U-BOATS' TROUBLES

Evening Post, Volume CXXXVI, Issue 4, 5 July 1943, Page 5

U-BOATS' TROUBLES

DEFENCE OF CONVOYS

(Special P.A. Correspondent.)

LONDON, July 3. • In addition to the revealing German reports on the effect of the British and American bombing on the flagging enemy morale comes a report from Stockholm of an article in the German newspaper "Das Reich," in which a naval officer, Lieutenant-Commander Kuhnt, discloses how the Royal Navy is employing new devices and tactics against the U-boats. He says that the corvettes and submarine-chasers are equipped with a new listening apparatus which is able to detect and register the approach even of Admiral Donitz's so-called "noiseless U-boats, and increased air support of Allied vessels neutralises the U-boats' most powerful weapon. of invisibility. Commander Kuhnt gives for the first time in the German Press a descripItion of the Royal Navy's methods of guarding the convoys. "The core of the convoy's defensive system," he says, "is composed of new escort air-craft-carriers, which steam right alongside the merchantmen. Just within sight of these is what might be called an inner ring of destroyers, corvettes, and other armed escort vessels. Outside these, at a similar distance, is a second ring of the same type of craft, working in close co-operation -with a ring of spotting aircraft from the carriers. The idea of this spread-out system is clearly to prevent the U-boats, whose field of vision is strictly limited, from ever sighting the convoy itself," he adds. This frank admission of the mastering of the U-bqats is particularly in- ■ teresting. An important point in the German propaganda represented the i U-boat fleet as invincible nd, in Goebbels's words, it had "seized Britain by the throat." The realisation that this alleged stranglehold has been broken, coming on top of the bombing, will probably help in depressing the German morale.