Operational research and the Royal Canadian Air Force Eastern Air Command's search for efficiency in airborne anti-submarine warfare, 1942--1945

This thesis analyses the contributions of operational research to the work of the Royal Canadian Air Force Eastern Air Command during the Second World War. The efforts of the handful of Canadian operational researchers in the Allied campaign against the German U-boat force, although having produced only modest results, did make a small but important contribution to the war which have been neglected by historians.; The techniques of operational research, first promulgated during the British experiments with radar during the 1930s, were, by 1941, applied to assist Royal Air Force Coastal Command in its campaign against the German U-boats which were taking an ever-increasing toll of Allied shipping. The work of P. M. S. Blackett and his staff at Coastal Command Operational Research Section would serve as the foundation upon which Eastern Air Command's Operational Research Section (ORS) would be constructed when it was created in November 1942.; Under the leadership of Professor Colin Barnes and later Dr. J. W. T. Spinks, Eastern Air Command ORS produced a series of studies which explored issues of concern to the Command's anti-submarine (bomber-reconnaissance) squadrons. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...