They Called It “Impossible” — Until His Weapon Sank 47 U-Boats

Spring 1941, North Atlantic. A British destroyer races through Blackwater, hunting a submarine that’s stalking a convoy of merchant ships carrying food, fuel, and ammunition to a starving Britain. The Azdic operator’s voice crackles through the bridge. Contact bearing 090, range 800 yd. The captain orders full speed ahead.

The destroyer’s bow crashes through the waves. 700 yd 600 500. The Aztec pings grow louder, faster, more urgent. 400 yd, 300. And then silence. The echo disappears. The submarine has vanished from the sonar screen. Not because it’s gone, because the destroyer is too close. The sound beam can’t track targets at close range.

The physics of underwater acoustics create a deadly blind spot. For the next 90 seconds, the crew will be firing completely blind. The captain shouts orders. The destroyer charges forward, passing over where the submarine should be. Depth charges roll off the stern, splashing into the water behind the ship.

The crew counts seconds, 20, 30, 40. At 200 ft depth, the hydrostatic fuses trigger. Massive explosions erupt. Water columns shoot skyward. The destroyer shakes from the shock waves. The captain watches the surface, waiting for debris, waiting for oil, waiting for anything that proves they hit their target. Nothing.

The submarine commander had 90 seconds of invisibility. 90 seconds to turn hard left. 90 seconds to dive deeper. 90 seconds to escape. The depth charges exploded exactly where the submarine used to be. By the time the water settled, the yubot was half a mile away, lining up a torpedo shot at the convoy.

This scene repeats thousands of times across the Atlantic. British escorts fire. German submarines evade. The  mathematics are brutal. For every submarine they sink, they fire an average of 60 depth charge attacks. 60 attacks, one kill. The Yubot are winning. And in London, a Canadian scientist who grew up causing explosions in his friend’s attic is about to do something that the British military establishment insists is physically impossible. His name is Charles Good.

He’s not a naval officer. He’s not a weapons expert. He’s a chemist who studies how the human eye perceives color. And he’s going to invent a weapon that will change the course of the Battle of the Atlantic. But first, he’s going to have to crash Winston Churchill’s lunch because the British Navy absolutely refuses to believe him.

This is the story of the hedgehog anti-ubmarine mortar. This is the story of how one stubborn Canadian fought the Royal Navy’s bureaucracy just as hard as he fought Hitler’s Ubot. This is the story of a weapon so effective that when a single American destroyer got its hands on it, the ship sank six Japanese submarines in 12 days, a record that has never been matched in naval history.

They told him his idea was impossible. They told him it had been rejected three times over 30 years. They told him that even if God Almighty himself proposed it, the British military would still say no. He built it anyway. February 21st, 1904. Nepawa, Manitoba, Canada. Charles Frederick Goodve comes into the world in a small prairie town, son of an Anglican clergyman with more conviction than money.

His father serves the church faithfully, but earns barely enough to support a growing family. His mother, though, possesses something more valuable than wealth. She has determination. She resolves to do the very best for her children despite her husband’s slender income. The Good Eve family has no history of scientists or inventors.

Charles’s great-grandfather had been a brewer in Dorset, England before immigrating to Canada. That’s it. That’s the only technologist in the entire family tree, a brewer. Everything else Charles will accomplish he’ll have to figure out himself. His childhood friends remember him as an unsociable boy older than his years. While other children play in town, Charles disappears for weeks at a time.

He loads his canoe with supplies, brings his husky dog as his only companion, and vanishes onto Lake Winnipeg. Hundreds of miles, just him, the dog, and the water. He doesn’t need other people. He has questions that need answering and experiments that need conducting. At 97 Chestnut Street in Nepawa, his friend John Parton’s mother tolerates something that most parents would absolutely forbid.

She allows Charles and his scienceobsessed classmates to use the upstairs room as an experimental laboratory. The boys gather there after school. They fill beakers with chemicals. They mix compounds. They heat substances over open flames. John Parton would later recall the chaos with a mixture of pride and terror. Any of Charles’s classmates interested in  science always congregated upstairs in our house.

They filled the air with vile smells and small explosions. The object was to see how bad they could make the smells and how loud the explosions. His mother was furious. She was always afraid they would burn the house down. They never quite managed to burn down the house, but they came close. Charles Good, aged 12, is learning something that will serve him well decades later when he’s fighting German submarines.

