(Long Story) I was a sonar operator in the 1951-54 navy, serving on the WWII diesel boats (SS245 and SS382). We had both active (W2) and passive (JT) sonar. The JT gear was extremely sensitive. In war games, headquarters would only tell us that there was a convoy, approx bearing such and such and we had to take it from there. I'd sweep the general direction and at some point would hear a very faint "pssst" over a small span of bearing (maybe 5 degrees), report it, and we'd head that way. After about an hour the width of the static band was 15-20 degrees and loud. We'd go to battle stations then. I would head a "thud", "thud", "thud" and dialed the MgHz spectrum, report the reading, which the book said was emitted by an XYZ class destroyer. They were still MILES away. We'd run on the surface until we were ahead of the convoy and then dive to 150 feet and wait. I could hear the screws quite plainly and would give a beat count, which the book would confirm the earlier ID as XYZ class destroyers. They usually formed a "V" in front of the convoy with a few on each side. We'd wait until the cans passed overhead, then would pop up and take out the oilers, and on one occasion, a carrier. We came so close to the carrier that it's cavitation sucked us up 20-30 feet or so. We'd fire a red flare indicating we fired a fish and the umpires would then figure out if it was a hit or not. That carrier reported that the flare we fired landed on it's flight deck, so they couldn't argue that we missed. Very rarely, when on the W2 gear, before firing a fish, I would be ordered to take one ping to confirm the range that the Torpedo Data Computer reported. I loved the old fleet boats, they rode nicely in heavy seas, with the flared bow pushing the water away from the deck. I'd be on lookout up in the shears and come off watch dry as a bone. The 382 boat was converted to a streamlined GUPPY (snorkel) boat and was wetter than Hell. You'd come off watch soaked to the skin. Also, when snorkeling, the waves would slosh across the intake valve and the diesels would suck the air out of the boat, so there was a constant pressure change. Pure Hell if you had a cold. One time they lost control of the bowplanes on a high-speed run and the diesels sucked enough air out to shut them down. A lot of us had colds that trip and I couldn't equalize as I was all stuffed up. Lost my high frequency hearing due to that. Have become pretty adept at lip-reading. :-)
Wow cool story I been fascinated by submarines since I was a little kid. Know alot about them I'm no expert of course but I wouldve never thought the engine would suck enough air that fast to create enough of a pressure change to fuck with you sinuses n shit but now that you mention it. That makes sense. Thanks for your service. My uncle Mike Stephens was a submariner probably around that time I think or a little after maybe like in the 60s or 70s didn't know him that well bh it he was about old enough to be my dads dad. My dad was the youngest of my grandparents kids and my gpa was pfc in the army. GPA on my moms side was airforce. When I was a kid I wanted to be a submariner but my life took a different path. I still have dreams I'm a mechanic on uboats I know wrong side lol and in them I can speak german.. weird because I cannot speak german at all but in my dreams I am speaking and understanding fluent German. It's hard to explain but that's what's happening ha. Idk cool story tho man.
I thought dubstep originated from a corrupted computer sound file of a machinegun firing. I heard it ended up causing a lot of window errors. The guy apparently enjoyed the sound and used it as music.
Be sure to check out my video on Wolfpack & U-Boat Tactics of WW2 here: ruclips.net/video/La6BM3HnU98/видео.html about Escort Carriers / Hunter-Killer-Groups it should be US Navy *and Royal Navy*. Sadly, RUclips doesn't let me use "end cards" (which are great) and annotation together. So I have this comment for any corrections etc.
Sweden is definitely on the list, but I already got books on Prussian Infantry/Cavalry/Artillery and nothing on Sweden yet, also my earlier searches on this back in Hamburg weren't successful. Hence Prussia will probably be first. Also videos of eras and nation I know little take way longer, right now I have to focus on popular topics.
something Silent Hunter players can relate... early war aircraft??? nuisance... heck if you are feeling brave you can try and shoot them down with the deck AA without too much risk. late war??? you detect radar signal coming from somewhere and maybe u hear the dreaded engine drone??? CRASH DIVE!!! then pray.... heck usually you don't even bother checking with periscope because if they by chance see the periscope they'll depth charge you, and if they do enough damage then ur forced to surface... then the plane's buddy will swarm the area and you will be ripped to pieces in short order... so in late war if you are not on electric boat, and have the misfortune of still sailing on the older sub ... you sail on surface constantly in fear that a plane might just come out of nowhere and blow you to smitheren, and every time you detect a radar signal... you just crash dive because u never know if it's coming from an aircraft that is inbound in just minutes... in early war they are annoying mosquitos... in late war they are god damn piranhas sniffing for your blood...
Iono Sama in the early war you can also get into ports and wreck everyone (most of my sunk ships were in ports) whereas if you go near the British isles in the late war you get jumped by 100,000 planes at once, each dropping atomic bombs
I don't even bother diving if it is a swordfish. My men would need some action for sailing a month without any good action (Some coastal freighters and few ASW Steamboats sunk, but they were trivial.) Just a short burst on that plane and it goes down. Allisons aren't that bad either, but they'll have kinda nasty bite. I avoid them if possible. When Beaufighters come to the playing field, then it is a crash diving time. And I remember hunting some convoy, but never found it. i found a aircraft carrier only escorted by two Black Swan class boats. Took care of the escorts with a single attack and that carrier was a piece of cake. Well it ate like four torpedoes, but was still going. Had to give her two more to finally see her sinking enough to confirm that she would go to down.
@Jonathan Stiles Cold Waters is easy in that 86 campaign. At least if you take the LA class big boat. That 68 campaign is a bit harder, because you see a lot of diesel subs and they can't see you and you can't see them. Had many missions where I did sunk like a whole fleet of surface ships and never saw the two diesel subs. They were probably the reason why some random torps came from odd direction. China campaign is hardest of them all, even with a seawolf, because you can't use the thermal layers effectively because shallow waters. If you can intercept something in deep waters, you can pretty much just yolo without any real threat.
@Jonathan Stiles Yea, I like the challenge. Diesel-electric subs are pretty hard to pick up, unless AI does something stupid, like diving at 20kt in 50ft depth. Nuclear subs are a lot louder than diesel-electric ones, because they run a pump to cool down the reactor. Electric ones run with batteries and are extremely silent if they move like 5kt speeds. If sea is bit rough and ambient voice is something like 100dB you really don't hear the electric boats unless they are pretty much in next to you. As for fighting ASW surface ships, there really isn't much you can do when they spot you. Try to pick up many of the surface ships as possible and fire your torps like from 80% of their max range. usually it is good to shoot torps at bit shallow depth and then silently dive and slip far as possible, before they spot your torps. If you turn 90 degrees after launching torps it lessens the change that enemy will get a lock on you when they fire their torps behind yours.
