Got to be careful with blair though while reading he posed some shall we say extreme hatred to the Uboats... couldn't help but think he was jealous by the success of Uboats verses the failures of the American and even British subs(failure in comparison at least) but it is a good read.

What failures would those be? Failures like being a major contributor to beating the Japanese, while the Germans still lost?

well failure compaired to the success of the germans heck it says alot when Churchill says "The only thing that really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril". I need to find the book though (its in a box because of moving and i still haven't unpacted everything) but i think Blair even said that the Uboats never came close to accomplishing the goal of choking britans supplies, but if that where true why so much effort to ASW, and even said that the electroboat was technologically behind. give it a good reread.

He does say that they never came close to strangling Britain. It has been a few years since I read them, but IIRC he seems to back up his conclusions with statistics.

:)

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Rgr that.

Him too. :yep:

This is a good read, written by an ordinary crew member, from a diary he kept whilst on board a British S Class Sub, HMS Safari during 1942/43 based in the Med. It just wasn't the U boats that had successes, this boat alone, from 14th May 1942 to 30th August 1943 had sailed 31,312 nautical miles, had spent 259 days at sea, 139 of these submerged Had 59 actions against German & Italian shipping, 30 by torpedo attack & 28 by gun attack Sunk definite 34 ships and 4 more by fire and caused 3 further ships to beach. Missed during 7 actions either by gunfire or torpedo. Fired 1,035 rounds of 3" shells and fired 72 torpedoes, hitting the targets with 30 of them Total tonnage of sinking's confirmed was 72,051 tonnes. and had 129 depth charges dropped on her. Besides this it was partially involved with the invasion of Sicily and was involved in landing special forces with follboats on eight separate occasions.

The book is called CRASHDIVE written by Artur P Dickison

Another book written by one of the Captains of the same boat is called
One Man Band by Ben Bryant currently out of print.


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Another couple of good reads are these two.

Attack & Sink, The Battle for Convoy SC42 by Bernard Edwards.

Darkest Before Dawn, U482 & The Sinking Of The Empire Heritage 1944 by John Peterson.

Ok the above two titles dwell mainly on Convoys, but are interesting all the same.

If your interested in the Enigma then this has to be the best book on the subject.

SEIZING THE ENIGMA, The Race To Break the German U Boat Codes 1939 - 1943, by David Kahn. I got a copy in paper back, which is 300 plus pages in quite small print, but it would have doubled the book's size if the print had been larger. It can get a bit heavy in parts of the book, but very immersive and interesting and nothing about the enigma is left untold.

It is apparent that he lets his nationalism and perhaps jealousy at the amount of attention/admiration towards the u-boat get in the way of objectivity. Sometimes he makes statements that seem, quite frankly...almost retarded. It must be admitted that one often hears even more unreasonable stuff on the opposite side of the spectrum so....
That said it is true that the germans were never on the verge of cutting off Britain, and this he shows quite nicely, albeit it is quite one thing to investigate with the benefit of hindsight and quite an other live it at the moment, without the full knowledge of how things would play out. Bet there were moments on the british side when things weren't looking rosy, perhaps not in the sense of "if the next couple of convoys don't make it we will have to ask for terms" but "another six months like this and we will have to delay operation XY and what not".
It is also true that the american submarine effort against Japan was actually comparatively much more successful, but of course Japan had fewer resources, both in terms of ASW assets and the ability to replace lost merchants.

Very, very true. I've long been an aviation buff and have read a great many books on the Battle of Britain. It's amazing how an author can, within the same book, say "We were on the verge of being strangled" and "They never had a chance", and not see the slightest incongruity. :sunny: