Why US Navy Pilots Invented “Suicidal” Dive Bombing for U-Boat Kills
May 22nd, 1943. The North Atlantic was a gray, unforgiving expanse, a vast battlefield where survival and death were separated by only a few inches of steel and water. Lieutenant Commander William Drain gripped the controls of his TBF Avenger, the hum of the engine reverberating through his chest. Below, the sea churned, a dark mirror reflecting the storm clouds above. Somewhere in that endless gray lurked U569, a German U-boat, a predator that had claimed countless Allied lives. Today, it would confront its hunter.
Drain had been flying for hours, skimming the ocean in search of the telltale periscope or conning tower. He and his squadron from Composite Squadron 9 aboard USS Bogue had been taught to follow doctrine: high-altitude approaches, careful planning, release bombs from 400 feet. Safety first. But doctrine had failed them time and time again. Ships were still being sunk, sailors drowning in the icy Atlantic, convoys slipping through their fingers like shadows. High-altitude attacks gave U-boat crews precious seconds to dive to safety, and every missed attack meant another convoy destroyed. Drain knew that if something didn’t change, the war at sea would be lost.
The moment came. U569 surfaced, her diesel engines thrumming as she raced to intercept a convoy. Her deck gunners swung their twin 20mm cannons skyward, ready to shred any aircraft foolish enough to approach. Drain’s heart pounded, each beat a thunderclap in his chest. But he did not climb. He did not hesitate. He pushed the nose of the Avenger into a steep dive, plunging straight toward the submarine. His airspeed soared past 230 miles per hour, and the windscreen blurred with salt spray and adrenaline.
The U-boat gunners fired, tracer rounds whistling past his cockpit, cutting the air like angry fingers. Each shot was a gamble with death. One hit, one mistake, and he would join the thousands of sailors already resting in the cold Atlantic. But Drain had a plan, a single, desperate idea born from endless frustration and the raw necessity of survival. He dove lower, closer than any pilot dared—barely 50 feet above the waves. The ocean seemed to reach up, threatening to crush him, yet he pressed on, knowing that hesitation meant failure.
At a hundred feet, he released the four Mark 47 depth bombs. Time slowed. The bombs fell in a precise line, straddling U569’s pressure hull. The explosions shook the water violently, creating massive pressure waves that lifted the submarine’s bow skyward. Water surged, splintering wood and metal, and the sea swallowed nine of the crew before U569 finally sank beneath the waves. Forty-six survived, hauled from the freezing water by destroyer escorts, faces etched with terror and disbelief. Below them, the ocean closed over the submarine, erasing the danger from sight but not from memory.
Back on USS Bogue, Drain’s hands shook, a mixture of triumph and lingering fear. Intelligence officers listened as he described the attack, every word precise, yet heavy with exhaustion. “Low altitude. High speed. Dive at twenty degrees. Release at one hundred feet.” Each parameter was a life or death decision. This wasn’t recklessness; it was professional courage, the cold calculus of warfare distilled into action.
In the days that followed, the method proved devastatingly effective. Other pilots adopted the dive-bombing technique, attacking U-boats with speed and precision, taking what once was terrifying to the skies and turning it against their enemy. Submarines that had terrorized the Atlantic for three years suddenly became prey. The hunters had become the hunters of hunters.
But the human cost was staggering. Flying at such low altitudes through concentrated anti-aircraft fire meant that death was never far behind. Casualty rates for these pilots ranged from eight to ten percent per deployment, extraordinary even for wartime aviation. Each successful strike was a testament not just to skill, but to sheer courage—the kind that refused to let fear dictate action. For Drain and his comrades, the line between victory and death was so thin it could be erased by the blink of an eye.
The strategic impact was undeniable. German U-boat losses skyrocketed. Convoys that had once been easy targets were now protected, sailing more safely across the Atlantic. The Navy had discovered that sometimes, taking extraordinary risks yielded extraordinary results. The escort carriers, small and underestimated, became lethal weapons, their Avengers diving into near-certain death to secure the sea lanes that would make the D-Day invasion possible the following year.
Yet amid the statistics and tactics, there were moments of raw human emotion. Survivors of sunk U-boats clung to life, shivering in lifeboats as the Atlantic wind tore at their clothing. Families far away would learn of fathers, sons, and brothers lost to an ocean they could not tame. On the Bogue, pilots who survived another day of terror felt the weight of each life taken, each calculated risk, knowing that while their actions saved thousands, they also brought death in their wake. War, they learned, was never clean or fair.
Drain survived the war and retired as a decorated commander, his courage recognized with the Navy Cross. His technique, born from frustration and desperation, became standard doctrine, taught to every anti-submarine squadron, leaving an indelible mark on naval history. Yet the story that history remembers is not the numbers, the tactical manuals, or the sinking submarines—it is the human story of men who stared death in the face, accepted it, and used their courage to change the tide of war.
The Atlantic had been a graveyard for thousands of sailors, but on that May morning, with the gray water rushing toward him and U569 looming like a shadow, William Drain made a choice. One that required him to disregard safety manuals, ignore instinct, and push into the teeth of death itself. And in doing so, he changed the course of a war. Sometimes, history is decided not by fleets or empires, but by one man’s refusal to accept that conventional wisdom is always right. One dive, one bomb, one heartbeat at a time.
