Type IX/D2

[Morpheus]

Originally Posted by martes86

Oh, BTW, I also think he's a little wrong when saying that the movie is propaganda.

this was the reason for me to reply on his post in the first place. so at least we both agree in that point

[Rockin Robbins]

Martes, the movie is typical German anti-war propaganda, similar, but much more poorly done than Im Westen nichts Neues. But, seeing that our other participant here is in other threads being incendiary, it's best to just

[martes86]

Originally Posted by Rockin Robbins

Martes, the movie is typical German anti-war propaganda

Oh, now I understand what you meant... ok... I don't like the word propaganda anyways... makes one feel as if beeing adoctrinated in some way...

And, it's not like it'd be good if it was pro-war propaganda, is it?

[Morpheus]

after all i think this was a funny but weird discussion

muchos salutos and hasta luego spaniard

morph

[martes86]

That's what we're all after. Fun.
In a way, I'm glad we all had fun writing these lines.

[Rockin Robbins]

Here is how superior U-Boats were. This is absolutely devastating and shows how pitiful the entire U-Boat gambit really was:

From Jak Mallmann Showell's U-boat Commanders and Crew 1935-1945:

Horst Bredow of the German U-boat Archive has records of 1,171 U-boats having been commissioned between 1935 and 1945. If one combines this figure with the famous Churchill comment the the only thing that frightened him throughout the war was the U-boat threat, then it is easy to conjure up visions of hundreds of bloodthirsty U-boat commanders prowling the waters around the British Isles and along the eastern seaboard of the United States. However, the figure of 1,171 boats is grossly misleading, and does not reflect the reality of the war at sea. The number of Allied ships which were attacked and at least damaged can be calculated from Axis Submarine Successes by Dr. Jürgen Rohwer. The details for the Atlantic and North Sea are as follows:

25 U-boats attacked, sunk, or at least damaged 20 or more ships
36 U-boats attacked between 11 and 19 ships
70 U-boats attacked between 6 adn 10 ships
190 U-boats attacked between 1 and 5 ships

This adds up to a total of 321 U-boats. Ships sunk in the Black Sea, Mediterranean, Baltic, and Indian Ocean will make the total rather higher, and one could allow a few more for calculation errors. However the probable total still leaves a staggering gap of about 850 U-boats which appear not to have sunk or damaged anything throughout the entire war. In fact almost all of these, representing three-quarters of the whole U-boat Arm, never came within shooting distance of the enemy. School boats, supply boats, experimental craft, and boats commissioned towards the end of the war which were never in a position to sink ships, could be discounted; but there still appears to be a huge discrepancy between the number of U-boats commissioned and the number which actually attacked the enemy. This makes one wonder why Germany put so much effort and so many resources into building submarines, if the majority never achieved anything other than tying down the vast enemy forces which hunted and destroyed them.

It might be worth adding that these figures were not calculated with hindsight: they were available to U-boat Command at the time, and the only difference between then and now is that we now know that U-boat commanders generally overestimated their tonnage sunk by about one third.

Looking at the same figures from a different angle, one might consider that these ships were sunk by men rather than by machines. Out of a total of about 2450 Allied ships sunk in the Atlantic one finds that 30 U-boat commanders were responsible for sinking just under 800 of these. This means that 2% of the U-boat commanders were responsible for sinking almost 30% of the Allied shipping losses in the central area of the submarine war.

In what way was such a dismally performing military arm with so many machines and so little actual achievement going to possibly succeed? Most U-Boats were just hiding and trying to survive, using the "ostrich theory" that I make fun of so much in the fleet boat strategy bull sessions. Yikes! I had no idea it was so bad. It just totally flies in the face of all U-Boat fanboy mentality. Heck, it flies in the face of what I thought was my considered opinion of their effectiveness. Only 321 of about 1,200 U-Boats offensively engaged the enemy at all. Disgraceful.

[Rockin Robbins]

Originally Posted by martes86

Oh, now I understand what you meant... ok... I don't like the word propaganda anyways... makes one feel as if beeing adoctrinated in some way...

And, it's not like it'd be good if it was pro-war propaganda, is it?

That's not it at all. All Quiet on the Western Front is excellent anti-war propaganda. There are many, many great anti-war films and books, Walt Whitman's Specimen Days being a fabulous one. "Propaganda" is not a disparaging word, but only a descriptive word signifying the intent of the work. Good propaganda is that which uses the truth to convince. Bad propaganda is that which cannot defend the position with the truth (because the position is defective or the author is) and resorts to using distortion. The distortion in Das Boot doesn't even support the anti-war stance of the movie, just discredits it! It's not distortion with the intent to deceive, it's distortion born of laziness and sloppiness.