He’s learning that sometimes you achieve impossible things by simply refusing to accept that they’re impossible. You try, you fail, you adjust, you try again. Eventually, something explodes. He also rigged up an entirely unauthorized telegraph system. He ran wires across the street from his house to his friend’s house, stringing them secretly.

so he could transmit messages. When adults discovered what he’d done, they made him take it down. Charles didn’t care. He’d proven he could do it. That was what mattered. In 1919, 15-year-old Charles enters the University of Manitoba. His family can’t afford tuition easily, but his mother is determined. She will find a way.

Charles enrolls as an art student. He’s supposed to study commerce, business, accounting. He hates every second of it. He discovers very quickly that he greatly dislikes balancing books and numbers. The entire discipline bores him to tears. He doesn’t want to track money. He wants to understand how the universe works.

He switches to science, chemistry, and physics. His parents worry about his job prospects. Charles doesn’t care. This is what makes sense to him. Money is tight, perpetually tight. He works every summer to scrape together enough funds to continue. Some years he’s not sure he’ll be able to afford the next semester, but he persists.

In 1925, he earns his bachelor of science with honors in chemistry and physics. In 1927, he completes his master of science in electrochemistry. In 1923, while still an undergraduate, Charles makes a decision that seems utterly disconnected from his future. He joins the Royal Canadian Naval Volunteer Reserve. Not because he dreams of military glory, not because he wants to serve his country in uniform.

He joins because he loves sailing and because the naval pay more than covers his expenses as a struggling student. Charles Good has no idea that this casual choice will eventually position him to save the Atlantic convoys. He just wants to go sailing and get paid for it. In 1927, his academic achievements earn him something remarkable, an 1851 research fellowship to study at University College London.

The fellowship commemorates the great exhibition of 1851 and funds the brightest Commonwealth scientist to study in Britain. Charles boards a ship and crosses the Atlantic, leaving Manitoba behind. In London, he studies under Frederick Donan, one of the world’s leading physical chemists. Charles’s research focuses on photochemistry, how light interacts with chemical compounds, and the physical chemistry of vision.

How does the human eye actually perceive color? What chemical reactions occur in the retina when photons strike it? These questions fascinate him. By 1940, at age 36, his work is so distinguished that he’s elected fellow of the Royal Society. This is one of science’s highest honors. Only the most exceptional researchers receive it.

Charles Frederick Goodivv, the unsociable boy from Nepawa who blew up his friend’s attic, is now Sir Charles Goodivv, recognized worldwide authority on physical chemistry. And then Hitler invades Poland and everything changes. September 3rd, 1939. Britain declares war on Germany. Within months, German yubot are tearing apart British shipping.

The submarines operate in coordinated groups that the British call wolf packs. They wait along the convoy routes. When merchant ships appear, loaded with food and fuel and weapons, the submarines attack. Torpedoes streak through the water. Ships explode. Sailors drown. Thousands of tons of desperately needed cargo sink to the bottom of the Atlantic.

Britain is an island. It cannot feed itself. It cannot fuel itself. It cannot arm itself. Everything must come by sea. If the Ubot cut the supply lines, Britain will starve into surrender without a single German soldier landing on its shores. Winston Churchill will later write that the only thing that ever really frightened him during the war was the Yubot peril.

Not the Blitz, not the threat of invasion, the submarines. Because if they won, nothing else mattered. The Royal Navy has destroyers and corvettes protecting the convoys. They have a technology called Azic, what the Americans call sonar. Azdic sends sound pulses through the water. When the pulses hit a submarine, they echo back. The operator can determine range and bearing.

In theory, this gives the escorts everything they need to kill submarines. In practice, Azdic has a fatal flaw. The sound beam projects forward and downward from the ship at a fixed angle. This creates a minimum detection range for a submarine at 100 ft depth. AIC loses contact at approximately 300 y. The submarine simply gets too close.

The beam passes over it. Worse, as the range decreases, the outgoing ping and the returning echo start overlapping. They merge into unintelligible noise. The operator can’t distinguish between the signal going out and the signal coming back. The submarine vanishes from the screen. This creates what the naval officers call blind time.

After losing Azdic contact at 300 yd, the escort ship has to keep charging forward. The captain estimates where the submarine is. He orders full speed ahead. The ship passes over the submarine’s position, or where the captain thinks the position is, and drops depth charges off the stern. But here’s the problem. The submarine commander knows exactly when the escort loses a contact.

