The British Weapon That Made German Torpedo Boats Sink Their Own Fleet

It is the early hours of August 2nd, 1942, and somewhere in the black water northwest of Gernzi, Lieutenant Commander Robert Hitchens has cut his engines.

There is almost no sound now.

The boat bobs on a gentle channel swell, and the crew of motor gunboat 64 stand perfectly still, listening, not for orders, not for the radar operators crackle.

They are listening for the particular low mechanical heartbeat that would tell them what they needed to know.

And then out of the darkness, they hear it.

The unmistakable diesel thrum of German torpedo boats running slowly heading for port.

Four eboats silhouetted faintly against a pale horizon, queueing to enter Sherborg Harbor.

Heins does not announce himself.

He does not open his throttles and charge.

Instead, he does something that will come to define an entirely new kind of warfare on the water.

He holds his position.

He keeps his engines barely turning.

He ghosts forward through the darkness at the same speed, the same rhythm, the same acoustic signature as the German vessels themselves.

To any ear listening underwater, to any lookout straining his eyes from the eboat stern, the British gunboat is indistinguishable from the traffic already in the water.

What happens next is, depending on your perspective, either brilliant seammanship or something close to witchcraft.

The men of the Royal Navy’s coastal forces, a collection of wooden hullled petrolengineed speedboats operated mostly by young reserveists who had never intended to go to war.

Discovered something that no amount of armor plating or heavier torpedoes could replicate.

They discovered that the English Channel at night was not simply a battlefield.

It was an acoustic maze.

A place where the difference between friend and enemy was measured not in kilome but in the pitch and frequency of an engine note.

And if you could master that maze, if you could make your boat sound like something it was not, you could walk into the heart of the enemy fleet and watch it destroy itself.

This is the story of a weapon that was never manufactured in a factory, never test fired on a range, and never formally classified by the Admiral Ty.

It was improvised, refined, and perfected by exhausted men on cold, dark water.

And it worked with an elegance that still seems almost impossible to believe.

By the summer of 1940, the English Channel had become one of the most contested bodies of water in human history.

The fall of France had handed the Germans an extraordinary prize.

Hundreds of miles of coastline from the Belgian border down to the Spanish frontier.

Calala was now German.

Bologna was German.

Sherborg was German.

The ports of the P de Calala, where the channel narrows to barely 34 km at its thinnest point, were now German bases from which the marine could threaten the vital convoy roots that kept Britain fed and armed.

The German solution to this problem came in the form of the Schnel boot, known to the British as the Eboat.

The E almost certainly standing simply for enemy.

These were not small boats in the sense that most people imagine.

At between 32 and 35 m in length and displacing over 100 tons, the S 100 class Eboats were large, muscular vessels powered by three supercharged Dameler Benz diesel engines, each producing 2,000 horsepower.

They could sustain speeds above 35 knots and in short bursts touch 42.

They carried four torpedoes, two ready in the tubes with replacements that could be loaded in 45 seconds.

They were armored around the bridge.

Their diesel engines, unlike the petrol motors of their British counterparts, did not produce the telltale blue flame that could betray a boat’s position in the darkness.

They were, in almost every measurable respect, superior to what the Royal Navy had to oppose them with.

In September 1939, Britain possessed precisely 18 operational motor torpedo boats, the oldest of which had been built before the war had even been declared.

They were short boats, between 60 and 72 ft in length, running on petrol engines that produced a distinctive and combustible roar and were prone to catching fire when hit.

They were fast, reaching 40 knots in ideal conditions, but the channel is rarely ideal.

In anything above a force 3C state, they were forced to throttle back to avoid slamming their flatbottomed holes to pieces.

The eboats, with their rounded bes forward, could maintain full speed in conditions that left British boats wallowing.

The early convoy battles of 1940 and 1941 demonstrated the imbalance with brutal clarity.

Eboat flotillas based at Iueden, Bologna, and Sherborg would sort after dark, slip through the minefields using their superior radar and local knowledge.

Strike at the slowmoving east coast convoys and be back in port before the first light of dawn gave any defending surface vessel a chance to respond.

Between 1940 and 1942, eboat sank dozens of merchant ships and damaged many more.

The mines they laid off the temp’s estuary and along the convoy lanes caused additional losses that were difficult to quantify.

The psychological effect on convoy crews was considerable.

Every night passage through Eboat Alley, the stretch of water between Haritch and the Tempame’s estuary, was conducted in the knowledge that somewhere in the darkness things were moving at 40 knots and hunting you.

What the Royal Navy needed was not just more boats.

It needed a different way of thinking about the problem entirely.

The sixth motor gun boat flotillaa was based at HMS Beehive in Felix Stowe.

And from April 1941, it was commanded by the man who would more than any other individual develop the tactical philosophy that would come to define British coastal forces.

Lieutenant Commander Robert Hchens, known universally to his crews as Hitch.

Hitchens was not a career naval officer.

He had read Lord Oxford raced Aston Martins at Lemon and joined the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve.

He was in the parliament of the time an amateur.

But like so many of the amateurs who came to dominate coastal forces, men who had sailed dingies and cruising yachts, who understood wind and tide and the feel of the water in a way that surprised career sailors, he understood something instinctively that it would take the Navy much longer to formalize.

He understood silence.

In the early raids and patrols off the Dutch and Belgian coasts, Hychens noticed something that the official accounts struggled to capture.

Nighttime naval warfare on a small scale was not primarily a contest of speed or firepower.

It was a contest of awareness.

The side that knew where the other was held an overwhelming advantage, and awareness in the darkness meant sound.

The throbb of engines, the crash of a hull at high speed, the hiss of a bull wave, the small sounds that distinguished a warship from an innocent piece of the sea.

The British MGBs and MTs of the period were not designed with acoustic discretion in mind.

Their Packard or Rolls-Royce petrol engines, magnificent pieces of engineering producing up to 1,250 horsepower each, were spectacularly loud.

Running at full throttle, a motor gun boat sounded like a formation of aircraft at low altitude.

You could hear one coming from several miles away on a calm night.

You could feel the vibration through the water long before you could see the boat.

But there was something else.

Running at very low speeds or at what the crews called silent speed, barely above tick over, perhaps 6 or 8 knots.

The sound signature changed entirely.

The engines murmured rather than roared.

The hull no longer beat and slapped at the surface.

The wake disappeared.

The boat became acoustically something close to nothing.

Hitchens began to build his tactics around this discovery.

Rather than racing towards German eboats at full throttle to engage them, he practiced something more counterintuitive.

Approach in silence.

Close the distance at six knots with engines barely turning.

Get inside the effective range before the enemy knew you were there.

Then at the moment of attack, open the throttles, illuminate, fire, and be gone before the Germans had processed what was happening.

The technical details of this silent approach were not trivial.

At low speed, coastal forces craft had to overcome a different set of problems.

They became sluggish and unresponsive to the helm.

The petrol engines were temperamental at low revs, prone to fouling their plugs and cutting out at the worst possible moment.

Holding a precise course in a channel tide required constant tiny adjustments that produced their own small sounds.

Crew members had to move about the deck in rubber sold shoes, whispering rather than speaking.

Even the act of racking a bolt on a machine gun could be heard by a German lookout at 50 m on a still night.

But Hitchens and the men of his flotilla solved these problems one by one through months of night patrols and painful trial and error.

They devised hand signal codes that could communicate complex maneuvers without a word spoken.

They learned to feel the boat’s behavior through their feet, through the bench beneath them, reading the water through vibration rather than sight.

They practiced until silent running became second nature until they could hold formation at six knots in the dark by the sound of each other’s boats alone.

Consider what happened during the night of the 1st to the 2nd of August 1942.

The action mentioned at the opening of this account, Hichchen’s flotilla running silently northwest of Gernzi penetrated far enough into German controlled waters to slip past a German torpedo boat lying at anchor, passing so quietly, so unremarkably that no alarm was raised.

They located four Ebboats waiting to enter Sherborg Harbor and maintained their position in the darkness, listening.

What exactly transpired in the minutes that followed is recorded in the action reports with frustrating brevity, as these things often are.