That is made even less excusable by the fact that the book the movie draws from is much better. Hey! American movie makers do even worse, ala Titanic. Das Boot has LOTS of company.

[Dread Knot]

None of this surprises me. Clair Blair states in the preface to his book, Hitler's U-Boat War that perhaps no weapon in WW2 is as mythologized as the U-Boat. Churchill inflated the U-Boat threat to help draw a neutral America's sympathy and support for the Britain The Germans exploited the threat for their own propoganda purposes.

Perhaps the greatest contribution they actually made was forcing the Allies to convoy, thereby slowing the movement of men and material.

[Rockin Robbins]

Originally Posted by Dread Knot

None of this surprises me. Clair Blair states in the preface to his book, Hitler's U-Boat War that perhaps no weapon in WW2 is as mythologized as the U-Boat. Churchill inflated the U-Boat threat to help draw a neutral America's sympathy and support for the Britain The Germans exploited the threat for their own propoganda purposes.

Perhaps the greatest contribution they actually made was forcing the Allies to convoy, thereby slowing the movement of men and material.

I think he also made his statement with the aim of encouraging Germany to plow even more men, money, resources and time into a dead end that had no power to help Germany's war effort and could not avoid pulling the United States into the war. Recruiting the US was one of Mr Churchill's most cherished goals. The U-Boats helped him immensely.

There you go making my mistake of misspelling propaganda as "propoganda." How is anybody going to believe us if we can't spell?:rotfl:And I patented that goof. You are expressly forbidden to copy it. Come up with your own misspelling!

[mookiemookie]

Originally Posted by Rockin Robbins

Here is how superior U-Boats were. This is absolutely devastating and shows how pitiful the entire U-Boat gambit really was:

In what way was such a dismally performing military arm with so many machines and so little actual achievement going to possibly succeed? Most U-Boats were just hiding and trying to survive, using the "ostrich theory" that I make fun of so much in the fleet boat strategy bull sessions. Yikes! I had no idea it was so bad. It just totally flies in the face of all U-Boat fanboy mentality. Heck, it flies in the face of what I thought was my considered opinion of their effectiveness. Only 321 of about 1,200 U-Boats offensively engaged the enemy at all. Disgraceful.

Well, you obviously have a fleet boat bias, but to say that a technology, in this case the u-boat, is inferior because of the odds stacked against it and the tactical deployment of it is not correct. You need to judge it on it's own merits. Was the boat suited for the task in which it was asked to do? Could it effectively remain deployed for a substantial length of time once on station? Was the armament it carried adequate for the task? You need to drill down to the micro unit level, not the macro strategy level.

[Rockin Robbins]

Hold it! That's German source material, written by a German who couldn't give a rat's patootie about fleet boats. Personally I like U-Boats a lot and play the German side of SH4 about as much as the American side. I went four months after the release of UBM without touching my fleet boat. One of the tutorials in the Sub Skippers' Bag of Tricks, the Fast-90 Technique, is applicable ONLY to U-Boats. How's that for fleet boat bias? Any U-Boat fans around here writing targeting tutorials for fleet boats? I thought not.

Have I not said that the Germans would have obtained the same results with a fleet of American boats? Or a fleet of Type XXI's also? Have I not been the only one to object when a fleet boat fanboy said that the fleet boats were several times better than the U-Boats?

I think you need to re-read the things I've written. My contention is that the American fleet boats were a little better in most respects than U-Boats, although there were aspects of U-Boats that were better than fleet boats. I have said that the Americans could have won the Pacific with a fleet of Type IXs. I've said the Germans could have lost the Atlantic with a fleet of fleet boats, even though they were demonstrably incrementally better boats.

The Battle of the Atlantic was not winnable with submarines. They were not an appropriate tool to use for the job of winning World War II for the Germans. A great crescent wrench (adjustable spanner for those across the pond) will not help me work on my computer. It doesn't matter if it is made of titanium, is computer controlled and costs a million dollars, a crescent wrench of any quality is useless for the job. Saying that is not the same as attacking crescent wrenches. It doesn't make me biased in favor of screw drivers either. I own and enjoy both crescent wrenches and screwdrivers and use them when they are appropriate.

[Kapitan Soniboy]

I can't really understand why you keep saying that the fleet boats were so much better than the german boats. You're wrong. Perhaps the radar is something the germans would have liked though.

