US fleet boats - best frontline sub of ww2?

[tater]

True, but the US built something like 140 CVL/CVEs during the war

[tater]

No edit---again---anyway, the UK is farther to sea than Norway, so the LW would have needed not just had bombers, but escorts. Long-range escorts. They didn't have any long enough ranged for the 20 minute hop across the channel in 1940...

[Torplexed]

Originally Posted by tater

No edit---again---anyway, the UK is farther to sea than Norway, so the LW would have needed not just had bombers, but escorts. Long-range escorts. They didn't have any long enough ranged for the 20 minute hop across the channel in 1940...

I'm figuring if the Germans could have come up with something with range similar to the Japanese Betty they could have outdistanced the Spitfires and Hurricanes that made up the majority of British fighter planes. They couldn't be everywhere. If such an effort had coincided with the Battle of Britain most of those planes would have been tied up defending British cities given Britain's pilot shortage.

This all fantasy speculation anyway. Hitler's main obsession was his eventual showdown with Stalin and the drive to the east. He pretty much planned the whole war towards that goal. After the fall of France and the securing of his western flank everything else, the Kriegsmarine, the aborted Operation Sealion, the Afrika Korps, etc. all got the short end of the stick.

[Rockin Robbins]

300 U-Boats would only have brought the US into the war earlier and doomed Germany in 1943 instead of 1945. The very use of the U-Boat was inappropriate and fatal to the cause of Germany. The U-Boat was completely unsupported either by surface navy or aviation. No number of U-Boats had any chance of success, because the resources to build them would have erased thousands of trucks, tanks, artillery pieces, submachine guns, fill in the blank. Adding U-Boats subtracts a lot of other things. Then Germany would have been a sitting duck on land as well as at sea. What a success!:rotfl:Things don't happen in a vacuum.

Germany would have preserved their chances of victory only by NOT building more U-Boats than were needed for coastal defense (that is much fewer boats than the "inadequate" number Doenitz objected to) and using them for coastal defense ONLY. That was the only purpose they were fitted to anyway. Then they could use the additional resources to build more tanks, planes, etc to attack Russia without the hindrance of Britain and the US on their back side.

Only by keeping Britain and the US out of the war did Germany have any prayer of a strictly limited victory. After the strictly limited victory they could have done the evil empire USSR bit and been squashed later by Reagan's "you want an arms war? WE"LL show you an arms war, and walking away at Reykjavik. Different evil empire, same result.

I'm afraid that I am not the one ignoring facts and implications. Read Torplex's post above about the real obsession and tell me I'm wrong. Hitler lost focus and doomed his own efforts, abandoning attainable goals for a mindless suicide run. It worked!

[Freiwillige]

Im afraid ill disagree with you Rockin Robbins. Germany could have had 300 submarines. In retrospect the Bizmark and Tirpitz were failures. Not in desighn but in the hopeless naval situation Germany found herself in. So how many U-boats could have been produced in place of those 2 Ships alone?

America coming into the war was inevitable from Hitlers perspective. Neutral countries are not to arm other waring nations. That is a breach of Germany and America's neutrality agreement. Extending the U.S. territory from 100 miles off the coastline to the mid Atlantic and then claiming all U-boats will be fired on by a neutral U.S. navy escorting arms to England. Again a clear violation of the United States neutrality agreement sighned with Germany.

300 U-boats would have knocked England out of the war and quick. They came close with 1/4 that number in 1940' 41'. With England out where is the United States gonna base? Chances are that Germany would have starved England into a peace agreement. The U.S. would have turned towards Japan after Pearl and Germany and Russia would have fought their war to the bitter end.

[Freiwillige]

Im afraid ill disagree with you Rockin Robbins. Germany could have had 300 submarines. In retrospect the Bizmark and Tirpitz were failures. Not in desighn but in the hopeless naval situation Germany found herself in. So how many U-boats could have been produced in place of those 2 Ships alone?

America coming into the war was inevitable from Hitlers perspective. Neutral countries are not to arm other waring nations. That is a breach of Germany and America's neutrality agreement. Extending the U.S. territory from 100 miles off the coastline to the mid Atlantic and then claiming all U-boats will be fired on by a neutral U.S. navy escorting arms to England. Again a clear violation of the United States neutrality agreement sighned with Germany.

300 U-boats would have knocked England out of the war and quick. They came close with 1/4 that number in 1940' 41'. With England out where is the United States gonna base? Chances are that Germany would have starved England into a peace agreement. The U.S. would have turned towards Japan after Pearl and Germany and Russia would have fought their war to the bitter end.

Ahem... "Operation Paukenschlag"
In WWII Germany declared war on America first not otherwise. If Hitler wouldn't have started the war, American ressources wouldn't have gotten so quickly to GB. Or in other words: if the open entry of the US to the European war would have been postponned to late 42 or early 43, the Brits would have had a really hard time and maybe even been forced to surrender. In retrospect, declaring war on the US and fighting at the same time the Sowjets was Hitlers doom.
Thank god he made the right wrong decision.

