, they do not toil, neither do they spin, but they live better than those that do." When the government closed down the Manchester Observer, the mill-owners' champions had the upper hand. The influential journalist Jeremiah Garnett joined Taylor during the establishment of the paper, all of the Little Circle wrote articles for the new paper.
The prospectus announcing the new publication proclaimed that it would "zealously enforce the principles of civil and religious Liberty warmly advocate the cause of Reform endeavour to assist in the diffusion of just principles of Political Economy and support, without reference to the party from which they emanate, all serviceable measures". In 1825 the paper merged with the British Volunteer and was known as The Manchester Guardian and British Volunteer until 1828; the working-class Manchester and Salford Advertiser called the Manchester Guardian "the foul prostitute and dirty parasite of the worst portion of the mill-owners". The Manchester Guardian was hostile to labour's claims. Of the 1832 Ten Hours Bill, the paper doubted whether in view of the foreign competition "the passing of a law positively enacting a gradual destruction of the cotton manufacture in this kingdom would be a much less rational procedure." The Manchester Guardian dismissed strikes as the work of outside agitators: " if an accommodation can be effected, the occupation of the agents of the Union is gone.
They live on strife "The Manchester Guardian was critical of US President Abraham Lincoln's conduct during the US Civil War, writing on the news that Abraham Lincoln had been assassinated: "Of his rule, we can never speak except as a series of acts abhorrent to every true notion of constitutional right and human liberty " C. P. Scott ma
Atlantic U-boat campaign of World War I
The Atlantic U-boat campaign of World War I was the prolonged naval conflict between German submarines and the Allied navies in Atlantic waters—the seas around the British Isles, the North Sea and the coast of France. The U-boat campaign was directed against the British Grand Fleet. U-boat fleet action was extended to include action against the trade routes of the Allied powers; this campaign was destructive, resulted in the loss of nearly half of Britain's merchant marine fleet during the course of the war. To counter the German submarines, the Allies moved shipping into convoys guarded by destroyers, blockades such as the Dover Barrage and minefields were laid, aircraft patrols monitored the U-boat bases; the U-boat campaign was not able to cut off supplies before the US entered the war in 1917 and in 1918, the U-boat bases were abandoned in the face of the Allied advance. The tactical successes and failures of the Atlantic U-boat Campaign would be used as a set of available tactics in World War II in a similar U-boat war against the British Empire.
On 6 August 1914, two days after Britain had declared war on Germany, the German U-boats U-5, U-7, U-8, U-9, U-13, U-14, U-15, U-16, U-17, U-18 sailed from their base in Heligoland to attack Royal Navy warships in the North Sea in the first submarine war patrols in history. The U-boats sailed north, hoping to encounter Royal Navy squadrons between Bergen. On 8 August, one of U-9's engines broke down and she was forced to return to base. On the same day, off Fair Isle, U-15 sighted the British battleships HMS Ajax, HMS Monarch, HMS Orion on manoeuvres and fired a torpedo at Monarch; this failed to hit, succeeded only in putting the battleships on their guard. At dawn the next morning, the 1st Light Cruiser Squadron, screening the battleships, came into contact with the U-boats, HMS Birmingham sighting U-15, lying on the surface. There was no sign of any lookouts on the U-boat and sounds of hammering could be heard, as though her crew were performing repairs. Birmingham altered course and rammed U-15 just behind her conning tower.
The submarine sank with all hands. On 12 August, seven U-boats returned to Heligoland. While the operation was a failure, it caused the Royal Navy some uneasiness, disproving earlier estimates as to U-boats' radius of action and leaving the security of the Grand Fleet's unprotected anchorage at Scapa Flow open to question. On the other hand, the ease with which U-15 had been destroyed by Birmingham encouraged the false belief that submarines were no great danger to surface warships. On 5 September 1914, U-21 commanded by Lieutenant Otto Hersing made history when he torpedoed the Royal Navy light cruiser HMS Pathfinder; the cruiser's magazine exploded, the ship sank in four minutes, taking 259 of her crew with her. It was the first combat victory of the modern submarine; the German U-boats were to get luckier on 22 September. Early in the morning of that day, a lookout on the bridge of U-9, commanded by Lieutenant Otto Weddigen, spotted a vessel on the horizon. Weddigen ordered the U-boat to submerge and the submarine went forward to investigate.
