Von Rom
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[QUOTE]Originally posted by Nikademus
[B]Churchill was also a passionate man who once latched onto an idea would not let go of it like a German Shepard that has it's teeth sunk into a meety bone. No dig against the man. But all i'm saying is that just because he "says" his nitemare and fear was the U-boat doesn't mean it "was" one in reality or for every one else. Remember at that time he was strongly campaigning to get the Americans to do what he wanted to most of his abilities. If you want someone to come to your way of thinking, you might be tempted to overinflate or overemphasis in order to get your point across.
Churchill did not have all the facts at the time nor all the data so as such I have no doubt that while he did fear the Uboat, neither does that make that fear a reality nor does that mean his resolve would waver
I disagree too that the Uboat was a terror weapon. Uh uh. It was a means envisioned by Doneitz to knock a maritime empire out of a war with germany and to prevent others from bringing war to Europe under German control. In that function it failed.
As for dead soldiers....again this is a misconception. You said you've read Blair....yet you are ignoring a very salient point. The US suffered *NO* major troop convoy casualties caused by Uboats. The oft malinged Admiral King made a hard choice to use his ASW assets to protect the US troop convoys vs the merchants beset by Drumbeat. One can argue that decision but the point here is that there was no long list of "casualties" for the US leaders to haw and hem about.
Britian did suffer some casualties because they saw things differently and gave equal measure to both merchant and troop convoys so they did suffer losses. They did not waver nor were these losses crippling.
Increase the Uboats and yes you increase their potential, but i do not believe anything happens in a vaccum despite arguments to the contrary. 300 Uboats is a major change and despite problems in finance, i do not doubt that the UK and US would have responded in some measure to this. Maybe you'll increase the total loss from 1% to 10%......but would it be decisive? Uboats were far more of a "terror" during WWI and they still failed.
No.....300 uboats is no easy answer. [/B][/QUOTE]
The U-boat was a great threat in WWII, especially to Britain during the years from 1939 to 1942.
Britain's imports - upon which it heavily relied - were halved during the war by the U-Boat threat, leading to enforced rationing and the introduction of the victory gardens.
Had Germany placed greater emphasis in more U-boats, history might have taken a different turn.
The tactics worked. The real problem was that Hitler did not build enough U-boats. Usually, only six U-boats were at sea at any one time in the early years.
This is from the BBC's History of WWII:
Winston Churchill once wrote that "The only thing that ever really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril". In saying this, he correctly identified the importance of the threat posed during World War Two by German submarines (the 'Unterseeboot') to the Atlantic lifeline. This lifeline was Britain's 'centre of gravity' - the loss of which would probably have led to wholesale defeat in the war.
If Germany had prevented merchant ships from carrying food, raw materials, troops and their equipment from North America to Britain, the outcome of World War Two could have been radically different. Britain might have been starved into submission, and her armies would not have been equipped with American-built tanks and vehicles.
Moreover, if the Allies had not been able to move ships about the North Atlantic, it would have been impossible to project British and American land forces ashore in the Mediterranean theatres or on D-Day. Germany's best hope of defeating Britain lay in winning what Churchill christened the 'Battle of the Atlantic'.
Germany had waged a similar campaign in World War One, and in 1917 had come close to defeating Britain. But in spite of this experience neither side was well prepared in 1939. Germany had underestimated the impact of U-boats, and was fighting with only 46 operational vessels, using mostly surface vessels - rather than submarines - to prowl the Atlantic. However, on the day Britain declared war on Germany, 3rd September 1939, the British liner Athenia was torpedoed by a U-boat. This marked the beginning of the second Battle of the Atlantic.
In the early stages of World War Two, the Royal Navy placed much faith in ASDIC (an early form of sonar) to detect submerged U-boats. The British were largely able to master the surface threat posed by Germany, sinking the pocket battleship Graf Spee in December 1939 and the battleship Bismarck in 1941, but from the summer of 1940 the U-boat menace grew. This was in part because the conquest by Germany of Norway and France gave the Germans forward bases, which increased the range of the U-boats and also allowed Focke-Wulf FW200 'Kondor' long-range aircraft to patrol over the Atlantic, carrying out reconnaissance for the U-boats and attacking Allied shipping.
