>Germans built over a thousand of these things during WWII and most of them got destroyed
In hindsight, was it a waste of resources?
>Germans built over a thousand of these things during WWII and most of them got destroyed
>Germans built over a thousand of these things during WWII and most of them got destroyed
In hindsight, was it a waste of resources?
no
no, the submarine campaign was effective
should've built even more submarines and been quicker with the new types
The Kriegsmarine lost the moment the US entered the war. American shipyards launched enough merchant shipping in 1943-1944 alone to replace Allied shipping losses, from all causes, in the entire war from 1939-1945 (21 million tons).
Yeah this was the main problem with the U-boat campaign, under the conditions the number of freighters they had to sink to put a dent in merchant shipping was simply not feasible. To give some numbers, in 1939 the US had 8.5 million gross tons in shipping available, in 1945 it was 40 million. That's after subtracting tonnage sunk, obviously.
It could be said the Germans would have had more success if they'd invested heavily in aerial support of the campaign.
>It is estimated by April, 1941, Fliegerführer Atlantik had on strength 21 Fw 200s, 26 He 111s, 24 Heinkel He 115s, and a mixed force of Messerschmitt Bf 110s and Junkers Ju 88s, numbering 12 aircraft. The total number of aircraft by July 1941 had reached 155; 29 Fw 200s, 31 He 111s, 45 Ju 88s, 18 He 115s, 20 Dornier Do 217s, 12 Bf 110s and Ju 88 specialised reconnaissance aircraft.[43]
115 aircraft is honestly pathetic. BUT;
>By Christmas 1940, KG 40 had sunk 19 ships of approximately 100,000 tons and damaged 37: 180,000 tons of shipping. In January 1941, 17 ships were sunk amounting to 65,000 tons and five damaged.[53] February was worse for the British, losing 21 ships to Fw 200s, totalling 84,301 tons.[54]
That's not pathetic, but that's not great either.
Aircraft would probably have been more useful for reconnaissance. The ocean is a big place, and searching for convoys from a U-boat, even when you know their general direction, is like a needle in a haystack. Most of the time U-boats first made contact with the Mk. 1 eyeball, which could only see as far as 15-18 nautical miles under perfect visual conditions, which was not very common in the stormy North Atlantic. Otherwise, they had to rely on B-Dienst decryptions of Allied merchant radio traffic, which were only sporadically available between 1939-1942 as the codes were repeatedly cracked, changed, then cracked again, or contact reports from other U-boats that also had to rely on their limited eyesight.
God I love Fw 200 so much its unreal
You can tell the Germans were on to something but sadly they didn't realize just how on to it they were.
Germans had a whole bunch of cool concepts missing an important piece that would've turned them to real wunderwaffe, like the acoustic torpedo could've been 10 times better than it was with few more features
>acoustic torpedo
The wat?
Germany and the Allies both fielded audio-seeking torpedoes within a couple months of one another
>not enough to be anything other than a farce for the much-diminished Royal Navy to laugh about
Except that the presence of modern German battleships required Britain to keep a good chunk of it's fleet in Home waters. With the need to keep Italy in check and protect against Japanese aggression, this stretched the Royal Navy worryingly thin. If Germany built no surface fleet, that would free up an entire naval front.
Reminder that the acoustic torpedo was fricked by simply towing a welded mass of pipes behind the DDs and DDEs they were meant to counter.
The Germans made a torpedo that would hone in on engine and propeller noise. The idea was that they'd use them to hone in on the escort ships' props, immobilizing them and forcing convoys to go on with fewer or no escorts.
It took a good amount of time to perfect it, was more expensive than regular torpedoes, and it had to be employed in a very specific way.
The allies found out that you could make a under-water noisermaker by towing a mass of pipes well behind the escorts, and invalidated this very high-tech and expensive weapon with cheap Wallace and Grommet shenanigans once they knew about the torpedo.
Typical angloids, using unfair and impermissible techniques rather than fighting correctly.
