Just having finished Werner's Iron Coffins, I was puzzled by a reference to a destroyer with a large red lamp, which lead him to believe that he was being hunted by means of infra-red. I have always understood that the Germans were far in advance of the Allies in the field of infra-red detection, in fact the Allies hardly made any use of it at all during the war. Is there any factual basis for Werner's assumption? - it has never appeared in any of the books I have read about the U-boat war.

And while we are on the subject of detection, was the revelation by a British airman that Metox could be detected by Allied aircraft a deliberate misinformation plant? If so, it was certainly a great coup, delaying the recognition of centimetric radar for some time and allowing those planes still equipped with older radars to carry on using them when the U-boats were told to stop using Metox.

Jamie