March 1943.
A U-boat surfaced in the Bay of Biscay at midnight.
The commander needed to recharge batteries.
Standard procedure.
The diesels coughed to life.
Lookouts scanned the darkness for aircraft.
They saw nothing, heard nothing.
Then a blinding light appeared directly above them.
Before the crew could react, depth charges bracketed the submarine.
The U-boat broke apart and sank in less than two minutes.
The survivors who made it to rafts couldn’t understand what happened.
Aircraft couldn’t find submarines at night.
It was impossible, except the British had been doing it for months.
The Lee Light was sinking U-boats at three times the rate of conventional methods.
German submarine crews were terrified of it.
The technology was proven.
The tactics were refined.
And Admiral Ernest King, commander-in-chief of the US Navy, refused to let American forces use it.
British officers begged.
They pleaded.
They showed him the numbers.
King said no.
This is the story of how one man’s stubbornness kept the most effective anti-submarine weapon out of American hands, while U-boats slaughtered merchant ships within sight of the American coast.
To understand why the Lee Light was revolutionary, you need to understand the problem it solved.
U-boats operated on the surface at night.
They had to.
The submarines of World War II weren’t truly submarines at all.
They were surface ships that could dive.
Underwater, they were slow, blind, running on battery power that drained in hours.
On the surface, they were fast.
The diesels could push them at 17 knots.
They could see, navigate, hunt.
So they dove during the day to hide from aircraft, and they surfaced at night to hunt convoys.
The darkness was their shield.
Allied aircraft hunted U-boats constantly.
But at night, they were useless.
You can’t sink what you can’t see.
Radar helped.
By 1941, British aircraft carried airborne radar that could detect a surfaced submarine at several miles.
But radar only told you where the U -boat was.
It didn’t let you see it.
And you needed to see it to attack.
The pilot had to visually acquire the target, line up the approach, release depth charges at exactly the right moment.
In total darkness, that was impossible.
By the time the aircraft descended to attack altitude, the submarine would dive, 30 seconds from the alarm to submersion.
Once underwater, the U-boat was safe.
Aircraft would circle the area, dropping depth charges blind.
Occasionally, they got lucky.
Usually, they didn’t.
Squadron leader Humphry de Verde Lee was an RF officer assigned to Coastal Command.
He wasn’t a scientist.
He was a pilot who’d spent hundreds of hours hunting submarines.
And he was tired of watching them escape.
In 1940, he had an idea.
What if you could hide a powerful searchlight under the aircraft? Keep it off until the last possible moment.
Use radar to guide you to within a few hundred yards of the target.
Then snap on the searchlight and illuminate the submarine before the crew could react.
The concept was simple.
The execution was not.
The light had to be bright enough to illuminate a submarine from several hundred feet up.
Powerful enough to penetrate sea spray and fog.
It had to be retractable so it wouldn’t create drag during flight.
And it had to be aimed precisely while the aircraft was moving at over 100 miles per hour.
Lee worked with engineers at the Royal Aircraft Establishment.
They designed a 24-inch naval searchlight producing 70 million candle power.
It was mounted in a retractable turret under the aircraft’s belly.
The pilot could extend it, aim it, and trigger it from the cockpit.
The first prototype was installed in a Wellington bomber in January 1941.
The test flights were promising.
The light was brilliant.
Blinding.
You could read a newspaper on the deck of a ship from 1,000 feet up.
But would it work in combat? The first operational Lee Light Squadron No.
172 began patrols in June 1941.
For the first month they found nothing.
Then on the night of July 4th, 1941, Squadron Leader J.H.
Greswell was patrolling the Bay of Biscay.
His radar operator picked up a contact.
Range, three miles.
Greswell turned toward the target, descended to attack altitude.
The radar operator counted down the distance.
One mile.
Half a mile.
Quarter mile.
Greswell flipped the switch.
The Lee Light blazed to life.
In the brilliant white glare, a German submarine was clearly visible.
The crew was scrambling to dive.
Too late.
Greswell lined up the approach, released four depth charges.
The explosion straddled the U-boat.
The submarine rolled over and sank.
It was the first confirmed Lee Light kill.
Over the next two years, the numbers told the story.
Conventional night attacks on U-boats had a success rate of about 3%.
For every 100 attacks, three submarines were destroyed.
Lee Light attacks had a success rate of 10%.
That doesn’t sound like much.
But in the Battle of the Atlantic, where every submarine mattered, that difference was enormous.