The British were consequently forced to divert their own shipping away from vulnerable UK ports, and were faced with the need to provide convoys with naval escorts for greater stretches of the journey to North America. The Royal Navy was critically short of escort vessels, although this problem was eased somewhat by the arrival of 50 old American destroyers that President Roosevelt gave in return for bases in British territory in the West Indies.
U-boats, supplemented by mines, aircraft and surface ships, succeeded in sinking three million tons of Allied shipping between the fall of France in June 1940 and the end of the year. Admiral Dönitz, the commander of the U-boat arm, introduced the 'wolfpack' tactic at the end of 1940, whereby a group of submarines would surface and attack at night, thus greatly reducing the effectiveness of ASDIC. Not surprisingly, the German submariners called this phase of the war the 'happy time'. This remorseless attrition of merchant shipping was a far greater threat to Britain's survival than the remote possibility of the Kriegsmarine landing German troops on the English coast. . .
The Battle of the Atlantic was one of the longest campaigns of the Second World War, and it was proportionally among the most costly. Between 75,000 and 85,000 Allied seamen were killed. About 28,000 out of 41,000 U-boat crew were killed during World War Two, some two-thirds, during the Battle of the Atlantic. The stakes could not have been higher. If the U-boats had prevailed, the Western Allies could not have been successful in the war against Germany.
by
Dr Gary Sheffield is Senior Lecturer in the War Studies Group at King’s College London, and Land Warfare Historian at the Joint Services Command and Staff College, Shrivenham.
From the Daily Times:
The British almost lost the war though by ignoring the U-boat peril, a mistake they also made in World War I. The German U-boat (submarine) threat grew from a single sub in 1935 to 57 by the time the war began.
Britain is an island nation that needs constant resupply of goods, raw materials, and armaments or it could be quickly starved into surrender. With two-thirds of her raw material and half her food imported from abroad, safe shipping was essential. Britain needed at least 1 million tons of imported shipping each month merely to subsist. However, the prewar Admiralty evaluated the U-boat threat as negligible.
On Sept. 3 , 1939, a German sub sank the British passenger liner Athenia with 1,103 aboard, including 300 Americans. A total of 112 passengers, including 28 Americans, went down with the ship. Only 14 days later another sub sank a 22,500-ton British aircraft carrier with the loss of 519 men, half of the crew.
Thus began the 72-month Battle of the Atlantic, the longest and deadliest sea battle in history. In lives there was a loss of 45,000 British, American and Allied sailors, merchant seamen, passengers and soldiers who went down with ships. And 15 million tons of shipping was sent to the bottom of the sea as well.
In the first nine months, 701 ships and 2.3 million tons of cargo were sunk by subs. By the end of the first year with only six U-boats at sea at any one time, more than 1,000 ships, a total of 4 million tons, an incredible 25 percent of the entire British fleet, had been sunk.
The fall of France on June 21, 1940, opened the French coast up for construction of five German submarine bases that were 450 miles closer to the sub targets in the Atlantic Ocean, saving both fuel and time for the Germans.
Jerome M. O'Connor in his article on the Lair of the Wolf Pack in World War II magazine details how Lorient, established in the 17th century and later developed as a naval base by Napoleon, apparently became the lead base, the others being Brest, St. Nazaire, La Pallice, and Bordeaux. All were built to last a 1,000 years, included deluxe living quarters as well as the submarine ``pens'' where they could be repaired and kept until they went to sea.
Virtually bomb-proof, the top layer of the roof over the structures was 25-foot thick of steel reinforced concrete which contained bomb traps. Almost undamaged, they still stand today.
By late June 1940, Britain was being bled white by the sea blockade and Adolf Hitler had finally given approval for a major increase in U-boat construction to 30 per month. German armies were triumphant everywhere. Poland, Holland, Norway, Belgium, Luxembourg and Denmark had been secured even before the fall of France. The entire 338,000-man British Expeditionary Force had been evacuated from Dunkirk with little of their equipment. Britain stood alone.
The U.S. with an Army ranked 18th in the world, just behind Holland's in 1940, was scornfully dismissed as a threat by the Nazi high command.
by
Dean Stone is editor of The Daily Times
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