My main point in highlighting that is to point out the tech side of the "Germany didn't have the resources to win" theme. They made a lot of progress and advancements to improve the subs' ability to invalidate escorts (the acoustic torps) and evade the escorts (better batteries, radar detection beacons, changing tactics to recharge or regroup at night), but the sheer amount of escorts and allied advances in tech (Better sonar, search radar, aircraft mounted search radar and longer ranged aircraft or CVE aircraft later, or bonkers CAMs) and tactics (improvements / relearning in the convoy systems and sub hunting, western approaches command, early EW in code-breaking) matched and outpaced them.
literally fly to the nearest airfield, or ditch. Program was canceled as soon as CVEs were available.
so did the burgers. Ever heard of the proximity fuse? A genuine wunderwaffel that is almost completely unknown
While I'm sure it wasn't glamorous, being a CAM pilot seems like it'd be peak fighter comfy.
>arguably most important person in the convoy
>if you have to fight, it's against a fragile and poorly armed bomber
>haha catapult launch go whooosh
>everyone rooting for you to save their ass
>everyone buying you a beer if you save their ass
Does it make up for maybe getting torpedoed by a sub and having to parachute into the Atlantic?
Dumb question, but how did they get back??? Did they kill the plane and head back to the nearest airfield??? What would happen if you couldn't make it to an airfield??
You cut the engines, jump out and get rescued by one of the escorts.
They just land carefully back on the catapult.
Rescue buoys deployed before combat
This looks really comfy. Do any still exist?
None of the german ones.
Here's a video on them
Top comfy.
There are a ton of posts here and none of them are talking about the real issue except maybe this guy
No weapons and no strategies in WWII matter, at all, because WWII was won and lost on the diplomatic/political/economic level.
It simply does not matter what weapons you build or how you use them when your economy is eclipsed multiple times and you are fighting against multiple times your own population.
MAYBE, the capping moscow in 41 was the only thing that might have won the war for them.
so US should just give up against China?
china is a phony superpower
>MAYBE, the capping moscow in 41 was the only thing that might have won the war for them.
hardly. Even if killing the vatnik in the east would have meant all of that humongous war material that was thrown to them going instead into allied invasion armies. West euro would definitely have been reconquered with normandy and the likes happening like the way it did.
The fundamental problem is simply burgers are absolutely OP on a grand scale. Two gigantic oceans for protection with self sufficient, continent size nation to draw from with a largely euro derived host population with productive protestant, low corruption work ethics. The last is the real killer in the mix because otherwise places like Brazil also fit the former criteria. Take away US from the equation as if it never existed and then imagine how the wars in euro and pacific would have turned out.
Also being english speaking means that realistically the US would never side with Germany against the UK, or even really remain neutral. I mean can you imagine.
>Also being english speaking
You have absolutely no understanding of geopolitics. The language doesn't mean shit.
Oh yeah explain AUKUS
Explain India and their level of English penetration while doing everything they can to piss off the anglo nations who speak English. What you're looking for is cultural ties which go far deeper then merely language.
They don't speak real english.
Still far better then glorious nippon or worst korea, both of whom are pretty tight with the anglos.
c**t half of the Indianisms people make jokes about are remnants from Indians learning English in the 1800s.
SIR y we do. do milk
American rebels had no problems siding with France against the UK though.
More so France was willing to offer aid to the revolution because it snubbed the UK.
They still regarded themselves as Englishmen.
And that was a few generations previous.
rebellion's aren't war moron
Aircraft can't touch the most important shipping routes so what's the point?
The real problem was that the uboat campaign was only a small part of a bigger commerce raiding strategy. Originally, they were to play a supporting role with cruisers, aviation, and tbhtschland class type vessels. without the support of aviation and surface ships, the uboats were limited in their effectiveness and vulnerable to ASW in the long run and therefore had no hope of denting American manufacturing.
Allowing an ENIGMA machine to fall into enemy hands intact was treasonous. Without that, casualties would've been much lower. If anything they needed to dump most of the surface fleet building early like Canaris insisted to completely flood the field with commerce raiding wolf packs. At least in hindsight.
