It was mid-April, 1945, the U-boat was U-234. Less than one month before Germany surrendered. Germany could have sent the nuclear material earlier(probably not as much), but she didn't.

While both sides were successful on the battlefield, their co-operation was almost non-existant. They had no combined strategy that could have led to an Axis victory. It wasn't until 1943-1944 that Germany and Japan pursued a more closer relationship. Finally, in late 1944-45, Germany began giving her new technology to Japan in a "fire-sale" fashion.

Bad pun I know.

Hey folks, It's Adolph "Crazy" Hitler again! Our factories have been bombed to rubble and we're going out of business! So everything must go! We have a King Tiger, only missing a few road wheels, but it still moves. ME-262, missing one engine but it still flies. One moderatly depth-charged U-Boat. Cheap! Cheap! Cheap! Can't come to us, not a problem, we still deliever! It's all gotta go. Go! GO!

Interesting discussion guys. And hindsight is a wonderful thing. It's great fun to explore "what if" scenarios and our hobby makes that a fascinating prospect.

Unfortunately the facts are, as ever, rather more banal.

Adolph Hitler was a European fascist dictator whose only military experience was as a corporal in the army and saw militery campaigns as primarily land battles.

His obsession and single motivating factor for going to war was the destruction of Bolshevism, ie Soviet communism in Russia and, once he had accomplished that, the creation of "living space" there for the future expansion of the German "master race".

He had virtually no understanding of the strategic importance of naval power projection on a world scale as it was irrelevant, as he saw it, to his struggle in Russia, which of course, was a land battle.

He needed a quick victorious local war so concentrated on developing weapons systems with short term tactical value, ie jet and rocket technology and consequently had very little inclination to develop long term strategic weapons systems such as nuclear weapons, as he thought he wouldn't need them. Fortunatly he chose not to develop nuclear weapons and stick them in his rockets.

He had very little strategic appreciation of the massive industial might of the US and held them in contempt.

As he saw it, there was really two wars going on at the same time. His war against Soviet Russia, and Japan's war against the US.

He fatally ignored the fact that Japan, as his ally, could have joined the struggle against Russia and, working together, probably would have defeated the soviets in 1942. It was "his" war!

And subsequently he was defeated by being at war with the two greatest industrial powers the world had ever seen. It would not have made any difference to the end result no matter how many jets, tiger tanks, rockets, subs, or anything else German industry could have made.

It took time, but they could not have won.

Which is why they lost. Thank god.

Dredd out. :arrgh!:

Yes, it´s the tactic used by the actual diesel electric submarines (still in use ) like kilo.

i´m sure that a good number of these boats arround england during 1942-43 could make very difficult the build of an invassion force for a second front.

Yes , allied could build a lot of ships, but it takes a lot of resources .

And if you have fidos and sonar detectors, this weapons have to deal with a 25 knts target, probably using sonar coating, antiradar coating in periscopes and snorkel, detectors and countermeasures.

How many time could take a crash dive from periscope depth for a walter boat with the drive engaged ??

Two words: Khalkin Gol

I think you will find that by the winter of 1941 Zhukov and many of the units he used to defend Khalkin Gol had moved west to defend Moscow, trying to stop the 2nd Pz Div, among others, from parking its tanks in Red Square. The opportunity for Japan to strike west was there. They were unwilling to take it for a host of reasons. Not least of which was the complete absence of any urging from their ally, the Germans, that they should, despite the fact that most of the Soviet army was now engaged against them. Not sound strategic thinking imho.

I did a little research in the Walther boats and there where a total of 4 versions produced starting with the V80, only one was built and used for research. The first versions of the type XVIII where the XVIIA and XVIIB as more research vessels. A total of 7 of these where made, 4 of the XVIIA and 3 of the XVIIB, but they where only commissioned. The last was the XVIII and where never built. Had they been built they would have greatly changed the U-Boat war in Germanys favor. If more funding and more research had been made the sciencetists would have found a better fuel than H2O2. Check it out here http://www.uboat.net/types/walter.htm .

Even with minimal defenders I don't think a Japanese attack on the Soviet Union would have aided Germany much. Eastern Siberia back then was a mostly trackless wilderness supplied by one slender rail line with no large cities or sources of supply, it is not suited for modern war in 1941, and even now would be a logistical nightmare to keep an army supplied in. Japan was ill-equipped to fight in the sub-Arctic as their reckless invasion of the Aleutians demonstrated. Plus, Japan badly needed oil and it wasn't until well after the war that a booming oil and gas industry was developed in Siberia. Those factories that Stalin shipped east during Operation Barbarossa were mostly resettled near the Urals. That's about 2,000 miles of endless swamps, forests and rivers from the Manchurian border. Territory the Russians could easy afford to play the space for time game with. Vladivostok would probably fall, but it was expendable. There was still the Persian overland route for Allied supplies.

Vorsprung Durch Technik. You have to admire the technological leaps during wartime. From this era the Germans have acquired a fantastic reputation for solid engineering over a range of aspects. Cars, optics, electronics and so on.

If ifs and buts were candy and nuts
 

We'd all have a merry Christmas!:rotfl:

What does the word "they" mean? Does it mean that if the Starship Enterprise had beamed down 300 of them with crack crews (thereby allowing about 80 on patrol at sea at any one time, optomistically) the Battle of the Atlantic would have been greatly changed? Or do you make allowances for building the production facilities for these boats? Or do you make allowances for the training (virtually from scratch!) of crews from these boats? Or do you make allowances for the instability of the H2O2 propulsion system, KABOOM! They DID produce Me-163s. They were a grand but worthless gesture against fleets of over 1000 bombers. Or do you make allowances for the inability to protect any mythical production facilities long enough to produce enough of these boats to produce any results? How about the inability of the factory building to withstand British and American bombing attacks? How about the necessity to remove productive crews from the theater of war to train for months in these Rube Goldberg contraptions?

None of this was doable and the Germans could not have had a merry Christmas. They had no more choices to make which would have changed the outcome of the Battle of the Atlantic or the war. Their only choices were when would they lose and who would die in the process.

This is the point I was trying to make. The only window of opportunity available to the Germans to win the war, or at least their part of the war, was in the late 1941- mid 1942 timescale, by knocking the Russians out. The Japanese were well placed with their armies in Manchuria to help. They didn't make the most of that opportunity. And subsequently lost the strategic initiative to the Russians and then the Americans in deciding the future conduct of the war.

Panacea weapons systems such as fancy U boats, no matter how technologically advanced, could not and did not alter that fact. An exact analogy would be their development of their Tiger tanks. Very fine weapons, far superior in many ways to anything the allies had, yet made in such small numbers that they accomplished nothing in any strategic sense, apart from tie up vast amounts of very scarce German resources, which arguably could have been better spent elsewhere.

I entirely agree with Rockin Robbins. The only thing they were then in a position to decide was how long they would keep on fighting, hoping to delay the by then inevitable conclusion of WW2, which was that they would lose. Quite simply as, strategically, they were not in a position to win it.

It could be argued that they were never in a position to "win", certainly not after the US became involved. They came closest to it in the winter of 1941, and then the summer of 1942. The Japanese could have helped in the winter of 1941 by tying up Russian units facing them, rather than allowing these units, lead by Zhukov, by then virtually the only Russian commander of any talent left, to be moved west to successfully defend Moscow.

And thank god for that, which is why I'm writing this in English rather than German.

Have nice day!:sunny:

Welcome aboard Mickeydread!
 

I'm thinking that Japanese landwar stategy wasn't advanced enough to be a real help to the Germans against the Russkies. It seems to me that the help should have gone in the other direction, with the transfer of 300 U-Boats, crews, support and production facilities to Japan. If this had been done in early 1942 to the middle of 1943 the amount of resources the Allies would have had to tie up in the Pacific would have given Germany much breathing room.

Fortunately, actually helping out an ally was a foreign idea for the Wermacht.

Interesting

So Fliegerkorps X ( Luftwaffe ) being sent to Italy to bomb Malta wasnt help
Or
Operation Sonnenblume ( Wehrmacht ) which saw the Afrika Korp despatched to North Africa in early 41 as the Italians were close to collapse wasnt help
Or
The formation of the 23rd and 29th U flotillas ( Ubootwaffe ) in the Med ?

I dont think there would of been any chance of sizable resources going to Japan\Pacific as the Germans simply didnt have them , even more so after bailing out the Italians in the med

Your right!

Il Duce's insecurity and need to be in the limelight were perfect setups for his disaster in Greece and the battles for North Africa. These two theaters distracted Hitler and vital resources from the Barbarosa order of battle. The need to rescue Il Duce proved to be just more nails in the coffin for Hitler and his minions.

The Axis were doomed to fail...anyone who invades and occupies another ethnic society will sooner or later meet armed, relenteless resistance, especially from nations such as russia and china.