By mid-1943, Lee Light aircraft were accounting for 40% of all U-boat kills by coastal command.
The tactics evolved quickly.
Aircraft would patrol at altitude, using radar to sweep large areas.
When they detected a surfaced U-boat, they’d close to about a mile.
Then they’d descend rapidly.
Cut the radar to prevent the submarine from detecting the emissions.
At a quarter mile, the pilot would snap on the Lee Light.
The submarine would be caught fully surfaced, crew on deck, hatches open.
The aircraft had maybe 15 seconds before the U-boat dove.
That was enough.
The depth charges didn’t even need a direct hit.
The concussion from a near miss could rupture the pressure hull, damage the diving planes, crack the battery cells, flooding the boat with chlorine gas.
U-boat crews began to dread the Bay of Biscay, the transit route from German bases to the Atlantic hunting grounds.
They called it the Valley of Death.
Submarines started diving at the first hint of aircraft engines.
They’d run submerged through the entire bay, burning battery power they desperately needed for hunting.
Some didn’t make it across.
The batteries would die.
They’d be forced to surface in daylight.
Then the aircraft would find them.
The Lee Light was breaking the U-boat force.
German intelligence knew about the weapon.
They’d recovered wreckage from shot down aircraft.
They’d debriefed survivors.
But they couldn’t counter it.
They tried mounting anti-aircraft guns on the submarines, stayed surfaced, and fought back.
That tactic failed spectacularly.
A U-boat was a stable gun platform.
But an aircraft attacking at night with a search light was nearly impossible to hit.
And while the submarine crew was firing at the aircraft, depth charges were falling.
The Germans developed radar detectors, equipment that would alert the submarine if it was being tracked.
The British responded by developing new radar frequencies the German detectors couldn’t pick up.
By 1943, U-boat losses in the Bay of Biscay had reached catastrophic levels.
Admiral Karl Dönitz, commander of the U-boat force, wrote in his war diary that the Lee Light had made the Bay of Biscay untenable for surfaced operations.
He was losing submarines faster than German shipyards could replace them.
The British shared the Lee Light technology with their allies immediately.
Canadian aircraft were equipped with it.
Australian squadrons in the Mediterranean got it.
The Americans were offered the complete technical specifications.
Training manuals.
Tactical doctrine.
Everything.
Admiral Ernest King said no.
King was the most powerful naval officer in the United States.
As both chief of naval operations and commander -in-chief of the U.S.
fleet, he controlled every aspect of American naval operations.
And he despised the British.
This wasn’t a professional disagreement.
It was personal.
King believed the British had manipulated America into World War I.
He believed they were trying to do it again.
He refused to attend social functions if British officers were present.
He wouldn’t read intelligence reports from British sources.
His staff called him the most even-tempered man in the Navy.
He’s always angry.
When the British offered to share Lee Light technology in early 1942, King’s response was immediate and final.
American aircraft would not use British anti-submarine tactics.
The U.S.
Navy would develop its own solutions.
His staff was horrified.
Captain Kenneth Knowles ran the Atlantic Section of Combat Intelligence.
He had access to decrypted German naval communications.
He knew exactly how many U-boats were operating, and he knew how many American merchant ships were dying.
January through June 1942.
Operation Drumbeat.
U-boats operated openly along the American east coast.
They attacked ships silhouetted against city lights.
Some commanders surfaced to shell coastal towns.
Over 600 ships were sunk in American waters in six months.
Knowles begged King to implement a convoy system.
The British had proven it worked.
Ships travelling in groups with escorts were 90 % less likely to be sunk.
King refused.
Convoys were a British tactic.
Knowles begged King to implement a coastal blackout.
City lights made it easy for U-boats to hunt.
King refused.
He said coastal blackouts would hurt civilian morale.
And Knowles begged King to equip American patrol aircraft with Lee Lights.
King refused.
American aircraft would use American technology.
The only problem was that American technology didn’t exist.
US Navy blimps patrolled the coast.
Slow, vulnerable, nearly useless at night.
Land-based patrol bombers flew endless missions.
They’d spot U-boats on radar, descend to attack.
The submarine would dive.
The kill rate was abysmal.
Meanwhile, British aircraft operating from Newfoundland and Iceland were massacring U-boats with Lee Lights.
King’s own intelligence officers compiled reports showing the effectiveness of the British weapon.
They presented detailed statistics.
King ignored them.
Captain Daniel Gallery commanded an escort carrier group in the Atlantic.
He later wrote about King’s stubbornness.
