I am glad that Hitler, being a dictator, did overrule his generals (and admirals). Otherwise he would have won the war.

As for what if: There was a tactical game in progress where you are BDU and need to use the ressources wisely for your U-Boot Flotte. And you can play the attacks in SH3 - anybody remeber the name and URL?

Wow who bought this classic thread back to life what a great read, I would like to point out one fact, Germany’s greatest weakness was oil. Hitler had the upper hand in 1939 to 1942 as we all know, but Hitler also had a thorn in his side Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini, who made a number of blunders in the war. Yugoslavia and North Africa which bled off German forces in bailing Italy out of the mess they created.

Hitler can not be blamed for all the errors in the war, his Generals made a number of mistakes as well and too few of them would stand up against Hitler. The planning of Barbarossa would over stretch the German army with poor planning of logistics, just look at the number of horses they used in Russia some 625,000 horses.

Another error by Hitler was to stop all long term scientific research in 1940, but the key element which bought Germany down was the myth they created. The Nazis sold the idea to the German people they were the strong and their time had come, and up to the end of 1942 that indeed looked the case. But the bad plans and decisions were about to come home to haunt them. Stalingrad and Kursk in 1943, D-Day and Bagration 1944, finally Berlin in 1945.

just jumping back to the original thort that started this thread.

In war you always get a countermeasure. - If someone built 5000 subs - the allies would countermeasure that.

someone invents fist fighting - someone will invent a club with a nail through it
someone invents a club - someone will invent the knife
some invents the knife --- someone else will invent the gun
someone invents the gun --- the other side invents the tomahawk missile


see how it goes

the allies took 3 full years (until mid-late 1942) to develop all the measures required for succesfull ASW tactics to work, meaning escort carriers, proper air cover over the atlantic, airborne radar, Huff-Duff, Bletchley Park Enigma break, etc...

Then they spent six further months in order to properly integrate those tactics into the atlantic (Until May 1943)


Bottom point is:

There's no difference in the number of ASW escorts the allied can build. Up to 1940 the british were on their own private paradise where ASDIC would rule out any sub attacks on convoys.

But when in 1940 most escorts were hopeless when facing a proper sub attack by a wolfpack on a convoy, they found out that suddenly surface tactics made ASDIC unusable to properly stop a well placed U-boat attack on a convoy. The only valid tool was radar, and a rediculous ammount of ASW escorts were so equipped. The other bane of the existing escorts was their limited speed. As the british thought the ASW ships would have to fight vs submerged submarines, surface speed was deemed unimportant. What happened was that surfaced uboats were able to outrun about 75% of the escorts the Empire could put in front of them.

They took a whole year in order to fit the existing surface vessels a working radar (and even then, many of them were left without one until late 1942). Even radar equipped flower class Frigates had problems vs surfaced Uboats.

Until that time when radar was present in most escorts, and those escorts were able to outpace surfaced u-boats, ASW escorts were mostly powerless against submarines that, quite frankly, did exactly whatever they wanted when attacking a convoy, like cats playing with their alive food before eating it.

Not to mention, roughly half the escorts the british could field when the war started couldn't give long-range escorting services. Most of them had to turn tails on their convoys to return home in the middle of the ocean because they couldn't reach the other side of the pond.

Not the best way to give a convoy proper cover.



I think Germany building 5.000 subs is totally out of any realistic mind. However, a 150-strong u-boat force by 1939 was perfectly attainable for them. 150 boats meant 50 at home, 50 on transit, 50 on operations.

Germany did massive damage on british shipping with one fifth of that number during 1940.

UK could build 5 times the ASW escorts they did, to counter five times as many u-boats, yes, but what they couldn't do was to:

1- understand that ASDIC was no longer an ASW panacea.

2- build enough radar sets for that massive ASW force to counter surface Uboat tactics...they knew NOTHING about (they never knew what a wolfpack was until the first one hit them hard. Until then they never understood how much was radar needed).

3- understand that air power was the main anti submarine tool. They only understood it by 1942.

4- develop proper anti-submarine weapons for coastal command aircraft (until 1941 their only ASW weapon was a totally stupid 250lbs anti-submarine bomb...which did nothing but kill some fish).