@Kelly Arthur In the early '50s wargaming, we did that on occasion, just before firing, to validate the range computed by our TDC (analog computer), which was sometimes off by a couple of hundred yards. This was with WWII gear.
"Naval Firepower" by Norman Friedman is an in-depth look at the evolution of surface to surface naval gunnery from the late 19th Century to the end of the Second World War. The hardcover version is expensive, but there are some paperback editions on Amazon going for under $30 right now. He also has a book on Naval Anti-Aircraft Gunnery.
Try Cold Waters, its pretty cool too, recently released. It isn't world war 2 however, there is a 1968 campaign and a 1984 campaign I believe but am probably wrong, somewhere around that though.
Artyom Liu that’s Ubisoft’s fault for ending this amazing series. Same thing happened to Rayman and Heroes of Might an Magic. All of these were my favorites and now they’re gone because I don’t count mobile games aimed for Chinese market as games I would ever check out. :(
The submarine was most effective attacking at night on the surface (when and where possible), then using its underwater capability to escape, preferrably undetected. When radar became available to naval escort ships relatively early in WW2 this tactic quickly became outdated.
17:46 - Fast and Fuhrious. LOL no, not in that war; he was in the _Army_ then. :D 23:30 The other thing about the first vs second world war is that in WW1 the Allies did not have the ability to interdict German industry with air power in the same manner as in WW2. It would be fascinating to see research which looked at or attempted to calculate the proportion of U boats that were "destroyed" because of lost construction time after factory bombings or raw resource denial (e.g. how many more could they have built if the bombings had not happened?) and/or straight-out destruction of unfinished hulls. I can recommend "Atlantic Escorts" by David K Brown for a Second World War account from the escort vessels' perspective. An English-language account looking at the evolution of U boat technology would be a valuable thing - can anyone recommend anything?
Riceball01 He had some really way-out plans for huge battleships, e.g. Super-Bismarcks with 16 or even 20 inch guns and "unsinkable" levels of protection that would have been bigger and heavier than the Yamato, but they got no further than design studies. You get to a point eventually where the ship becomes too big for its own good; the Yamato class were probably the pinnacle of big-gun ship development in purely structural terms (Musashi absorbed some incredibly high number of hits before sinking).
These outlandish plans and other wrong assumptions (surface fleet) was what prevented Dönitz from "winning" the U-Boot war, when it was still possible according to him. 1) Dry docks ware build (huge) and 1-2 keels were even laid down for the Z-Ships (Super Battleships) 2) Dönitz was of the opinion that with 300 operational UBoots (Type VII C and IX D) he could have won the Atlantic War in 1939-41. And he also asked for this number "long" before the war started. What he got was around 100 operational boats, a big part so called "Einbäume" only suitable for coastal operation. Only after seeing the early successes (and the losses of the big ships) of the U-Boots did german strategy shift from surface to submerged vessels. But by the time Dönitz became not only Kommandant der U-Boote but Chef der Kriegsmarine (Navy boss) and the shift happend, it was already to late to win the war in the Atlantic despite increased efforts to produce U-Boots. An other aspect worth mentioning is that the german Superboote of 44/45 (Type XXI) had a comparable fate as the german atom programm and the Me-262. First ideas and drafts for them were made long before serious work started, because they weren't deemed "kriegsentscheidend" (relevant for the war effort) at the beginning of WWII. Serious attempts to get them into production came only when the tide had already turned. So what would have happend if Dönitz would have had 300 "Atlantik-Boote" at the start of WWII? We ll never know, but it isn't unlikely that Churchills greatest nightmare would have become reality and negotiations as Hitler wanted them in 40/41 would have started.
Folterknecht Great information, I really don't know much about the Kriegsmarine during WW III and you helped fill in the many gaps in my knowledge of that area. So it's safe to say that the Kriegsmarine from some of the same nonsense about wunderwaffe that afflicted the rest of the Wehrmacht except that much of it wasn't actually produced unlike Hitler's dream of super tanks, and super planes.
The topic of "Wunderwaffen" is complex and multi-layered - some where utter nonsense from a military standpoint (Panzerkampfwagen Maus, Bachem Natter) others were to far ahead of their time (Hortens america bomber, Walters H2O2 propulsion for Uboots only became reality in the late 1990 or early 2000s with the new german conventional submarine designs.) and others could have been decisive (or at least prolong the war - Me262/Ho 229 and the Type XXI), if implemented earlier and in sufficiant numbers. You have to look from case to case. Germany did have opportunities to "win" WWII up to '41-42 in Europe or at least reach a peace treaty, which would have made certain developments a total "what if". The term Wunderwaffen is a Goebbels product anyway. Their "inventors" and the military were more realistic when it came to judging their capabilities than Goebbels, though they also overestimated it from time to time or where to optimistic when it came to time tables. The Type XXI for example formed the foundation of many russian U-Boats types till the 50/60s (non nuclear). You can visit Wilhelm Bauer (U-2540), preserved as a museum ship at Bremerhaven.
Very good discussion. Re the US Hunter Killer groups being more aggressive than the Royal Navy (RN), you may have overlooked the RN "Support Groups" which despite the name were similarly aggressive hunter killer groups and developed tactics to overcome some of the limitations you describe. For example cooperating vessels in radio communication would cover each other's short range ASDIC (sonar) gaps during depth charge attacks. You might also want to look at centimetre-band radar and aircraft searchlights which further step changes in the ability to counter submarines.
thankyou this was the subject of my undergraduate dissertation so i have a passion for u-boat warfare in both warfare so im glad you finally decided to cover the U-boat wars
thanks, yeah, but I can't live from appreciation alone that video took 27 hours and probably mainly due to a recent RUclips change got way less initial views than expected, as a result it gets less suggested by RUclips. Thus, from the business side it was probably the worst decision so far, maybe it will be a profit over time, but right now, it was a grave mistake. Sadly, it seems I have to focus on "easier" yet more popular topics or at least reduce the time on videos as these by a huge amount to prevent myself from burning out.
Yeah, it sucks. RUclips really needs to be something you do by passion these days. If i had the money id fund you, this info is hard to find and put together, and sometimes hard to understand in the first place. Especially when its in another language. well, ect ect. You're worth more than you receive
Honestly I think you need more videos like this hell make them even longer. Most creators fall into trap and try to make some deadlines or focus on doing easy stuff and then you lose core viewership. I mean there are tons of stuff that you can do that is way more fun to make and can generate more then *Insert generic title here".
I'm currently binge-watching your channel, excellent content that resonates a lot in a military history addict like me. Your formats and sourcing are an amazing sight on RUclips, where the expected patriotic bias too often ruins information for the sole sake of clickbaiting. o7
I may have missed it but the reason submarines near the convoy or escort ships could not be detected by sonar easily was that they were notoriously sensitive to the nearby interaction of the ships either carrying them or the convoy itself. Further away this signal noise dissipated so that detection was possible. Another discovery was made by Canadians was of sudden temperature changes (and hence density) caused false echoes or otherwise distorted the distance and bearings of the target because of changes in the speed of sound due to density.
