What if N-Germany had discovered Enigma had been cracked?

[scandium]

Originally Posted by Mike 'Red Ocktober' Hense

the TypeXXI, while being a revolution in sub design, would not have made much difference in the atlantic war... like all so called super weapons, if they are not part of an effective deployment system, they would've been a spectacular misuse and waste of great technology...

and, while cracking the enigma code was definitely a big plus... the cards were slowly (maybe not so slowly) being stacked up against the nazi regime's war effort with advances in sonar and radar... as well as the attacks on the logistics centers required to support such a weapons system...

plus, when japan entered the war, the us was committed anyways...

also, the us wasn't about to let the brit islands fall, nor were they gonna sit back and let the soviets take over spoils in asia or europe... we were in it... like it or not...

cracking the enigma wasn't that significant of an event (not to downplay it though) as to change world history to the extent suggested... neither was the deployment of the XXI...

--Mike

Agree that the type XXI was too little, too late. Though it wasn't a new concept when it was finally designed and built, but prior to radar being developed and enigma being cracked there was no reason for building it as the Germans' surface based wolfpack attacks were working. The problem was they didn't have enough u-boats to cover the Atlantic (let alone the other theatres they were later called on to operate in, like the Med or the Arctic Ocean). Doenitz had wanted 300 u-boats by the outbreak of war - he had 58; at the peak of the Battle of Atlantic, when the tide was almost turned, he had about 100 total. If he had his 300 U-boats Britain would have had its life strangled out of it (that life being the import of goods & resources it needed not just for the war machine, but for day-to-day life) while Roosevelt was still sniffing the wind to see which way it was blowing both at home and abroad. This is because Britain had greatly underestimated the value of the u-boat and the impact it would have for three reasons:

1. They had, at the time, the world's best Navy which they placed too much faith in;

2. They had successfully countered the U-boat threat in the first World War by implementing the convoy tactic and did not forsee that u-boats, operating in wolfpacks, could beat numbers through numbers (they couldn't forsee it because these wolfpack tactics had never been used before);

3. Lastly they underestimated the U-boat threat because of their possession of the ASDIC (which the Germans did not have) which they believed effectively rendered the submarine threat obsolete (and for proof of that one need only look at the submarine treaty of 1935 in which they again allowed Germany to build U-boats, which they'd previously been forbidden to build since the end of WWI, and not just build them but build a disproportionate number of them versus the other naval units that treaty authorized (which was 35% of Britain's tonnage for all ship types except U-boats, which Britain permitted 45% of).

Germany never came close to building even the 45% of Britain's submarine tonnage, as authorized by treaty, in the years leading up to the war even when it became inevitable. Had they had their 300 U-boats, or had they known Enigma had been comprised then things may have very well gone differently.

Recall that it wasn't until America was attacked first by Japan, then had Germany declare war on her, that she finally shrugged off her cloak of neutrality and really got involved in it (over two years after the declaration of war on Germany by France, Britain, and a half a dozen or so other Commonwealth countries).

This is too long a time period of maintaining neutrality, after so many others had already cast their lot in, to take it for granted in hindsight that the US "wasn't about to let the brit islands fall". I mean if that were the case, why wait two years?