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Originally Posted by iambecomelife
That's difficult to answer, since you have to adjust for ships built and sunk during the war. If you're talking about the prewar merchant fleet as a whole, casualties for many of the larger companies were 1/2-1/3 of the prewar vessels, with oil companies being especially hard hit. I guess you could conclude that British losses as a whole were roughly equivalent (33-45% of prewar freighters, 50-60% of prewar tankers). If you're talking about ships that were actually hit by u-boats (regardless of when built) you'd find that the vast majority of them were destroyed. Still, given that a lot of tonnage was constructed during the war and that even ships that were sunk had often completed dozens of trips safely prior to their loss, I'd probably agree that the U-boat war was futile, especially once Germany was fighting the US and USSR as well as Britain. You also have to remember that complete massacres of convoys were rare; IIRC PQ-17, Pedestal, and SC-7 were the only major convoys to lose more than 1/2 of their ships. All this is largely speculation on my part, although I was influenced by Clay Blair's research (Hitler's U-Boat War).
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Thanks guys!
This is the type of information I was looking for!
Now I see that the u-boat war was a kind of "sabotage" war, doing as much damage possible, in order to bring chaos and fear to the allies.
I imagine the amount of resources the allies put on hunting U-boats, and the war effort to build a lot of destroyers, etc, just for hunting the u-boats, helped the germans to distract the allies from the war on the land, and served as a "terror" factor to the allies (psychological war?)
That said, if the numbers were about 20% of all ships (built pre-war and during the war) destroyed by u-boats, in my opinion it was a really impressive number! Especially because the "kaleuns" aways tried to sink the biggest ones, especially tankers!
Thanks!