What where the differences between American and German Subs?

[Hitman]

You guys are forgetting that the U-boats war was fought against Great Britain and not the USA, and that the whole strategy was based on the realities of 1939 - 1941, when Germany still had a chance to defeat Britain with swift action as it had with France. From 1942 onwards, I agree, Germany had missed her small chance and it was a lost cause once Britain and the USA were geared up for war, and with Russias neverending supply of cannonfodder.

Had Germany build and concentrated a maximum number of boats as well as her whole airforce to the siege of Britain, while she was struggling with the most basic ASW measures, and the USA was a teethless giant, this had a realistic chance of completely disrupting Britains imports, forcing Churchill out of power and getting an armistice in 12 months. That was the plan, and it was not impossible in '40 and '41, but it was never carried out. Instead Hitler conducted the Atlantic campaign more like a propaganda war that would give him of a big number of war heros and propaganda material for very little investment.

Agree COMPLETELY

A decided and brutal U-Boat blockade (With enough U-Boats) at the beginning of the war would have effectively strangled England and forced a negotiated peace. The USA would have been too slow to react in 1939, but the thing is, Hitler always believed (And failed) that he would be able to keep Britain out of his crusade against the Soviet Union. That's the reason he never approved to invest resources in U-Boats, but instead diverted them to panzers and surface ships (More useful against the USSR than submarines).

[Hartmann]

Yes. if germany don´t change his tactics during the england battle and continues bombing factories, airfields and harbours, this together with a decided u-boat blockade could strangled England and forced them to surrender or negociate.

[Rockin Robbins]

First of all Germany had no planes that could reach more than a third of Britain. You can't conquer a nation you can't touch. Secondly, Germany had no way to transport the invasion across the English Channel. This very basic qualification for any invasion has, for some reason, been ignored by those who champion German possibility for victory in WWII.
Conclusion: the Battle of Britain and subsequent invasion were never possible from the beginning. Hitler was only wasting his best-trained pilots tilting at windmills.

Second, the only way to strangle Britain with the subs was to sink American shipping. Doing that would have brought the US into the war with or without Pearl Harbor. Without Pearl Harbor, you can imagine the consequences. With Pearl Harbor it just doomed Germany. Had Britain signed any type of armistice, it would have been short-lived as they would have been necessarily liberated right away to give us the indispensible base of operations they were in order to prosecute the war.

Third, if there were no attack on Russia is absurd. Hitler's goals in order of priority were the killing of all Jews and the conquest of Russia. Everything else was just an obstacle to those two goals. The top two obstacles as he saw it were the French, a mere nuisance, (use a french-derived word to describe them: how appropriate) and the Italians (sometimes with the friends you have you don't need enemies). In other words, Russia was a primary goal of Hitler's war, not an unfortunate error. The United States was an unfortunate error, and the UK as well. I believe we tend to unjustly minimize the British contribution to victory.

If Britain were neutralized, it would only have been for a very short time, as the means of making them capitulate must bring the US into the war. Conclusion: build half the number of submarines, use them for defensive purposes, use the saved raw materials for more land based weapons and win the continent of Europe.

Of course Hitler was capable of none of this.

[GlobalExplorer]

@RR no disagreement to what you say this time but didnt you silently change the topic? From the question of the best submarine strategy for Germany / USA to the question if Germany had a genuine chance to achieve world domination? (I don't think she had).

Originally Posted by Hartmann

Yes. if germany don´t change his tactics during the england battle and continues bombing factories, airfields and harbours, this together with a decided u-boat blockade could strangled England and forced them to surrender or negociate.

That's exactly what they tried, and failed with miserably. Germany was not in a position to achieve anything with an air offensive against the British mainland. They did not have the right equipment, there were serious defects in the Luftwaffe, all in all they were fighting the battle under the most unfavorable conditions.

Nazi propaganda had done its utmost to convince the world that the Luftwaffe was invincible, and they were so successful that in the end they were fooled by it themselves. Hitler definitely believed it, but a closer look reveals that his officials had tried to impress him with inflated numbers, especially after they had been complacent to make good the losses from Poland, Norway and France.

I am not saying it would have won WWII, but the best strategy would have been to concentrate all efforts of all arms on Britain. That would have meant building more U-Boats, and use them together with a new naval airforce (built from 4-engined types with sufficient range) to attack british shipping, thereby negating all the British advantages of fighting over their mainland which made Battle of Britain such a glorious affair for the defenders.

The RAF would have had a hard time struggling against lone Fw200s and torpedo planes, as the british escorts against U-Boats. And they would have lost many many pilots in the icy atlantic. In fact the Luftwaffe had at least had a basic sea-rescue service, the RAF had none. German airplanes were very effective against convoys, as demonstrated in Norway where they had some naval bombers. And a few hundred long range interceptors along the French coast could have turned the tables on coastal command, in that case Biscay could have been their cemetry and not that of the U-Boats.

Apart from a couple of nightfighters the germans never had any airplanes over France after Barbarossa which gave the RAF years to build up before the invasion, and it was a death sentence for the U-boats.

P.S. Let me add the germans had many additional options on their sleeve, like sending commando troops over the channel, frogmen and explosive ships into british ports, torpedo boats, long range artilley and rockets, mines, etc, and they never used them. Britain was extremely vulnerable from the sea.

[Rockin Robbins]

Well, I guess I did rotate from the intrinsic capabilities of the boats to their actual usefulness to their respective countries.

How about yet another angle? I think German submarines in the hands of American commanders would have repeated the American torpedo debacle almost exactly and for the same length of time. American submarines in the hands of German commanders would have had their torpedo problems sorted out in a month and had four years of very productive campaign.

What a great discussion this has been. Isn't it amazing that fifty years after a war that killed off a generation of Europeans and made a significant impact on America, we are still interested enough to even have the discussion?