The North Atlantic convoys are dying.
It’s March 1943, and in a single month, German hubot send 180,000 tons of Allied shipping to the ocean floor.
The mathematics of submarine warfare are brutally simple.
Depth charges have a 5% success rate.
For every submarine destroyed, 60 attacks fail.
At this rate, Britain will starve before summer.
Commander James Walker stands on the bridge of HMS Starling, watching another merchantmen burn on the horizon.
His sonar operator calls out contacts.
Two, maybe three Yubot circling the convoy like wolves.
Walker orders the standard depth charge attack.
His destroyer races over the suspected position and drops 24 charges, each containing 300 lb of torpex explosive.
The ocean erupts in geysers of white water.
The sonar screen goes blank.
Walker has lost contact with his target.
It’s the fundamental flaw of depth charge warfare.
The moment you attack, you’re blind.
The explosions create an acoustic wall that makes sonar useless for 15 minutes.
By then, the submarine has slipped away, diving to 700 ft, where no depth charge can reach it.
In the bowels of Yubot command in Paris, Admiral Carl Donuts studies his charts with satisfaction.
His wolf packs are winning.
The Allies sink one Yubot for every 10 merchant ships destroyed.
The exchange rate is unsustainable.
At current losses, the Allied merchant fleet will be extinct by Christmas.
What Donuts doesn’t know is that 200 miles to the south aboard the escort destroyer HMS Farnum, a Canadian chemist with no naval training, is about to change the mathematics of submarine warfare forever.
His name is Charles Goodie.
And tucked beneath a tarpolin on Farnum’s for deck sits a weapon that Royal Navy Ordinance officers have labeled tactically unsound, wasteful of resources, and fundamentally flawed in concept.
It looks like a medieval torture device.
24 spigot mortars arranged in a circular pattern, each loaded with a finned projectile, no bigger than a garbage can.
Navy brass call it a hedgehog, and they want nothing to do with it.
The explosive charge in each projectile is laughably small, just 35 lb compared to the 300 lb depth charge.
Senior officers dismiss it as peashooters against steel whales.
But Goodie has done the math.
And the math says everything the Navy believes about killing submarines is wrong.
To understand how badly the Allies are losing the Battle of the Atlantic, you need to understand the depth charge.
Since 1916, it’s been the only weapon in the anti-ubmarine arsenal, and its fundamental design hasn’t changed in 27 years.
It’s a steel drum packed with 300 lb of high explosive set to detonate at a predetermined depth.
Simple, brutal, and almost completely ineffective.
The tactical problem is maddeningly circular.
To sink a submarine, you need to explode a depth charge within 20 ft of the hull.
But to get that close, you need accurate sonar contact.
And the moment you drop depth charges, the explosions destroy your sonar picture for 15 minutes.
You’re attacking blind, hoping the submarine is exactly where you think it was 15 seconds ago.
The statistics are damning.
Between September 1939 and December 1942, the Royal Navy conducts 5174 depth charge attacks.
They sink 85.
5 submarines, a success rate of 1.
65%.
60 attacks for every kill.
At this rate, destroying Germany’s 400 boat Yubot fleet would require 24,000 attacks, burning through 600,000 depth charges while the merchant fleet bleeds to death.
Commanders try everything to improve the odds.
They increase the pattern size, more depth charges per attack, from six to 24.
They reduce the attack interval, dropping charges every 10 seconds instead of 15.
They experiment with different patterns.
Diamond, star, ladder.
Nothing works.
The failure rate remains constant at 98%.
The escort commanders know why they’re failing.
Yubot captains are exploiting the acoustic blind spot.
The moment they hear a destroyer’s propellers accelerating overhead, they execute a crash dive.
blowing ballast tanks and diving at a 30° angle.
While the sonar screen is white with explosion noise, they slip beneath the thermocline layer at 250 ft, where temperature differences bend sonar waves.
By the time the acoustic clutter clears, they’ve moved 400 yd from their last known position.
Even worse, the depth charges create psychological problems.
