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THE POWER OF WARGAMES BY DOUGAL ROBERTSON
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t the beginning of World War Two, German U-boat captains settled on a revolutionary new tactic when attacking against Allied ships. “Otto Kretschmer, one of the leading U-boat aces, began to stage his attacks from point-blank range, instead of maintaining a distance of two to three kilometres from the target as recommended by the manufacturers of their torpedoes,” says Simon Parkin, author of A Game of Birds and Wolves, an engaging history of what became the Battle of the Atlantic.
“Kretschmer would approach a convoy of merchant ships from the rear, on the surface, at night, when it was far harder for the Royal Navy escorts to pick out the U-boat in the dark. Having snuck into the middle of the convoy Kretchmer would make his attack like a fox in a henhouse before diving to wait for danger to pass.” This pioneering tactic was adopted by many of the U-boat captains and was successfully used to evade Royal Navy ships tasked with protecting convoys. How did the Royal Navy attempt to understand this problem? Parkin’s research led him to the Royal