There was a FORMIDABLE weapon NOT used by Germs: the *towed mine* Imagine feral escort is trying to get over the sub when mine on chain suddenly STRUCK the hull! BOOM and destroyer is going down...
This videos pretty consistently cover the germans use submarines to attack shipping and the allies respond. yet the russian submarines were a menace to the germans, attacking iron shipments from sweden and cobalt from turkey. The Baltic Sea became the most heavily mined water in the world to combat russian submarines, and I think the germans even built a giant chain to fence them in.
Keep up the good work! Avid watcher here. Love the subtle humor you weave into these too. The little creative umlauts and subliminal flashes make me smile while I learn. Kudos!
Hey just a friendly reminder from a half German half British chap: You always pronounce Comparison like if it had an 'sch' or 'sh' in it. It doesn't. It just gets spelled Com-pa-ri-son not Com-pa-ri-shon. Like your videos! Mach weiter so!
The British had actually planned for all kinds of things like Escort carriers, but political reality never made that happen until during the war. Politically Japan was empathised as the enemy and a lot of anti-sub technology didn't get the required funding. Because who would want to fight a war with Germany, who would be so stupid as to want to repeat WW1. Forward firing depth chargers and a small fleet escort carriers would have totally changed the Atlantic war early on. Unfortunately it took time to actually deploy this technology. Still overall the total effort put forward by the RN in WW2 was impressive and they pretty much crushed the German subs. When the US entered the war they were bad at protection and that's why there was Second Happy Time, but in reality that only reflected a far larger force that was soon against them.
I very much enjoy your videos, very informative and interesting for such a brief format. Also, you have a wonderful accent and a natural teaching tone. I'll be on Patreon momentarily.
I would like to say that your video helped me a lot in writing my seminar about the impact of submarines on naval warfare. Too bad i can't cite you as a sorce because youtube is not considered a "valid academic site" but oh well. Thank you for this great video anyway.
1:38 The Danish and Dutch coastlines were insignificant for the submarines. The Norwegian coastline however, was one of the most important areas of the entire kriegsmarine. Submarine bases in Bergen and Trondheim provided extended range for submarine operations in the north atlantic and arctic oceans. The fjords also provided excellent cover for German warships operating in the area. Later in the war when the bases in France became cut off and the ports in Germany was constantly bombed. Most of the remaining operational submarines were transferred to Norway.
Worse thing about U Boat attacks is heartlessly allowing men (non combatant civilians) to just die in the sea ....slinking away as IF it were in any way honorable? Scumbag murdering is scumbag murdering whether one has a uniform and orders or not...i think
Good stuff. At a tactical level I've always said the decisive factor between the successes of the Allied ASW efforts and the corresponding failure of Axis submarines was radar. Unsurprisingly, particularly in the Pacific, the reverse was true; the effectiveness of USN radar (surface and air) on submarines v the relative lack of sets (and quality) of IJN Radar proved just as decisive. There's a rather famous episode where the Germans were testing their own radar (I think in Baltic in 1942 but might have been earlier) and an officer asked Donitz if it wasn't going to make submarines terribly vulnerable. He wasn't impressed. He'd have been even less so had he any idea just how superior the British (and by extension the USA) radar was. Pretty sad (in terms of the consequences for his crews) if good for us that he singularly failed to grasp what was IMO the single most devastating change through the war in his U-boats' abilities to inflict and avoid losses.
The actual geopolitical reality of the respective wars also bears mentioning. In ww1 the submarine was the only likely means of winning the war (other than the complete collapse of the French army), and it came quite close to doing so in 1917. In ww2 there was never any real prospect of the submarine winning the war (at least not once the war went global), instead it could only really try to contain some of Germanys deficits in resources by limiting lend lease to the USSR and hindering the rebuilding/build up of Commonwealth/American forces. It didn't really manage this to a significant degree. So ww1 U-boat campaign - was undefeated and could have won the war if Germany had not been defeated first. ww2 U-boat campaign - was defeated and could not have won the war in any case except maybe in conjunction with more general British defeat in 1940 (i.e. battle of Britain and war in North Africa).
I think you're seeing this in retrospect - Britain actually came very close to defeat in 1940 and further destruction of shipping and resouces arriving in the UK could have led to starvation and difficulty maintaining morale and material. The RAF could only fly with fuel....
It came close to defeat in 1940, but that had nothing to do with the submarine. Arguably things like the introduction of rationing increased national unity at the time and made defeat less likely. The prospects of the UK being starved into submission in ww2 were very remote. I mean Britain was sending food to the USSR by 1941 and feeding the American military by 1942. Same goes for fuel, sure the u-boat campaign could have been ratcheted up to prevent the vast quantities of fuel needed for the invasion of Europe being stockpiled or forced a cut in strategic bombing but Germany never had the capability of preventing the fuel required for Britains defence getting in. Maybe if they delayed Barbarossa a few years and threw everything into u-boat production, but now we are way into speculation territory. There is a big difference between "winning the war" and "staving off defeat in the war". If they were capable of winning the war it was by destroying convoys heading to the USSR from Britain in 1941/42 when the arrival of key battlefield supplies arguably did make the difference at Moscow and Lenningrad. There is no comparison with ww1, Britain was on the edge of actual starvation. She was importing a greater proportion of food, had increased that proportion even more due to mass conscription of agricultural workers (people exempt in ww2 but often conscripted in ww1) and less automation, was sending a vast amount of that food to France, had far less leeway for losses and was experiencing a greater rate of losses.
I believe at one point almost half of the Allied shipping in the Atlantic was lost, which had the losses continued at that rate meant Britain may well have been starved into submission. The breaking of Enigma was the main thing that saved us.
Not sure how I haven't seen this until now but I have to say it's very well done, thank you for your hard work. While the ship tonnage lost is large, I've often look to see if there was a breakdown, even an incomplete one, of the amounts of cargo lost with those ships? For example X number of tanks, Y # of aircraft, Z tons of steel, etc...
There is the the general belief that Germans didn't know anything about radars and hadn't realized that enigma was broken. Both are wrong. Germans were also using radars after the first years of WWII and knew their potential from the beginning of the war. However they were not as advanced as British. Also they had realized that something wrong was going on with enigma and had improved their codes quite late. Germans knew that their U-boats were detected by radar by air and sea. At the end of the WWII Germans had developed ballistic rockets, jet fighter,s and improved snorkels for their submarines. All of them were too little too late. Like with the first war the introduction of Americans with their vast resources and the safety of distance were detrimental. The Germans weren't fool and from the beginning knew that only blitz crieg, a very fast war could ensure the victory. After failing the first year, they didn't have the recourses for a long war no matter how innovative their were. Hitler stubbornness made things worst. However somehow they were lucky. If Soviets were slower and unwilling to sacrifice so many millions fast, many Germans cities would have faced American atomic bombs.