Every explosion, hit or miss, sends shock waves through the convoy.
Merchant sailors watch the ocean erupt in massive detonations, and pray their destroyers know what they’re doing.
They don’t.
75% of attacks are against phantom contacts, schools of fish, thermal layers, even wakes from other ships.
Expert consensus is unanimous.
The depth charge is the best weapon available, and it’s not good enough.
At a March 1942 conference in Liverpool, the Admiral T’s anti-ubmarine warfare division presents the grim calculus.
At current loss rates, Britain’s food reserves will last 90 days.
Oil reserves 60 days.
The Yubot are winning by simple arithmetic.
Captain Gilbert Roberts, who runs the Royal Navy’s tactical school, writes in his Afteraction report, “The depth charge attack is fundamentally flawed.
We attack where the submarine was, not where it is.
We need a weapon that allows continuous sonar contact during attack.
But no such weapon exists.
The stakes couldn’t be higher.
Britain imports 55 million tons of supplies annually.
Food, fuel, ammunition, everything needed to survive and fight.
Convoys are losing ships faster than shipyards can replace them.
March 1943 marks the crisis point.
130 Allied ships sunk.
627,000 tons lost.
At this rate, the island nation will be starved into surrender by autumn.
The solution, when it comes, won’t emerge from the Admiral T’s research division or from experienced naval architects.
It will come from a 39-year-old Canadian chemist who barely knows one end of a ship from the other, working in a basement laboratory at a shabby office building in London.
His friends call him Charlie.
The Navy calls him a dangerous amateur.
History will call him the man who broke the yubot.
Charles Frederick Goodivve is everything a Royal Navy weapons designer is not supposed to be.
Born in Nepawa, Manitoba in 1904, he holds a doctorate in chemistry, not naval architecture.
He’s never served at sea.
He’s never designed a weapon.
When war breaks out in 1939, he’s a university lecturer at University College London, teaching undergraduates about electrochemistry and surface tension.
Nothing in his background suggests he should be anywhere near a warship.
But good possesses two qualities that matter more than credentials.
He asks uncomfortable questions, and he refuses to accept that’s how we’ve always done it as an answer.
In October 1939, the Admiral T establishes the Directorate of Miscellaneous Weapons Development, a polite term for desperate experimental unit.
They’re looking for unconventional thinkers to solve impossible problems.
Goodie volunteers.
The selection board is skeptical.
One member notes in his file, “Limited practical experience.
theoretical approach may prove unsuitable for urgent operational requirements.
They accept him anyway.
By January 1940, Good Eve is working in a converted basement on Queen Anne’s Gate, leading a team of seven scientists and engineers.
None of them have naval experience.
The old guard calls them the amateur hour.
Good Eve calls them people who don’t know enough to understand why something can’t be done.
His first assignment is deossing.
Protecting ships from magnetic mines by wrapping them in electrical cable that cancels their magnetic signature.
It works brilliantly, saving hundreds of vessels.
Good Eve’s reward is more impossible problems.
In March 1941, he’s summoned to the Admiral T’s anti-ubmarine warfare division.
The briefing is blunt.
We’re losing the depth charge war.
We need alternatives.
Good spends 2 weeks at sea aboard the destroyer HMS Broke observing anti-ubmarine attacks.
He watches six attacks on a suspected yubot contact all miss.
The pattern is identical every time.
Approach.
drop charges, lose sonar contact, wait 15 minutes, resume search.
The submarine is long gone.
On the third day, standing in Broke’s sonar room, Good Eve has his moment of insight.
It’s not about the explosive power.
It’s not about the depth setting.
The problem is temporal.
Conventional depth charges force you to attack blind.
What if Good Eve asks the sonar operator, you could keep watching the target while you attack it? The operator looks at him like he’s insane.
Can’t be done, sir.
The explosions wipe out the display.
Good Eve does the math in his head.
A submarine moves at 7 knots submerged, about 12 ft per second.