He’s been watching the pattern of the pings. The moment they stop, he knows he’s invisible. He has perhaps 90 seconds of complete freedom. 90 seconds where the escort is firing blind. 90 seconds is an eternity. The yubot commander orders hard right rudder. Full speed. Dive to 250 ft. By the time the depth charges sink to detonation depth, the submarine is hundreds of yards away from where it used to be.

The charges explode harmlessly. The crew feels the shock waves. The  boat shakes, but the hull holds. They’re alive. They escape. The  mathematics are absolutely brutal. Depth charges sink at approximately 6 to 9 ft per second. If a submarine is at 200 ft depth, it takes 22 to 33 seconds for the charges to reach detonation depth.

If the submarine is at 300 ft, the charges take 33 to 50 seconds. Some attacks require charges set for 400 ft or deeper. That’s 67 seconds. 100 seconds if the submarine has gone really deep. During all those seconds, the submarine is maneuvering, turning, changing depth, moving away from the attack point. The escort crew has to guess not only where the submarine is, but where it will be when the charges finally detonate.

They have to estimate the submarine’s course, speed, and depth. Then they set the hydrostatic fuses on the depth charges to explode at that exact depth. If their guess is wrong by 50 ft, the charges explode too shallow or too deep. The pressure wave dissipates. The submarine survives. The attacking crew gets no feedback. They can’t see the submarine.

They can’t track it. They just drop charges and hope. When the explosions erupt, the underwater chaos makes Azdic completely useless for the next 10 to 15 minutes. Debris, turbulence, temperature layers from the explosions, all of it scramles the sonar picture. The submarine commander uses this chaos to escape.

By the time the water settles and AIC starts working again, the Yubot is long gone. The statistics tell a grim story. Between September 1939 and May 1945, British escorts make 5,174 depth charge attacks against submarines. They achieve 85.5 confirmed kills. That’s a ratio of 60.5 attacks per kill. Roughly 1.65% success rate.

60 attacks, one kill. Some submarines survive astonishing punishment. U427 endures 678 death charges dropped against it in April 1945. 678 explosions. The crew counts every single one. The boat survives. Other submarines routinely withstand hours long barges, waiting for the escorts to run out of ammunition or give up.

The depth charge gives crews a psychologically satisfying experience. The weapons make tremendous noise. The ocean erupts in spectacular explosions. Sailors feel like they’re accomplishing something, but the mathematics don’t lie. 98.35% of the time, they’re accomplishing nothing except wasting ammunition and alerting every submarine in the area that an escort is nearby.

Naval officers understand the problem. They’ve understood it since World War I. Attacking blind is nearly useless, but nobody can figure out how to solve it. The physics seem insurmountable. AIC can’t track close targets. That’s just how the technology works. The minimum range is dictated by the speed of sound in water and the fixed angle of the beam. You can’t change that.

The only option is to charge forward, hope your estimate is correct, and drop charges behind you. In London, Charles Good is now Commander Charles Good. His Naval Reserve Commission has been activated. His expertise in chemistry and physics has brought him into a remarkable organization, the Department of Miscellaneous Weapons Development.

The staff nickname themselves the Wheezers and Dodgers. Their job is to invent solutions to impossible problems. Good studies the depth charge problem. He talks to destroyer captains. He reviews the attack statistics. He learns about the blind time. He learns about the abysmal success rates. And in the spring of 1940, he has an idea that’s so simple it sounds stupid.

What if you didn’t drop weapons behind the ship? What if you fired them ahead? The concept is straightforward. Instead of running over the submarine and dropping charges behind you, you fire projectiles forward while you still have Azdic contact. You aim ahead of the submarine. You launch weapons toward where the target is, not where it used to be.

The advantages are obvious. First, you maintain sonar contact throughout the attack. No more blind time, no more guessing. Second, you can fire from several hundred yards away before you lose contact. The submarine commander doesn’t get his 90 seconds of freedom. You’re already shooting while he’s still visible, but there are massive technical problems.

Problem one, you need a launcher that can throw heavy projectiles hundreds of yards forward. The launcher has to be small enough to fit on a destroyer’s for deck without making the ship unstable. It has to be simple enough that it won’t break down in the middle of combat, and it has to be cheap enough to massroduce.

