"Hunter Killer" by William T. Y'Blood

I am currently researching the use and performance of the Mk 24 "Mine" (FIDO) air-dropped acoustic homing Anti-Submarine Warfare  (ASW) torpedo. I had found a plot (rather poor reproduction) of the main attack by LtCmdr Taylor's Avenger on the I-52 on-line and hoped there might be more such plots available on-line and so conducted a search. The main result of the search was the discovery of the subject of this post "Hunter Killer" by William T. Y'Blood, an account of US Navy escort carrier operations in the Atlantic (mainly ASW but also in support of operation Dragoon the invasion of Southern France).

This post is my comment on this source.

My first comment is that my hopes were disappointed, while there are plots of search patterns and depth bomb, rocket and FIDO attacks they do not really add much to the original plot that I had found. Like the original they lacked scales, but they can be reconstructed from the attack narratives, which should not have been necessary (and still suffer from the ambiguous use of the mile as a unit of distance on occasion, but probably means nautical mile, fortunately most distances are given in feet which are unambiguous). One thing that did emerge was that when used to prosecute contacts made on sono-buoys on non-recently submerged submarines the probability of a successful FIDO attack was very small. More success was achieved by calling in surface ships to prosecute the contact. The high success rate appears to have been reserved for dropping FIDO a few hundred feet ahead of and and a few tens (nearer 50?) feet to one side of the swirl of a submarine that had been seen submerging. This while not exactly what I was looking for in this book is the information that makes the trivial sum that I paid for this volume worth while.

As history this book suffer from the same problem that we see in many popular histories from American authors, the need to recount the detailed activities of the protagonists. It is a heroic style of history more akin to the Iliad than Thucydides. Also it is parochial, the CVEs took part in operations with other forces (I'm thinking operation Dragoon here), but we get no real overview of the operation or of the activities of the other forces involved, just a list of ship movements and narratives of aircraft sorties...

It is not until the very end of this volume that there is any indication that there was/is any controversy about the operations of the US CVEs in the Atlantic, were it is finally revealed that there was disagreement between the UK and the US on the offensive use of Hunter Killer Groups and the tactical exploitation of information derived from Ultra (reading of the U-Boat cyphers).

I would not be surprised if the total absence of any reference to OR/OA also has some significance but what it is either escapes me or will require further research to substantiate my suspicions.

.. to be extended/amended on rereading ..