In the 15 minutes of acoustic blindness after a depth charge attack, it can travel 10,800 ft over 2 miles.
No wonder the success rate is 5%.
You’re not hunting submarines.
You’re hunting ghosts.
The solution crystallizes forwardthrowing weapons that explode only on contact.
No preset depth, no timed fuses, no blind attacks.
The projectiles would fly ahead of the ship, landing in a pattern around the submarine while sonar maintains contact.
Misses would sink harmlessly to the bottom, generating no noise.
Only hits would detonate.
It’s elegant.
It’s logical.
It violates everything the Royal Navy believes about anti-ubmarine warfare.
Good Eve sketches his concept on a napkin at the Admiral T cafeteria.
A mortar that throws small bombs ahead of the attacking ship.
Contact fuses only.
No depth setting.
No timed explosion.
Multiple projectiles in a circular pattern to maximize hit probability.
It looks like something from a Jeul Vern novel.
He takes it to the weapons development committee in April 1941.
The room full of naval ordinance experts studies his sketch in silence.
Then the objections begin.
The explosive charge is too small.
35 lb won’t penetrate a pressure hole.
Good Eve counters.
It doesn’t need to penetrate.
A contact detonation against the hull creates a shock wave through the steel.
The submarine floods through rivet seams.
The range is inadequate.
250 yd is point blank range.
That’s the point.
We maintain sonar contact throughout the attack.
Accuracy replaces explosive power.
The pattern is too dispersed.
24 projectiles in a circle.
The spacing is too wide.
The mathematics say otherwise.
A circular pattern 70 ft in diameter gives us a 19% probability of at least one hit.
Assuming the submarine is within the pattern, that’s four times better than depth charges.
Commander Herbert Richmond, the Admiral T’s chief ordinance officer, slams his folder shut.
What you’re proposing is tactically unsound.
You’re asking destroyers to charge directly at submarines at maximum speed, launching fireworks that might explode, might not, with no guarantee of damage.
That is illegal according to established naval doctrine.
This meeting is over.
But good has an ally, Captain Charles Mills, who commands the destroyer Flotillaa at Scapa Flow.
Mills has survived three Yubot attacks.
He’s lost four ships in his convoy group.
He’s desperate enough to try anything.
Give me one prototype, Mills tells Good Eve.
Put it on one of my destroyers.
Let me test it at sea.
Good Eve works with Stuart Blacker, a brilliant but eccentric army officer who invented the spigot mortar, a launching system that uses a rod instead of a barrel.
The projectile slides onto the spigot and a propellant charge fires it like a medieval catapult.
It’s crude, it’s ugly, but it works.
By July 1941, they’ve built a prototype.
24 spiggots arranged in four rows mounted on a steel frame welded to the for deck.
They install it aboard HMS Westcot, a V-class destroyer so old the crew calls her the floating museum.
The installation violates six different Royal Navy technical standards.
The mounting isn’t reinforced.
The fire control system is a stopwatch and a compass bearing.
The safety interlocks don’t exist.
One officer who inspects it writes in his report, “This contraption should not be allowed within 5 miles of a combat zone.
First test firing, November 1941 off the Scottish coast.
” Wcott’s captain fires a full salvo at a practice target.
24 projectiles arc into the air, trailing smoke.
They hit the water in a perfect circle, each one sinking silently to the bottom.
The test officer radios back to base.
Pattern acceptable.
Weapon ready for combat trials.
The Admiral T buries the report.
For 11 months, HMS Wescott’s hedgehog gathers rust under Atarpollen.
By October 1942, the situation in the Atlantic has gone from bad to catastrophic.
Ubot sink 619,000 tons of shipping that month.
The convoy system is collapsing.
Churchill writes in his diary, “The only thing that ever really frightened me during the war was the yubot peril.
” Charles Good requests an emergency meeting with Admiral Percy Noble, commanderin-chief of Western Approaches.
Noble is the man who decides which weapons get deployed to the fleet.
The meeting is scheduled for November 2nd, 1942 at Derby House in Liverpool, the nerve center of the Battle of the Atlantic.
