I think that you guys are, in general being far too hard on the pre-war USN. If they were wedded to the false god of A.T. Mahan, they were certainly not alone and in many respects the USN proved to be doctrinally superior to everybody else where it mattered.

It was the belief that the submarine could act in concert with the Battle Fleet that lead directly to the design of the Fleet Boat. This resulted in the near perfect marriage of submarine design and unrestricted warfare doctrine that made the USN's operations in the Pacific the only truly successful submarine campaign to date. Without the extraordinary range, firepower and growth potential that was built into the Fleet Boat designs it is arguable that the submarine war against Japan would have been much different. Admiral Hart, himself a submariner who had studied German sub ops in the Great War, wanted smaller boats, S-Class sized but the Navy General Board insisted that only bigger boats would be compatible with fleet operations. Thus it was a happy coincidence that designs produced for a role they could never effectively fulfill were superbly adapted for duties that had been inconceivable before Pearl Harbor.

So, while it's easy to laugh at the Gun Club with 20/20 hindsight, it's important to recall that after 27-months of total war no battleship had been sunk by aircraft while at sea and only one sunk by submarine when under weigh, HMS Barham lost a month before Pearl Harbor.

Also one should not forget that the peacetime USN got it's air-sea doctrine pretty much on target. Seven months after Pearl, Midway, fought with pre-war aircraft using pre-war doctrine, training and commanders won perhaps the decisive naval battle of the war at Midway.

At Midway, submarines on both sides contributed to the outcome of the battle performing as adjuncts of the Fleet much as envisioned by the pre-war theorists. With I-168 scoring essentially the only Japanese success of the battle; sinking Yorktown and Hammann this tended to reinforce Japan's battlefleet oriented submarine doctrine. Meanwhile the Silent Service's lack of results in the battle provided the USN with further evidence that submarines were largely ineffective in the fleet support role and could serve best as commerce destroyers.

It is also interesting to note that up until the war, the primary target of the submarine was the combat ship.

-- Struma, M., (2011) Surface and destroy. University Press of Kentucky p. 16.

I am working on a review of this book to be posted in the book forum.

Nevermind Silent Victory, bring on Roscoe's book:
http://books.google.com/books?id=5lT...attack&f=false

S38 vs the odds:rock::Kaleun_Periskop:. I just did this in my career. I sank 1 minesweeper, 1 transport 7000 tons, and 1 sub chaser.:Kaleun_Party:

The Dilemma of SD RADAR
 

I found an interesting observation about the early use of SD RADAR in Blair's book, "Silent Victory": Pearl Harbor, December, 1941; First Patrols to Empire Waters":
". . . In addition to her Mark VI magnetic exploders, Plunger carried another secret weapon into combat: a primitive radar set known as the SD. The SD was new. It had extremely limited range, 6 to 10 miles. It was "nondirectional," useful primarily for detecting enemy aircraft. Its mast could be poked up before the boat surfaced.
Like many submarine skippers, (Dave) White was leery of the SD. In limited tests, he had found it temperamental and unreliable. It gave off a powerful signal which could be picked up by Japanese RDF stations. Unsparing use of the SD, White believed, was tantamount to breaking radio silence. It would make his presence known and reveal his exact location. The Japanese could send antisubmarine vessels or aircraft to attack him and route their shipping well clear of him. White preferred to depend on alert lookouts for spotting Japanese planes."

Now I know why those pesky patrol/float planes always seem to be vectored right at me - THEY ARE! :damn: The SD RADAR is always on in the game while surfaced, and I regularly do a search for aircraft with extended antenna at periscope depth before surfacing.
If I spot a plane while submerged, I just lower the antenna and dive to around 150'. If I spot a plane on the surface, then I crash dive and make a 90 degree turn to right or left at 40' and continue down to 160' at flank speed, then slow to 1/3 ahead and continue down to below 200'. The planes do sometimes drop bombs or DCs, but I haven't been hit yet. :rock:
This is the first time I've seen the RDF triangulation problem noted anywhere.

I always thought that was from Helmuth von Moltke. :hmmm:

Anyway it was some old dead guy with von in his name. :up:

Thanks for the link. I got so jazzed after reading this that I ordered the book (Used - Good Condition) from one of the dealers on Amazon.com
United States Submarine Operations in World War II

by Theodore Roscoe
$32.95
Link to this title: http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listi...condition=used

More books are available at a similar price. Thanx again :salute:

You have to factor in the achievement there: The US won our submarine war and the Germans lost theirs. I think that was not due to the quality of the brass, but to the quality of the submariners themselves. Who ever heard of an American sub coming to the surface to scuttle, largely undamaged? Happened so much with the U-Boats that Admiral Daniel Gallery actually planned on it when setting up to capture the U-505. In the event it worked out just as planned. The U-Boat was pounded a bit and came up to scuttle. Gallery pounced and had himself a trophy.

But I really believe that the largest reason the Americans succeeded and the Germans failed was one of strategy, not tactics. In the Atlantic, U-Boats were not an appropriate weapon because they could not attain victory in any event. British supplies came in on neutral shipping. Sinking the neutral shipping guaranteed they wouldn't be neutral any more. Wonder what side they would come in on?

As the enemy became stronger as more and more neutral nations were pushed into the war by the U-Boats, the end of that story was pretty obvious. Had the money and men wasted on U-Boats been used to other purposes, at least Germany could have fought longer and had more success.

Japan, however, brought all supplies to Japan on Japanese bottoms. We were already at war with Japan. There was no downside to sinking the supplies. In that case, we actually were denying them what they needed to fight more effectively and the submarines were an important part of the eventual victory there. In the Pacific, submarines were an appropriate weapon which could contribute to the overall war effort.

Regardless of the better American submarines and perhaps better sub commanders as a whole, those differences were small. The strategic situation, to which the Germans were entirely blind, trumped everything and guaranteed German defeat.

I disagree RR, don't think Uboats failed so much on strategy as they did technology and not given enough resources. I think had they gotten the support they needed from Hitler, who knows, certainly it was a waste for Germany to build BB's, CA's, etc...


The biggest failure was Germany didn't figure out we could read their code.

Anyway, no matter what they did, it would be a matter of time nonetheless.

I tend to agree with RR. If Pearl Harbor hadn't abruptly brought the US into the war, then eventually the U-Boats would have as they did previously in World War One. The USN and Kriegsmarine were already trading heavy blows in the fall of 1941. The indiscriminate sinking of ships just brought the Reich more enemies when it already had more than it could handle.

One wonders if the resources poured into U-Boats and the German Navy as a whole might have been better spent on a few extra armored divisions on the Eastern Front where the land war was really decided. The Germans were basically outnumbered from the opening day on the invasion of the Soviet Union and eventually Russian quantity caught up with German quality.

That would be an arguable point except that there WERE no more resources. Almost from the beginning of the war the Germans were playing a zero sum game. Adding resources here meant taking them from there.

Had they put twice as many resources in the submarines it would have made no difference. They sank less than 1% of total cross-Atlantic shipping. Making that 2% would have changed what? Then what results? No tanks for Rommel? No, something had to give and it should have been U-Boats.

Donitz and Raeder didn't give a hoot about plans for winning a war. All they were concerned with was expanding their particular realms to the largest extent possible. They continually pressured for a larger navy in spite of the fact that a navy only made sense from a coastal defense standpoint.

Without control of air and water surface somewhere, the U-Boats were doomed. A plurality were sunk before they had downed even a single target. An appalling number were sunk before firing a single torpedo in anger.

Of course, we are reasoning here and World War II was not the product of reason. It was the product of a raving madman without the capacity for rational thought. All he had was irrational desires.

I think it was a bad failure not to put more Uboats at sea. We have to remember that the so called "Happy Times" where Uboats did great damage lasted to basically 43, with Churchill stating that his greatest fear was Uboats. The problem was even during this period where Uboats did great damage, they never had more than 30 boats at sea, the entire North Atlantic, imagine if they had say 100 or more what they could've done, certainly more than Rommel. The other key of course was having France to port out of. Had Hitler put the resources into Uboats early, who knows the amount of damage that could've been done, with no more than 30 boats on patrol at one time Germany almost sunk Britian.

No, Germany was failed to lose in the end when they declared against America, that was the big mistake.

In the beginning, the Germans didn't need to put more U-Boats to sea. They were sinking record numbers of vessels right off the American coast during 1942:

"America's first year in the war ended with the loss of 1,027 Allied ships to U-boat action. This was more than half of all the ships lost by all the Allies in the U-boat war, in all areas, all through the war years from 1939 to 1945."
-The Tenth Fleet pg.60

"The Strategic Situation in 1942:
This was a phenomenal and unprecedented episode in the whole history of warfare-a major and potentially decisive victory being scored by a tiny force of submarines...
...Doenitz's U-boats wrought havoc, not merely with the material strength of the Allies during this crucial period of their build-up, but indeed with their whole planning and the grand strategy of the war."
-The Tenth Fleet pg.61-62

"December, 1941, brought the crisis to a head in the U-boat arm. It came abruptly and dramatically in the wake of the first indubitable defeat of the U-boats: in a convoy battle west of Gibralter three British ships were sunk, but five U-boats were lost. Five more U-boats were sunk in other operations in waters around the Azores. Only twice before had Doenitz lost five boats in a single month and never ten in a thirty-day period. For the first time, defeatism swept the U-boat Command. Doenitz's staff openly voiced the opinion, and in no uncertain terms, that the U-boats had had it and were no longer capable of combatting the reinforced convoys."
-The Tenth Fleet pg.63

Not about records, think if they had double the numbers what the effect and possible outcome could've been.