Problem two, you need projectiles that will detonate when they hit the submarine, but won’t detonate when they hit the water. Traditional depth charges use hydrostatic fuses, pressure sensitive triggers set to explode at a specific depth. That won’t work for forward firing weapons because you don’t know what depth the submarine will be at when the projectile arrives.

Problem three, you need to solve the problem that nobody in naval warfare has figured out how to solve. If your weapon misses the submarine, you need it to not explode and create underwater chaos that blinds your sonar. Depth charges create massive disturbances whether they hit anything or not. That’s part of why they’re so ineffective.

You fire one pattern, lose sonar picture for 15 minutes, and the submarine uses that time to escape. Good Eve’s solution is radical. He proposes firing 24 projectiles simultaneously in a circular pattern. Each projectile carries a contact fuse. If it hits the submarine, it explodes. If it misses, it sinks silently to the bottom.

No explosion means no sonar disruption. You can immediately fire again if the first pattern misses. The concept requires a technology that the British military has rejected repeatedly. The spigot mortar. A spigot mortar works backwards from a traditional cannon. Instead of having a tube with a projectile inside it, you have a fixed rod, the spigot sticking up.

The projectile is hollow at the base. You slide the projectile down over the spigot. When you fire, explosive propellant in the hollow base detonates. The expanding gases push against the spigot, launching the projectile forward while the spigot stays in place. The British inventor Stuart Blacker had been promoting spigot mortars since the 1930s.

The military establishment dismissed the design every single time. Too unconventional, too unreliable, not proven. The ordinance board, the committee responsible for approving weapons, had rejected spigot mortars so many times that it became a running joke. Good Eve approaches a senior member of the ordinance board to discuss using spigot mortar technology for his anti-ubmarine weapon.

The response he receives is absolutely astonishing. The officer tells him this idea was put up by Major X in 1910 and it was turned down by the ordinance board. Then the spigot mortar was put up by Colonel Blacker in 1930 and was turned down again. It was put up by Major Jeff in 1939 and the ordinance board turned it down for the third time.

If God Almighty himself sponsored the spigot mortar, I tell you, it would still be turned down by the Ordinance Board. Goodie refuses to accept this. The Ordinance Board may have rejected the concept three times over 30 years, but the board isn’t fighting Yubot in the North Atlantic. The board isn’t watching merchant ships sink.

The board isn’t calculating how many weeks of food Britain has left before starvation forces surrender. The Department of Miscellaneous Weapons Development begins work on Good Eve’s weapon regardless of official approval. They need a name for the project. Someone suggests hedgehog because the launcher’s pattern of spiggots looks like a hedgehog spine sticking up.

The name sticks. Development starts in mid 1940. The team has to solve multiple problems simultaneously. They need to design a launcher that can fire 24 projectiles in a rapid succession without shaking itself apart. They need to develop projectiles stable enough to fly accurately through the air and sink predictably through water.

They need to create contact fuses sensitive enough to detonate against a submarine hull, but robust enough not to explode when they hit the ocean surface at high speed. The fuse problem falls to Lieutenant Commander HD Lucas. He spends months testing different designs. The fuse has to survive tremendous forces. When a 65lb projectile hits water at terminal velocity, the impact generates shock that would trigger most explosive mechanisms.

Lucas designs a system that uses the projectile’s own sinking motion to arm the fuse. During the first few seconds underwater, the fuse is mechanically locked. Only after the projectile sinks 15 to 20 ft as the arming mechanism engage. By then, the impact shock has dissipated. If the armed projectile then hits something solid like a submarine hull the fuse triggers the projectiles themselves are engineering marvels.

Each one weighs 65 lb total. 35 lb of that is Torpex, a more powerful explosive than standard TNT. The projectile measures 7.2 in in diameter and 46.5 in long. Tail fins set at a slight angle cause the projectile to spin during its descent, stabilizing it. The flat nose ensures it sinks vertically rather than tumbling or sliding off at angles.

Boozy and Hawks, the famous musical instrument company, gets the contract to manufacture the projectiles. Wartime production is strange. The same factories that made clarinets and flutes are now producing submarine killing weapons. The launcher goes through multiple iterations. The final Mark 10 version mounts 24 spigot mortars in six rows of four.