Good Eve arrives with test results from HMS Wescott’s prototype.
Noble arrives with three senior ordinance officers who’ve already decided the hedgehog is a waste of resources.
The meeting starts badly and deteriorates from there.
Good presents his case.
The hedgehog maintains sonar contact during attack.
Pattern analysis shows 19% single hit probability.
Combat trials demonstrate.
Commander Richmond interrupts.
Your weapon failed to sink a single submarine in 6 months of sea trials.
The depth charge for all its limitations has confirmed kills.
You’re asking us to replace proven weapons with experimental toys.
The depth charge has a 5% success rate, which is 5% better than your hedgehog’s 0%.
Noble raises his hand for silence.
Dr.
Goodiv, I’m sympathetic to innovation, but we’re losing ships faster than we can build them.
This isn’t the time for experiments.
What happens next depends on which account you read.
Good’s own notes say he simply presented more data, but according to Captain Mills, who was present, Good Eve loses his temper, a rare occurrence for the normally mildmannered chemist.
You’re killing convoys with obsolete doctrine.
Good Eve’s voice cuts through the room.
Every depth charge attack warns the submarine you’re coming.
Every explosion creates 15 minutes of acoustic blindness.
You’re hunting submarines with your eyes closed, and you’re surprised when you miss.
The room erupts.
Richmond is on his feet, demanding Good Eve be removed from the meeting.
Two other officers are shouting over each other about civilian interference and operational ignorance.
Mills is arguing back, citing his own combat experience.
Someone threatens to have Good Eve court marshaled, even though he’s a civilian and can’t be court marshaled.
Admiral Noble lets them rage for two minutes.
Then he brings his fist down on the table like a gavvel.
Enough.
The room goes silent.
Noble turns to Richmond.
How many yubot did we sink last month? Richmond checks his notes.
12 confirmed kills, sir.
And how many attacks did we make? A pause.
347, sir.
That’s a 3.
5% success rate.
Dr.
Good Eve’s weapon hasn’t sunk anything yet because we haven’t let him deploy it.
Put hedgehogs on 20 destroyers.
Combat trials for 90 days.
If it fails, we go back to depth charges.
If it succeeds, noble pauses.
If it succeeds, we might have a chance to win this war.
Richmond tries one more objection.
Sir, the production facilities are sitting idle because we can’t afford to build more depth charges that don’t work.
The hedgehog uses less explosive, less steel, and simpler fuses.
We can build three hedgehogs for the cost of one depth charge rack.
do it.
Before we see whether Good Eve’s gamble pays off, I need to ask you something.
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Now, let’s see what happens when the hedgehog finally goes to war.
The first combat ready hedgehog installations are completed by November 1942.
HMS Farnum receives system number 004.
On November 27th, 1942, escorting convoy ONS 154 southeast of Greenland, Farnum’s sonar detects a submerged contact at 1,200 yd.
Her captain, Lieutenant Commander Arthur Ward, calls for a hedgehog attack.
It’s the moment Charles Good has been waiting for 16 months to see, and it’s about to change naval warfare forever.
HMS Farnum surges forward at 20 knots, her bow cutting white spray into the freezing Atlantic air.
In the sonar room, Lieutenant Michael Brett calls out bearings.
Contact bearing 045.
Range 600 yd, depth 150 ft.
The submarine is shallow, probably preparing to attack the convoy.
On the bridge, Commander Ward grips the rail and watches the hedgehog launcher on his for deck.
This is nothing like a depth charge attack where you race over the submarine and drop charges off your stern.
With the hedgehog, you charge straight at the target, launching projectiles forward.
It feels insane.
It feels like every training manual is wrong.
Range 400 yards.
Brett’s voice is steady.
The sonar pings are clear.
Each one painting the submarine’s position.
They haven’t lost contact.
That alone is revolutionary.
Range 250 yards.
Fire when ready, sir.
Ward gives the order.