At closer range, Weddigen discovered three old Royal Navy armoured cruisers, HMS Aboukir, HMS Cressy, HMS Hogue. These three vessels were not antiquated, but were staffed by reservists, were so vulnerable that a decision to withdraw them was filtering up through the bureaucracy of the Admiralty; the order did not come soon enough for the ships. Weddigen sent one torpedo into Aboukir; the captains of Hogue and Cressy came up to assist. U-9 put two torpedoes into Hogue, hit Cressy with two more torpedoes as the cruiser tried to flee; the three cruisers sank in less than an hour. Three weeks on 15 October, Weddigen sank the old cruiser HMS Hawke, the crew of U-9 became national heroes; each was awarded the Iron Cross Second Class, except for Weddigen, who received the Iron Cross First Class. The sinkings caused alarm within the British Admiralty, nervous about the security of the Scapa Flow anchorage, the fleet was sent to ports in Ireland and the west coast of Scotland until adequate defenses were installed at Scapa Flow.
This, in a sense, was a more significant victory than sinking a few old cruisers. These concerns were well-founded. On 23 November U-18 penetrated Scapa Flow via Hoxa Sound, following a steamer through the boom and entering the anchorage with little difficulty. However, the fleet was absent, being dispersed in anchorages on the west coast of Scotland and Ireland; as U-18 was making her way back out to the open sea, her periscope was spotted by a guard boat. The trawler Dorothy Gray rammed the periscope, rendering it unserviceable. U-18 suffered a failure of her diving plane motor and the boat became unable to maintain her depth, at one point impacting the seabed, her captain was forced to surface and scuttle his command, all but one crew-member were picked up by British boats. The last success of the year came on 31 December. U-24 sighted the British battleship HMS Formidable on manoeuvres in the English Channel and torpedoed her. Formidable sank with the loss of 547 of her crew; the C-in-C Channel Fleet, Adm.
Sir Lewis Bayly, was criticized for not taking proper precautions during the exercises, but was cleared of the charge of negligence. Bayly served with distinction as comm
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters are at Broadcasting House in Westminster, it is the world's oldest national broadcasting organisation and the largest broadcaster in the world by number of employees, it employs over 20,950 staff in total. The total number of staff is 35,402 when part-time and fixed-contract staff are included; the BBC is established under a Royal Charter and operates under its Agreement with the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture and Sport. Its work is funded principally by an annual television licence fee, charged to all British households and organisations using any type of equipment to receive or record live television broadcasts and iPlayer catch-up; the fee is set by the British Government, agreed by Parliament, used to fund the BBC's radio, TV, online services covering the nations and regions of the UK. Since 1 April 2014, it has funded the BBC World Service, which broadcasts in 28 languages and provides comprehensive TV, online services in Arabic and Persian.
Around a quarter of BBC revenues come from its commercial arm BBC Studios Ltd, which sells BBC programmes and services internationally and distributes the BBC's international 24-hour English-language news services BBC World News, from BBC.com, provided by BBC Global News Ltd. From its inception, through the Second World War, to the 21st century, the BBC has played a prominent role in British culture, it is known colloquially as "The Beeb", "Auntie", or a combination of both. Britain's first live public broadcast from the Marconi factory in Chelmsford took place in June 1920, it was sponsored by the Daily Mail's Lord Northcliffe and featured the famous Australian soprano Dame Nellie Melba. The Melba broadcast caught the people's imagination and marked a turning point in the British public's attitude to radio. However, this public enthusiasm was not shared in official circles where such broadcasts were held to interfere with important military and civil communications. By late 1920, pressure from these quarters and uneasiness among the staff of the licensing authority, the General Post Office, was sufficient to lead to a ban on further Chelmsford broadcasts.
But by 1922, the GPO had received nearly 100 broadcast licence requests and moved to rescind its ban in the wake of a petition by 63 wireless societies with over 3,000 members. Anxious to avoid the same chaotic expansion experienced in the United States, the GPO proposed that it would issue a single broadcasting licence to a company jointly owned by a consortium of leading wireless receiver manufactures, to be known as the British Broadcasting Company Ltd. John Reith, a Scottish Calvinist, was appointed its General Manager in December 1922 a few weeks after the company made its first official broadcast; the company was to be financed by a royalty on the sale of BBC wireless receiving sets from approved domestic manufacturers. To this day, the BBC aims to follow the Reithian directive to "inform and entertain"; the financial arrangements soon proved inadequate. Set sales were disappointing as amateurs made their own receivers and listeners bought rival unlicensed sets. By mid-1923, discussions between the GPO and the BBC had become deadlocked and the Postmaster-General commissioned a review of broadcasting by the Sykes Committee.
The Committee recommended a short term reorganisation of licence fees with improved enforcement in order to address the BBC's immediate financial distress, an increased share of the licence revenue split between it and the GPO. This was to be followed by a simple 10 shillings licence fee with no royalty once the wireless manufactures protection expired; the BBC's broadcasting monopoly was made explicit for the duration of its current broadcast licence, as was the prohibition on advertising. The BBC was banned from presenting news bulletins before 19.00 and was required to source all news from external wire services. Mid-1925 found the future of broadcasting under further consideration, this time by the Crawford committee. By now, the BBC, under Reith's leadership, had forged a consensus favouring a continuation of the unified broadcasting service, but more money was still required to finance rapid expansion. Wireless manufacturers were anxious to exit the loss making consortium with Reith keen that the BBC be seen as a public service rather than a commercial enterprise.
The recommendations of the Crawford Committee were published in March the following year and were still under consideration by the GPO when the 1926 general strike broke out in May. The strike temporarily interrupted newspaper production, with restrictions on news bulletins waived, the BBC became the primary source of news for the duration of the crisis; the crisis placed the BBC in a delicate position. On one hand Reith was acutely aware that the Government might exercise its right to commandeer the BBC at any time as a mouthpiece of the Government if the BBC were to step out of line, but on the other he was anxious to maintain public trust by appearing to be acting independently; the Government was divided on how to handle the BBC but ended up trusting Reith, whose opposition to the strike mirrored the PM's own. Thus the BBC was granted sufficient leeway to pursue the Government's objectives in a manner of its own choosing; the resulting coverage of both striker and government viewpoints impressed millions of listeners who were unaware that the PM had broadcast to the nation from Reith's home, using one of Reith's sound bites inserted at the last moment
Erich Raeder
Erich Johann Albert Raeder was a German admiral who played a major role in the naval history of World War II. Raeder attained the highest possible naval rank—that of Grand Admiral — in 1939, becoming the first person to hold that rank since Henning von Holtzendorff. Raeder led the Kriegsmarine for the first half of the war. At the Nuremberg Trials he was sentenced to life in prison but was released early due to failing health. Raeder was born in Wandsbek in the Prussian province of Schleswig-Holstein in the German Empire, his father was a headmaster, who as a teacher and a father was noted for his marked authoritarian views, who impressed upon his son the values of hard work, thrift and obedience—all values that Raeder preached throughout his life. Hans Raeder warned his children that if Germany were to become a democracy, that would be a disaster as it meant government by men "playing politics"—doing what was only best for their petty sectarian interests instead of the nation. Raeder joined the Kaiserliche Marine in 1894 and rose in rank, becoming Chief of Staff for Franz von Hipper in 1912.
