Word: u-boats
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...necessities of war mother many an ingenious idea. At the height of the U-boat campaign, the office of the Quartermaster General had a timely brain wave. It was described last week in a release from the Army Service Forces depot in Atlanta...
This is a deliberate German choice, but it is a choice made from weakness. It is similar to the German choice not to press the U-boat war. The Germans still have many U-boats. Some day, perhaps when the second front is launched, they will be thrown in as a wolf pack, exceeding in size any that has ever struck before. But the undersea war has become so tough for the Germans that they have had to limit operations sharply in order to preserve their U-boat fleet...
...scientists, the turning point of World War II was March 20, 1943. That was the day that U-boat sinkings began to sag like a beaten fighter. Bigger and bloodier battles have since been-and are yet to be-fought, but, in the scientists' log, none more decisive. And no one knows better than they how close the United Nations came to losing the crucial Battle of the Atlantic...
Last week a small part of the story could be told. The struggle against the U-boats was primarily a battle of technology, and in the summer and fall of 1942 Allied technologists heard disturbing news about the U-boat's growing effectiveness. New German devices and tactics were steadily increasing the submarines' kill. U.S. scientists, too, were working on new devices, but there was no predicting how soon they might begin to produce results. That winter the Allied high command sweated through perhaps the worst period of the war, awaiting a U-boat campaign which might virtually...
That it never came was due to a double break: the Germans got their improvements into play later and the Allies earlier than expected. When the chips were down, U.S. scientists won. In the last ten days of March, 1943, U-boat ship sinkings dramatically dropped two-thirds. They have continued to decline ever since. At 1943's end, Adolf Hitler publicly acknowledged that "one single technical invention of our enemies" had checked his U-boats...