Comments by "Keit Hammleter" (@keithammleter3824) on "RAF Coastal Command vs U-Boats" video.

  1. This History Guy repeats a bit of nonsense. Eg when he says at 4:34 and 7:01 that the Brits used radar to detect submarines. Submarines could NOT be detected with the radar technology of WW2. What happened is that Bletchley Park was decoding German radio traffic and from that knew where each German submarine was supposed to be. However, if the Germans had realised that that was the reason Coastal Command kept intercepting submarines, they would have changed their encryption and that would have been a disaster for the Brits. So the Brits "leaked" a cover story - they let it be leaked out a fake story that they could detect submarines with radar, knowing that the Germans knew quite a bit about radar, but not as much as the Brits. This fake news story has been repeated in history books ever since (aided by the eaves dropping being kept a state secret until the 1970's), but that doesn't make it right. At electronics courses at technical schools in the 1970's, we got taught the "radar equation" - a formula that applies to the pulse radar technique used by the Brits and predicts how far away you can detect an object of a given size. It was amusing to apply it and realise that the Brits could not have detected subs unless they were so close they could detect them visually. Anybody who doesn't have command of math can look up the Marconi Review for July 1950. Page 104 gives a graph of range plotted against target size. For clear weather, it shows that a 45,000 ton ship can be detected at 30 km, but a tug boat can only be detected at only 7.5 km. If a tug can only be detected at 7.5 km, detecting a submarine conning tower must be a lot less, and if it its only showing a periscope, detecting it by radar is hopeless. It gets much worse if there is rain. The Marconi graph shows rain typically halves the range. I just love it when professional historians get things horribly wrong because they just read other historians' missives or old newspapers and don't bother with finding out just what the technology of the day could and could not do.
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