Let me throw another monkey wrench in there!
 

Yes, the Phony War, where words attempted to take the place of deeds and the time wasted was all to the Germans' advantage. To be fair, I HATE to contemplate the consequences of a French attack on anything. I wonder if the words "French" and "attack" can rightfully co-exist in the same sentence. Their whole plan was based on static defense, and that was the end of them. The British would have had to go through the French and the two of them mix like oil and water. They have a long history of mutual disdain, which even we Americans took advantage of to gain our independence from Britain. So if they HAD tried to fulfil their agreements immediately, I wonder how it would have worked out.

However, here's the ultimate injustice of leaving Poland to be devoured by two mad dogs. It was Polish mathemeticians, not the British or Americans who solved the Enigma code. According to the Ducimus theory, which is solidly based on fact, the moment those Polish mathemeticians landed in Britain and convinced authorities that they indeed could read the code and the British organized Bletchley Park with the Poles at the core, the Germans lost a battle decisive as the Battle of Stalingrad or the Battle of the Atlantik. Poland was not lost in vain.

Here are my to cents and I make it very short so that you guys don't have to read that much.;)

1.The Navy wasn't ready for a war. In fact Hitler had promised Admiral Raeder that a war would occur not earlier than 1945. Because of that the German Navy lacked a lot of ships and and U-Boats.

2. Ther Germans started their research on radar, HF/DF and other eletronic devices rather late and thus had a major disadvantage.

3. The Allied could read the messages that U-Boats sent via Enigma and thus could locate and sink the U-Boats.

After all the U-Boats lost the war because they didn't have the technology and because the leadership (Hitler, Dönitz) made some grave blunders.

I believe we are trying to compare apples and oranges
here.
a succsesful strategic anitsubmarine campaign
vs.
a succesful strategic submarine campaign.

Both are individually complex enough to
fill a lifetime and never finish.
there is no simple answer in their comparison
each campaign has enough in it to fill
volumes.
there are no single warbreaking factors on
either side.

I abstain.
M

My position is that U-Boats could not have won the war, regardless of numbers or technology short of nuclear ballistic missiles. They were an inappropriate tool for the task at hand. The war was a hex nut. U-Boats were a phillips head screwdriver, a fine tool but not suited for the job.

But that's my point. Both England and the United States had prominent people who were pro-German and a few who were even pro-Nazi (Charles Lindberg comes to mind). A little-known fact is that Churchill moved the British secret service, a shadow government and a duplicate Enigma decoding team to the US before our entry into the war for fear that the British would join forces with Germany. (read A Man Called Intrepid for all the juicy details) Germany could have taken advantage of that fact to avoid fighting either party at all. Then whether the US could conquer continental Nazi Europe would be moot. The US and Britain would have had no interest in doing so. Both fought not for conquest but in defense against an aggressor.

I have to disagree. The U-Boats were a great weapon and if Doenitz had 300 boats at the beinning of the war Great Britain would have been starved out pretty soon.
Again, the reason why the U-Boats weren't successful are the small numbers of U-Boats available and advanced allied technology.
But since you think that U-Boats were not suitable for the job at hand I've got one question: What kind of U-Boat would one need to defeat GB?

I'm pretty sure the Germans tried the "we're brothers" approach, and I'm pretty sure the British would never have gone for it. Well, Chamberlain might have, but he was part of the problem anyway. I don't think it would have happened.

On the other hand, I have myself proposed a similar 'dissuassion' concerning the start of the American Civil War, so who knows? Speculation is always fun.

[edit] I see I've fallen behind the conversation. Never mind.

I don't know what the ambassador exactly said, but German ideology was that the English were Aryans as well. Actually Hitler didn't like to fight other Aryans.
BTW: German ideology although dictated that the Japanes were the Aryans of the far east.

That makes perfect sense, since in the previous war the King and the Kaiser were first cousins. On the other hand, the British Royals changed the family name from Saxe-Coburg und Gotha to Windsor, so they probably didn't see it the same way.

That's my exact point
 

No kind of U-Boat could have defeated Great Britain. The reason for that is that Great Britain was very different from Japan.

Japan was importing raw materials on Japanese bottoms to make into war materiel. England imported finished goods and raw materials, but here's the dynamic: Britain was importing on other nations' bottoms, including the United States. If you sink those ships, you're fighting those nations. Supplies to the United States were not interruptable at sea unless Donitz could figure out how to torpedo a train 100 miles inland. Even Eugene Fluckey couldn't do that!

