Von Rom
Posts: 1705
Joined: 5/12/2000
Status: offline
|
[QUOTE]Originally posted by Nikademus
[B]I'm not interested in broadening the subject to Britian's overall military fortunes. I am aware of those aspects. I want too see data that refutes the points i have highlighted. You have been steadily expanding on the orig subject regarding the Uboat war to focus now on Britian and have added other non-related aspects (BoB for example)
I remain focused on the Uboats and Blair's thesis and remain waiting for info on the key aspects i've highlighted that remain untouched. This includes Britian's economic state before US entry into the war and is part of Blair's first book. Were Britian truely "in peril" to the point that a few more Uboats would have tipped the balance, his data would have shown it.
Stubborn I is..... ;) [/B][/QUOTE]
Hi :)
You mention that you are not interested in Britain's overall military fortunes. And it appears from the research that Blair wasn't interested in it either. By examining the U-boat peril in "isolation", Blair has both handicapped his research and its results.
Let me explain.
Blair's approach to the study of the U-boat is a bit odd, in that he worked with numbers and then extrapolated this information into faulty conclusions. For example, it is one to say that between 1943 to 1945 that 99% of all convoy ships reached their destination; it is quite another to examine the perilous years of 1939 to 1941 and realize that 50% of ALL WWII Allied shipping losses occurred during those two years. The other 50% shipping losses had occurred through the last 4 years of war. The fact that Britain bore the brunt of most of these shipping losses further compounds the problem. Unlike America or Germany, its very existence depended on maritime trade.
This shipping loss is further magnified by the fact that so few U-boats accounted for these terrible losses. Most historians agree, that had Hitler not intervened in the U-boat campaign on many occassions, and had more U-boats been built, then Britain faced a possible defeat. This aspect of the U-boat war was not a part of Bair's "analysis". So his selective use of statistics presents a faulty picture.
The following is a bit lengthy, but I feel is important in this discussion. The following contains information with sources noted.
*******
"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'.
"The Battle of the Atlantic was one of the longest campaigns of the Second World War, and it was proportionally among the most costly. . . 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."
(Source: 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.)
********
"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.
"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."
(Source: The Daily Times)
**********
"By the end of 1940 the Germans had sunk 1,281 ships, mostly British, totalling 4,747,033 tons. This was equivalent to more than one fifth of Britain's 1939 merchant fleet or to five years' peace-time construction of new vessels.
"But there was a period during the winter of 1942-3 when the Germans came close to cutting the North Atlantic lifeline. The crescendo of this crisis was reached in March 1943.
But the Germans had made one vital mistake:
"During the first year after the war had started, the U-boat construction programme had almost been halted; only thirty-seven new boats were commissioned in those first twelve months, despite earlier plans to have over 100 boats in that time. Hitler had hoped for a quick vistory on the Continent and that Britain would agree terms for peace when she found that she stood alone in Europe. It was 1941 before the building programme was really going again, but a valuable chance had been lost. Although 230 new boats were being built in April of that year, only thirty-two boats were available for operations!
"If Hitler had not miscalculated the British mood and had allowed the U-boat building programme to proceed in 1940, Donitz could possibly have won the Battle of the Atlantic in 1941 or 1942. . .
"By October 1942 Donitz had no less than 196 front-line boats, compared with under 100 at the beginning of the year. The German shipyards were turning out twenty new boats every month. . .
[Note: Had Germany originally built 20 U-boats per month from Sept 1939 onwards, it would have had almost 400 U-boats by the end of 1940. These additional U-boats would have substantially added to the shipping losses. This type of analysis is completely ignored by Blair.]
"All through the autumn and into the winter the battles continued. In the last six months of 1942 the U-boats sank another 575 ships in all areas, totalling 3,000,000 tons. This brought the total sinkings by U-boats for 1942 to a staggering 1,160 ships of over 6,000,000 tons weight, and a further 1,600,000 tons had been sunk by other German forces. This was more than had been sunk in the years 1939, 1940 and 1941 combined. The Allies had now lost 14,000,000 tons of merchant shipping through all causes and had replaced less than half of it with new construction."
(Source: "Convoy" by Martin Middlebrook, NY, 1977; pp ix, 8, 17, 18)
****************
Martin Gilbert wrote the definitive biography of Winston Churchill in 8 volumes. He was given unprecented access to all of Churchill's public and private papers, letters, diaries as well as access to the diaries of foreign leaders.
Here is what he wrote:
". . . it was the Battle of the Atlantic that threatened to close Britain's food and supply life-line. One of Churchill's staff, reporting a particular convoy disaster on February 26 [1941], called it 'distressing'. Churchill replied: 'Distressing! It is terrifying. If it goes on it will be the end of us. . .
"At Chequers on March 1 Churchill told the Australian Prime Minister, Robert Menzies, that the German sinking of merchant ships was 'the supreme menace of the war'.
Churchill stated: "The Battle of the Atlantic, 'on which our life depends', as well as the movement of convoys under constant submarine and air attack, 'strains our naval resources, great though they be, to the utmost limit.'"
(Source: "Churchill: A Life" by Martin Gilbert, Minerva, 1994; pp. 690, 691, 704)
**************
It does not take much logic to conclude from the above, that if 20 U-boats can bring Britain's naval resources to the breaking point, then adding 20, 30, 50 or more U-boats can effectively help tip that balance. Yet again, this type of analysis is ignored by Blair.
By leaving out all outside influences on the development of the U-boat, its use, and the interference in its operation, leaves Blair's book, while good in so many other ways, as myopic in approach.
This is further compounded by the fact that Blair has ignored other influences that were greatly impacting Britain at the time: its isolation in fighting Germany; the fact that Britain was strained to the limit in fighting in North Africa; its naval resources were reaching the breaking point in the Battle of the Atlantic; and that both the Battle of Britain and later the Blitz were pounding Britain mercilessly from the air, and in which over 60,000 citizens died.
As the leader of Britain, Churchill had to look at the total picture, and not just at the U-boat threat. Yet, as a tool, the U-boat was a helping and effective instrument in bringing about Britain's demise.
The evidence is clear: the U-boat was a highly effective instrument of German warfare. The biggest problem in its failure to eventually defeat Britain was not in its use; rather, the problem was that more U-boats were not employed in attacking Britain's shipping.
Yet, Blair, by painting a faulty picture of the U-boat's effectiveness in the first several hundred pages of his work, has then laid the ground work for the next several hundred pages (almost 300) for defending the American Navy's (King's) failure to provide escorts for ships on the US east coast (585 ships were sunk before something was done).
By showing that the U-boat was not a threat (hey all types of ships got through), Blair is better able to convince the reader that escorts for these convoys were not all that important, thus allowing the American Navy to get "off the hook".
By using this approach Blair has 1) presented a false picture of the very real threat of the U-boat; and 2) has used this approach to present a defense for the US Navy. The first is simply wrong, and the second is indefensible.
_____________________________
|
Printable Version
- 
New Messages
No New Messages
Hot Topic w/ New Messages
Hot Topic w/o New Messages
Locked w/ New Messages
Locked w/o New Messages
Post New Thread