What is clear is that the British boats went undetected until the moment of engagement.

That is the essential outcome of acoustic deception.

The attacker chooses the moment.

The defender never does.

The tactic developed a further, more remarkable dimension as the war progressed.

In the confused waters of the English Channel at night, where vessels from multiple nations operated without lights, often without reliable radar, and always in the awareness that the enemy might appear from any direction at any moment, German escort vessels and eboat crews faced a peculiarly acute version of the problem that has plagued naval warfare since its beginning, identifying what you can see before you fire at it.

The German convoy system along the channel coast relied on small, fast escorts, often not professional creeks marine sailors at all, but Luftvafa or army personnel co-opted into naval duties who operated under extreme stress in conditions of poor visibility.

When British MTBs and MGBs penetrated these convoys at silent speed, weaving between the merchant men and their escorts, the escorts faced an impossible choice.

Fire at a dark shape and risk hitting a German vessel, or wait, challenge, and allow a British torpedo boat the seconds it needed to complete its attack.

Many of them fired.

And in the chaos of a night engagement, with British boats accelerating to full speed and their wakes and muzzle flashes adding to the confusion, the German escorts frequently found themselves shooting at each other.

The accounts that survive, some British, some from interrogated German prisoners, some from the records of German flotilla commanders, consistently mention this pattern.

German vessels in convoy, uncertain whether a dark shape at short range was friend or enemy, would open fire and draw return fire from their own side.

The British boats, meanwhile, having laid their torpedoes or completed their gun run, would be accelerating away into the darkness before the Germans had established what had happened.

If you’re finding this interesting, a quick subscribe helps more than you know.

This was not a named weapon.

It was not given a designation or a program number.

It was never manufactured.

But it was perhaps the most cost-effective offensive capability that British coastal forces possessed.

And it cost nothing except the courage and discipline required to hold your nerve in the dark at 6 knots with armed Germans 30 m away.

The eboats themselves were in many ways technically superior to their British opponents throughout much of the war.

Their diesel engines were harder to detect than the British petrol motors and produced no exhaust flame.

Their rounded billagege hulls allowed them to maintain speed in heavier weather.

They were longer, heavier, and better armed.

By the time of the S100 class, they carried enclosed torpedo tubes that improved seaorthiness still further.

The armored cola bridge gave their crews a measure of protection that British MGBs entirely lacked.

In postwar comparative tests, it was established that eboats were actually more stealthy than their British counterparts in terms of their acoustic signature, and they could spot the enemy before being spotted themselves.

What the Germans never developed with the same sophistication was the doctrine to exploit these advantages.

Eboat tactics evolved towards the high-speed strike and withdraw model.

the sorty across the channel at speed, the torpedo run on the convoy, the withdrawal at full throttle before British forces could intercept.

This was effective, and the Ebo’s kill record was formidable.

Over 101 merchant ships totaling 214,728 tons, plus 12 destroyers, 11 mine sweepers, and numerous other vessels over the course of the entire war.

But it was a blunt instrument.

The Germans did experiment with acoustic technology in a different direction entirely.

The T5 Zhound Kernig torpedo known to the British as the Guinat or German Navy acoustic torpedo was a passive acoustic homing weapon issued to Ubot from August 1943 and later adapted for eboat use.

It was designed to home on the propeller noise of convoy escorts and initially caused considerable alarm when it first appeared, but it was countered rapidly and effectively by the British Foxer device.

A pair of noisemaking canisters towed a stern of escort vessels, which created a mechanical cavitation sound louder than a ship’s propellers and drew the incoming torpedo away from its target.

The Foxer was crude, and it had drawbacks.

It rendered the ship’s own Aztec sonar ineffective while deployed and had to be retrieved before any anti-ubmarine maneuver, but it worked well enough to neutralize the Zhoig as a warwinning weapon.

The American PT boats, which entered the Channel Theater in 1944, operated on broadly similar principles to their British counterparts, though their tactics tended more towards the aggressive patrol in force.

They collaborated effectively with British coastal forces in the months before D-Day.

