What's the biggest failure of the uboat service?

[BasilY]

Originally Posted by DarkFolle

the biggest failure? :hmm:
maybe starting a war with a bunch of egocentric, self-satisfying, each-other-intolerant, each-other-unsupporting commanding officers, first of all that genius of Hitler (the one who said "i don't want to conquer Russia, i just want the Arian space"....yeah, mate, sure, just in a second, the russians will give their life and territories for free...)?? :hmm:
U surely start a war with what u have, but if u start a war with nothing AND plan to conquest the entire world with it... :hmm: gimme another beer dude...:rotfl:

Useless topic, because there are so many faults the Nazi did from the very beginning of the war that are countless. They could and would have won if.. or if... or if not, better to say...

You go to war with the leader(s) you have, not the leader(s) you want

[Subnuts]

Voted "Other" ; their inability to keep pace with Allied ASW advances and to provide appropriate countermeasures, and the fact that technological development in Nazi Germany was almost wholly reactionary, eventually doomed the U-boats.

[saltysplash]

I dont think it was a U Boat service failure...it was a lack of forsight......Germany unlike Great Britain focused on land based warfare.....Her Hitler didnt listen to Raeder, who imo understood the importance of a global fleet which would challenge the British fleet and cause it to divert rescources to far and away places, away from its most needed locations close to the homeland.

Dont forget Sealion failed due to lack of air support.....but even more so because the kreigsmarine couldnt provide suitable cover for the channel crossing......Hitler....inspite of all his foresight....couldnt foresee that Naval power combined with air power would only bring victory against the british isles.

We all know Hitlers fears when his surface vessels put to sea!!!!!! his restricions made their operations unattainable.

The U-Boats played a valient role in their war in the Atlantic but.......they were ...even with hindsight on a hide into nothing........All Churchill had to do was stand his ground and enjoy american aid and it was a matter of time......and men.

Nicholas Monsarrat in his novel 'Cruel Sea' kinda hit the nail on the head.....They had a good time in the early days but they were doomed......it was a matter of time only

[Steeltrap]

A few things:

* The fact the KM was 'unprepared for war' was in no small part due to the fact that Hitler had assured them there would be no war until 1945 at the earliest.

* The lack of an effective invasion plan for England was a reflection of the point above. Hitler did not believe that England and France would honour their commitments to Poland. His view was there was no strategic reason to justify it, hence they wouldn't do it. Clearly the idea that one might honour a treaty because that's the point of them wasn't in his nature....quite revealing.

* Technology killed them. The fact that the Brits 'broke' enigma (and they had the hardest time with the u-boat version, and didn't get a lot of 'real time' intel until later in the war) wouldn't have mattered one little bit had the u-boats had a technological advantage. In other words, knowing where they were would not have helped, other than in terms of evasion, if you didn't have an effective means of killing them once you found them. The fact that they could kill them meant the use of sigint to find them was adding insult to injury....

Consider the fact that the operational XXI patrol in progress at the time the war ended succeeded in getting into a firing position on a Brit task force, and had observed evasion was almost easy due to superior depth and, especially, speed abilities of the XXI, and you can see where superior technology might have got them.

They were defeated because they became too easy to locate AND SINK (from around May 1943 they lost 1 u-boat for every merchant sunk...). Allied radar, sonar/asdic and weapons, plus aircraft equivalents, simply overwhelmed them as the u-boat's technologies did not advance in any really effective manner prior to the introduction of schnorkel coupled with the XXI.

** Another way of answering this is by answering a different question: as a u-boat, what's the ONE thing you would deny the Allies were you able to do so? My answer would be RADAR of any kind. Why? Because it was radar that forced u-bpats to abandon surface attacks. That meant they were severely limited in their ability to manoeuver, tactically AND strategically, making them much easier to locate and destroy. Had you been able to conduct night surface attacks throughout the war the situation would have been considerably different....

[jpm1]

never had any failure , my crew's top banana lol

[mr chris]

1.
Failure to have the U-Boot arm ready for war.
What might have happened if BDU had his 300 boats in 39?:hmm:

2.
Contuining to think that Enigma was unbroken by the Allies.

3.
Not getting electro boats into the U-Boot arm sooner.
The Germans had been looking at the technology long before the war came.
Not a failure of the U-Boot service but one of the German war time leaders.

[jpm1]

difficult to say as often during a war if you create a high end weapon the enemy doesn't last long in general to play oppsite to you , but i would be curious to see how the things would have turned into if during the Norway invasion all the faulty torps would have been functional

[Hartmann]

Originally Posted by saltysplash

Dont forget Sealion failed due to lack of air support.....but even more so because the kreigsmarine couldnt provide suitable cover for the channel crossing......Hitler....inspite of all his foresight....couldnt foresee that Naval power combined with air power would only bring victory against the british isles.

i don´t think so, with a full air cover the british navy is not a problem.

since 1941 and the pearl harbour attack it was clear that the main ship in a navy is an aircraft carrier and not a battleship.

i can´t imagine the british navy in the channel under the attack of stukas or other bombers like ju-88 without air cover.

[danoh]

I voted "other" as the possibilities given overlook the fact that despite the many problems listed the U-Boat arm in fact did it's job quite well until long after the war was lost (Dec. 7, 1941.)

My "other" reasons are strategic. In both all the simulations I've played and in reality, Germany should have crushed Britian when she had it by the balls .

Germany could have also followed the historical path and beaten Russian with a more intelligent campaign in the east in 1941. In which case the U-Boat war becomes trivial.

Given the strategic decisions that were made, loosing the ASW technological battle was decisive.

[Kipparikalle]

The biggest mistake of the war, was Hitler starting it without putting the war factories on full production mode.
"...It would ruin the country's economy" or something like that, he said.


When the war facilities finally went on full mode (1944), war machines such as planes was producted much faster than they were lost (read in Adolf Galland, Stuka Bomber Pilot, Deutchland's hawks, etc...)

But it was already too late

[Red Heat]

Originally Posted by CCIP

Well, in all fairness, I think the thing that really failed them is less their decisions and more the fact that the service was not adequately prepared and invested into before the war started. The only way I see things going differently is if they started with Doenitz's planned 300 boats, not 57.

Very well said, Sir!
The true!

[Brag]

Wrong priorities. Too much effort and expenditure was made on the surface fleet, which could never catch up with the RN.

Later, the failure to recognise that Enigma was compromised (this was very obvious).