Something you might find of interest is Nomohan the Russian Japanese war from 1937 to 1939 in Manchuria. I only recently read about this and the various political alliances that surrounded it. Would make and interesting video.
Bob1942ful The Japanese had two plans for their conquest. First plan involves the army pushing through Manchuria and into the Mongolian steppes. Second plan involves naval expansion to Southeast Asia and other Pacific territories. The Battle of Kaklin Go between Imperial Japan and the USSR was an very important battle between the two nations, both in technical and political advancements.
Strange but true about the Battle for the Atlantic: No convoy escorted by Dirigibles lost a ship. This is perhaps more of a tribute to the spotting platform that a dirigible is than is combat effectiveness, still compared to a submarine, a dirigible is pretty fast. And I am not sure that dirigibles operated singly or in small groups.
Good vid . Very well researched & presented. I grew up in a city with an extensive naval tradition so I have lot interest in this subject plus museum based information . A Canadian fan . P.S. the city is Victoria BC . Pacific fleet base Esquimalt
Great information, very well thought out. However the accent could use improvement, I'm having trouble understanding some words :( 17:40 Fast & Führious, too good 😂
I found your information that the British Admiralty was reluctant to use the convoy system in the early stages of the First World War due to the contrast with the Australian experience. While the Royal Australian Navy was independent of Britain by 1914 I would have expected a strong influence from London on the young Australian Navy doctrine at that time. However, Australia did use the convoy system from the inception of the war. This can be seen from the Battle of Cocos, one of the first German defeats of the war. In that case a convoy of Australian and New Zealand troop carriers bound for Egypt was defended by two Australian light Cruisers, the HMAS Sydney and HMAS Melbourne, a British heavy cruiser, HMS Minotaur and a Japanese battlecruiser, the Ibuki. The flagship was the Melbourne. At the time the German cruiser SMS Emden had sunk or captured 27 ships in the Indian Ocean including a French destroyer and a Russian cruiser, and had shelled Madras. The Emden had entered the Indian Ocean due to the presence of the Australian battlecruiser Australia in the eastern Pacific where it had been previously. This extreme danger forced the use of the convoy system. When the Emden attacked the radio station at Direction Island the attack was broadcast and Melbourne ordered Sydney to break off and engage the German ship which it did on the morning of 9th November 1914. British intelligence had determined that the Emden's gun had a smaller range than the Sydney so it was a surprise when Emden opened fire at 10,000 yards and Sydney had to sail 10 minutes directly into the German fire with shells landing every 6 seconds. Both forward and aft gun sighting mechanisms were hit on the Australian ship before it was in range to open fire. Despite firing by dead reckoning the Sydney's guns were far more accurate than the Emden's guns and were larger. The Emden was hit in the magazine and engine room and started sinking. Von Muller, the German captain, ordered the ship run onto the beach of the island. 134 German sailors died in the battle, and 4 Australian sailors died. Following the battle the other main German ship in the Indian Ocean, the SMS Konigsberg became blockaded in the Rufiji River in Africa and German power in the Indian Ocean was neutralised. As a result there was no need for convoys in the Indian Ocean until 1917 when the German navy returned to operations there in a last ditch effort to try to stem food and manpower supplies reaching Britain from India and Australia and convoys were reintroduced. I walk past a gun from the Emden which is positioned near my apartment. It is there as a memorial for the dead. The thick steel of the barrel has gouges out of it where shells have melted the steel testifying to the ferocity of the battle. Most people walk past it without giving it a thought, but I often see flowers left on the railing in memory of those who died, and I often pause in respect for those who fought so bravely and those who paid the ultimate sacrifice. Perhaps the Australian Navy, being younger, was more open to more flexible ideas in naval doctrine than the more tradition minded Royal Navy and so adopted the convoy strategy earlier. Perhaps being a smaller navy it felt more vulnerable than the massive RN and so was forced to be more adaptable in meeting naval threats. But I think it more likely that the influence of the Admiralty was strong, even in Australia, and that they were more adaptable than is given credit here. Most of the history books focus on major events in the main theater of war and thus produces a view of actions that might be a little different if taking a more global view. Thus I think that the early adoption of the convoy by Australia may have had an element of new-guy new-ideas but was almost certainly a strategy carried out with the full cooperation of the Admiralty. This is supported by their contribution of RN ships to the Australian convoys.
One weakness of early active sonar not covered here was that you could only ping on a single bearing and had to maintain that bearing to hear the return. It wasn't until later on that it was possible to scan an entire arc like you would imagine active sonar doing.
Thank you for this excellent history. My Dad of 1st mate on a Liberty ship on Mermansk runs. His ship was torpedoed in the White Sea and towed to shore where it became a Russian fishing boat after the war and was scraped in the 70's.
Homing torpedos were just used by Germany in ww2 ("Falke-Zaunkönig I-Zaunkönig II") and you talk about Submarines in ww2 and you didnt talked about the Type XXI........
The merchant marines in WW II Atlantic may have had a more hazardous time than that of the naval combat ships of that era. A couple of decades ago I spoke with an old-timer that served on merchant ships in WW II, where he had three of the ships he was on sunk from U-Boats.
0:47)In WW I, the German Embassy had warnings printed, in the US newspapers, next to the sailing schedules.The Lusitania was an armed merchant vessel (AMV). To get limey government loans the ship, & others in the class, had to be built with gun mounts. Divers have located war material. One million rounds of .303 caliber. WW I ended 28 June 1919. If the war ended 11 Nov. 1918, why the Paris Peace Conference that went on for 5 months?
I have often heard that early in the Second World War is the Germany did not enough long range U-boats early during the war. Had both the German both had RADAR and enough a sufficient number of boats to employ the wolf packs prior to the USA entering the confict things may have been very different. Both, my mother's family ( Linneman ) and father's family ( Kläne ) came to the USA in the 1860s from the Duchy of Oldenburg.
Wow, I never realized how immense the U-boat threat was in WW1. I only read the stories about WW2 and I knew how flimsy and small the U-boats were during WW1. So the U-boats in WW1 did a tremendous job, while in WW2 propaganda was far more effective I guess. Perhaps the British propaganda made the situation during the early years of WW2 more desperate to win over American support while during WW1, British kept 'mum' about the disastrous losses. But of course, the British couldn't brag about the fact they had broken the German naval codes during WW2.
You could benefit from looking at Linybeige channel, he has 3 videos on WATU, Western Approaches Training Unit based in Liverpool in WW2. In particular Jean Laidlaw. There is some discussion on U Boat tactics you should find interesting
Oh come on, you place too much confidence in those wolfpack stuff. It sounds cool but it is not something that really changed anything, as history has proven. U-boat by its nature is best suited and utilized for independent operation and can perfectly operate against convoy alone. All that Germany lacked is more U-boats in 1939-1940. Or type XXI to be prioritized and done sooner.
The British considered the use of submarines as cowardly and tantamount to piracy and the British said that they'd consider submarine crews to be pirates. By World War III, every country had them. We used the same tactic the Germans did in the Battle of the Atlantic___the wolfpack___against Japanese merchant ships which weren't organized into convoys. By the end of World War II, the British pioneered the hunter-killer submarine.
Question: the Kriegsmarine used a lot of its founding to built the super-battleships, Bismark and Tirpitz, which accomplished little. I am sure that money would have been better spent building the Type VII or even the Type XXI. My question is, what was the price difference between a Bismark-class battleship and a Type VII U-boat, and how many more U-boats could the Germans had built had they not wasted their money on battleships that were sunk early in the war, or force to stay in dock?
You should do an in-depth video bout general naval strategy in both world wars. I mean on strategic, operational and tactical levels. Keep up the good work, this channel is awesome! Und vergessen nicht: frankreich ist ein baguette, aber Deutschland muss sein eine kartoffen! (sorry for my awful german...)
It's often thought all mercantile shipping concerning the UK was from overseas. A lot of British mined coal was transported by coastal barge ( collier) to the the blast furnaces, along the coast, as it was less costly than by train or canal barges. Captain Cooks ship, the HMS Endeavour, was originally built and used for this purpose. Did the E-boats, U-boats or Luftwaffe target this internal mercantile trade.
I am thinking Herr Fritz here is wishing HE had been Wolf Pack Kriegsmarine U-boat commander....no? Blasting British and American cargo ships with his deck guns?
I had no idea the Allied shipping losses were so similar in both wars. That is a remarkable statistic that I don't remember ever seeing before. Have you made a video comparing U-Boat to the US Submarine operations in WW2? Some of the things U-boats were criticized for were also practiced by American submarines. It's also interesting that the Japanese and I think the Italians made excellent submarines but were not able to use them as effectively as did the U.S. and Germany. And British subs? I know almost nothing. Some of the first hand accounts of American submariners are some of the most interesting and exciting first hand accounts of war. I recommend them. One of my high school teachers was in US Naval Intelligence during the war, stationed in China. They were plotting Japanese ship movements. He said that commanders were so embarrassed they weren't reporting losses, so Japanese Naval command was ordering around ships that no longer existed. He said they'd order a convoy of ships and almost none of them showed up. Of course I don't know how his memory of what his unit observed matches the historical record. If the Japanese were not reporting losses, they certainly weren't mentioning that they were embarrassed by radio. It's also interesting that all the U.S. Submarine captains at the beginning of the war had to all be replaced by more aggressive captains. (This both supports your Mattis video and to a lesser degree my snarky remarks. In that video when you mentioned 'agressiveness' I scoffed, yet here is a clear example. The captain's were indoctrinated to one way of thinking (fleet submarine operations) But apparently were not capable of shifting to the more independent and aggressive way of thinking.)
One way of looking at the U-boat becoming unimportant is that it was extremely important early in World war 2 (roughly 1940) had Germany started the war with more U-boats (for example rather than battleships) they could well have led to britian being defeated before the advances in ASW were introduced. One other thing that you didn't mention was improvements in drilling - a rigorous system of simulatiors and and drilling for escort captains was introduced replacing the rather amateurish preparations prior to the outbreak of war.
![[Barbarossa] The Major Errors and Blunders - Or why Barbarossa Failed](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/A_3R-Rkn_98/mqdefault.jpg)
"Monty Python Doctrine" :D
SPAM! SPAM! SPAM! SPAM!
SHUT UP!
also note the source
And another victory for the Vikings!
Well known for Bravely Running Away tactics.
Yep. Likewise I was totally "WTF" for couple seconds. :D
The sword against the baguette.
Another like gained
I would give you another like for the Monty Python reference
Actually, if you've ever tried to eat a stale French baguette... I'd give it good odds against a sword.
Von Neely
I have one right here now, I can kill a person by hitting his head with it
Luftwaffe Recon Ltd.
Thank you for inspiring me for my new company name. 7:15
;)
Military History Visualized omg he replied.
"...great great grand father of a War Thunder player" 😂
Instablaster
wtf
(Long Story) I was a sonar operator in the 1951-54 navy, serving on the WWII diesel boats (SS245 and SS382). We had both active (W2) and passive (JT) sonar. The JT gear was extremely sensitive. In war games, headquarters would only tell us that there was a convoy, approx bearing such and such and we had to take it from there. I'd sweep the general direction and at some point would hear a very faint "pssst" over a small span of bearing (maybe 5 degrees), report it, and we'd head that way. After about an hour the width of the static band was 15-20 degrees and loud. We'd go to battle stations then. I would head a "thud", "thud", "thud" and dialed the MgHz spectrum, report the reading, which the book said was emitted by an XYZ class destroyer. They were still MILES away. We'd run on the surface until we were ahead of the convoy and then dive to 150 feet and wait.
I could hear the screws quite plainly and would give a beat count, which the book would confirm the earlier ID as XYZ class destroyers.
They usually formed a "V" in front of the convoy with a few on each side. We'd wait until the cans passed overhead, then would pop up and take out the oilers, and on one occasion, a carrier. We came so close to the carrier that it's cavitation sucked us up 20-30 feet or so.
We'd fire a red flare indicating we fired a fish and the umpires would then figure out if it was a hit or not. That carrier reported that the flare we fired landed on it's flight deck, so they couldn't argue that we missed.
Very rarely, when on the W2 gear, before firing a fish, I would be ordered to take one ping to confirm the range that the Torpedo Data Computer reported.
I loved the old fleet boats, they rode nicely in heavy seas, with the flared bow pushing the water away from the deck. I'd be on lookout up in the shears and come off watch dry as a bone. The 382 boat was converted to a streamlined GUPPY (snorkel) boat and was wetter than Hell. You'd come off watch soaked to the skin. Also, when snorkeling, the waves would slosh across the intake valve and the diesels would suck the air out of the boat, so there was a constant pressure change. Pure Hell if you had a cold. One time they lost control of the bowplanes on a high-speed run and the diesels sucked enough air out to shut them down. A lot of us had colds that trip and I couldn't equalize as I was all stuffed up. Lost my high frequency hearing due to that. Have become pretty adept at lip-reading. :-)
Great story, thanks for sharing it Sir.
Wow cool story I been fascinated by submarines since I was a little kid. Know alot about them I'm no expert of course but I wouldve never thought the engine would suck enough air that fast to create enough of a pressure change to fuck with you sinuses n shit but now that you mention it. That makes sense. Thanks for your service. My uncle Mike Stephens was a submariner probably around that time I think or a little after maybe like in the 60s or 70s didn't know him that well bh it he was about old enough to be my dads dad. My dad was the youngest of my grandparents kids and my gpa was pfc in the army. GPA on my moms side was airforce. When I was a kid I wanted to be a submariner but my life took a different path. I still have dreams I'm a mechanic on uboats I know wrong side lol and in them I can speak german.. weird because I cannot speak german at all but in my dreams I am speaking and understanding fluent German. It's hard to explain but that's what's happening ha. Idk cool story tho man.
fun fact:
dubstep was invented when an american sonar operator grew a liking to the sound of depth charge explosions.
robo336 thought it was some Jamaican sound engineer trying to play Mozart with dub music
I thought dubstep originated from a corrupted computer sound file of a machinegun firing. I heard it ended up causing a lot of window errors. The guy apparently enjoyed the sound and used it as music.
robo336
I thought dubstep was born when a group of underground artists make a secret party in 1990.
@@MB-tb6jy r/woosh
Be sure to check out my video on Wolfpack & U-Boat Tactics of WW2 here: ruclips.net/video/La6BM3HnU98/видео.html
about Escort Carriers / Hunter-Killer-Groups it should be US Navy *and Royal Navy*. Sadly, RUclips doesn't let me use "end cards" (which are great) and annotation together. So I have this comment for any corrections etc.
Nice video MHV, keep up the good work!
Military History Visualized Love the video. Could you make a video about Swedens1600-1700 army ( the caroleans ) and their tactics
Sweden is definitely on the list, but I already got books on Prussian Infantry/Cavalry/Artillery and nothing on Sweden yet, also my earlier searches on this back in Hamburg weren't successful. Hence Prussia will probably be first. Also videos of eras and nation I know little take way longer, right now I have to focus on popular topics.
Military History Visualized Im patient. As long as it will happen I don't really care whether it's tomorrow or 2018
Yes I just pointed this out above.
something Silent Hunter players can relate...
early war aircraft??? nuisance... heck if you are feeling brave you can try and shoot them down with the deck AA without too much risk.
late war??? you detect radar signal coming from somewhere and maybe u hear the dreaded engine drone???
CRASH DIVE!!! then pray.... heck usually you don't even bother checking with periscope because if they by chance see the periscope they'll depth charge you, and if they do enough damage then ur forced to surface... then the plane's buddy will swarm the area and you will be ripped to pieces in short order...
so in late war if you are not on electric boat, and have the misfortune of still sailing on the older sub ... you sail on surface constantly in fear that a plane might just come out of nowhere and blow you to smitheren, and every time you detect a radar signal... you just crash dive because u never know if it's coming from an aircraft that is inbound in just minutes...
in early war they are annoying mosquitos...
in late war they are god damn piranhas sniffing for your blood...
Iono Sama in the early war you can also get into ports and wreck everyone (most of my sunk ships were in ports) whereas if you go near the British isles in the late war you get jumped by 100,000 planes at once, each dropping atomic bombs
Are you the real Iono Sama?
I don't even bother diving if it is a swordfish. My men would need some action for sailing a month without any good action (Some coastal freighters and few ASW Steamboats sunk, but they were trivial.) Just a short burst on that plane and it goes down. Allisons aren't that bad either, but they'll have kinda nasty bite. I avoid them if possible. When Beaufighters come to the playing field, then it is a crash diving time.
And I remember hunting some convoy, but never found it. i found a aircraft carrier only escorted by two Black Swan class boats. Took care of the escorts with a single attack and that carrier was a piece of cake. Well it ate like four torpedoes, but was still going. Had to give her two more to finally see her sinking enough to confirm that she would go to down.
@Jonathan Stiles Cold Waters is easy in that 86 campaign. At least if you take the LA class big boat. That 68 campaign is a bit harder, because you see a lot of diesel subs and they can't see you and you can't see them. Had many missions where I did sunk like a whole fleet of surface ships and never saw the two diesel subs. They were probably the reason why some random torps came from odd direction. China campaign is hardest of them all, even with a seawolf, because you can't use the thermal layers effectively because shallow waters. If you can intercept something in deep waters, you can pretty much just yolo without any real threat.
@Jonathan Stiles Yea, I like the challenge. Diesel-electric subs are pretty hard to pick up, unless AI does something stupid, like diving at 20kt in 50ft depth. Nuclear subs are a lot louder than diesel-electric ones, because they run a pump to cool down the reactor. Electric ones run with batteries and are extremely silent if they move like 5kt speeds. If sea is bit rough and ambient voice is something like 100dB you really don't hear the electric boats unless they are pretty much in next to you.
As for fighting ASW surface ships, there really isn't much you can do when they spot you. Try to pick up many of the surface ships as possible and fire your torps like from 80% of their max range. usually it is good to shoot torps at bit shallow depth and then silently dive and slip far as possible, before they spot your torps. If you turn 90 degrees after launching torps it lessens the change that enemy will get a lock on you when they fire their torps behind yours.
"fall of france" sword crossed with a broken baguette... Now thats funny!
One ping. One ping only, please!
:)
Warmaker01 “one ping, one ping ONLY! please!”
@Kelly Arthur In the early '50s wargaming, we did that on occasion, just before firing, to validate the range computed by our TDC (analog computer), which was sometimes off by a couple of hundred yards. This was with WWII gear.
Great video.
The broken baguette at 2:00 was hilarious...
Superb video, great to finally get an overview and insight into submarine warfare :)
Bigger warships next? :D
I would like to know how big naval battles in ww2 worked, like how they managed to land a salvo on the enemy ship
a Warships 101 for WW2 is definitely planned. Also there will be an interesting book out by Lavery soon that could be great.
Military History Visualized Glad to hear that, keep up the great work!
"Naval Firepower" by Norman Friedman is an in-depth look at the evolution of surface to surface naval gunnery from the late 19th Century to the end of the Second World War. The hardcover version is expensive, but there are some paperback editions on Amazon going for under $30 right now. He also has a book on Naval Anti-Aircraft Gunnery.
I like PC game called: Silent Hunter, about submarines campaigns in WWII
Especcialy Sielnt hunter III or Silent hunter IV with operation monsun mod its excellent
Silent hunter III has GWX which makes it a lot better.
Try Cold Waters, its pretty cool too, recently released. It isn't world war 2 however, there is a 1968 campaign and a 1984 campaign I believe but am probably wrong, somewhere around that though.
Too bad the series is now dormant.
Artyom Liu that’s Ubisoft’s fault for ending this amazing series. Same thing happened to Rayman and Heroes of Might an Magic. All of these were my favorites and now they’re gone because I don’t count mobile games aimed for Chinese market as games I would ever check out. :(
The submarine was most effective attacking at night on the surface (when and where possible), then using its underwater capability to escape, preferrably undetected.
When radar became available to naval escort ships relatively early in WW2 this tactic quickly became outdated.
17:46 - Fast and Fuhrious. LOL no, not in that war; he was in the _Army_ then. :D
23:30 The other thing about the first vs second world war is that in WW1 the Allies did not have the ability to interdict German industry with air power in the same manner as in WW2. It would be fascinating to see research which looked at or attempted to calculate the proportion of U boats that were "destroyed" because of lost construction time after factory bombings or raw resource denial (e.g. how many more could they have built if the bombings had not happened?) and/or straight-out destruction of unfinished hulls.
I can recommend "Atlantic Escorts" by David K Brown for a Second World War account from the escort vessels' perspective. An English-language account looking at the evolution of U boat technology would be a valuable thing - can anyone recommend anything?
Riceball01 He had some really way-out plans for huge battleships, e.g. Super-Bismarcks with 16 or even 20 inch guns and "unsinkable" levels of protection that would have been bigger and heavier than the Yamato, but they got no further than design studies. You get to a point eventually where the ship becomes too big for its own good; the Yamato class were probably the pinnacle of big-gun ship development in purely structural terms (Musashi absorbed some incredibly high number of hits before sinking).
These outlandish plans and other wrong assumptions (surface fleet) was what prevented Dönitz from "winning" the U-Boot war, when it was still possible according to him.
1) Dry docks ware build (huge) and 1-2 keels were even laid down for the Z-Ships (Super Battleships)
2) Dönitz was of the opinion that with 300 operational UBoots (Type VII C and IX D) he could have won the Atlantic War in 1939-41. And he also asked for this number "long" before the war started. What he got was around 100 operational boats, a big part so called "Einbäume" only suitable for coastal operation.
Only after seeing the early successes (and the losses of the big ships) of the U-Boots did german strategy shift from surface to submerged vessels. But by the time Dönitz became not only Kommandant der U-Boote but Chef der Kriegsmarine (Navy boss) and the shift happend, it was already to late to win the war in the Atlantic despite increased efforts to produce U-Boots.
An other aspect worth mentioning is that the german Superboote of 44/45 (Type XXI) had a comparable fate as the german atom programm and the Me-262. First ideas and drafts for them were made long before serious work started, because they weren't deemed "kriegsentscheidend" (relevant for the war effort) at the beginning of WWII. Serious attempts to get them into production came only when the tide had already turned.
So what would have happend if Dönitz would have had 300 "Atlantik-Boote" at the start of WWII? We ll never know, but it isn't unlikely that Churchills greatest nightmare would have become reality and negotiations as Hitler wanted them in 40/41 would have started.
Folterknecht Great information, I really don't know much about the Kriegsmarine during WW III and you helped fill in the many gaps in my knowledge of that area. So it's safe to say that the Kriegsmarine from some of the same nonsense about wunderwaffe that afflicted the rest of the Wehrmacht except that much of it wasn't actually produced unlike Hitler's dream of super tanks, and super planes.
The topic of "Wunderwaffen" is complex and multi-layered - some where utter nonsense from a military standpoint (Panzerkampfwagen Maus, Bachem Natter) others were to far ahead of their time (Hortens america bomber, Walters H2O2 propulsion for Uboots only became reality in the late 1990 or early 2000s with the new german conventional submarine designs.) and others could have been decisive (or at least prolong the war - Me262/Ho 229 and the Type XXI), if implemented earlier and in sufficiant numbers. You have to look from case to case.
Germany did have opportunities to "win" WWII up to '41-42 in Europe or at least reach a peace treaty, which would have made certain developments a total "what if".
The term Wunderwaffen is a Goebbels product anyway. Their "inventors" and the military were more realistic when it came to judging their capabilities than Goebbels, though they also overestimated it from time to time or where to optimistic when it came to time tables.
The Type XXI for example formed the foundation of many russian U-Boats types till the 50/60s (non nuclear). You can visit
Wilhelm Bauer (U-2540), preserved as a museum ship at Bremerhaven.
man, you won't believe all the nonsense Wunderwaffen the Kriegsmarine invented in WW III.
I believe they even deployed UFO 's ?
That's right ww 3.
Very good discussion. Re the US Hunter Killer groups being more aggressive than the Royal Navy (RN), you may have overlooked the RN "Support Groups" which despite the name were similarly aggressive hunter killer groups and developed tactics to overcome some of the limitations you describe. For example cooperating vessels in radio communication would cover each other's short range ASDIC (sonar) gaps during depth charge attacks. You might also want to look at centimetre-band radar and aircraft searchlights which further step changes in the ability to counter submarines.
I love how you show the defeat of France as a broken sword crossed with a broken baguette. Lol!
thankyou this was the subject of my undergraduate dissertation so i have a passion for u-boat warfare in both warfare so im glad you finally decided to cover the U-boat wars
Anything you can add to the topic? I've become interested recently in the capablities of submarine warfare in modern warfare
War Thunder joke... I see what you did there :P Well played :)
Look at your like ratio, Amazing. Thats how you can tell people appreciate the work an research you put into these videos.
thanks, yeah, but I can't live from appreciation alone that video took 27 hours and probably mainly due to a recent RUclips change got way less initial views than expected, as a result it gets less suggested by RUclips. Thus, from the business side it was probably the worst decision so far, maybe it will be a profit over time, but right now, it was a grave mistake. Sadly, it seems I have to focus on "easier" yet more popular topics or at least reduce the time on videos as these by a huge amount to prevent myself from burning out.
Yeah, it sucks. RUclips really needs to be something you do by passion these days.
If i had the money id fund you, this info is hard to find and put together, and sometimes hard to understand in the first place. Especially when its in another language.
well, ect ect. You're worth more than you receive
Honestly I think you need more videos like this hell make them even longer. Most creators fall into trap and try to make some deadlines or focus on doing easy stuff and then you lose core viewership. I mean there are tons of stuff that you can do that is way more fun to make and can generate more then *Insert generic title here".
I'm currently binge-watching your channel, excellent content that resonates a lot in a military history addict like me. Your formats and sourcing are an amazing sight on RUclips, where the expected patriotic bias too often ruins information for the sole sake of clickbaiting. o7
thank you!
Thanks for watching
Love your channel, man. Professional, balanced, educational and interesting!
So the French were fighting with baguettes?
Another great episode. Love the humour included.
Also do you do your own graphics for the icons?
thx, yes.
There was no humor that's just how the man speaks.
@@tomvobbe9538 There was humour. Did you miss the part about War Thunder?
Speaking of aircraft, how effective were the Zeppelins during the great wars?
I have an issue with the narrator calling the Entente Powers the "Allies"...
