[Rainer]

Tony, even if the Coastal Command would have had 100 VLR Liberators in mid-1942 they would have achieved almost nothing because the U-boats weren't operating against the North Atlantic convoys at all, but found plenty of easy targets off the US East Coast and the Caribbean.

Although the few available VLR aircraft made some impact during the large convoy battles in the winter 1942/43, the Admiralty recognized that it was not possible to maintain the needed continous air cover over a convoy in the Mid-Atlantic gap with those aircraft. Often the aircraft had difficulties to find the ships they were supposed to cover, expended their depth charges quickly in one or two attacks and the convoys were inevitably left without air cover if one of the VLR aircraft had to return to base for one or the other reason. The Admiralty clearly preferred the aircraft from escort carriers as air cover of a convoy as they could be used for defensive patrols around a convoy, but also offensively against U-boats located by HF/DF or ULTRA.

The Coastal Command played a major part when the tide eventually turned in the Battle of the Atlantic in May 1943, but it weren't its VLR Liberators. During that month almost no U-boat could leave or reach its base in France without having been attacked at least once by an aircraft during the transit of the Bay of Biscay, caused by the deployment of ASV Mk.III fitted aircraft on continous patrols at day and night. Not getting an allocation of a certain aircraft type well suited for anti-submarine patrol was bad for the Coastal Command, but the true scandal is that the rivalry between the RAF services almost led to a stop of the development of the airborne centrimetric ASV radar that proved to be decisive to beat the tactics employed by the the type VII and IX submersibles.