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Post by alexbrunius on Oct 17, 2018 3:45:19 GMT -6
There is no serious argument over how effective submarines were in WW2, just look at the statistics: In all, during the Atlantic Campaign only 10% of transatlantic convoys that sailed were attacked, and of those attacked only 10% on average of the ships were lost. Overall, more than 99% of all ships sailing to and from the British Isles during World War II did so successfully. Most emphasis is focused on aces who did the "Raid of Scapa Flow" and such but those were isolated examples, if every Uboat had been that successful the war wouldn't have lasted a month. The vast majority of Uboat patrols never hit anything. The KM estimated they needed to sink 300,000 tonnes a month a starve out the British islands, and they only managed it for 4 months out of the first 27, this was during the Happy Time when they were most effective, and they didn't know about all the extra land reclamation being done, I think Britain doubled its effective farming capacity from 1939 to 1945, I'm not sure of the exact numbers, it was certainly still not enough to really support the country but it was taking the pressure off the losses. Even Donitz himself admitted they weren't convinced about the tonnage target they estimated to starve Britain, and that in order to starve it they'd have to maintain it for almost a whole year when they couldn't manage more than 2 months at a time. By the times the Yanks get involved the KM needs to sink 700,000 tonnes a month, something they only achieve once (Nov 1942) but by June 1943 they are sinking less than 10% of that a month. The confusion over this is because Britain took very drastic measures throughout the war with such things as the "WarAg" and the Great Pet Euthanasia very early on, and that at times basics were comparatively very hard to come by thanks to rationing, also because later documentaries, films and such like to play everything up for dramatic effect and that seeps into the National Consciousness, the fact is most people get what they know about history off TV and Film, and it doesn't make for good TV and film to say "well it wasn't really that bad", rationing actually got worse after the war, but it was never so bad as to prevent people eating meat or force people to only eat the most necessary food. I don't really care who is on what side of this argument oldpop2000 or alexbrunius but to suggest that the Uboats brought this country to the brink of surrender or even close is just bad history. Well, when you cheery pick statistics like that sure. The vast majority of material and convoys that did cross the Atlantic however did so during the latter half of the war, when the submarine threat already was defeated and most of those 2700 Liberty ships the US built could cross uncontested. That greatly reduce how much % was sunk on average compared to if you just look at the times when the submarines were a serious threat. For a counter example at the other end of the scale we can look at a convoy like PQ17, Stalin thought the allies were lying when they claimed to have sent 35 ships fully loaded with Lend lease, because only 11 actually reached Soviet ports! Now just using that as an argument is ofcourse also cherry picking, but a balanced truth lies somewhere in between these extremes. And the important part is not how big % of the materials crossing that was sunk, but the key here is the merchant ships themself and assets needed to defend them. The so called tonnage war. If Germany can sink merchant ships faster than the allies can build them ( and this was the case historically for all of 1939-42 ), then logic and reason makes it clear that any allied buildup is impossible, and that eventually UK will starve unless they can turn it around. For example: "In May 1941, the rate of German sinkings of merchant ships was more than three times the capacity of British shipyards to replace them, and more than twice the rate of combined British and American shipyard output at the time." I do agree that submarines were a greater threat in WW1 than in WW2, but the point is that the uboats cost Germany almost nothing compared to how much they spent on Battleships, Tanks, Fighters or Bombers. And the threat from the uboats forced the allies to spend dis-proportionally more to counter them about 10 times more, that IMHO a good definition of an effective weapon. The German uboats came much closer to knocking out UK from the war than their Battleships, Luftwaffe or Tank force ever managed to do. Thanks to sinking critical Lend Lease to the Soviets when it was most desperately needed the uboats also impacted the east front dis-proportionally as well compared to their cost. A single merchant ship could carry over 100 tanks or 100 dismantled airplanes, and such a merchant ship + it's cargo could be worth as much as 5 submarines looking at the manhours or money needed to for production!