This book and Silent Service for 8 bit nintendo were what started
it all for me. :up:

It's not about records, indeed. That (records) wasn't my point. I wasn't trying to criticize you, or anyone else for that matter.
I was just posting some general facts, that seemed to be on a general par with a lot of things that everyone else was saying. You made me think of a particular fact when your last post alluded to U-boat numbers, that's all.

Nice to see you back in these parts M :up:

I second that! :yeah:

Then instead of sinking a little less than 1% of total Allied merchant tonnage during the war they would have sunk something less than 2%. The U-Boats were not a factor. The fact that the first quarter score was in their favor only encouraged them to waste more resources in a losing strategy.

There is no scenario where the U-Boats in any quantity, sinking neutral shipping on an ocean they could not control under skies that they could not control could attain victory in the Battle of the Atlantic. Period. Read Admiral Daniel Gallery's U-505 to see the casual way in which the U-Boats were swept from the sea by hunter-killer groups centered around jeep aircraft carriers. They could operate in an almost leisurely way, controlling the ocean surface and the skies above completely and securely. It was like killing fire ants in your lawn. Nothing strenuous.

Any particular reason to believe a public statement by Churchill regarding the U-Boats? He certainly was bright enough to lie when the results of the lie would be to build more German coffins.

At the beginning of the war Donitz said that they did not have anywhere near enough U-Boats to win the war. He tried as hard as he could to postpone the starting kickoff for another four or five years in order to have the number necessary. Of course, the war was not begun with a rational plan at all and no effort by higher authority (see how nice I am there?) to determine what requirements for victory were. The corporal was blind, convinced he had x-ray vision and nobody could see what he saw. Therefore he listened to no assessments, whether from the army or navy. He was superior to the war professionals, therefore they were wrong.

See how that worked out?:D

Donitz wanted about three times more boats than he had. And he planned on keeping the US and other neutral countries out of the war. I don't know how he planned to do that. Either he sank the tonnage and sucked all neutrals into the war against Germany or he did not sink the tonnage and Britain won anyway. The number of boats was irrelevant. The only possible way would be to subdue Britain so quickly that nobody could come to her aid.

But the British government was already ready (read A Man Called Intrepid) to run the British government out of a skyscraper in New York City. Any defeat would have been very temporary as the resulting US entry would still have ensured the defeat of Germany. You cannot sink tank factories in Detroit. Or wheat fields in Kansas. There was no way Germany belonged in a war with the United States. But with the U-Boats in play, how were they to avoid it?

The U-Boats were inappropriate for German use and should have been all scrapped in 1938, except for a small coastal defense fleet.

Nothing would'be brought them victory in the Atlantic, but bang for the buck and what had effect, I would pick uboats.

As Winston Churchill said "The only thing that ever really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril".

He was there, I'll take his word over yours anyday..lol

You often hear it said that if Admiral Doenitz had his magical number of 300 U-Boats at war's start he could have brought Britain to it's knees.

For Donitz to have 300 active boats at the war's start, it would mean those designs proven and ready BEFORE the war meaning many would be type II models and only a few type VII's and certainly not many of the longer ranged type IX's. The type II and type VII lack the necessary range to cruise into the western Atlantic where they could operate outside the range of aircover from Iceland, Newfoundland and Britain... so maybe the happy time is a little longer or more severe (assuming the early torpedo problems are worked out) But if the British sense 300 U-Boats in production they will cancel some of their capital ship construction and build more sloops, frigates and destroyers.

Plus, you're going to at least double the amount of commanders, and crews in training over the number that was already being hurriedly trained during the same period in and you're going to cram all that additional training into the same number of days and in the same number of limited areas. With everyone, new construction, new commanders, repairs, and refreshers alike, all vying for the time on the limited number of firing ranges in the Baltic you're going to have to cut back on the amount of firing time any one boat, commander, and crew actually can get.

There may be an increase in the total number of live test firings but there's going to be a decrease in the number of live test firings any one boat, commander, and crew get to make.

Congratulations. You've got more boats now, but you've also you've diverted scarce materials and supplies away from other activities and diluted the overall training level of your U-boat fleet.