...... or Iraq!

cherry picking isn't fair
 

How about the Norman invasion of Britain? Or the Roman occupation of Britain, for that matter? There are plenty of examples (Alexander the Great) where invasion did not result in implacable resistance. How about the Allied invasion of the European continent at D-Day? American occupation of Japan? Union invasion of the Confederacy?

Invasion is like going to court. Anything can happen and justice has nothing to do with it.

On the other issue, I wonder if Italy could be considered an ally of Germany at all?:-j Militarily, they were thoroughly incompetent and just too decent a people to be any help for the Nazi cause. Italians saved many more Jews in their society than the French did! The vast majority of Italians just refused to participate in the Jewish extermination programs and actively shielded Italian Jews from persecution. Italians were tempermentally unsuited for the dark side.

I think Hitler was not helping Italy, but doing the opposite: attempting to dominate a reluctant but grandiose misfit. In effect he was occupying an ally!

Oh and Spain with the Moorish invasion....they spent 800 years there prior to the "reconquista".

I think we are in danger of getting way off topic now. But I'm going to have to take issue with a couple of points RR.

The Roman invasion of Britain faced continual resistance from the local population for hundreds of years. Queen Boadacea springs to mind to name just one. Why do you think the Romans felt the need to build hundreds of fortified towns and forts up and down the country? Hadrian's wall was built to try prevent these constant uprisings. It was only after a long period of time, when the Roman invaders had largely assimilated into the local population, adopting many of their customs and religious practices, that resistance petered out. Indeed the "Romans" who lived in Britain towards the end of their empire, regarded themselves as primarily British.

As for the Norman invasion, I seem to remember that they had it hard right from the start,(the battle of Hastings!) despite having, as they saw it, a legitimate claim the English crown. Resistance was so widespread and endemic that they had to write the Domesday Book, just to find out what was in front of their eyes, as the locals wouldn't even tell them how many chickens they had!!! Why do you think they felt the need to buld fortified towns and castles the length and breadth of Britain? And again, English resistance only really stopped when the Normans had become so anglicised that they had become indestinguishable from the local population.

Tha allied landings on D day as I remember it, was to relieve Europe from the occupation of Nazi Germany and was hugely welcomed by all the indiginous populations of those countries, who saw it as liberation. With maybe the exception of certain elements in France.

The US occupation of Japan at the end of WW2 was not as a result of an invasion. The US used their atom bombs so as to prevent the need for a costly and bloody invasion of the Japanese mainland. The US merely occupied a defeated land that had already signed a peace agreement with them. And this occupation was primarily aimed at preventing any possibility of the still largely intact and undefeated Japanese army from being re-activated and re starting hostilities. Indeed General MacArthur went to very great lengths to try and prevent the Japanes feeling that they were being occupied by anyone at all!

As for the "occupation" of the South by the North after the Civil War, that would open a whole can of contentious worms which I'm not prepared to go into.

It seems the lessons of history regarding one nation invading and occupying another are very clear. This happens for one of two, sometimes both, reasons. The invasion occurs because either 1: that country feels threatened, or at least pretends to feel threatened, and/or 2: it wants to exploit the raw materials of the invaded country for its own ends.

The invading nation then faces one of two possible results:
it either stays for so long that it largely becomes part of the invaded nation, adopting its customs, religion and language, so that in effect it becomes that nation. It goes native;
or it chooses not to do this, is then seen as an occupation force, and is booted out sooner or later by the locals, probably with the help of someone else.

Lessons that are as valid today as they have always been!! And you are right - justice has absolutely nothing to do with it.

As for the Italians in WW2, just ask yourself how many times they changed sides. Was it three, or four?!! Certainly the Germans did see themselves as occupying Italy towards the end of the war, who by then they regarded as totally unreliable, and their vicious treatment of the local population at that time is very well documented.


Anyway, enough of this. We should be discussing subsimming. Which is much better fun.:)

The dreddster out.:arrgh!:

What about the Type XXIII? Sure it was a tiny little boat with only two torpedoes and no reloads, but it was the only Walther powered U-boat to enter service. In a way, the Type XXIII is kinda like an overgrown torpedo with a small crew (as many of you know, the Russians did and still do use H2O2 for torpedo fuel).

Type XXIII is the smaller "elektroboot", the little brother of type XXI. It had a normal diesel/electric drive, and the only Walther about it was the hull, which I believe was based on his work(if not designed by him).