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Post by marcorossolini on Oct 17, 2018 9:39:38 GMT -6
Eastern front nerd must chime in here once again to remark that the contribution of the u-boats to the Eastern Front would not be the destruction of tanks or planes but oil, studebakers and spam (luxury food according to some memoirs!).
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Post by jeb94 on Oct 17, 2018 19:56:11 GMT -6
Its interesting to note how wrapped up we have gotten as a group with talk of the type XXI. While I do hope that technology can be developed as it did come about in the last 6 years or so of the time period covered, there are some older concepts that would also make interesting conversation. The ones I'm thinking of at the moment specifically are the cruiser-submarines. Surcouf was mentioned in the pre-release discussion thread and got me thinking. While Surcouf was probably the largest and most heavily armed of the cruiser-submarines, she didn't accomplish much. I know part of this had to do with the way she was used and politics but still, there are other cruiser-subs that accomplished a lot. Two that come to mind are USS Narwhal SS-167 and USS Nautilus SS-168. What all do you think?
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Post by oldpop2000 on Oct 17, 2018 21:56:43 GMT -6
Its interesting to note how wrapped up we have gotten as a group with talk of the type XXI. While I do hope that technology can be developed as it did come about in the last 6 years or so of the time period covered, there are some older concepts that would also make interesting conversation. The ones I'm thinking of at the moment specifically are the cruiser-submarines. Surcouf was mentioned in the pre-release discussion thread and got me thinking. While Surcouf was probably the largest and most heavily armed of the cruiser-submarines, she didn't accomplish much. I know part of this had to do with the way she was used and politics but still, there are other cruiser-subs that accomplished a lot. Two that come to mind are USS Narwhal SS-167 and USS Nautilus SS-168. What all do you think? One of the main problems for submarines is that they have to be stealthy. With the advent of sonar, a large submarine presents a nice sonar target and that is a problem. A submarine of that size is useful as a supply ship and for transporting small teams of soldiers on special missions. However, when you are engaging a convoy, with many escorts and sonar available, you will present a larger target. Nothing wrong with building them for other purposes though.
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Post by alexbrunius on Oct 18, 2018 14:02:00 GMT -6
Eastern front nerd must chime in here once again to remark that the contribution of the u-boats to the Eastern Front would not be the destruction of tanks or planes but oil, studebakers and spam (luxury food according to some memoirs!). Tanks and planes was a very important part of what what they sunk on PQ-17 and other Arctic Lend Lease convoys. "The convoy consisted of 35 ships and was heavily loaded with 297 aircraft, 594 tanks, 4246 lorries and gun carriers and additional 156,000 tons of cargo. This was enough to equip an army of 50,000 men and valued at 700 million dollars at the time." uboat.net/ops/convoys/pq-17.htm"Lend-Lease also supplied significant amounts of weapons and ammunition. The Soviet air force received 18,200 aircraft, which amounted to about 30% of Soviet wartime aircraft production (mid 1941-45). And while most tank units were Soviet-built models, some 7,000 Lend-Lease tanks were deployed by the Red Army, or 8% of war-time production." "Lend-Lease tanks constituted 30 to 40 percent of heavy and medium tank strength before Moscow at the beginning of December 1941." Another quirk of the Lend Lease system was that they were not allowed to transport any weapons at all on the Vladivostok route ( since the Japanese routinely searched these Soviet convoys and did not allow sending weapons past them according to agreement between them ), and the Iran route was also less suitable for heavy weaponry due to being much further away from the front, so almost all weapons sent by Lend Lease was transported on the Arctic route.
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Post by alexbrunius on Oct 18, 2018 16:04:12 GMT -6
Actually, let's use the 700 million dollar value above and do some basic math of submarine efficiency.
700 / 35 = 20 million dollar value on average per merchant ship.
Cost of a 1525 ton Gato-class submarine (1940): 2.85 million dollar.
