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Down U-Boat Alley. No sooner had a U.S. crew, briefly trained in Britain, brought the Angry home, than they were in the thick of battle. Hitler had turned East Coast waters into U-boat Alley. In the weeks that followed, the General Quarters signal, raucously summoning all hands to battle stations, wailed dozens of times, day & night. Men of the Angry slept in their work-stained dungarees, roused hastily, donned life belts and climbed quickly to the darkened deck to heave depth charges when another submarine tried to break through the protective ring of escort ships.
Sometimes a great oil slick would boil up after the depth charges—TNT packed in containers the size and shape of small ash cans—had been rolled off the Angry's stern or fired from small catapult-like Y-guns. Each subterranean explosion, as the sea seethed for 50 sq. yds., made the Angry's stern buck and quiver like a blooded stallion's. It seemed that her seams would open, so close was the muffled thunder.
The Technique. Other ships have been credited with definite kills; never the Angry. But neither has she ever lost a ship entrusted to her care. For Captain Adair, his gunner's mates and sound-detection men have learned their business. Its primer lessons are:
> Depth charges are best dropped in a diamond-shaped pattern around the target, to bring the submarine, seams bursting, to the surface.
> Charges are best set to explode at two depths, say one at 100 ft., the other at 200. Thus a submarine may be crushed like sandwich filling between two slabs of explosive.
> U-boats caught cruising on the surface, as they do at night, can be disabled by 3-or 4-in. shells from a corvette's deck guns. If the conning tower is damaged, the submarine may be helpless.
> U-boats like to attack at dusk and dawn; they prefer to lurk in passages between islands or off harbor entrances.
Light & Darkness. The British favor sending up "snowflakes" (a kind of flare) simultaneously from each ship in the attacked convoy. Hanging in the sky three or four minutes, snowflakes turn the entire area bright as day. By their light the escort ships, hovering in the outside darkness, can see where the U-boat has attacked. U.S. experience has been that merchant ships seldom fire their snowflakes simultaneously, with the result that a convoy may be illumined for 15 or 20 minutes, giving the U-boat a chance to choose further targets. If the attacker is one of a pack, submarines outside the circle of light can attack the escort ships, silhouetted against the snowflakes' light.
So the U.S. Navy favors the limited use of flares and greater dependence on submarine-detection devices. These are miracle machines, but men must operate them. Highly trained and acutely attuned, those operators are the superbrains of a convoy escort. Their job and their accomplishments will not be fully told until after the war, perhaps longer.
The Record. "Our Navy has gotten so cagey," mused an officer of the Angry, "that you have to bring back the U-boat skipper's pants to prove you've sunk a sub."