The entire assembly tilts forward at a 45° angle. When fired, the projectiles ripple launch in pairs 0.1 to 0.2 seconds apart. All 24 are in the air within seconds. They arc forward and land in an elliptical pattern approximately 200 yd ahead of the ship. The pattern measures roughly 140 ft x 120 ft. Anywhere in that ellipse, a projectile might hit a submarine.

By early 1941, they have a working prototype. Test firing show it works. The pattern is consistent. The projectiles are stable. The contact fuses function correctly. Now, good eve needs official approval to produce it. The Royal Navy refuses. At Royal Navy headquarters, the expression to do a good eve becomes popular slang. It means to accomplish something by hook or by crook by any means necessary, regardless of proper procedure.

Some officers admire Good Eve’s determination, others resent it deeply. The military is a machine that runs on established procedure. Weapons development has a process. You submit proposals through channels. Committees review them. Testing protocols are followed. Production is authorized through proper chains of command.

Good Eve keeps shortcircuiting the process. He talks directly to admirals instead of going through the hierarchy. He arranges demonstrations without proper authorization. He pushes development forward before official approval arrives. He acts like the war is urgent, like there isn’t time for committees to meet and discuss and  table motions and schedule follow-up meetings in 6 weeks.

The establishment doesn’t appreciate this attitude. As one contemporary observer noted, all their working lives, the machine they served had run at a set tempo. If people like Good Eve thought they could shortcircuit longestablished procedure, they would have to be shown that the machine did not take kindly to attempts at acceleration.

The opposition to Hedgehog comes from multiple directions. Some officers argue it’s unnecessary. Depth charges work fine. The Ubot threat is exaggerated. Some claim it’s too complex. Destroyers already have enough equipment crowding their decks. Adding a forward firing mortar will make ships unstable. Some insist it won’t work.

The physics are wrong. The contact fuses will malfunction. The projectiles will detonate prematurely or not at all. According to Gerald Paul, who worked in Good Eve’s department and later wrote a detailed account, the hedgehog met furious resistance among certain establishments within the Royal Navy right from the start.

This opposition was expressed in constant sniping at the Hedgehog for shortcomings which had no foundation. In fact, again and again, DMWD’s development officers were obliged to stage extra trials or waste time on elaborate calculations on paper in order to refute criticism for which there was no real justification.

They criticize the weight too heavy. It’ll make destroyers bow heavy and unstable. Good Ever Ranges demonstrations proving the weight is manageable. They criticize the complexity. Too many moving parts. It’ll jam in combat. Good Ever Rangers reliability test showing the launcher functions consistently. They criticize the accuracy.

The pattern will be too scattered. Projectiles won’t land where intended. Good ever ranges live fire tests showing the pattern is predictable. Every time he refuts one criticism, they find another. By early 1941, Goody is fighting a two-front war. He’s fighting German submarines and he’s fighting his own side’s bureaucracy. Some days the bureaucracy seems more difficult.

The problem is that he needs authorization to begin mass production. Building prototypes is one thing. Equipping the fleet is another. That requires resources, steel, factory space, workers, priority in the production queue, authorization to divert materials from other projects. Only the highest levels of command can approve that.

In Good Eve’s own words, there was keen resentment at the intervention of his little department in a sphere outside its normal field of operations. The Department of Miscellaneous Weapons Development was supposed to handle small projects, emergency innovations, quick fixes. They weren’t supposed to be developing major weapon systems that could change fleet tactics.

Good Eve needs someone with unquestionable authority to see the hedgehog and understand its importance. Someone who can overrule the committees and the skeptics and the bureaucrats. Someone who can simply order production to begin. He needs Winston Churchill. The opportunity comes in spring 1941. Churchill is scheduled to attend a weapons demonstration at a firing range near Czechers, the prime minister’s country residence.

The demonstration is for a completely different weapon, something Churchill specifically requested to see. Good learns about this scheduled event. He makes a decision that could end his career if it goes wrong. He’s going to crash the demonstration without authorization, without an invitation, without permission from anyone.

Good Eve contacts Captain Jock Davies, who shares his frustration with the Navy’s resistance to innovation. They agree on a plan. They’ll show up at the demonstration site with a hedgehog launcher and projectiles. They’ll find a way to get past security. They’ll somehow convince Churchill to watch their demonstration instead of going to lunch.