A 769 ton type VII submarine built at same dollar per ton cost would be 2.85*769/1525 = 1.44 million dollar.
Conclusion: Each merchant ship fully loaded with Lend Lease had an average value of about 14 type VII submarines.
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Post by thatzenoguy on Oct 18, 2018 16:32:23 GMT -6
Actually, let's use the 700 million dollar value above and do some basic math of submarine efficiency. 700 / 35 = 20 million dollar value on average per merchant ship. Cost of a 1525 ton Gato-class submarine (1940): 2.85 million dollar. A 769 ton type VII submarine built at same dollar per ton cost would be 2.85*769/1525 = 1.44 million dollar. Conclusion: Each merchant ship fully loaded with Lend Lease had an average value of about 14 type VII submarines. Can you calc the cost of the XXI? Or IX?
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Post by dorn on Oct 18, 2018 23:19:40 GMT -6
Issue is that convoys to Murmansk were extremes. They shloud not be taken as example for submarine warfare.
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Post by alexbrunius on Oct 19, 2018 0:55:09 GMT -6
Can you calc the cost of the XXI? Or IX? According to the study the price of a Type IX submarine was 42% higher than a Type VII and the price of a Type XXI submarine 28% higher. Issue is that convoys to Murmansk were extremes. They shloud not be taken as example for submarine warfare. I agree. For a more balanced compairson over the entire war I refer to the study I linked a few pages back. But there is no denying that the Arctic convoys also were some of the most strategically important convoys, given how sinking Lend Lease aid to Soviet would translate directly to a weaker enemy on the ground for Germany. These convoys success also was of great diplomatic importance for the relations between Stalin and the western Allies.
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Post by thatzenoguy on Oct 19, 2018 3:02:18 GMT -6
Huh...So the XXI was a little more expensive, but CHEAPER than the big IX's? Weird... I guess that's latewar German mass production. Imagine if the buggers figured it out in 1936!
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Post by dorn on Oct 19, 2018 5:15:54 GMT -6
Can you calc the cost of the XXI? Or IX? According to the study the price of a Type IX submarine was 42% higher than a Type VII and the price of a Type XXI submarine 28% higher. Issue is that convoys to Murmansk were extremes. They shloud not be taken as example for submarine warfare. I agree. For a more balanced compairson over the entire war I refer to the study I linked a few pages back. But there is no denying that the Arctic convoys also were some of the most strategically important convoys, given how sinking Lend Lease aid to Soviet would translate directly to a weaker enemy on the ground for Germany. These convoys success also was of great diplomatic importance for the relations between Stalin and the western Allies. It is true as the allies were fighting Germany on land only in east and they need politicaly support Stalin. So it is in line what I decribed earlier that production does not matter if it could not be used in front.
Murmansk convoys are specific by 2 points. They cannot hide as you have night ideal for submarines and you have day which ideal for air power. And that the route is well known.
I think that Germany should use more naval and air resources to deny these convoys as Allies had dificulty to use their equipment except bombers on attack against Germany and Italy except North Africa.
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Post by oldpop2000 on Oct 19, 2018 11:23:55 GMT -6
One of the issues, probably the primary one, was the fact that the Type XXI went from the drawing board to production; that rarely works. Once built and production began, the whole steering system had to be redesigned because it was ineffective. There were many redesign issues and the cost of redesigning and testing are much higher than the original cost. This was the reason why the cost figures were low along with the fact that Speer had resigned the production methods of all weapons. But the real cost was in the failure to test and redesign before production. The war ended before those extra costs could be included into the total cost of production. So, the actual cost of design, building test beds and testing, redesign and production were never compiled.
I went a little further in my research. I used my copy of "Inside the Third Reich" by Albert Speer. On Page 273 he states that Doenitz had requested after all Naval production was in Speer's hands, to stop production of all older U-boats and focus on the newer boats like the Type XXI. Speer decided to use Otto Merker, an automobile production specialist, to design a new construction program to increase the number of U-boats built. Speer received Doenitz excited approval after reviewing the new construction system and they reviewed a wooden mockup of the Type XXI U-boat. After this, the production system was instituted and they began to produce the boats. No prototypes were ever built and tested. Unfortunately, due to the strategic bombing campaign production never reached its peak. Speer does say that the technology was always available for these boats prior to the war, and he did not see why they were not built.
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Post by oldpop2000 on Oct 19, 2018 15:34:38 GMT -6
I did some further investigation using Doenitz’s Memoirs. He became aware of the new Type XXI U-boat design in June 1943 when he became the CinC of the German Navy. Three of the Walther boats were already under construction. The Construction Branch was responsible initially for the plan to build these ships. They were going to build two experimental Type XXI boats in eighteen months. After a trial period, then the boats would be placed in production. The Construction Branch would not take responsibility if the boats were not fully tested.
The two boats would not be completed before the end of 1944 and the Type XXI would go into production in 1945. Doenitz could not live with this time delay and that is when he went to Speer for a better production plan. The plan for production by Otto Merker would have had large numbers ready by the autumn of 1944. However, while the new plan was exactly what Doenitz wanted, he was concerned about the risk for not having tested all the new technology to see if it was effective. The plan was approved, and no testing was conducted. This is how the Type XXI production proceeded.
The new plans were concentrating on the Type XXI and XXIII. The monthly plan was 40 boats, and no mods were allowed to delay the production.
I hope this helps the discussion
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Post by britishball on Oct 20, 2018 6:59:54 GMT -6
There is no serious argument over how effective submarines were in WW2, just look at the statistics: In all, during the Atlantic Campaign only 10% of transatlantic convoys that sailed were attacked, and of those attacked only 10% on average of the ships were lost. Overall, more than 99% of all ships sailing to and from the British Isles during World War II did so successfully. Most emphasis is focused on aces who did the "Raid of Scapa Flow" and such but those were isolated examples, if every Uboat had been that successful the war wouldn't have lasted a month. The vast majority of Uboat patrols never hit anything. The KM estimated they needed to sink 300,000 tonnes a month a starve out the British islands, and they only managed it for 4 months out of the first 27, this was during the Happy Time when they were most effective, and they didn't know about all the extra land reclamation being done, I think Britain doubled its effective farming capacity from 1939 to 1945, I'm not sure of the exact numbers, it was certainly still not enough to really support the country but it was taking the pressure off the losses. Even Donitz himself admitted they weren't convinced about the tonnage target they estimated to starve Britain, and that in order to starve it they'd have to maintain it for almost a whole year when they couldn't manage more than 2 months at a time. By the times the Yanks get involved the KM needs to sink 700,000 tonnes a month, something they only achieve once (Nov 1942) but by June 1943 they are sinking less than 10% of that a month. The confusion over this is because Britain took very drastic measures throughout the war with such things as the "WarAg" and the Great Pet Euthanasia very early on, and that at times basics were comparatively very hard to come by thanks to rationing, also because later documentaries, films and such like to play everything up for dramatic effect and that seeps into the National Consciousness, the fact is most people get what they know about history off TV and Film, and it doesn't make for good TV and film to say "well it wasn't really that bad", rationing actually got worse after the war, but it was never so bad as to prevent people eating meat or force people to only eat the most necessary food. I don't really care who is on what side of this argument oldpop2000 or alexbrunius but to suggest that the Uboats brought this country to the brink of surrender or even close is just bad history. Well, when you cheery pick statistics like that sure. The vast majority of material and convoys that did cross the