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The following story by Terence Robertson is out of copyright and appears courtesy of and with thanks to Mike Kemble, and Captain Frederic John Walker.

For the next two days they patrolled about 100 miles off Bordeaux and down to Spanish territorial limits. Early on the morning of the 17th it was reported that a British aircraft had been shot down about seventy miles to the north, and the sloops set off to search for survivors. The report and the Group鈥檚 navigation proved satisfyingly accurate when at 8 am they sighted a dinghy; half an hour later eleven of a crashed Sunderland鈥檚 air crew were sipping hot cocoa aboard Starling. By coincidence, the captain of the aircraft and six members of the crew had been in the Sunderland which had destroyed the U-461 at the time when the Group had raced across the Bay under the 鈥淕eneral Chase鈥�. Later that day, Kite and Woodcock rejoined having had an adventurous twenty-four hours assisting XE 11 through a danger area. At one time the two sloops had sailed into the outfield to meet a formation of JU 88s flying in low to attack the convoy. The aircraft were met by the combined fire of the ships and, after a thirty-minute engagement in which neither side scored hits, the enemy broke off the action without getting nearer to their main target. The Group returned to Liverpool on the 20th with fourteen airmen and four French tunnymen, the latter, if anything, more excited at their adventure and the prospect of being guests of the British Government than the RAF men returning to fly again. Between May and August, the U-boat Arm had taken a severe beating. In the Bay, Coastal Command aircraft and the Second Support Group had made the passage en route to the Atlantic a dangerous undertaking; on the northern Atlantic convoy routes, increased escort groups operating under continuous air cover were taking a heavy toll of the 鈥減acks鈥�. The stamina and efficiency of the U-boat crews began to wilt and when they returned to harbour there was no rest, for the Allied offensive was maintained by nightly visits to the Biscayan bases by Bomber Command. By August Admiralty Intelligence could report: 鈥淭he U-boats have been forced on the defensive and for the moment appear to have no antidote for the great and growing power of the Allies working together in unison on the sea and in the air.鈥� This was unusually encouraging from a source which preferred to survey the Atlantic scene cautiously; and it gave rise to the premature hope that, if the battle were not yet won, victory was at least in sight. Doenitz, probably the finest U-boat tactician Germany had ever produced, made a practice of probing our defences and striking hard when a weak link was exposed in the thin chain stretching over the vast, lonely wastelands of the north and south Atlantic. By the time we had raced reinforcements to one area he had found a crack elsewhere. Late in August, he discovered that Allied convoys from America to North Africa were being routed for speed 500 miles southwest of the Azores, an area which shore-based aircraft could not reach, and returned to the offensive in two directions. He spread more than a hundred U-boats across the Atlantic, some to cut the smaller supply arteries off Rio de Janeiro, Freetown, Mexico and the West Indies, while his main forces were concentrated in the 鈥淏lack Hole鈥� to intercept convoys taking the southern route to the Mediterranean and again along the northern routes to disrupt the supplies of men and materials gathered in Britain for the invasion of Normandy. This offensive was accompanied by the introduction into the Battle of the Atlantic of two new weapons which struck a sombre chord in the wearied breasts of our sailors who were faced yet again with the spectre of U-boat supremacy and the mass destruction of convoys. The first of these 鈥渟ecret weapons鈥� made its appearance on September 20th when two west-bound convoys, one of nearly fifty ships and the other of some thirty-odd, both with escorts, were within ninety miles of each other nearly 700 miles out into the Atlantic. Long-range air cover was supplied by Liberators from Iceland, and twenty U-boats were known to be operating in the vicinity. At dawn, one of the escorts was torpedoed, losing her stern, and soon afterwards the two merchant ships nearest to her were also torpedoed. One of the escorts took the stricken warship in tow, and miraculously she made port barely afloat. Meanwhile, the two convoys joined forces at noon and pooled their escorts, an operation easier to order than effect. Nearly 100 merchant ships had to be re-organised without loss of speed by a handful of escorts. The senior officer of the combined escort group, Commander (now Captain) M. J. Evans, wrote later: 鈥淭he two convoys gyrated majestically round the ocean never appearing to get much closer to a union and watched appreciatively by a growing swarm of U-boats.鈥� The combined convoy was seven miles deep and eight miles across when the first attacks developed after dark. For the next five nights, sometimes in dense fog, they were under continuous assault and eventually reached safety on the sixth day, at a price. Despite the strain of handling so many ships in fog while knowing that the U-boat 鈥減acks鈥� were in contact by hydrophones, only six merchant ships were lost. Far more serious was the loss of three warships and another damaged, for the probable destruction of three U-boats. Curiously, all the warships torpedoed had reported their sterns blown off.
An intense interrogation began of the crew of the one that made port under tow to find the answer to this curious phenomenon. This enquiry, followed by an analysis of the escort鈥檚 manoeuvring at the time she was hit, when added to the reports of the three warships which had been sunk, reached an astonishing and alarming conclusion. The enemy was apparently using a torpedo which followed a ship鈥檚 course and struck her in the stern. Intelligence soon provided indisputable evidence that Doenitz was equipping his U-boats with three or four of these acoustic weapons, and the true picture began to unfold. This deadly torpedo was intended primarily to destroy escorts so that a convoy would be left unprotected at the mercy of ordinary torpedoes. The new weapon could be fired at extreme range in the general direction of an escort. It would then 鈥渉ear鈥� her propellers and automatically alter course towards the target, faithfully following her zigzags until hitting the propellers and blowing off her stern. This provided a disquieting thought to depth-charge crews whose action station was on quarter decks. Only experience in action would produce a counter-measure; meanwhile, morale among the escorts of the Western Approaches Command took a serious knock. What could be done about torpedoes which followed you around until they hit? The second weapon made its appearance in the battle late in September while the Second Support Group, still without Woodpecker, was patrolling off Lorient searching for U-boats which continued to creep across the Bay surfacing only at night for the minimum time necessary to charge their batteries. They saw nothing on this patrol, although on September 29th a signal was received warning all ships of an air attack in which an escort had been subjected to a 鈥済lider bomb鈥� assault.

Continued.....
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