In addition, the US had to capacity to literally pave the Atlantic with ships. If you have a 1000 ship convoy, what are 100 active U-Boats going to do? (figure 100 on station, 100 in transit to and from and the other 100 in training or repair. My 100 on station is hopelessly optimistic. 70 would have been a best-case estimate with more than half of them not positioned to deliver a blow) What if you have 5 1000 ship convoys? This was entirely within the capability of the United States, which outproduced the losses inflicted by the U-Boats at the top of their form before ASW techniques were meaningfully good. Keeping the US out of the war was essential if Germany was to have any chance of lasting success at all. U-Boat use made that (therefore victory) impossible.

German victory depended on divide and conquer. First, keep the Allies from shutting down their war machine while they prepared for conquest. (done) Then keeping Britain and Russia happy while they controlled the European continent. (not done) Then making peace with Britain and the US so they could do what they pleased with Russia before Stalin could get aggresive (not done), because you know that given time Stalin would have attacked Germany anyway. Stalin was no pussycat, you know.:arrgh!:

Dead on. Hilter did now want a war with the Brits. Hilter just wanted them to understand that he wanted all of Europe and had no interest in the UK. In fact, I had read somewhere that Hitler was stunned when the Brits declared war on Germany.

Simple fact remains, there were not enough u-boats to keep up with the amount of merchant vessels slipping off the blocks at the construction yards. It is very similar to the Sherman tank. The German tank was far superior to the Shermans. It is just that there were Shermans being built like mad. Sheer numbers once again over came the issue at hand.

In the confusion...
 

This one was ignored and it should not have been. My spelling needs checking there and I totally forgot about Khalkin Gol. I'll jump on board the proposition that the Japanese wouldn't attack the Russians on land after that. I don't think they were interested in achieving domination over frozen tundra anyway (a fine excuse after Zhukov was finished with them!:rotfl:). Any resources available there could more easily be obtained in the Dutch East Indies. Japan abandoned any plans to use Siberian resources.

In order for the Russians to attack Japan we're back to considering if the Japanese would have hesitated to deal with the Russians at sea. Nope. It would have been a repeat of Tsushima, only probably much worse.

So the Russians left the Japanese alone because they were busily preparing to hit Germany. The Japanese left the Russians alone because they didn't like Mr Zhukov and couldn't use all that ice:p. Actually they both were busy enough with other things. Neither one wished more complications to enter the situation. They smoked the peace pipe.

I recommend the reading of this book:

http://www.foreignaffairs.org/200703...e-victory.html


Absolutely superb book on WW2.

Not one bit.

22nd June 1941 did it.

First nail in the coffin -
Have you seen the logistics in the planning of Operation Barbarossa, make your eyes pop out. :o

Second nail in the coffin -
Stalingrad over stretched the German Army supple lines and how the hell were the Germans going to get the oil from the Baku oil fields?

Third and final nail in the coffin -
Hitler stripped the whole front for his big Kursk offensive and lost, resulting in Armour that could not be replaced.

Case Closed


PS: I believed America would had declared war on Germany if Hitler had not, after all, they were at war with Germany in October 1941 all but in name.

While I agree that there is no question that the industrial power of the US combined with the rest of the Allies ultimately won the war, it seems some here are missing a very important point. England was on the brink of defeat in the summer 1940 - well before the US entered the war officially. In fact, the lend/lease program didn't begin until March of 1941 - so to argue that the production ability of the US was a guarantee of England's survival vs. the Uboat threat can't be used. I am a proud American, but I am enough of a student of history to know that we couldn't have saved England if Sealion had moved forward.

Yes, we could have built and sent a 1000 ship convoy..... but it could not have been done in time. War is more than just production ability. It takes time to build the ships, or if they are in use already - congregate them, load them, form them up with a suitable escort, and then figure the transit time. Not to mention the time needed to produce all the necessary articles a country at war would need - enough to fill a 1000 ships! This also doesnt even take into account the fact that even using every port in Britain, there wasn't enough dock space for that many ships....

I won't argue the fact that the US could have, given enough time, built enough of a lifeline to keep Britain supplied. But the time required would have been the issue. The decision to indefintely postpone Operation Sealion bought England a reprieve, and the decision to strike west was one of two turning points of the war for Germany. Had it not been for the hesitancy and incompetence (some say cowardice) of Raeder, the GrossAdmiral of the Kreigsmarine, Sealion would have moved forward and England would have fallen. It was his determination that both the RN and RAF had to be totally wiped out before an invasion of the British Isles could occur - and that is why Sealion was postponed and then ultimately cancelled.