Atlantic however did so during the latter half of the war, when the submarine threat already was defeated and most of those 2700 Liberty ships the US built could cross uncontested. That greatly reduce how much % was sunk on average compared to if you just look at the times when the submarines were a serious threat. For a counter example at the other end of the scale we can look at a convoy like PQ17, Stalin thought the allies were lying when they claimed to have sent 35 ships fully loaded with Lend lease, because only 11 actually reached Soviet ports! Now just using that as an argument is ofcourse also cherry picking, but a balanced truth lies somewhere in between these extremes. And the important part is not how big % of the materials crossing that was sunk, but the key here is the merchant ships themself and assets needed to defend them. The so called tonnage war. If Germany can sink merchant ships faster than the allies can build them ( and this was the case historically for all of 1939-42 ), then logic and reason makes it clear that any allied buildup is impossible, and that eventually UK will starve unless they can turn it around. For example: "In May 1941, the rate of German sinkings of merchant ships was more than three times the capacity of British shipyards to replace them, and more than twice the rate of combined British and American shipyard output at the time." I do agree that submarines were a greater threat in WW1 than in WW2, but the point is that the uboats cost Germany almost nothing compared to how much they spent on Battleships, Tanks, Fighters or Bombers. And the threat from the uboats forced the allies to spend dis-proportionally more to counter them about 10 times more, that IMHO a good definition of an effective weapon. The German uboats came much closer to knocking out UK from the war than their Battleships, Luftwaffe or Tank force ever managed to do. Thanks to sinking critical Lend Lease to the Soviets when it was most desperately needed the uboats also impacted the east front dis-proportionally as well compared to their cost. A single merchant ship could carry over 100 tanks or 100 dismantled airplanes, and such a merchant ship + it's cargo could be worth as much as 5 submarines looking at the manhours or money needed to for production! I never said that Uboats weren't effective compared to how much the Germans wasted on Wunderwaffe or overly complicated tanks or planes, just that barring a few odd months the submarines as a whole never pulled their weight; either compared to the Heer or Luftwaffe. I'm not blaming you or having a go at you for falling for the idea that Britain was somehow really in danger of Uboats, for some reason we've (our historians, documentaries, political memoirs, etc) made a massive fuss out of nothing. When you look at how bad conditions were in Sevastopol or Stalingrad you realise Britain was a long long way off being starved into surrender. But if you watch any BBC documentary they make it sound like a matter of weeks, for dramatisation of course. Even respected historians like Tony Robinson or Dan Snow are part of shows which claim this, but then I suppose they just present them rather than writing everything. Actually the closest anyone came to beating Britain was the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain when they were bombing airfields, a lot of similar documentaries claim that if they kept bombing them rather than switching to London they could have knocked out the RAF by preventing it from taking off, this is of course also wrong, you can take a Spitfire or Hurricane off on any field provided its long enough, refuelling and repairs would be a nightmare as would coordinating 40 planes taking off from random fields in a twenty mile radius but if there is one thing we proved in WW2 its that the British are good at adapting and persevering, "Keep calm and carry on" etc. But whilst there was little problem producing planes we did have a shortage of pilots, the Battle of Britain was never going to be won in 1940 but if Hitler had kept it going rather than switching to attack the Soviets he could have ground down our pilots to nothing but the same dregs that the Japanese were left with in 1945, and won that way, of course the "if Hitler had only done this" is quite subjective, Stalin could have betrayed Hitler in 1942 if Hitler hadn't done it first and we'd all be saying "if only Hitler invaded Russia in 1941 the Blitzkreig could have knocked the Red Army out after the purges and pushed on to Moscow" really very few arguments stand up to the hindsight clause. Point is we wouldn't have known how strongly the Soviet people would fight without seeing it, just as we wouldn't have known how well the British could adapt without seeing it (I mean we went in with biplanes and came out with Jet fighters) so that is why I am pushing for as accurate a simulation as can be achieved. And a little less emphasis on "just blockade them with Uboats" as the default tactic.
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Post by alexbrunius on Oct 20, 2018 9:00:02 GMT -6
I never said that Uboats weren't effective compared to how much the Germans wasted on Wunderwaffe or overly complicated tanks or planes, just that barring a few odd months the submarines as a whole never pulled their weight; either compared to the Heer or Luftwaffe. Submarines "pulled their weight" with a factor of almost 10:1 even when averaged over the entire war and including the years of 1943-45. I already linked the report before, but feel free to read it again and point out the flaws you can find in it when coming to this conclusion that the submarines never pulled their weight: web.archive.org/web/20080409052122/http://www.navy.mil/navydata/cno/n87/history/wwii-campaigns.htmlThe performance of the submarine as far as I have read was superior in efficiency to any weapon in use in the Luftwaffe or Heer that I have read about, but do feel free to attempt to prove me wrong. Actually the closest anyone came to beating Britain was the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain when they were bombing airfields, a lot of similar documentaries claim that if they kept bombing them rather than switching to London they could have knocked out the RAF by preventing it from taking off, this is of course also wrong, you can take a Spitfire or Hurricane off on any field provided its long enough, refuelling and repairs would be a nightmare as would coordinating 40 planes taking off from random fields in a twenty mile radius but if there is one thing we proved in WW2 its that the British are good at adapting and persevering, "Keep calm and carry on" etc. But whilst there was little problem producing planes we did have a shortage of pilots, the Battle of Britain was never going to be won in 1940 but if Hitler had kept it going rather than switching to attack the Soviets he could have ground down our pilots to nothing but the same dregs that the Japanese were left with in 1945, and won that way I disagree strongly with this view. According to what I read over half of the pilots survived getting shot down and the battle of Britain was fought over British soil. This means that for each pilot lost by the British Germany will lose 2-3 pilots, so any shortage of pilots would ( and did ) hit the Luftwaffe over twice as hard as it hit the RAF. During the battle of Britain the RAF historically lost 1500 aircrew and the Luftwaffe lost 3500 ( killed or captured ). On top of this we have the fact that the RAF had a flood of experienced volunteer pilots applying from all of the defeated allied nations of Europe ( especially Poland ) as well as American volunteer pilots. Germany had no such thing to rely on, but had to pay precious oil and use precious airplanes for the long and cumbersome job of training new aircrew from scratch. Even if the Luftwaffe had focused on hitting the RAF airfields in southern UK there are plenty of airfields they can retreat to further north that are out of range from Me 109 escort meaing bombers must hit them unescorted ( a distaster ), and airfields that can field fighters are very cheap and easy to build more of as needed. Point is we wouldn't have known how strongly the Soviet people would fight without seeing it, just as we wouldn't have known how well the British could adapt without seeing it (I mean we went in with biplanes and came out with Jet fighters) so that is why I am pushing for as accurate a simulation as can be achieved. And a little less emphasis on "just blockade them with Uboats" as the default tactic. I fully agree that a blockade with just more uboats alone could never have defeated or starved Britain. A multi pronged approach to isolate them would have been needed focusing on things like: - Keeping USA out of the war at any and all costs
- Supporting the uboats with long range airpower, both for recon purposes and to hit convoys and escort ships + forcing them to divert assets to AA (done very successfully against the Arctic convoys)
- Deploying some air recon like submarine launched floatplanes in the middle of the Atlantic to spot convoys out of range from land based air ( the Japanese had this capability for example )
- Securing additional bases for uboats on the flanks of UK for example along Spain, Portugal or Iceland
- Persuading Spain to join the war denying the UK the shortcut to the Mediterranean through Gibraltar which stretches their convoys further
- Winning the intelligence war, both in keeping the naval enigma secure and when it comes to decryption of Royal Navy codes
- Winning the technological war, developing more modern submarines and weapons like the Type XXI, better homing torpedoes and superior radars and radar warning
Perhaps the surface fleet also could have some place in such an isolation strategy, but probably only if Germany managed to complete their Carrier which would have been able to protect such a raiding fleet from British Carriers. Looking at what they achieved the submarine fleet was vastly more effective than the surface fleet, especially when considering you could get 50 submarines for the price of a single Battleship.
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