U-Boat victories and claims

[Adriano Baumgartner]

Sorry re-read U-976 as U-960 as being attacked by Tsé-Tsés from 248 Squadron...

[Bruce Dennis]

Hello Adriano and all,
British Naval Intelligence relied very heavily on D/F (direction finding) and T/A (traffic analysis) to maintain their OIC (Operational Intelligence Centre) maps. These maps were extraordinarily accurate even during the ‘blackout’ caused by the introduction of the fourth wheel. The OIC situation reports and Naval Intelligence Summaries were constantly updated and it was from these that victories were credited.

Hope this helps,
Bruce

[Nick Beale]

I can't answer the claims/awards question but maybe www.uboat.net could?

I'm pretty sure that several years ago the Ministry of Defence published a set of books and maps (all in a case) which had details and track charts for all the U-boats "followed" by British Intelligence.

For Adriano: listening stations picked up and recorded traffic BdU and the individual U-boats but this was encrypted, so it was passed to Bletchley Park for decoding (if possible). A lot of information could still be derived from direction-finding (as Bruce says), frequencies and the "fist" of the individual morse operators. Take a look at this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodger_Winn

And, if you can get hold of it: "Very Special Intelligence: The Story of the Admiralty's Operational Intelligence Centre, 1939-1945" by Patrick Beesley. It's very good on the non-Ultra aspects of buidling up the intelligence picture.