[Dread Knot]

Seems like we always have these attempts to salvage the U-Boat's reputatution with "what-ifs."

If you look at the constraints put on U-boat production in the 1930s, there is no way to get to 300 U-boats in 1939 or 1940. Under the treaty of Versailles, Germany was not allowed any submarines, so the Germans did some U-boat design work for other countries during the 1920s and early 1930s to keep up with the state of the art. Hitler was afraid of various treaty obligations, so he waited until 1935 to build his first small U-boats . The first Type II was launched is June 1935 and 13 more followed until the end of the year. Production peaked in 1936 with 10 Type II, 2 Type I and 9 Type VIIA. A single Type VIIA was launched in 1937.

If the Germans had used every loophole in the naval treaty with Britain and stretched things to the breaking point, they may have had around 90 U-boats in September 1939 and maybe as many as 150 by end 1940. The majority of them probably of the early Type VIIA design. This would have been most unpleasant for the British, but it would not have been decisive. In order to get the required 300 U-boats by end 1940, the shipyards would have had to set the stage for flat out production already in 1937/38 at a time the tonnage extension was not yet negotiated. Hitler would only have authorized this clear breach of the treaty if he had known he would have to fight the British when he attacked Poland. If he had known that, I am not at all sure he would have invaded Poland in 1939.

I'm also fairly certain that such a crash U-Boat buidling program would not have gone unnoticed by Britain. If they see the Germans have ceased building capital ships in favor of submarines, they cancel their own capital ships in favor of escorts.

[Rockin Robbins]

@Freiwillige: I have to agree with you on the German surface ships. They also were a waste for anything but coastal defense, and their resources could have been used to make U-Boats, which would have been dispatched to the bottom of the ocean with their crews and captains.

@gmuno: Had U-Boats actually threatened the defeat of Britain, the US would have entered the war without prompting by the German declaration of war, despite the Nazi-loving actions of Ambassador Kennedy. Roosevelt was already risking his job violating the US Constitution to save Britain by moving their secret service to New York, duplicating their enigma decoding operations in the United States and setting up the framework for a possible British government in exile.

Make no mistake about Roosevelt's determination not to allow Britain to be defeated. It would not and could not have happened. Submarines were not appropriate weapons to use against the British because, unlike Japan, their supplies came in ships of other nations. Sinking British supplies necessarily involved war with those other nations, dooming Germany. The use of U-Boats was one of many fatal errors of the Wehrmacht. Even in the absense of all the other fatal errors, the use of any number of U-Boats in unrestricted warfare against Britain and the US guaranteed the defeat of Germany.

@Dread Knot: your point is the central fact U-Boat enthusiasts choose to ignore. Hitler built the maximum number of boats he figured he could get away with. Just like the fact that using the U-Boats guaranteed the one enemy the Germans could not defeat, if they had ramped up production to the levels necessary to put 300 boats in the water, they would have been attacked and defeated easily in 1937 or 1938. Or they would have had to scrap ALL production to placate the Allies and ended up with even fewer boats at the start of the war in 1939. Paradoxically the forced killing of the U-Boat program could have saved possibilities for Germany to win, or at least it would have allowed one of Hitler's other fatal mistakes to lose the war for him. Either way, the 300 boats was a pipe dream in a vacuum. If ifs and buts were candy and nuts we'd all have a merry Christmas.

Has anyone thought of the other problem associated with putting several hundred more U-Boats into operation? U-Boats can't do squat without well-trained crews. If the Starship Enterprise were to for some imponderable reason, transported 500 Type VII U-Boats down the the German bases in 1939, they would have been useless. The same thing happens to U-Boat crews as happens to sports teams when there are too many. The quality of their crews would decline to the point that they could not have been a factor at all. This was the case in the Japanese air forces, where the good pilots were killed early and pilot skill just plummeted for the rest of the war until Japan was forced by incompetent pilots to use them as suicide bombers.

I can only advise to read Churchills memoires.
He wrote quite clearly, how close the U-boats came to achieve victory.

[Rockin Robbins]

Churchill spent months in Washington DC, cultivating the friendship of President Roosevelt and conspiring to ensure that it couldn't happen. Churchill's fear was not based on impending doom, but on the possibility that if he failed the U-Boats could win. He knew what to do about it. He did it. He won.

But Churchill had to depend on Roosevelt for that victory. Knowing the nastiness of American politics, which looks on the surface to be more orderly than British politics, but tends to the politics of personal destruction, knowing that Roosevelt was violating the Constitution in several ways that if discovered would definitely cause him to be removed from office, knowing that if that happened the Republican isolationists of the time would take power and Britain would fall, he was justifiably afraid things might not work out the way he planned.