From 1901 to 1903 Raeder served on the staff of Prince Heinrich of Prussia, gained a powerful patron in the process. Raeder's rise up the ranks was due to his intelligence and hard work. Owing to his cold and distant personality, Raeder was a man whom his friends admitted to knowing little about; the dominating figure of the Navy was Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, the autocratic State Secretary of the Navy. Tirpitz's preferred means of obtaining "world power status" was through his Risikotheorie where Germany would build a Risikoflotte that would make it too dangerous for Britain to risk a war with Germany, thereby alter the international balance of power decisively in the Reich's favor. Tirpitz transformed the Navy from the small coastal defense force of 1897 into the mighty High Seas Fleet of 1914. Raeder had three children by his first wife. In 1904, who spoke fluent Russian, was sent to the Far East as an observer of the Russo-Japanese War. Starting in 1905, Raeder worked in the public relations section of the Navy, where he first met Tirpitz and began his introduction to politics by briefing journalists to run articles promoting the Seemachtideologie and meeting politicians who held seats in the Reichstag in order to convert them to the Seemachtideologie.
Working with Tirpitz, Raeder was involved in the lobbying the Reichstag to pass the Third Navy Law of 1906 which committed Germany to building "all big gun battleships" to compete with the new British Dreadnought class in the Anglo-German naval race that had begun early in the 20th century. Raeder was the captain of Kaiser Wilhelm II's private yacht in the years leading up to World War I. In itself, this was not a rewarding post, but people in this post were promoted afterwards. Raeder served as Hipper's Chief of Staff during World War I, as well as in combat posts, he took part in the Battle of Dogger Bank in 1915 and in the Battle of Jutland in 1916. Raeder described Hipper as an admiral who "hated paperwork". During and after World War I the German navy had divided into two factions. One faction, led by Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, consisted of avid followers of the teachings of the American historian Alfred Thayer Mahan and believed in building a "balanced fleet" centred around the battleship that would, if war came, seek out and win a decisive battle of annihilation against the Royal Navy.
Another faction, led by Commander Wolfgang Wegener, argued that because of superior British shipbuilding capacity Germany could never hope to build a "balanced fleet" capable of winning an Entscheidungsschlacht, so the best use of German naval strength was to build a fleet of cruisers and submarines that would wage a guerre de course. After reading all three of Wegener's papers setting out his ideas, Admiral Hipper decided to submit them to the Admiralty in Berlin, but changed his mind after reading a paper by Raeder attacking the "Wegener thesis" as flawed; this marked the beginning of a long feud between Raeder and Wegener, with Wegener claiming that his former friend Raeder was jealous of what Wegener insisted were his superior ideas. In May 1916 Raeder played a major role planning a raid by Hipper's battlecruisers that aimed to lure out the British battlecruiser force which would be destroyed by the main High Seas Fleet; this raid turned into the Battle of Jutland. Raeder played a prominent role, was forced midway through the battle to transfer from SMS Lützow to SMS Moltke as a result of damage to Hipper's flagship.
As Chief of Staff to Admiral Hipper he was involved in a plan of Hipper's for a German battlecruiser squadron to sail across the Atlantic and sweep through the waters off Canada down to the West Indies and on to South America to sink the British cruisers operating in those waters, thereby force the British to redeploy a substantial part of the Home Fleet to the New World. Though Hipper's plans were rejected as far too risky, they influenced Raeder's thinking. On 14 October 1918, Raeder received a major promotion with appointment as deputy to Admiral Paul Behncke, the Naval State Secretary. Raeder had doubts about submarines, but he spent the last weeks of the war working to achieve the Scheer Programme of building 450 U-boats. On 28 October 1918 the Imperial German fleet mutinied. Raeder played a major role in attempting to crush the mutiny. Raeder's tw
Karl Dönitz
Karl Dönitz was a German admiral who played a major role in the naval history of World War II. Dönitz succeeded Adolf Hitler as the head of state of Nazi Germany, he began his career in the Imperial German Navy before World War I. In 1918, he was commanding UB-68. Dönitz was taken prisoner. While in a prisoner of war camp, he formulated what he called Rudeltaktik. At the start of World War II, he was the senior submarine officer in the Kriegsmarine. In January 1943, Dönitz achieved the rank of Großadmiral and replaced Grand Admiral Erich Raeder as Commander-in-Chief of the Navy. On 30 April 1945, after the death of Adolf Hitler and in accordance with Hitler's last will and testament, Dönitz was named Hitler's successor as head of state, with the title of President of Germany and Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces. On 7 May 1945, he ordered Alfred Jodl, Chief of Operations Staff of the OKW, to sign the German instruments of surrender in Reims, France. Dönitz remained as head of the Flensburg Government, as it became known, until it was dissolved by the Allied powers on 23 May.
