Lake Views. This World and the Universe [2010, 2012] by Steven Weinberg

Author:Steven Weinberg [Weinberg, Steven]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard University Press [ebook]
Published: 2010-01-14T16:00:00+00:00

The size of the sea is so vast that the difference between the size of a convoy and the size of a single ship shrinks in comparison almost to insignificance. There was in fact nearly as good a chance of a convoy of forty ships in close order slipping unperceived between the patrolling U-boats as there was for a single ship; and each time this happened, forty ships escaped instead of one.

(This is also the reason that fish of many species swim in schools.) Furthermore, forty merchant ships can be guarded by a much smaller number of destroyers or other escorts, while it would be impossible to send an escort with each merchant ship sailing alone. Even before sonar became available, a submerged submarine could be found when it attacked, by tracing back the track of the submarine’s torpedo. It is true that a convoy presents a great many more targets than a single ship, but even with all those targets, a single U-boat can destroy only a few ships before it exhausts its torpedoes or is destroyed or driven off by the escorts. U-boats in World War II learned to call in other U-boats to the attack when a convoy had been found by using radio to communicate with their headquarters in occupied France, but this technology was not available in World War I. (Nor is it available to fish.)

For several months after the start of unrestricted submarine warfare, while British ship losses mounted, the Admiralty continued to reject the use of convoys. For the Royal Navy in World War I, convoy duty was inglorious.1 Arthur Marder, the leading historian of naval warfare in the early twentieth century, has explained in From the Dreadnought to Scapa Flow that

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