Still came close to starving the island out regardless. More aggressive interdiction and heavier losses makes FDR's already untenable position even more unviable. It was bad enough that the UK had to 'fortify' the Republican primary to install Wendell Wilkie rather than a neutrality candidate to push FDR over the line in his final election, picrel. Two presidents in two world wars non compos mentis in the end doesn't happen by accident. picrel.
Probably. The Heer and Luftwaffe lost the day Germany invaded the Soviet Union. Even without a war against the British Empire, a war that will either end in complete destruction of the whole USSR, or a German surrender, isn't a war Germany was going to win in 1939, much less 1941.
i've been inside this bote
lewd
with enigma busted and them failing to detect that plus shit recon since the condor likes were never ramped up to aid consistent sea recon to spot targets.
Besides that the fact that burgers sit behind two gigantic oceans with all the industrial inputs they ever need. Simply its existence made the war near impossible with its natural tendency to side with dear old daddy UK. If it never existed now that would have been another sight. UK vs Germany vs soviets with no outside inference
no
No, in fact it was critically unfunded.
Didn't the U-boat service from the entier 39-45 period have a 75% casulty rate? I believe that's the highest service of any military arm during WW2, INCLUDING the Kamikaze corps
No, whenever Donitz was able to organize wolf packs without the allies listening in some fricking devastating shit happened. One might argue the Germans would have been better off focusing their efforts on an air force but as a whole the U-boats were worth it.
The breaking of German codes was more devastating for the navy than any other branch. The army had to deal with it extensively on a divisional level in Africa and later in France, the army had strategic orders from Hitler leaked up to early 1945, but at no point were things like "Hey company X, go to Y and hit Z unit at A time" leaked as often as they were in the navy. The army still had the ability to make tactical decisions and outsmart the enemy until the end of the war.
I honestly feel kinda bad for Donitz.
US/UK bomber pilots in 1943 had something like a 3-5 sortie life expectancy, a high casualty rate doesn't mean they're useless.
Hitlers mood always went up after speaking with his submarine commanders. Even at the very end.
it was great from 1941 to mid 1943, after that the loses were at 80-90% and they were bearly making a dent in the convoys.
Battle of the Atlantic was the most underappreciate campaign of the entire war
>"The allies total investment was $26.4 billion to counter the the German submarines as compared to the German investment of $2.76 billion to build them. The allies spent at least 9.6 times the German investment."
References:
(115) - Erich, op. cit., German Warships 1815 - 1945, (Annapolis, Naval Institute Press, 1990), Vol. II., pp 40, 44, 68, 77, 85.
(116) - War Production Board, World Munitions Production, (Washington, D.C., War Production Board, Bureau of Planning and Statistics, 1944), p. 44. Much thanks to historians Timothy Francis (Naval Historical Center) and George Papadopoulos for this information.
(117) - Bureau of Ships, op. cit., p. 282.
(118) - Henry Davis, "Building U.S. Submarines in World War II", Processdings, (July 1946, pp.939.
-Commander Michel Thomas Poirier 1999
This is the key takeaway from the whole thing. U-boats were incredibly effective at what they did, but America's economic and manufacturing capabilities meant that no German superiority in tactical or technological affairs would have changed the course of the war. Germany simply didn't have enough manpower or manufacturing capability to keep up.
There's also an argument to be made that their cultural baggage about engineering things to be high performance at the cost of being complex, maintenance intensive and logistically inefficient hamstrung them as much as anything else, but even if you take the manpower losses from the eastern front off the table and compare 1:1 production capacity, Germany gets crushed by the US by every conceivable economic measure.
the more interesting question how would the Pacific Fighting turned out if Japan implemented German Submarine tactics to sink USA merchant shipping.