After all, Churchill himself narrowly won the victory in the 1930's with King Edward wanting to throw in with the Nazis and morph Britain into a proto-Nazi state. Churchill, standing almost alone (as usual) built the alliances that finally pressured royalty into forcing Edward's abdication "for the woman I love":rotfl::rotfl:and exile to Canada. Afterward, in spite of our ambassador to Britain, Joe Kennedy's Hitler loving, there was no talk of throwing in with the Germans.

So Churchill had been there before. He knew the end was not guaranteed. His previous experience was that of paying the price and gaining victory against fearsome odds. I have no doubt that although he chose to say he was afraid of the U-Boats he was confident that he was able to gain the victory. The key to that victory was the entry of the US. Roosevelt's illegal moves to help the British guaranteed entry of the US, Pearl Harbor or no Pearl Harbor.

American escorts were already killing U-Boats and we were already in the war before December 7, 1941. Even after December 7, 1941, official US policy was that we hold the line against the less threatening Japanese while we annihilate the more dangerous Nazis. Then we were going to focus on the Japanese. The reason for that policy? Churchill and Roosevelt. The moment Hitler decided to fight them with unrestricted submarine warfare, he was doomed.

[Dread Knot]

Originally Posted by Rockin Robbins

Has anyone thought of the other problem associated with putting several hundred more U-Boats into operation? U-Boats can't do squat without well-trained crews. If the Starship Enterprise were to for some imponderable reason, transported 500 Type VII U-Boats down the the German bases in 1939, they would have been useless. The same thing happens to U-Boat crews as happens to sports teams when there are too many. The quality of their crews would decline to the point that they could not have been a factor at all. This was the case in the Japanese air forces, where the good pilots were killed early and pilot skill just plummeted for the rest of the war until Japan was forced by incompetent pilots to use them as suicide bombers.

Exellent point since this actually happened during the course of the war. As production increased and Doenitz put more U-Boats into the fight, the sinkings per U-Boat plummeted as the crews were increasing made up of former surface sailors drafted into a task they didn't care for. You can have a small elite force with hand picked crews trained to a razor's edge, but sooner or later quantity dilutes quality. There were only so many professionial and highly motivated former WW I U-Boat officers to go around to train such a large force to the same degree.

Another thing to bear in mind is the consequences of scrapping the German surface fleet to create this 300 boat armada that Doenitz craved. The German surface ships are remembered as a failure but as the classic fleet-in-being, they had their effect too. Without them there would have no German invasion of Norway in 1940. The Kriegsmarine took a beating getting the Gerrman army ashore there, but without some sort of escort they never would have gone. Norway neutral was a nagging worry to the Germans. They were convinced Churchill would grab it as a base, and the British did think about it. Even as late as 1944 a lot of British ships which could have been used profitably elsewhere were still tied up in home waters just to guard against the possible threat of the Tirpitz venturing from her Norwegian lair.

In addition, with no German surface raiders to worry about containing, the British are free to throw the full weight of the Home Fleet with their carriers against the Italians and their supply line to Africa. Needless to say that would leave Rommel dry on his side of the Mediterranean, if it didn't knock Italy out of the war all together.

[Rockin Robbins]

Choices, choices, and all the choices were lousy ones. Germany had no business going to war in the first place. It reminds me of a memorable paragraph in The Perfect Storm, where the author explained that the entire book was about choices: how in the beginning there were many, many choices. Most of them were apparently inconsequential and good and bad choices were available in plenty. But as events moved forward and choices were made, the available field of choices shrank as each choice contained more and more consequence. The good choices became fewer and fewer until finally they were gone and the only choice left was how to die.

Germany was like that.

[Freiwillige]

I did'nt say anything about scrapping the entire German fleet, I was Talking about the Bizmark And Tirpitz. Just those two ships alone would provide the materials for 300 U-boats. And lets add the failed carrier Graf whatever that was never completed to the list. Now keep in mind that the first of these ships were laid down initially in what 37'? Thats almost three years before war. To train 300 Submarine crews in 3 years is not unacheivable. With 300 U-boats Germany would have still benn able to land in Norway. They had the Scharnhorts, Gneisneu, Deutschland class ships Etc. Plus all the tin cans, With a massive U-boat screen between England and Norway!

Secondly, Nobody was drafted into the Ubootwaffe. It was an all volunteer force. And with the prestige the U-boat arm held within the German navy, Volunteers were never short. Almost everyone wanted to command a battleship or a U-boat.

[Rockin Robbins]

No I was the one who said that their entire fleet, both surface and submarine, except for a small portion for coastal defense, was useless. You can't attack Russia from the sea and that was their real aim. Everything else was useless window dressing, although Hitler did appear to enjoy his trip to the railroad car after beating France.

But "I beat the French" is hardly a compelling thing to put on a T-shirt. It would beg the question, "And your point is?" I don't understand all the cheerleading for a third-rate sandbox bully. They killed people with cool looking weapons and that's as far as it goes. And the Russians made them look like amateurs at both dying and killing.