We had the answer handed to us on a silver platter.
The British had done the development work.
Proven the tactics.
All we had to do was copy them.
But King would rather lose merchant ships than admit the British had a better idea.
The American Lee Light program, when it finally started, was half-hearted at best.
A small number of aircraft were equipped with searchlights.
But the Navy didn’t develop proper tactics.
Didn’t train crews specifically for night attacks.
The lights were treated as an experiment rather than a proven weapon system.
American pilots who flew with RF Coastal Command saw the difference immediately.
Lieutenant Commander Joseph Bryan was seconded to the British in 1943.
He flew Lee Light missions out of Cornwall.
When he returned to the US Navy, he submitted a report detailing exactly how effective the weapon was.
He included photographs.
Combat footage, to testimony from German POWs.
The report was filed and forgotten.
By the time the US Navy fully adopted Lee Light tactics, it was late 1943.
The Battle of the Improved radar.
More escort carriers.
Better depth charges.
Long-range patrol aircraft.
The U-boat threat was being contained.
But historians estimate that if the United States had adopted Lee Lights in early 1942, hundreds of merchant ships could have been saved.
Thousands of merchant sailors who died in burning oil slicks off the coast of New Jersey and Florida might have lived.
The British were diplomatic in public.
But privately, they were furious.
Air Chief Marshal Arthur Harris wrote in his memoirs that American refusal to adopt proven British anti-submarine tactics bordered on criminal negligence.
Winston Churchill, personally appealed to Roosevelt, explained that the U-boat war was being won with specific technologies and tactics.
Roosevelt passed the message to King.
King’s response was essentially, we’ll handle it our way.
The irony is that King eventually came around.
By 1944, the US Navy was using British radar, British sonar, British depth charge patterns, but he never publicly admitted the Lee Light mistake.
After the war, the US Strategic Bombing Survey analyzed anti-submarine operations.
Their conclusion was damning.
The delayed adoption of proven British anti-submarine technologies cost the Allied war effort approximately 350 merchant ships and 15,000 lives in 1942 alone.
Admiral King retired in 1945.
He died in 1956.
In his memoirs, he devoted exactly three sentences to the Lee Light controversy.
He wrote that, differences in operational doctrine between Allied navies were inevitable and generally productive.
That was it.
No acknowledgement of the cost.
No reflection on the consequences.
The Lee Light itself continued in service until the 1950s.
By then, submarines were staying submerged for longer periods.
Aircraft carried better radar and sonar buoys.
The searchlight that had terrorized U-boat crews became obsolete.
But for three years from 1941 to 1944, it was the most effective anti-submarine weapon in the world.
And for 18 months of that period, the US Navy refused to use it.
Not because it didn’t work.
Not because American aircraft couldn’t mount it.
Not because American crews couldn’t learn the tactics.
But because one admiral couldn’t set aside his personal prejudices long enough to accept help.
The men who died in those merchant ships never knew why the aircraft overhead couldn’t find the submarines killing them.
They didn’t know that British pilots 2,000 miles away were sinking U-boats at triple the rate using a weapon their own Navy refused to adopt.
They just knew they were burning.
Drowning.
Dying within sight of shore.
And somewhere in Washington, Admiral King was insisting the US Navy would do it the American way.
Even if the American way was getting Americans killed.
The Battle of the Atlantic was won despite Admiral King, not because of him.
The British developed the Lee Light, proved it worked, offered it freely.
King’s stubbornness kept it out of American hands until the cost became impossible to ignore.
By the time he finally relented, the weapon that could have saved hundreds of ships had become just another tool in the arsenal.
The U-boat crews who survived the war remembered the Lee Light as the weapon they feared most.
That blinding light appearing out of nowhere, the desperate scramble to dive, the depth charges falling while they were still on the surface.
One German submarine commander described it in his debriefing.
You couldn’t defend against it.
You couldn’t hide from it.
The aircraft would find you with radar, then illuminate you before you could dive.
By the time you saw the light, you were already dead.
We called it der Weissertod, the white death.
The British had offered to share that weapon in early 1942.
Admiral King said no.
And for 18 months, American merchant sailors paid the pride.
The next time someone tells you that accepting help is weakness, remember the Lee Light.
Remember the 350 ships that didn’t have to sink.
Remember the 15,000 men who didn’t have to die.
And remember that sometimes the strongest thing a leader can do is admit someone else has a better answer.
Admiral King never learned that lesson.
The men who burned in the Atlantic paid for his education.
