To be clear: All major navies at the start of the war had decent radio direction finding gear, and the doctrine to use it.

We take for granted in the modern world that the use of active sensors is a tool of last resort since they, duh, give your position away completely. It's astounding that submariners that would have NEVER considered banging away with active sonar on patrol, had no problem using the radio, sometimes multiple times per day. Transmissions that could be DFed not just by nearby enemy warships, but by anyone with a shortwave set back on the mainland. Two guys with radios and a protractor, FTW.

Boggles the mind.

Eh... _did_ someone?

I just pointed out that the Allied victory wouldn't have happened without a hard and bloody land war on 2 major fronts - the Pacific and Eastern Europe. Tater's observation of the American victory over Japan having been all but impossible without the Silent Service is, however, entirely correct... so you guys are of course right as regards its importance in the Pacific War!

Something that I OTOH never argued against per se ;)

German: better hardware , hull, and optics but poor life conditions and electronics.

American : better life conditions, and very good electronics like radar, a lot of firepower (torpedo load and torpedo tubes)

American: a great torpedo computer / position keeper

I would say that the American hardware was considerably better than the Germans'. You MIGHT say the German hardware was better than an S-Boat, but only marginally so. They were both basically World War I technology. But all the fleet boats were head and shoulders better than any U-Boat except the Type XXI, which didn't see enough service to see if it was any good or just a forlorn hope.

Just the 50% more firepower up front was enough to make the above statement. But there are several dozen reasons the fleet boat was the best in the world.

The only thing I seem to recall was deeper diving due to round hatches or something like that (for u-boats). Course I don't think the later fleet boats were poor in terms of depth.

I'd say the germans had a marked superiority in optics, though, that's totally fair. And their worst torpedo nightmare could not have been as bad as the Mk 14 debacle, they get points for that.

Simple and too the point:up:

One is pretty hard pressed to say the Germans had "better hardware" and "optics" when you know about the enviornment your average ship designer worked in for the KM. :)

Actually for the optics, all you have to do is look through the periscope. German optics were the best in the world. As far as "equipment" I couldn't agree less. American equipment was consistently several steps better than the Germans.

The only exception was the torpedoes themselves, which were copied from the German models. In untypical American fashion, we copied them slavishly, right down to the defects! So our equipment was functionally identical with torpedoes. The Germans, however, placed much more credibility and emphasis on front line decision making. When their captains came back with reports of torpedo problems, the German command listened and responded quickly to fix the problem.

The American torpedoes, copied from the Germans, had the same defects, but American brass lent no credibility to their men on the front line and in very France-like (Italians would tend to do the exact same thing) fashion, insisted that the equipment was fine and the men were defective.

The fault there wasn't so much the equipment, which was pretty identical to German equipment, but the misuse of authority.

Detail by detail, you consistently see better design in the American boats. I'm not counting the Type XXI because it was never tested in combat. It could have been a total failure. All we know is that the concept was superior. The machinery is suspect.

I have to disagree with that. First of all, the peace with the britians was never an option after war started for the own britians. Hitler insistently wanted to keep them out of his war (I have readed enough quotes of him professing his respect and admiration for the brits), and repeatedly assured them that he just wanted to go eastwards. In fact, he even toyed with the illusion of Britain actively helping him defeat communism. But the British external politics in WW2 era remained unchanged in one aspect: They did NOT want someone as powerful as themselves in Europe (Specially germany, and secondarily, France), no matter at which cost. It was not the presence of U-Boats in the war what prevented a negotiated exit; it was simply Britain's knowledge of Hitler being even more dangerous if he was allowed to continue his expansion with no opposition. I don't even think that, had Britain stayed neutral after the invasion of Poland, they would have continued to be so after Hitler attacked the USSR. They allowed Hitler to rearm and expand as a way of keepinga counterbalance to the soviets in Europa, and if the USSR had attacked germany first, it is not improbable that Britain would have aided the germans.

Germany could in fact have wiped away the whole british army (Not the navy or the air force) in a hand-to-hand confrontation in 1939, (which is logic, given that germany worked a non-democratic state, preparing for the war as single purpose, while Britain was a democracy with a peace-time economy and not the slightest will for entering another war) but the germans were historically never in a situation to actually invade Britain. They weren't in 1914, and they weren't in 1940, even if the Luftwaffe had won the "Battle of Britain" (Which it didn't).

It is more than probable, however, that if Hitler had not invaded the URRS and instead strengthened his submarine and aerial blockade around Britain, devoting all his resources to that -instead of building tanks for the war on the ast front- he could have forced an Armistice. By summer of 1940, just before the Battle of Britain, the UK was in a very delicate situation, facing alone the german power, and had it not been for the english channel, I doubt much that they could have survived.

I do agree however in that Germany had not the slightest chance to win a war against the USA, even if fighting just against them and nobody else. The dimensions of the industrial and human power of the US were too far from anything germany could even dream of.

I believe that you may be right. But the existence of the phony war showed that Britain did not have the stomach for battle to the death, and might (emphasis on the might!) have been receptive to a face-saving gesture by the Germans after they evacuated Dunkirk and if the submarines were not trying to choke Britain, to the tune of:

not really a OK, fast talker, Churchill, your move! I don't think that Britain could have done anything other than stand down and smoulder in anger that Hitler had pulled another one of his masterful coups. Our own heroes, Lindberg, Doolittle and friends, would have applauded like crazy, cheering the whole world to its doom.

Damn, I'm cheerful this morning.

You pretty much hit the nail on the head Hitman. Germany was at an extreme economic and industrial disadvantage against the allies. You'll always hear plenty of people acknowledging this, but then saying "yeah well X german super weapon could blow up 10 allied tanks anyway".

The problem is German's "super weapons" were useless. They didn't work. More than likely, they made Germany lose FASTER. They simply lacked the industrial base, organization, and personell to make a lot the ideas they had work. Moreover, it was the Americans, an allied power, that successfully researched, built, and used, the war's one true working wonder weapon, the nuke.

The Axis (all of them) failed utterly at logistics. I was not just American industrial might, but the ability to efficiently get all that materiel to the battlefield that mattered.

If you can keep your front line forces in ice cream think about how much they must have that they actually need to do battle with.

There was a quote in some book (was it a movie?) of Germans discussing a captured parcel to some regular US infantry soldier. It had cake in it, and the cake was fresh. The one guy talked about how soft the Americans were to have such luxury. The smarter of the two observed with amazement that we could ship something so perishable in the mail to a war zone so quickly, and what that meant in terms of our logistical support.

Holy cow! That is a brilliant observation.:up: