Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Dantenoc
I'll get clobbered for saying this on this forum, but the whole U-boat war effort was pointless, nevermind what type of boat. There is no way that Britain could have been starved to death... ever. It just isn't possible.
Besides, Hitler was never betting on starving England out of existence, but rather the original plan was to make it suficiently uncomfortable for the British so that they would just sign a peace treaty where they would basicaly leave Hitler be and have his way on continental Europe. Hitler was betting that the British had only been allies of the French for a short while but enemies for ever (hey, how about that hundred years war?). Of course the whole deal is more complicated than that, but that was the general idea.
He just miscalculated the Churchill factor. I beleive Chamberlain would have signed for peace.
|
I'm not going to clobber you, but I am going to disagree with you. Had the Kriegsmarine had the requisite number of boats at the beginning of the war, it could have starved the UK into submission.
It very nearly did so in WWI, and in fact could have done so, had they stuck to the policy of unrestricted submarine warfare from 1915 on. They didn't due to fears that America would join forces with England, but even the sinking of the Lusitania didn't bring America into the war. It took a ham-fisted attempt by Germany to enlist Mexico's aid in case America declared war on Germany to bring the US into the war. Even then, American reaction to the Zimmermann telegram was ambivalent, until Zimmermann himself, in what must be the most stupidly honest thing a politician has ever uttered, admitted that it was in fact true, and not a provocation by Britain as many in the US believed.
There were some advances in anti-submarine technology and doctrine by 1939, including ASDIC and convoying, but those advances weren't necessarily a death-knell to the U-bootwaffe, as doctrinal changes between WWI and WWII (specifically, night surface attacks, and the concept of the 'wolfpack') largely nullified those.
With a large enough u-boat force in 1939, the Kriegsmarine could have effectively blockaded the British Isles. They didn't do too badly with the force they had: They reduced the imports into the British Isles to a large degree. The Royal Navy of 1939 and 1940 would not be able to cope with large numbers of u-boats surrounding the British Isles. It would have required them to pull just about all of their naval assets from around the World back into home waters, and that would have led to further advances by the Axis powers. As late as the Spring of 1943, Britain was chronically low on fuel reserves, and had they not been able through technological advances to turn the tide, would have been in dire straights indeed.