Despite his postwar claims, Dönitz was seen as supportive of Nazism during the war, he is known to have made a number of anti-Semitic statements. Following the war, Dönitz was indicted as a major war criminal at the Nuremberg Trials on three counts: conspiracy to commit crimes against peace, war crimes, crimes against humanity, he was found guilty on counts and. He was sentenced to ten years' imprisonment. For nearly seven decades, Dönitz was the only head of state to be convicted by an international tribunal until the conviction of Liberia's Charles Taylor in April 2012. Dönitz was born in Grünau near Berlin, Germany, to Anna Beyer and Emil Dönitz, an engineer, in 1891. Karl had an older brother. In 1910, Dönitz enlisted in the Kaiserliche Marine. On 27 September 1913, Dönitz was commissioned as a Leutnant zur See; when World War I began, he served on the light cruiser SMS Breslau in the Mediterranean Sea. In August 1914, the Breslau and the battlecruiser SMS Goeben were sold to the Ottoman navy.
They began operating out of Constantinople, under Rear Admiral Wilhelm Souchon, engaging Russian forces in the Black Sea. On 22 March 1916, Dönitz was promoted to Oberleutnant zur See; when the Midilli put into dock for repairs, he was temporarily assigned as airfield commander at the Dardanelles. From there, he requested a transfer to the submarine forces, which became effective in October 1916, he served as watch officer on U-39, from February 1917 onward as commander of UC-25. On 2 July 1918, he became commander of UB-68. On 4 October, after suffering technical difficulties, this boat was sunk by the British and Dönitz was imprisoned on Malta, he realized. However, he had learned that convoys could be attacked at night by several U-boats; the war ended in 1918, but Dönitz remained in a British camp near Sheffield as a prisoner of war until returning to Germany in July 1920. He continued his naval career in the naval arm of the Weimar Republic's armed forces. On 10 January 1921, he became a Kapitänleutnant in the new German navy.
Dönitz commanded torpedo boats, becoming a Korvettenkapitän on 1 November 1928. On 1 September 1933, he became a Fregattenkapitän and, in 1934, was put in command of the cruiser Emden, the ship on which cadets and midshipmen took a year-long world cruise as training. In 1935, the Reichsmarine was renamed Kriegsmarine by the Nazis. Germany was prohibited by the Treaty of Versailles from having submarines. On 1 September 1935, he was promoted to Kapitän zur See. Now under the Anglo-German Naval Agreement they were allowed small submarines, he was placed in command of the first U-boat flotilla Weddigen, which included U-7, U-8 and U-9. The British believed that the submarine was no longer a menace because, when submerged, they could be located by the echos from sound pulses: ASDIC or sonar. Many in Germany felt the same. However, Dönitz proposed to attack convoys at night with packs of U-boats — operating on the surface, where they were faster than merchantmen, — and firing torpedoes at 600 yd. German doctrine at the time, based on the work of American Admiral Alfred Mahan and shared by all major navies, called for submarines to be integrated with surface fleets and employed against enemy warships.
By November 1937, Dönitz became convinced that a major campaign against merchant shipping was practicable and began pressing for converting the German fleet entirely to U-boats. He advocated guerre de course, pointing out that destroying Britain's fleet of oil tankers would starve the Royal Navy of the fuel to run its ships, which would be just as effective as sinking them, he argued a German fleet of 300 of the newer Type VII U-boats could knock Britain out of the war. Dönitz revived the World War I idea of grouping several submarines together into a "wolfpack" to overwhelm a merchant convoy's defensive escorts. Implementation of wolfpacks had been difficult in World War I owing to the limitations of available radios. In the interwar years, Germany had developed ultrahigh frequency transmitters, which i
