Allied ASW

[Charles2222]

mdiehl: I made a rather lengthy response but ultimately totally gave it up for this. Your accusations of wrongdoing on my part, along with it getting way too windy, even for me, has me giving it up. If my two sources I've quoted don't find your opinion changed, so be it.

[mdiehl]

So be it. I don't know how many times I can say "when you say 'lax' could you be more specific" before someone agrees to be more specific.

I think your comment/quote in re Lord Avon was appropriate and describes one aspect of pre-war UK willingness (lack of convoying early on) well. Again, it was my understanding that we were talking about the USN. By September 1941 the US implemented convoys for cross-Atlantic traffice inside the 'neutrality zone.' In Spring 1942 the lack of convoying on the US east coast was not symptomatic of USN attitude towards convoying in general nor was it something that the USN/King implemented by choice. It was solely a consequence of the lack of escorts.

The point is, the US DID learn from the UK's experiences in the interval from 1939-1940. Both the USN and UK made substantive organizational changes as a response to continuing shipping losses. I don't see how the lack of 1943 results in January 1942 can be called "laxity" though, unless the position is that technologies and organizational responses that were available in 1943 should have been available in 1940-1941. And to make that argument I think you have to anticipate that everybody expected a war in 1939. Even the Germans were caught unawares by the UK/French response to the invasion of Poland, and key resources that might have been available in greater numbers in Fall 1939 were not there because the Germans did not anticipate a full blown war. I'm not willing to call the Germans "lax" on account of failing to have everything ready before it was needed.

So if you ever want to get specific as to what aspects you think were lax and why, I'm game. But name dropping Hoyt isn't enough to move me off my position when there are at least a dozen good sources from the last ten years that show that the situation was more complex and nuanced than can be adequately or accurately conveyed using ambiguous generalizations like "lax" (or in the case of another participant in this discussion, that 'US ASW sucked in comparison with everybody else in 1941-1942').