And by mid 1944, the combined weight of MTBs, MGB, and PT boats from several Allied nations was creating an environment in which German coastal shipping became increasingly untenable.

But the silent approach tactic with its particular exploitation of acoustic confusion remained a distinctly British refinement.

British coastal forces fought over 900 actions in home waters alone during the course of the war.

And the official tally is approximately 400 enemy vessels sunk or probably sunk, including 48 eboats and 32 submarines against the loss of 170 of their own craft.

The 76 coastal forces boats lost in the Channel Theater represent a ratio of roughly three and a half enemy vessels for each British boat lost, which is a creditable exchange rate by any measure.

But disagregating which proportion of that damage resulted from silent approach acoustic deception as opposed to conventional torpedo attack or gun action is not possible from the surviving records.

What can be said with confidence is that the tactic created a psychological dimension to the war on the water that outlasted any individual engagement.

German convoy commanders and ebo flotilla leaders were aware that British boats could penetrate their formations undetected.

They knew it had happened.

The awareness that any dark shape moving slowly alongside you in the channel night might be British, not German, introduced a hesitation and a confusion into German convoy defense that had effects beyond the purely material.

German escort commanders were documented to have held their fire when they should have opened it because they were uncertain and they were documented to have opened fire when they should not have because uncertainty in battle tends to resolve itself in explosion.

The record of the Royal Navy Coastal Forces is now commemorated at the National Museum of the Royal Navy’s Explosion Museum of Naval Firepower in Gossport, where the Nightigh Hunters Gallery open to tell this story to a public for whom coastal forces has long been overshadowed by the larger narratives of bomber command in the Yubot War.

MTB71, one of the surviving craft, can be seen there alongside equipment, uniforms, medals, and the operational orders issued for Operation Neptune, the naval component of the D-Day landings, kept against standing instructions by Lieutenant Commander Richard Galashan, who could not bring himself to destroy them.

Return for a moment to that dark water northwest of Gernzi.

August 2nd, 1942.

Robert Hichens holds his boat at 6 knots with the engines barely breathing.

The German torpedo boats, entirely unaware, continue their slow procession towards harbor.

In a few moments, the situation will change violently and irrevocably.

The throttles will open.

The darkness will fill with muzzle flash.

and the crack of Erlicon cannon.

The Germans will not know for those first confused seconds from which direction the attack is coming or how many boats are involved or whether the shapes accelerating away from them in the darkness belong to their own side or the enemies.

But right now there is only silence.

There is only the sound of the sea and the low heartbeat of engines and Hitchens and his crew existing in the darkness as if they were not there.

That silence was the weapon, not the torpedoes, not the guns, not the speed or the armor.

The silence, the disciplined, practiced, painstaking, dangerous silence was what separated the men of the Royal Navy coastal forces from every adversary they faced on those cold, dark waters.

Between 1940 and 1945, those men fought over 900 separate actions.

They lost 170 boats and the men who crewed them.

They sank or damaged approximately 400 enemy vessels, including nearly 50 of the formidable eboats that had seemed so dominant in the early years.

They protected convoys.

They inserted agents onto occupied coasts.

They cleared mines and laid them.

They raided and ambushed and withdrew.

They made of the English Channel, that narrow, freezing, fogprone, mind-star never managed to make it.

They did it at night.

They did it mostly in wooden boats powered by engines that could catch fire if you looked at them wrong.

They did it with an average crew age of 21, with reserveists and volunteers who had sailed yachts and motor launches before the war, who had never imagined themselves fighting anyone, and who learned patrol by patrol, engagement by engagement, quiet approach by quiet approach, that the most devastating weapon they possessed was the one that made no sound at all.

The Germans had faster boats, better technology, and more experienced naval crews.

They also in the end had convoys that stopped moving and fleets that, in the confused darkness of the Channel Knight, were sometimes found to be firing at themselves.

The weapon that caused it cost nothing to build and everything to master.

It was silence.

If you liked my video, please share your opinion in the comments box and subscribe to the channel.

Also, turn on the bell icon so that the latest videos like this keep reaching you.

See you in the next video.