Rodger Winn

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Lord Justice of Appeal (1965-1971)
Lord Chancellor's Law Reform Committee (1963-)
Criminal Law Revision Committee (1964-)
Chairman, Permanent Security Committee (1964-1971)
Committee on Personal Injury Litigation (1966-1968)
Governor of St Thomas' Hospital
and Chairman of Council of Medical School (1965-1970)

Sir Charles Rodger Noel Winn, CB, OBE (22 December 1903 – 4 June 1972) was a British judge and Royal Navy intelligence officer who led the tracking of German U-boat operations during World War II.

Early life

Winn suffered from

called to the bar by the Inner Temple in 1928 and joined the chambers of Sir Patrick Hastings
.

War service

At the outbreak of war in 1939, Winn volunteered for service as an interrogator of German prisoners. But he was soon assigned to the

Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve
. It is a measure of his ability that he received this rank and position without formal naval officer training, which was unprecedented at the time, and that he displaced his former superior. Winn's advancement was no surprise to his colleagues and he extended his influence within the OIC.

During the

Ernest King (the formidable USN commander in chief), to implement a convoy system.[2]

Winn was a keen student of

Beobachtungsdienst (Signals Intelligence Service) had been reading BAMS since the start of the conflict.[3]

In 1944, the Germans equipped the U-boats with snorkels, so that they could operate without surfacing. It was still extremely difficult for a U-boat to navigate without surfacing. But U-boats operating in the dangerous waters south of Ireland managed anyway. Winn guessed that they were using their depth sounders to locate and fix on a particular conical seamount. He arranged for a double agent to send a bogus message, warning the Germans of a new British minefield "where [the U-boats] go to fix their position." The Germans soon declared a zone 60 miles square, prohibited to U-boats and centered on that seamount.[4]

Winn's war-time work was crucial to the Allied success in the Battle of the Atlantic. Without this success, Britain might have been forced out of the war.

By the war's end, Winn attained the rank of

OBE in 1943, and the American Legion of Merit
in 1945.

Post-war career

Winn returned to the Bar after the war. From 1954 to 1959, he served as

Privy Counsellor
. He also served on several important official and legal committees.

Rodger Winn died on 4 June 1972.[6]

Honours and awards

References

  1. ^ "Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve (RNVR) Officers 1939-1945". Retrieved 2 September 2007.
  2. ISBN 0-06-092088-2
    .
  3. ISBN 978-0-684-83130-5
    .
  4. ISBN 978-0-698-10882-0
    .
  5. ISBN 0-06-016155-8
    , p. 340
  6. ^ a b "WINN, Rt Hon. Sir (Charles) Rodger (Noel)". Who Was Who. Oxford University Press. April 2014. Retrieved 6 December 2016.
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