You can't realistically strangle the US out like you could Japan or the UK, it's a continental nation that's largely self sufficient, thousands of miles from you. Attacking stuff supplying the American war effort in the Pacific is a better idea, but the Pacific is a really big fricking place. And Japan's subs were kneecapped by institutional issues, doctrine and designs that sounded cool on paper but were shit in practice (aircraft carrying subs)
yeah thats what i meant, Japanese submarines could've been attacking all the shipping lanes from Guadalcanal / Midway/hawaii etc
Germany wasn't even matching the UK for production, they were turbofricked from the start
America have unlimited money cheat THO
The allies put a shit load of resources into dealing with the U-boat threat. The ROI for the Germans was actually pretty good considering that, but they couldn't keep pace with the developing ASW tech and tactics, not to mention the allies codebreaking efforts fricking their moves.
Coming from a sailor who works on cargo ships I massively respect the U-boat crews for what they went through, what was their job and how they did it and all other men in the navy and merchant navy.
Often at pitch black in the night I'd think how it must suck knowing that your submarine or ship might be your iron coffin in the cold, dark depths.
yeah, most of the crews are still out there with the same ships
>In hindsight, was it a waste of resources?
No, but ships like the Bismarck, Tirpitz or the Zeppelin were. Should've invested more resources and time into things like the Type XXI.
I mean the U-boats did kill and require the allies a lot of resources to invest, so they have been worth it from a bookkeeping standpoint.
However the question is if trying to beat the Bongs and AmeriBlack folk in naval warfare was pointless from the beginning, seeing that probably Germany (limited by resources) could reuse the U-Boat steel and manpower for tanks more easily than the Americans (who could go brrrt with every factory they had, including shipyards, but when the Germans don't even contest they can't turn out Shermans from a Liberty shipyard.)
Though that means Japan gets trashed even harder so probably it's just all losing moves for Germany.
>However the question is if trying to beat the Bongs and AmeriBlack folk in naval warfare was pointless from the beginning
That's the point of U-boats, you go sneaking around instead of trying to match the enemy.
German U-boats were a significant problem for the UK at the start of the war, despite Germany barely having any at that point. After the fall of France they started to utterly ravage UK shipping, shipping the UK was entirely dependent on. Only later did the allies whip their ASW into proper shape and start eating subs for breakfast, and it's lucky for them that Germany took even longer to decide to go in hard on subs.
I mean the UK and US despite some frickups beat the Kriegsmarine in the ASW vs. U-Boat department. Of course trying to directly compete was a non starter. (though also you can say the German battleships had some value as a fleet in being). But still, even despite as you correctly said the u boats whole point is assymetrical naval contestion, it still was a question of not "can you strangle the UK" but "how expensive can you make supplying the UK" once Hitler declared on the US and the US was forced to stop israelily sitting the war of Hitler against humanity out.
>the war of Hitler against humanity out
israelite
Are you fricking moronic? They were severely outmatched. The western allies only survived the war because of the Norwegian merchant fleet.
also a little thing called "Liberty ships" that were being churned out at a rate of more than one per day
The entire German navy was a waste of resources because Hitler wasn't expecting the Allies do declare war in 1939 so the entire force wasn't ready for war and wasn't able to contribute meaningfully. The only reason we portray the battle of the Atlantic as being close run is to flatter the dead.
who's we?
Germans don't consider the battle of the atlantic that important.
seems to be an American thing simple for the reason that Americans were involved.
Germans think the war was lost in the East and don't care what Americans did.
>Germans think the war was lost in the East
which happened because burgers kept feeding the beast of the east saving it from starvation and its own ham fisted incompetence. So yes, germans cared very much about what burgers did
>The entire German navy was a waste of resources
if they had time to prep the plan was to build more battleships and a few aircraft carriers. Absolutely mogged by allied naval superiority
They were told to be prepared by 1945, timetables jumped ahead of them due to anticipation of Soviet invasion.
no it was literally the only thing that almost strategically won the war for Germany.
UK/USA devoted a disproportionately large amount of resources to protect merchant shipping
the biggest crime is that we weren't allowed to keep the prototypes germans built for us as museum ships
No, they successfully disrupted shipping and troop movements
The waste of resources were the end of war terror weapons - the v-bombs, the extreme long range artillery - to try to terrorize the British into surrendering
They served no strategic or tactical value, wasted resources, and were simply a means for Hitler to express his narcissistic rage
>No, they successfully disrupted shipping and troop movements
No they didn't. All the weapons and supplies got shipped and the Allies were never lacking for weapons except due to local logistics.
