By Luke Wagner
You probably did not know that the radio in your car, the cell phone in your pocket, and the weather forecast have origins in the life or death pressure faced by the Allied forces in the Second World War when they tried to outthink the Germans/
As you know, WWII started in September of 1939, when Hitler invaded Poland. In May 1940, the Germans invaded the Netherlands, France, Belgium, and Luxembourg. The Battle of Britain – between the RAF (Royal Air force) and the Luftwaffe (German air force) -soon followed. RADAR, which is short for “radio detection and ranging”, uses radio waves to calculate the distance, direction, and size of an aircraft. German planes could be spotted and British air force bases could be given enough notice to launch a counterattack. And it worked – the battle of Britain was over after 4 months.
The Battle of the Atlantic was next. It began in the summer of 1940, with Germany using its U-boat submarines to target vital supplies being shipped from North America to Britain.
The German navy saw no reason why the U-boats should fear airplanes, and while that may have been true at the start of the battle, it certainly didn’t stay that way. It was not an easily won battle, nor a short one. It lasted for years, with each side garnering huge losses. The German navy’s strategy was quite simple – the most important thing was to sink ships.
At the start of the battle of the Atlantic, Britain was woefully unprepared. They had a lack of long-range aircraft, poor defense tactics, and very few escorts; it was a miracle that the battle turned out the way it did. What may have won the war was the time in which the Allies were able to recognize and fix these problems. The RCN (Royal Canadian Navy) improved training and experience, the US navy changed tactics to have more convoys, and aircraft were reassigned + escorts were put into place. As the Germans waged a battle of attrition, the Allies had lots of time to find counters to the German attacks.
The two inventions of RADAR and SONAR helped win the war by taking away the element of surprise from Axis attacks, helping the Allies to win the Battles of the Atlantic and Britain, and enabling the Allies to detect and destroy the formidable U-boats.
It was extremely likely that whoever won the Battle of the Atlantic would win the war. As Winston Churchill stated: “The Battle of the Atlantic was the dominating factor all through the war. Never for one moment could we forget that everything happening elsewhere, on land, at sea, or in the air, depended ultimately on its outcome, and amid all other cares we viewed its changings fortunes day by day with hope or apprehension.”
This quote captures the fact that nothing else mattered except for this battle, every other facet of the war would depend on its outcome. The Battle of the Atlantic was the turning point in the war, quite possibly a defining event for the world as a whole, and was more important than any other battle throughout the war in terms of impacts – physical, mental, societal, and historical.
So what are RADAR and SONAR? Each of them uses wave technology – radio waves for RADAR, ultrasonic waves for SONAR, to detect objects in the air and in the water. The waves hit the object and reflect back to the transmitter, showing the size and shape of the object. Different frequencies of waves can be used – higher ones are more accurate but can travel less distance in water. These two technologies were used together by the allies in the battle of the Atlantic – airplanes spotted the boats and damaged them, which allowed the convoys to come by and finish the U-boat off.
RADAR was first developed in the early 1930s when scientists using shortwave radio receivers noticed that aircraft caused interference to the signals. In Jan. 1935, Robert Watson Watt proposed a radar system to the British gov. which enabled approaching bombers to be found and tracked. He was given a lab and a team of researchers and by 1938 they had developed a system that could detect bombers at up to 60 miles away. In 1940, during the Battle of Britain, this radar system allowed the RAF to withstand the onslaught from the Luftwaffe.
In the Battle of the Atlantic, airplanes used RADAR to spot enemy airplanes and drop bombs on them. As SONAR technology improved, navy ships became able to spot U-boats and drop depth charges, which are explosives set to go off at a certain, predetermined depth. All of this was possible because the U-boats had to spend a large portion of their time at or just below the surface of the ocean. This gave Allied airplanes the ability to patrol around shipping convoys and spot U-boats in the area and attack them before the U-boat knew it had been spotted.
A German writer named Herbert A. Werner wrote a personal account from the German perspective. His submarine was trying to intercept a convoy when he noticed a small airplane. His U-boat tried to dive underwater as fast as it could, but it was still hit by some explosives. The “steel shrieked, ribs moaned, valves blew, deck-plates jumped, and the boat was thrown into darkness”.
Over the next several hours, multiple airplanes attacked the U-boat, slowly damaging it as it continued battling its way toward the convoy. After the repeated air attacks, a destroyer in a convoy hit the U-boat with its propellers before it could dive underwater, and it dropped 6 depth charges next to the submarine, sending it flying up out of the water.
In the hours that followed the U-boat was struck with depth charges every 20 minutes, taking on more water each time. After 12 hours the U-boat passed 280m of depth- far deeper than its max depth of 220m. After 35 hrs of attacks, the convoys left and the U-boat somehow managed to resurface, allowing Werner to survive to write his story.
His personal account shows just how effective the Allied system was in the later parts of the Battle of the Atlantic. While under attack, Werner’s U-boat got 2 calls from other boats sinking near them. The attacks on the U-boats were so effective that, by the time Germany surrendered in 1945, just three of the U-boats that had been in battles remained, and over 800 had been sunk.
The Allies’ Anti submarine warfare tactics could not have worked without the use of RADAR and SONAR. These technologies were crucial for finding and sinking the U-boats.
The story of the United States entering the war began with RADAR as well. We all know that Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbour led the U.S. to join the war. The Oahu military base was equipped with RADAR but tragically, the workers in charge of monitoring it did not properly interpret the signals and did not realize that what they were seeing was approaching Japanese military aircraft. The failure by those workers to act on the information RADAR gave them raises an interesting question: if the attacks on Pearl Harbor had not happened, would the United States have joined the war? The answer to this matters because America’s machines, troops, economy, and technologies proved invaluable to the war effort, and certainly to the Battle of the Atlantic.
Based on the facts presented, RADAR and SONAR did play a key role in winning the war. The technologies were incredibly useful in the battles of Britain and the Atlantic, and gave the allies a clear upper hand. Our world could have been much different without it. At the start of the battle, Britain was in a bad position, losing many ships and tons of supplies to the U-boats. But then SONAR and RADAR advanced and they figured out how to use them to get and keep a tactical advantage over the Axis forces. In a very short space of time the U-boats went from being deadly, to obsolete, as the tables had been turned. The Germans could no longer keep up with the rate of ships being destroyed due to the Allies, and eventually lost the Battle of the Atlantic.
Imagine what would have happened had the Allies lost the war. The next time you watch a weather forecast, say a thank you for the inventions of Robert Watson Watt, who may have changed the course of history.