Then why did both the americans and the russians copy german technollogy in every way after the war? Here, let me show you something:

http://www.richard-seaman.com/Wallpa...egreesLeft.jpg

http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/russia...9-farmr_p4.jpg

These pictures show the russian MIG and the american Sabre Jet which were used in the korean war. Do you think they look similar to each other? They were copies of german technollogy. Without german rocket technollogy, the americans wouldn't have been able to reach the moon in 1969! The type XXI submarine was copied by the americans and russians after the war. The allies were stunned by the german superior technollogy. When the americans captured U-505, they knew they were far behind. You know I'm right!

But the germans had never heard the word "mass produce" before. They always had to come up with something new.

[Torplexed]

I don't think anyone is implying that fleet boats would have done any better than U-Boats in the Battle of the Atlantic. However, as Rockin Robbins has stated the battle was probably not winnable with submarines...certainly not with conventional submarines. Even if the vaunted Type XXI had it become operational sooner it would have found itself hounded by Allied weapons in the development pipeline like MAD (magnetic anomaly detection gear) sonabouys, dipping sonar from helicopters, better homing torpedoes, etc.

I concede the Germans were ahead in rockets, missiles and jets. However, had they somehow by some miracle won the war they doubtless would have raided and copied Allied technology in areas like ASW, electronic warfare, amphibious techniques, strategic bombers, aircraft carrier technology and the atomic program where the western allies were miles ahead of them. To the victor go the spoils.

The allies were stunned by the german superior technollogy. When the americans captured U-505, they knew they were far behind. You know I'm right!

If it was so stunningly superior how the hell did U-505 get blasted to the surface and captured intact by these backwards Americans? Shouldn't it have been the other way around?

[Rockin Robbins]

Originally Posted by Kapitan Soniboy

I can't really understand why you keep saying that the fleet boats were so much better than the german boats. You're wrong. Perhaps the radar is something the germans would have liked though.

Then why did both the americans and the russians copy german technollogy in every way after the war? Here, let me show you something:

http://www.richard-seaman.com/Wallpa...egreesLeft.jpg

http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/russia...9-farmr_p4.jpg

These pictures show the russian MIG and the american Sabre Jet which were used in the korean war. Do you think they look similar to each other? They were copies of german technollogy. Without german rocket technollogy, the americans wouldn't have been able to reach the moon in 1969! The type XXI submarine was copied by the americans and russians after the war. The allies were stunned by the german superior technollogy. When the americans captured U-505, they knew they were far behind. You know I'm right!

But the germans had never heard the word "mass produce" before. They always had to come up with something new.

The Americans did not copy the Type XXI. They did not need to. The fleet boat was already superior. All they did was reskin the fleet boat and it was over a knot faster both on the surface and submerged. How about posting a picture of an American copy of the Type XXI. There aren't any!

What German plane did the Sabre and MIG 15 copy? You show a Russian and American plane, but no German plane. The Russian could have copied tha American or the American could have copied the Russian, but you have not established that either was a copy of a German design. I'm not saying that ideas weren't derived from German swept wing experimental planes, but jet engines were more advanced in Britain and the US than in Germany.

When the Americans captured U-505 they knew that the Germans were no supermen and our subs were better. I'm sure they studied the optics in the periscope and the German sonar to see if they could pick up any pointers, and they were interested in German homing torpedo designs, but the German homing torpedoes were much less effective than the American cutie. The German design looked good on paper but never sank a target in real life.

By the way, there were no similarities in design, fuel, controls, construction techniques or anything other than the fact that it was a rocket between the V2 and Saturn V rockets. It isn't like they strapped two dozen V2s together and went to the moon. Also, the rocket was only one element of thousands of individual elements that had to work together to get to the moon (the lunar excursion module, for instance had nothing to do with German technology), computers, space suits, fuel, navigational systems, communications, food, water, life support, all the things the Germans never even dreamed of in their rocket program. Von Braun's contribution was a tiny part of the whole. And he had competition with equally good ideas that were not adopted. They will be used next.

Kapitan, aside from taunting, you don't have any ammunition in your popgun. Time to fold the tent and look for a discussion in which you can be an actual participant. If photos of a couple of planes, where you can't even compare the planes meaningfully by the too dissimilar angles, and without establishing that they copied a German design, is the best you got, you're way over your head here.

[The Fishlord]

Originally Posted by Rockin Robbins

What German plane did the Sabre and MIG 15 copy? You show a Russian and American plane, but no German plane. The Russian could have copied tha American or the American could have copied the Russian, but you have not established that either was a copy of a German design. I'm not saying that ideas weren't derived from German swept wing experimental planes, but jet engines were more advanced in Britain and the US than in Germany.

Sorry, just had to say it. The Soviets captured the wind tunnel prototypes and schematics for it, progressed up to the MiG15, then the Americans copied that for the Sabre.