Yeah, say that to the British who had to cut down on rations because of the blockade.
Hah, they built l3anana
Why not just make underwater bunkers/pens where subs can resupply?
>Inb4 how
Just waste Reich budget on smth stupid and/or insane
How do you resupply the resupply bunkers on the ocean floor
With cargo subs
but how do you resupply the cargo subs
They tried replenishing underway U-boats with u-tankers or "milk cows". The Allies just focused on targeting them instead of the regular U-boats.
Yup because Germany still lost the war and it cost them thousands of lives that would have been put to better use elsewhere. The allies had near unlimited resources so any merchant ships lost were easily replaced as well as their cargo and crew.
realistically, germany should have dumped all its resources into ICBMs and the nuclear bomb
Ernst Jordan, co-inventor of practical QM with Heisenberg and Born, tried repeatedly to interest the high command in nuclear physics but they weren't having it. He was a committed nazi and had even been in the SA, but the official physics system was too taken up with grifters and crackpots.
starting a war they couldnt possibly win was a waste of resources so arguably any weapon other than a white flag was ultimately a waste,
but in terms of getting the most return for resources expended the subs were the best choice,
Absolutely not. The sub campaign was the closest the Nazis came to forcing Britain out of the war and being able to concentrate on the Soviets, (which would have struggled if all that Lend-Lease shit gets sunk in the North Sea).
The real mistake was half-assing a surface fleet. Just enough to deprive the subs, but not enough to be anything other than a farce for the much-diminished Royal Navy to laugh about.
They really were never close. In 1942, the U-boat's best year, only 10% of total imports into Britain were sunk. The entrance of the US ensured the futility of cutting off the UK from its sea lanes anyways and relegated the U-boats to mere distractions occupying Allied resources.
and how many U-boats did that?
if the resources that built Bis and Tirp had gone into more U-boats?
Initially, it was one of the few places where Germany was actually dealing allied losses as efficiently as it needed to.
Considering the sheer tonnage of shipping they destroyed, the U-Boats more than repaid their investment. If anything, they were underappreciated compared to the tank and fighter aces who became virtually celebrities in Nazi media (and post-war historiography).
Why is this sub flying a flag in combat? when did the crew have the time to hoist it? will they go underwater with this flag flying too?
if they didn't raise a flag while surfaced it would be perfidy by the rules of war
US subs did superbly destroying the Jap merchant marine but it was deliberately under-publicized.
1 bismark made the allies piss and shit themselves until it was gone
u-boats were handled easy by spamming destroyers
more bismarks would have been a better investment
Yes, more investment to get bottled up in the Norwegian fjords or lost in battles on the arctic convoy route.
Hold on, I have to head to the bathroom. Oh crap.
Well, if you lose the war, the whole thing is a waste of resources. So yeah, in that way, it was. But overall, it helped their war effort quite a bit. Especially in the beginning.
only 2 things mattered for the destruction of the uboat fleet- capturing enigma machines and equipping b24s for anti sub work
The battle of the Atlantic was won by the shipyards as much as it was won by the escorts and aircraft.
They sunk more shipping than they cost. At least until the hedgehog killed them
The US really fricking saved the UK a bit last century (not that it was charity)
Canada was just as, if not more important from 39-42.
Yes it was. Germans should've just stay put and don't bother anyone.
>Germans built over a thousand of these
how the frick does one country produce a thousand submarines in such a short time? are aryans really that much superior? are whites really that supreme?
By focusing their entire naval production on submarines
No, they were the only weapon that could have won the war.
welp i think its time to install this ad get to work
1 of only maybe 4 good decisions germany made.
ZEIGT SICH EIN SCHIFF AUF DEM OZEAN SO JUBELN WIR LAUT UND WILD!