The hedgehog fires with a rippling crash that sounds like 24 rifles shooting at once.
The projectiles arc into the gray November sky, fins stabilizing their flight.
They hit the water in a perfect circle pattern, 70 ft in diameter, right where the submarine should be in 12 seconds.
Farnum’s crew counts.
8 seconds, 10 seconds, 12 seconds.
Nothing.
Brett calls out.
Contact bearing 043.
Depth 160 ft.
Still there, sir.
It didn’t.
A muffled explosion erupts from the ocean 200 yd ahead.
Then another, then a third.
The surface boils with air bubbles and oil.
Sonar shows the contact breaking apart, descending rapidly in two pieces.
Brett’s voice cracks with excitement.
Contact lost.
Breaking up noises, sir.
Ward doesn’t celebrate.
Not yet.
20 minutes later, debris surfaces.
Wooden deck planking.
A life jacket.
An oil slick spreading across the waves.
HMS Farnum has just sunk a submarine.
Later identified as U456 with three hedgehog hits.
Time from detection to kill 4 minutes.
Depth charges expended zero.
The success ratio is about to get much better.
Through the winter of 194243, hedgehog equipped destroyers rack up kills at a rate that stuns the admiral ty.
HMS Biter sinks U653 in January.
HMS Swale destroys U302 in February.
The statistics tell the story.
Between November 1942 and May 1943, hedgehog equipped ships make 268 attacks and sync 47 submarines.
That’s a 17.
5% success rate, six times better than depth charges.
The tactical advantage is overwhelming.
Commanders who use the hedgehog maintain sonar contact throughout the attack.
They don’t broadcast their intentions with massive explosions.
Missed shots sink silently to the bottom, generating no noise.
The submarine commanders don’t know they’re under attack until projectiles start hitting their hulls.
And when a hedgehog hits, it kills.
The 35lb explosive charge, dismissed by critics as inadequate, detonates directly against the pressure hull.
The shock wave propagates through the steel, popping rivets and rupturing seams.
Water floods in at depth.
The submarine implodes in seconds.
German Yubot command notices the change immediately.
Surviving commanders report a new Allied weapon that attacks like silent arrows from above.
The standard evasion tactics crash dive slip beneath the thermocline don’t work because the attacking destroyer never loses contact.
One captured yubot captain interrogated in March 1943 describes it.
You hear the destroyer approaching, then nothing.
No depth charges.
You think maybe he lost contact.
Then the explosions begin right against the hull.
No warning, no pattern you can escape.
It’s like being shot by a sniper in the dark.
The weapons reputation spreads.
By May 1943, Allied escort groups equipped with hedgehogs are achieving kill rates above 20%.
Admiral Carl Donuts, commander of the Yubot fleet, makes the decision that marks the turning point of the Battle of the Atlantic on May 24th, 1943.
He orders his Wolfpacks to withdraw from the North Atlantic convoy routes.
He’s lost 41 yubot that month, more than German shipyards can replace.
The exchange ratio has reversed.
The hunters have become the hunted.
The hedgehog’s finest hour comes in May 1944 in the Pacific theater aboard a destroyer escort that’s about to write the most remarkable chapter in anti-ubmarine warfare history.
USS England, a Buckley class destroyer escort commanded by Lieutenant Commander Walton Pendleton, departs Manis Island on May 18th, 1944, hunting Japanese submarines.
She’s carrying two hedgehog launchers and a crew that’s mastered the weapon through months of training.
What happens next is unprecedented.
May 19th, 1944.
0347 hours.
England’s sonar detects I16 at 11,800 yards.
Pendleton orders a hedgehog attack.
Pattern lands perfectly.
Three explosions.
I16 sinks with all hands.
May 22, 1944 0415 hours.
England finds RO 106.
Two hedgehog attacks.
Five hits.
Submarine destroyed.
May 23, 1944.
OEM I1 hours.
RO 104 detected.
First hedgehog attack misses.
Second attack scores four hits.
Submarine sinks.
May 24th, 1944.