5- give Coastal COmmand proper aircraft (they never really did in real life anyway, as bomber command had priority over long range aircraft)

6- "magically" develop the CVE Concept (it was only developed after very rough lessons learnt during 1940-42 mid-atlantic convoy battles)

7- "Magically" develop liberators which could cover the whole of the atlantic, 2 years before scheduled.

8- "Magically" develop shortwave (low decimetric-centimetric radar) airborne radars, 3-4 years before schedule.

9- "magically" place a base on Iceland, 2 years before what they did (and declaring war to Denmark before, for starters).

10- "magically" find out that B-Dienst had broken their merchantile codes, and change then on spot

11- "Magically" reproduce Bletchley Park achievements, 3 years before scheduled.



etc etc etc.


if we multiply the number of uboats by 5 and we multiply the number of ASW escorts by 5, all we do is to multiply the scale of the allied disaster in the early war by 5...at the very least. Until 1940 Dönitz was unable to launch a wolfpack to battle because he was so stupidly low on submarine assets.

with 150 sea-going submarines in 1939, the debacle for the british would've been massive as wolfpacks would've been sent to battle as soon as the war started. As it was, barely 30 submarines gave them fits...go figure 5 times that number.


And that counting with 5 times as many ASW ships the british had at the moment. How do you plan to build them?. I mean, ASW building was already topping before the war, the bottleneck being that most resources were directed to the KGV and carrier projects. Unless you cut down on those projects, Britain could NOT build more ASW ships.

And you will understand that while Germany could afford passing on building the Bismarcks (or even the Scharnhorsts), the british simply could not afford not building the KGVs or the Illustrious.


Anyway pitting 5 times the number of escorts britain had when the war started vs 5 times the number of Uboats the Germans had only increments the German victory. ASW assets until 1941 were mostly uncapable of dealing with surfaced night attacks on convoys.



One last point. You don't really need to isolate Britain in order for them to ask for terms. 150 u-boats in 1939 could realistically have strangled Britain to the point of getting them to believe Germany could ACTUALLY achieve it, way before they had actually done it,and to drop down the whole convoy system.

They almost did it in april 1943; at that moment the allies had everything they needed to destroy the uboat offensive. CVEs, allied cover over almost all the atlantic, centimetric airborne radar, all escorts with radars, and in massive numbers, 100% of u-boat radio traffic being read by Bletchley Park, huffduff, etc. They had all the tools in place.

Yet they almost dropped the convoy concept because the germans were so successfull in april 1943 (highest tonnage sunk by uboats in a month in all the war), it seemed ASW attempts and convoy sailing simply would never work against some 3 wolfpacks in the atlantic with decent numbers of submarines on them.

Suddenly in May 1943 everything fell in it's place. The ASW tactics finally shown their worth and the U-boats were defeated just one month after they had achieved their biggest victories in the Atlantic.

But it was off by a hair for the allies. Had victory evaded them for 1 or 2 more months of similar losses than those of March and April, they would've dropped the whole convoy scheme and resorted to individual sailing...That would mean WWI all over again. And we all know what happened in WW1 until the convoy system was implemented.


In 1943 would've been too late for germany anyway. the war in Russia was already lost and USA had entered the war.

But make that happen in 1940 (perfectly attainable with 150 u-boats and totally innapropiate anti submarine tools and tactics by the british), and you simply give Hitler victory over Great Britain.

When France falls the way it did, and with a massive merchant monthly loss rate in the atlantic that forces UK to completely abandon convoy tactics and resort to individual sailing (with its associated high costs), how will Britain say "no" to the very favorable terms Hitler was going to offer them? (which bassically was: you let us live in the contintent, you live your life in the rest of the world).


U-boats could've given Hitler victory against Britain. In fact I think, the ONLY thing which could give Hitler victory against Britain was U-boats. IN decent numbers, of course, and before proper ASW tools and tactics were developed by the allies.

I've been toying over the past few years with simulating what would happen in the Battle of the Atlantic if Bletchley Park were effectively taken out of the equation.