Sealion was envisioned in such a way as to first destroy the RAF, then to force the RN to sortie in defense of an invasion - which would allow the Luftwaffe to smash the English Navy. The Kriegsmarine didnt have the surface strenth to match up with the RN, so it was left to the German air forces. Raeder was in such fear of the RN that he could not act without them neutralized. Had Raeder understood the tools at his disposal - aka - Doenitz and his U-boats, Sealion could have moved forward despite the outcome of the Battle of Britain. The fact that Raeder and Doenitz despised each other kept Raeder from truly utilizing the full force of the Kreigsmarine.

What should have occured (in hindsight) was a layered barrier of blockading uboats on both sides of the Channel. While the Luftwaffe had failed to destroy the RAF, they still held air parity at the minimum (though the decision to not base aircraft forward, closer to the front, was one of Goering's biggest blunders), and could have been used to negate any RAF threat to Sealion. Thus it still would have fallen to the RN to sweep the channel clear, and with the layered barrier defense in place, the results would likely have been catastrophic for the RN. Recall - this would have all occured in the late summer of 1940 - well before the major advances in ASW were fully in the field, so the Uboats still held a decisive advantage at the time. A successful in force landing of troops on Great Britain, as well as a well publicized major defeat of the RN at the same time, would have devastated morale. Once the landings were secured and could be reinforced from the "mainland", the British Isles would have been all but lost, as the major concern regarding an invasion was the lack of a home army to repel it. Recall the majority of the British forces were overseas, except for the remnants that had just survived Dunkirk - and that remnant was undersupplied, unorganized in the classic sense of a military meaning, and had just recently been routed by what would be the invading forces. Not a good equation - and this is why Churchill knew that the fate of England lay in the Battle of Britain.

Hitler's decision to strike west enabled England to have some breathing room. The Japanese decision to attack the US, with the result of our entering the war, sealed the fate of Germany. This was due to the D-day landings. Had Germany not had to create "Fortress Europe", they would have been able to concentrate forces against Russia, with a distinct possibility of a different outcome on the western front.

The Uboats were not intended to be anti-warship weapons - but during the early years of 1940, they could have been used as such given the advantages they held. This would have only been possible had they had assurance that enemy warships would become targets (using something like the above to funnel the RN forces into a specific area). Just sending them out to search for and find enemy naval forces would not have worked.

War is not just production capability - though logistics do have an important role. War is also the profuse use of every weapon at hand to win - and it was not the fault of the Uboat crews or captains that they were not used fully.

Make no mistake - what I have proposed above would not have been without cost, but the gains would have far outweighed the losses incurred when speaking in a purely strategic sense.

The U-boats didn't lose the war, they simply were not included in the equation properly in how to win it.

That's fine but... where's the nails?
 

All that happened after the U-Boats lost the war. The things you state were just the Germans deciding HOW they would lose it. After all, the Russians could only put up such a great fight because of help Britain and the US were able to contribute. They would have fought Germany anyway with some effectiveness, but much less than they had.

Also, without the need to keep two fronts open, Germany would have been able to concentrate on defeating the USSR with its entire military. Germany could have attacked Russia with great chance of success if Britain and the US were neutralized by treaty.

You are correct that once Hitler's army GOT to Russia it was too big to handle. The Germans just expanded to the point that they were too thinly spread and the logistics didn't work so then they were beaten. Who's to say if they wouldn't have done that anyway with double the resources. Had they limited production of U-Boats, they could have had many more tanks, trucks, trains, more equipment and men to attack Russia with. Had they just punished the Russians, wiping out Stalingrad, Moscow and Leningrad, then falling back to a defensible line, building the infastructure to supply themselves without worrying about the western front, they would have been free to make other mistakes than the ones they did. But they would also have been free to win their Russian matchup.

As it was, with the Battle of Britain they eliminated any possible British goodwill and with U-Boat sinkings of American ships, they guaranteed American entry into the war with the British, taking away the option of starving Britain. Once that happened they lost the ability to put Britain out of the war, lost the abiility to limit Allied production of war materiel, since the US industrial capacity could not be injured by U-Boats or any other German weapon. Now, having to defend two fronts, they were unable to commit enough to the Eastern Front to win and didn't have the sense to surrender. The war was lost.

Had Operation Barbarossa not taken place, Stalin would eventually have attacked Germany and that would have been a fascinating and even battle. Could Marshal Zhukov have done to the Germans what he did to the Japanese?

So I see no nails in the coffin there. Those nails you cite were produced after U-Boats determined the course of the war. Even though Russia was attacked before unrestricted warfare was declared, the resources were already wasted on the submarines to do it. Unrestricted sub warfare was already an inevitability before the attack on Russia.