By 1943, expansion of Allied antisubmarine force, improvement of Air operations against submarines, including aircraft operating from small escort carriers, were making life difficult for German submarines. Admiral Doenitz, the German submarine commander, explained his withdrawal of the force by improvements in Allied ASW weapons and organization. Here is his report.
Doenitz' list is incomplete. How did the Allied ASW forces know where to look for German submarines? It's a big ocean out there.
The Allies knew where to look because of their great successes in communications intelligence. They intercepted and decrypted German orders to submarines, even orders encrypted by Germany's latest Enigma machines. When Germany began changing their communications keys several times a day, cryptanalysts kept up.
They tracked submarines using the extensive Allied High Frequency Direction Finding network ("Huff-Duff"), even when the submarines began compressing the messages and sending them in "burst" transmissions.
The war was fought and won not only on the high seas and in the air, but more significantly in the back rooms of headquarters, using the black arts of cryptanalysis.
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