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Originally Posted by Zantham
Yes as Ducimus said they were underwater bombs... H2O2 is very unstable and explosive.
However the Walther boat didn't have to outrun the escorts or HK groups, they just had to go fast enough that the destroyers couldn't use their sonars to track them. Imagine chasing one of these things that had gone deep (possibly 900 feet deep?). Now its moving away from you at over 20kts. You can hear it, but when you try to catch up to it your sonar guy goes deaf. So you have to slow down again to get a bearing in case the wily uboat captain changed course, dropped a decoy, or whatever. Remember he can go 200kms at 24kts. And at any time he thinks he lost the escorts go back to regular battery propulsion to go silent. By the time he has to surface (or snorkel?) hes over 300kms away!
So it would not have been quite so easy to catch as the regular uboats. It would have brought another happy time in 1943 maybe, but its very likely the Allies would have adapted their tactics and eventually started sinking them again, tho maybe not as easily as they caught the regular uboats.
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Yes, it´s the tactic used by the actual diesel electric submarines (still in use ) like kilo.
i´m sure that a good number of these boats arround england during 1942-43 could make very difficult the build of an invassion force for a second front.
Yes , allied could build a lot of ships, but it takes a lot of resources .
And if you have fidos and sonar detectors, this weapons have to deal with a 25 knts target, probably using sonar coating, antiradar coating in periscopes and snorkel, detectors and countermeasures.
How many time could take a crash dive from periscope depth for a walter boat with the drive engaged ??