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Originally Posted by Weiß Pinguin
It's catching on! Soon we shall have nuclear-powered Type II's cruising around the atlantic  |
Having a Type XXI or XXIII in 1939 isn't out of the question. The technology was there to build subs with comparable performance.
The British built 12 R Class subs in 1918 or so. They had a submerged speed of 14 knots, a bit slower than a Type XXI but faster than a Type XXIII. The technology needed to build a submarine with the submerged performance of a Type XXI was readily available in the 1930's. It was doctrine and inertia that prevented it from being implemented earlier.
Kriegsmarine doctrine, formulated by Doenitz himself, was that the preferred attack mode of submarines was a night surface attack, and that submerging was a way to escape, or for the occasional daylight attack. Therefore, performance while surfaced was emphasized.
Likewise, design inertia was also in play: The engineers that built U-boats in WWI basically designed the boats used through most of WWII as evolutionary improvements over their previous designs, instead of starting from scratch with different assumptions.
So starting with a Type XXI in 1939 is an interesting "what if" kind of thing that could have happened, if not for a lack of imagination on the part of the Germans. I'd ditch the homing torpedos, though.