It’s audacious to the point of absurdity. But Good Eve has run out of other options. On the scheduled day, Good Eve and Davies load the hedgehog equipment onto trucks and drive to the test site. They arrive at the security checkpoint. Military police ask for their passes. They don’t have passes. They weren’t invited. Davies simply wave some entirely irrelevant documents out of the truck window and keeps driving.

The guards, confused, let them through. They set up the launcher at the edge of the range. They wait for Churchill’s scheduled demonstration to finish. When it ends, Good Eve intercepts Lord Chirwell, Churchill’s personal  scientific adviser. He explains that they have something the prime minister absolutely must see.

Cherwell is skeptical but intrigued. He mentions it to Churchill. Churchill’s response is exactly what you’d expect from a man who’s been up since dawn dealing with a world war. I’m sorry, but I haven’t time to come and see this weapon now. I’m hungry. I want my lunch. Good Eve persists. Through Chirwell, he emphasizes that this weapon could change the Battle of the Atlantic.

It could solve the depth charge problem. It could save hundreds of ships, thousands of lives. It will only take a few minutes. Churchill, smiling rofully, gives in. The procession of cars drives to the hedgehog setup at Wit Church. The prime minister is tired. He’s hungry. He’s prepared to give this Canadian scientist exactly 3 minutes of his time before returning to his postponed lunch.

The demonstration begins. The launcher fires 24 projectiles in rapid sequence. They climb into the blue sky in pairs, creating a strangely graceful pattern. At the apex, they turn lazily over and begin their swift dive to Earth. They impact in a tight elliptical pattern, exactly where Good Eve said they would. Churchill watches in silence.

When the demonstration ends, he doesn’t move toward his car. He asks for a second demonstration, then a third. Here, at last, it seems, is the instrument which could turn the tide of the Yubot war. The following morning, First Seaord Admiral Sir Dudley Pound summons Good Eve. Pound’s words are exactly what Good Eve has been fighting for months to hear. This anti-ubmarine gun of yours.

How soon can you arrange a trial for me? Production is authorized. The Hedgehog will be built. The bureaucratic wall has finally cracked because Winston Churchill missed his lunch. The first operational hedgehog is installed on HMS WCOT in January 1942. Within months, dozens of escorts are being fitted with the weapon.

By 1943, it’s becoming standard equipment on convoy escorts in both the Royal Navy and the US Navy. The tactical difference is immediate and profound. A destroyer detects a submarine at 800 yd. A dikeke is solid. Range closes to 500 yd, still tracking. 400 yd, 300 y. Traditional tactics would now lose contact and force blind firing, but the hedgehog fires at 300 yd while sonar contact is still perfect.

The launcher ripples 24 projectiles forward. They land in an ellipse 200 yd ahead. Each projectile carries 35 lb of torpex and a contact fuse. If any projectile hits the submarine, it detonates. If all 24 miss, they sink silently. Silence means miss. Explosion means hit. The feedback is instant and unambiguous.

If the pattern misses, the aic picture remains clear. No underwater chaos, no debris fields, no temperature disruptions. The operator still has solid contact. The ship can maneuver and fire again immediately. Second pattern. Third pattern. Keep attacking while the submarine is still visible. The  mathematics transform from brutal to devastating.

For the submarines, early attacks show a success rate of approximately one kill per five or six attacks. Compare that to the 60 to1 ratio for depth charges. Hedgehog is roughly 10 times more effective. As crews gain experience and tactics improve, the ratio gets even better. By 1944, skilled operators achieve 20% success rates per attack pattern.

But there’s a problem. Crews don’t trust it. Sailors are used to depth charges. Depth charges are psychologically satisfying. You drop them. Massive explosions erupt. Water columns shoot skyward. The ship shakes. You feel like you’re doing something. You’re dropping tons of high explosives on the enemy.

It feels violent and powerful and effective. Hedgehog attacks that miss are discouragingly quiet. 24 projectiles splash into the water. Then nothing, just silence. No explosions, no visible effect. It feels like failure. crews start to doubt whether the weapon works at all. Maybe the fuses are defective. Maybe the projectiles aren’t sinking properly.

Maybe the whole thing is a waste. The Royal Navy has to issue a directive. By early 1943, captains are ordered to report why they did not use Hedgehog on underwater contacts. The directive exists because crews are actively avoiding the weapon in favor of traditional depth charges. They trust what they know, even though the statistics prove it doesn’t work.