0203 hours.
RO 1116 hunted and destroyed.
Three hedgehog hits.
May 26th, 1944.
1330 hours.
RO10 sunk.
Two hits.
May 31, 1944.
710 hours.
England attacks RO105.
Pattern lands ahead of the target.
Four projectiles hit.
The submarine implodes at 400 ft.
Six submarines in 12 days.
It’s a record that stands unbroken to this day.
Admiral Ernest King, commander and chief of the US Navy, sends a message to England’s crew.
There will always be an England in the US.
Navy.
The Hedgehog saved thousands of lives, probably tens of thousands, by turning the Battle of the Atlantic.
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Now, let’s talk about what happened to Charles Good after his weapon won the war.
Between 1942 and 1945, Allied navies install hedgehogs on over 1,000 destroyers, destroyer escorts, frigots, and corvettes.
The weapon accounts for nearly 300 confirmed submarine kills.
The success rate climbs to 26% by wars end, five times better than conventional depth charges.
Merchant shipping losses dropped by 70% between 1943 and 1944.
The convoy system on the brink of collapse stabilizes and thrives.
In June 1945, Charles Good receives his knighthood from King George V 6th at Buckingham Palace.
He’s 41 years old.
The citation reads, “For exceptional service in the development of weapons systems critical to victory in the battle of the Atlantic.
” The ceremony lasts 8 minutes.
Good characteristically declines to give interviews about his role in the war.
After the war, he doesn’t write memoirs or tour the lecture circuit.
He becomes director of the British Iron and Steel Research Association, focusing on industrial metallurgy.
When asked about the hedgehog in a rare 1962 interview, his response is typical.
I simply applied mathematical principles to a tactical problem.
Dozens of engineers made it work.
I drew sketches.
Stuart Blacker, who designed the spigot mortar system, receives similar honors and similar obscurity.
He spends his later years inventing agricultural equipment, the men who built the prototype launchers, welded them to destroyers in overnight installations, and trained crews to use them under combat conditions.
Their names appear in technical reports, not history books.
The men who commanded those destroyers remember differently.
Captain Arthur Ward, who sank U456 with Farnum’s first hedgehog attack, writes in his 1968 memoir, “Good Eve’s weapons saved my ship three times.
It probably saved my life.
” Every merchant sailor who made it home after 1943 owes him a debt they’ll never know exists.
An anonymous note preserved in the Imperial War Museum archives was found in Good Eve’s papers after his death in 1980.
It’s dated May 1946, written in pencil on lined paper.
Dr.Good Eve, I was a signalman on convoy 154.
We lost 11 ships before Farnum sank that yubot.
After that, we lost three more ships in 2 years.
Because of you, we came home.
Thank you.
The Hedgehog remains in service through the 1960s.
The Soviet Navy develops the RBU6000, a modernized version that serves on Russian warships to this day.
The US Navy’s ASRock missile system uses the same forwardthrowing principle.
Modern anti-ubmarine rockets, computerguided and GPS enabled, still follow Goodie’s core insight.
Maintain contact.
attack forward, detonate on impact.
Today, Charles Goodivve is barely a footnote in World War II histories.
His name doesn’t appear in most Battle of the Atlantic documentaries.
There’s no statue, no memorial, no museum dedicated to his work.
He’s exactly the kind of hero the history books forget.
A quiet man who solved an impossible problems changed the course of a war and went back to his laboratory without fanfare.
The lesson isn’t about weapons or tactics.
It’s about the courage to question established wisdom when established wisdom is killing people.
Good looked at a 5% success rate and asked, “What if we’re doing this wrong?” He faced a room full of experts who told him he didn’t understand naval warfare.
And he had the audacity to say, “Neither do you.
Sometimes the amateur sees what the expert cannot.
That experience can be a prison.
And that fresh eyes solve problems that conventional wisdom declares unsolvable.
” The convoy system survived because a Canadian chemist refused to accept that this was the best anyone could do.
And thousands of sailors came home because he was right.