My reasoning is that while RADAR and improved equipment and tactics did indeed have an effect on the campaign, in effect bringing the u-boat offensive to a near standstill from mid 1943 onwards, Allied codebreaking had more of an effect than it generally gets credit for.

The main way that BP helped to the Allies to effectively use things like centimetric RADAR and Hunter/Killer groups centered around CVE's were to give future locations for u-boats. High Frequency direction finding (HF/DF, or Huff Duff) can tell you where a u-boat is when it transmits, but it can't tell you where it is going to be several days in the future. In addition, there is a natural, irreduceable systematic error in HF/DF. You don't get a precise location, you get an area that could be hundreds or even thousands of square miles in area, depending on a number of factors. However, if you can actually read those transmissions, or the orders transmitted telling them to go to a certain location, you can know either the precise location of the u-boat (limited to the errors made by the navigator), or where they will be at some point in the future, again with less error.

When you know the precise location of a u-boat, and where it will be three days from now, you can steer convoys away from that sub, and you can task an ASW asset (H/K group, task force, aircraft, etc.) to sink that boat. That is what happened to U-505, and indeed to all of the Milchcows. Through UK/US decryption of the Naval Enigma, we knew where they would be, and took appropriate action.

Now, things like RADAR are vital for searching a limited area for a submarine, but they are useless if you don't know the general area where the boat is to begin with. Even the best RADARs are limited by line of sight. Signals Intelligence doesn't have that limitation.

Now, the Germans had a couple of options to increase the security of their signals. They could have built a 'super Enigma', one with, say, ten rotor positions and 20 or 30 rotors to choose from. That would have completely prevented the British from breaking it on a regular basis, given the technology at the time. Even just adding a couple more rotors to the ones available without adding anymore slots in the machine itself would have expanded the keyspace beyond the point where Bletchley could have broken it, even with knowledge of the internal wiring of the rotors.

The other option is the 'nuclear option' of cryptography, the only cipher that is unbreakable both in theory and in practice: the One Time Pad. Invented simultaneously in the US and Germany back in the early 1920's, if used properly the OTP is forever unbreakable. In non-machine form, it usually consists of a pad of paper with numbers or letters used to encipher the messages, and an identical pad to decipher. Pages are numbered, used once, then destroyed. If you re-use the pads, it can be broken as shown by the VENONA project (but even then, we were still working on messages from the 1940's in the 1970's!).

Using the OTP, which was known in Germany at the time, would have afforded complete security. Even if a pad were captured, that would only help until the pad expired. It would have been possible, if somewhat inconvenient, to produce the number of pads necessary for communications with the boats actually involved in fighting.

The result would have been like the 10 month intelligence blackout of 1942, when the Kriegsmarine introduced the 4 rotor Enigma, over the entire war. That means less u-boats sunk, more available to hit convoys, and fewer chances to steer convoys away from those boats and H/K groups to them. Milchcows don't get taken out as quickly, and so are available to resupply the increased number of boats on station.

To my thinking, that means that fewer supplies reach the UK and Russia, meaning D-Day gets pushed back to the Spring of 1945 at the earliest. By that time, the new Type XXI and XXIII boats are starting to sail on operational cruises, boats which would effectively preclude using most of the ASW tactics of the time. That makes the invasion of France, an effort that could very well have failed as it was, virtually impossible. Russia doesn't have the trucks or radios that it needs to press in from the East (most of the trucks and radios used by the Soviets came from the West).

With the hypothetical failure, or even non-attempt, of a landing attempt in France, and an invigorated u-boat offensive using both the new boats and the old ones with schnorkels and the advanced RADAR detection gear available, the only real options are to let the war drag on, or to nuke Berlin. As much as it pains me to say this, I think there would have been much more reluctance to dropping The Bomb on a European city than there was to dropping it on Japan, for both pragmatic and racist reasons.

As a side note, there really was no reason not to have Type XXI boats available at the beginning of the war, other than a lack of vision. England had developed the R Class submarine back in WWI, and it had high underwater speed. As it was, the Germans went to war with boats that would have been very familiar to the Kriegsmarine of 1918.