The US Navy, interestingly, adopts Hedgehog more enthusiastically than the British. American destroyer escort crews embrace the weapon. They develop tactics specifically designed to maximize Hedgehog’s advantages. They practice coordinated attacks where multiple ships fire patterns simultaneously, creating overlapping coverage.

The improved results start appearing in afteraction reports throughout 1943 and 1944. HMS Swale sinks U1051 with Hedgehog in April 1945. HMS Lock Killllin destroys U774 in Hedgehog Attack in March 1945. HMS OR sinks U1169 with Hedgehog in March 1945. The list grows. But the most dramatic vindication of Good Eve’s weapon comes from an American destroyer escort in the Pacific.

A ship that will achieve something unprecedented in naval history. Her name is USS England. May 1944, Southwest Pacific. The destroyer escort USS England DEE635 is assigned to a Hunter killer group searching for Japanese submarines. Japan’s submarine squadron 7 has deployed boats to form an early warning line ahead of the American advance toward the Mariana Islands.

These submarines are supposed to detect the American fleet and radio warnings back to Japanese commanders. The England’s commanding officer is Lieutenant Commander Walton B. Pendleton. His executive officer is Lieutenant John A. Williamson. The ship carries a full hedgehog installation on the for deck. The crew is trained extensively with the weapon.

On May 19th, England detects a submarine contact. It’s a 16, a Japanese fleet submarine. The England sonar operator has solid contact. They close to firing range. First hedgehog attack, miss. Second attack, miss. Third attack, miss. Fourth attack, miss. Some captains would give up. Pendleton doesn’t. Fifth attack.

At 1433, somewhere between four and six projectiles strike Eye 16. The explosions lift England’s fan tail a full 6 in out of the water, then drops it back with a tremendous splash. The submarine’s pressure hole ruptures. Water floods in at tremendous pressure. The temperature inside the submarine climbs catastrophically as compression heats the air.

Within minutes, every man aboard is dead. I6 sinks to the bottom. Lieutenant Williamson later recalls the moment. We had with cataclysmic certainty heard the last of one Japanese submarine. Sobered and more than taken aback by that final blast, we no longer felt like cheering. They’ve just killed potentially 80 men.

The reality of what a hedgehog hit does to a submarine crew is viscerally, horrifically clear. 3 days later, May 22nd, England detects R106. Three hedgehog detonations. The submarine is destroyed. May 23rd, another ship in the group detects R104 and attacks eight times over two hours without success. England arrives. First attack 10 to 12 detonations.

RO104 is obliterated. May 24th, England finds R116, 3 to 5 detonations, another submarine gone. May 26th, England sinks R108 with four to six projectile hits. Five submarines in eight days. The England’s crew is exhausted but grimly efficient. They’re developing instincts for submarine hunting that most crews never acquire. May 31st.

Other ships detect R105. They attack the submarine for 30 hours straight. 21 separate attack runs. All miss. The submarine survives. Orders come for England to rejoin the fleet. The operation is over. They’re needed elsewhere. Pendleton defies orders. He takes England back to where RO105 was last detected. Against explicit instructions, he hunts for one more submarine.

His superiors will forgive him if he succeeds. They’ll court marshall him if he fails. England finds RO105. The hedgehog fires. Detonations. The sixth submarine dies. Six Japanese submarines sunk in 12 days. It’s a record that has never been matched. No other ship in naval history has achieved anything comparable. Admiral Ernest King, the US Chief of Naval Operations, sends a message that becomes famous.

There will always be an England in the United States Navy. The strategic effect is devastating for Japan. On June 15th, Admiral Toyota orders Submarine Squadron 7 to move east of Saipan to avoid further losses. Rear Admiral Aada commanding the submarine force sends a reply that’s both tur and tragic. The seventh submarine fleet has no submarines.

England has destroyed Japan’s entire early warning system for the central Pacific. When American forces invade the Maranas, there are no submarines to warn Tokyo. The attack achieves complete surprise. England’s 12-day rampage contributes directly to one of the most important American victories of the Pacific War. The England herself will be hit by a kamicazi attack in May 1945 and severely damaged.

She survives but never returns to combat. After the war, she’s decommissioned and eventually scrapped. But her achievement stands forever. Six submarines, 12 days, all killed by a weapon that British bureaucrats insisted was impossible. Charles Good watching from London has been vindicated in the most dramatic way possible. The statistics tell the story that bureaucrats couldn’t see.

5,174 British depth charge attacks, 85.5 kills, ratio of 60.5 to1, 268 hedgehog attacks, 47 confirmed submarine kills, ratio of 5.7 to1. Hedgehog is roughly 10 times more effective than the weapon it replaced. 10 times. That’s not a minor improvement. That’s a revolutionary change in naval warfare.

No submarine is known to have survived a direct hedgehog hit. The contact fused projectiles punch through pressure holes and detonate inside the submarine. The explosive forces contained by the surrounding water, focusing all the energy into the submarine’s interior. Crew compartments catastrophically flood. Temperatures spike above 200° F as compression heats the air.

Death comes within minutes, sometimes seconds. It’s brutal. It’s horrific, but it’s effective. The weapon spawns an entire family of a head throwing systems. The Squid, developed in 1943, improves on Hedgehog’s design with three-barreled mortars that automatically set depth based on sonar data. Squid achieves 17 kills in 50 attacks, a ratio of 2.

9 to1, even better than Hedgehog. The Limbo, introduced in 1955, serves Royal Navy and Commonwealth navies through the Cold War. It sees combat in the Falklands war in 1982. The American Azrock system carrying torpedoes or nuclear depth charges to ranges of 19 km eventually replaces Hedgehog in US service during the 1960s. But all of them trace their lineage to Charles Goodiv’s stubborn insistence that firing forward was better than firing blind.

For his wartime service, Good receives his OBC in 1941. In 1946, he’s kned. Sir Charles Frederick Goodivve. The United States awards him the Medal of Freedom. His own University of Manitoba grants him an honorary doctorate. The Royal Commission on Awards to Inventors grants him £7,500 for his work on magnetic mine countermeasures, the largest individual award for that category.

Good Eve generously shares the money with the people who helped him. Stuart Blacker, whose spigot mortar technology made hedgehog possible, receives £32,000 for his contributions to multiple weapon systems. After the war, Goodie returns to  science. He directs the British Iron and Steel Research Association from 1946 to 1969, pioneering the application of operational research methods to industrial problems.

He appears on the BBC television series The Secret War in 1977, finally discussing some of his classified wartime work publicly after decades of silence. He dies on April 7th, 1980 from Parkinson’s disease at age 76. His papers are preserved at the Churchill Archives Center, Cambridge. The Operational Research Society creates the Good Eve Medal awarded annually in recognition of the most outstanding contribution to the philosophy, theory, or practice of O.

The Naval Museum of Manitoba maintains his record as a memorable Manitoban. His legacy lives in every modern anti-ubmarine weapon, every ahead throwing system, every contactfused projectile. But perhaps his greatest legacy is simply this. He proved that impossible problems sometimes just require someone stubborn enough to refuse to accept that they’re impossible.

The British military told Good Eve his idea had been rejected three times over 30 years. They told him the ordinance board would never approve it. They told him that even God Almighty couldn’t get a spigot mortar approved. They were wrong. Good built it anyway. He crashed Churchill’s lunch. He fought bureaucracy as hard as he fought submarines.

And he created a weapon that saved thousands of lives. and changed the course of the Battle of the Atlantic. The statistics went from 60 attacks per kill to five attacks per kill. 10 times more effective. That’s the difference between losing the war and winning it. The USS England sank six submarines in 12 days using Hedgehog. No ship has matched that record in 80 years.

When experts tell you something is impossible, ask yourself, are they basing that on physics or on procedure? Are they saying it can’t be done? Or are they saying it hasn’t been done before? Good didn’t have better resources than the ordinance board. He didn’t have more authority. He didn’t have institutional support.

What he had was the stubborn conviction that the problem needed solving and that the current approach wasn’t working. He had the numbers. 60 attacks per kill meant sailors were dying while submarines escaped. He had a better idea. And he refused to accept no for an answer. When the world tells you your idea is impossible. Remember the boy from Manitoba who blew up his friend’s attic? Remember the chemist who studied color perception and ended up inventing submarine killing weapons? Remember the man who crashed the prime minister’s lunch because protocol wasn’t

more important than victory. They said it was impossible. They rejected it three times over 30 years. They insisted it would never work. He built it anyway and it saved the Atlantic. If this story moved you the way it moved us, do me a favor. Hit that like button. Every single like tells YouTube to show this story to more people who care about the heroes who got forgotten.

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