The Allies was a WW2 term NOT used in WW1.
next time I will call them the Anglo-French
I may have missed it but the reason submarines near the convoy or escort ships could not be detected by sonar easily was that they were notoriously sensitive to the nearby interaction of the ships either carrying them or the convoy itself. Further away this signal noise dissipated so that detection was possible. Another discovery was made by Canadians was of sudden temperature changes (and hence density) caused false echoes or otherwise distorted the distance and bearings of the target because of changes in the speed of sound due to density.
There was a FORMIDABLE weapon NOT used by Germs:
the *towed mine*
Imagine feral escort is trying to get over the sub when mine on chain suddenly STRUCK the hull!
BOOM and destroyer is going down...
This videos pretty consistently cover the germans use submarines to attack shipping and the allies respond. yet the russian submarines were a menace to the germans, attacking iron shipments from sweden and cobalt from turkey. The Baltic Sea became the most heavily mined water in the world to combat russian submarines, and I think the germans even built a giant chain to fence them in.
Gotta love the Monthy Python and War Thunder references!
P.S. If you occasionally do play WT what is your Id there? :))
Keep up the good work! Avid watcher here. Love the subtle humor you weave into these too. The little creative umlauts and subliminal flashes make me smile while I learn. Kudos!
would love to know your opinion on the use of torpedo boats in ww 1 and ww2. especially the german s-boats during the battle for Jutland.
Hey just a friendly reminder from a half German half British chap: You always pronounce Comparison like if it had an 'sch' or 'sh' in it. It doesn't. It just gets spelled Com-pa-ri-son not Com-pa-ri-shon. Like your videos! Mach weiter so!
Many Irish also pronounce S like this. Spud becomes Shpud.
Buzz! Buzz! Buzz! UNTERTAUCHEN !!! (great vidéo as usually ....)
The British had actually planned for all kinds of things like Escort carriers, but political reality never made that happen until during the war. Politically Japan was empathised as the enemy and a lot of anti-sub technology didn't get the required funding. Because who would want to fight a war with Germany, who would be so stupid as to want to repeat WW1.
Forward firing depth chargers and a small fleet escort carriers would have totally changed the Atlantic war early on. Unfortunately it took time to actually deploy this technology. Still overall the total effort put forward by the RN in WW2 was impressive and they pretty much crushed the German subs.
When the US entered the war they were bad at protection and that's why there was Second Happy Time, but in reality that only reflected a far larger force that was soon against them.
The British Royal Navy also deployed escort carriers, and they did so before the USN.
Does anyone have any recommendations on discussions of allied submarine activity during WW2, e.g. against Japan?
I very much enjoy your videos, very informative and interesting for such a brief format. Also, you have a wonderful accent and a natural teaching tone. I'll be on Patreon momentarily.
Really appreciate the longer videos you've been making recently.
Yeee
The Fast and Furherious at 17:30 had me in stitches hahaha
Excellent video, as always! Well researched! "Fast & Fuhrious" @ 17:54. HA!
I would like to say that your video helped me a lot in writing my seminar about the impact of submarines on naval warfare. Too bad i can't cite you as a sorce because youtube is not considered a "valid academic site" but oh well. Thank you for this great video anyway.
If escort ships made the use of U-boats much more challenging, why couldn't the U-boats attack the convoy escorts first?
smaller, faster, more dangerous, waste of torpedoes etc.
Military History Visualized I always lol when you say death charge instead of depth charge. 😉💣💥🌊
Actually the name is fitting.
At 4:40 and 5:20. I really love the complexity of tactical warfare. Who would have ever think that more boat= better. Simply Genius.
How did the Monty Python Doctrine predate Monty Python?
nobody expected that
Nobody expects the Monty Python doctrine!!
Ah Ha! Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition! Ha Ha ha!
Ah Ha! Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition! Ha Ha ha!
Excellent work. I have been interested in the U-Boat wars since reading a book by John Terraine - Business in Great Waters - The U-Boat was 1916-1945.
Excellent. Thank you.
Do you have, or have you considered, a video on WWII submarine warfare (both sides) in the Pacific?
1:38 The Danish and Dutch coastlines were insignificant for the submarines. The Norwegian coastline however, was one of the most important areas of the entire kriegsmarine. Submarine bases in Bergen and Trondheim provided extended range for submarine operations in the north atlantic and arctic oceans.
The fjords also provided excellent cover for German warships operating in the area.
Later in the war when the bases in France became cut off and the ports in Germany was constantly bombed. Most of the remaining operational submarines were transferred to Norway.
Great topic! I noticed the info in most docs on WWI and WWII, about subs, is virtually the same.
Did u 406 suffer failure on launch again
How not to been, the Monty Python tactic. That's awesome!
Homing torpedoes in the 1940s? Wut
Worse thing about U Boat attacks is heartlessly allowing men (non combatant civilians) to just die in the sea ....slinking away as IF it were in any way honorable? Scumbag murdering is scumbag murdering whether one has a uniform and orders or not...i think
ehm, it actually was common for german submarine crews to help merchant crews out, but a order from berlin stopped this behavior and forced them away.
great video!
will you do one on modern submarines as well? I'm quiet interested in nuclear submarines
I like the accurate information and the little pictographs. Especially the sneak attack pictograph.
i know you're covering military history, but can you please cover MODERN submarines at least to some degree?
wow I often wondered how the uboat losses were so high in ww2 .here comes the reason excellent job altogether
Someone should tell the Germans third times a charm.
Another early antisub weapon was a qship
Good stuff. At a tactical level I've always said the decisive factor between the successes of the Allied ASW efforts and the corresponding failure of Axis submarines was radar. Unsurprisingly, particularly in the Pacific, the reverse was true; the effectiveness of USN radar (surface and air) on submarines v the relative lack of sets (and quality) of IJN Radar proved just as decisive.
There's a rather famous episode where the Germans were testing their own radar (I think in Baltic in 1942 but might have been earlier) and an officer asked Donitz if it wasn't going to make submarines terribly vulnerable. He wasn't impressed. He'd have been even less so had he any idea just how superior the British (and by extension the USA) radar was.
Pretty sad (in terms of the consequences for his crews) if good for us that he singularly failed to grasp what was IMO the single most devastating change through the war in his U-boats' abilities to inflict and avoid losses.
Loved the Luftwaffe Recon Ltd.
i swear on my British infantry division i flames of war your videos are getting better and better
Uboats were death traps only 1 in 8 made it home
The actual geopolitical reality of the respective wars also bears mentioning. In ww1 the submarine was the only likely means of winning the war (other than the complete collapse of the French army), and it came quite close to doing so in 1917. In ww2 there was never any real prospect of the submarine winning the war (at least not once the war went global), instead it could only really try to contain some of Germanys deficits in resources by limiting lend lease to the USSR and hindering the rebuilding/build up of Commonwealth/American forces. It didn't really manage this to a significant degree.
So ww1 U-boat campaign - was undefeated and could have won the war if Germany had not been defeated first.
ww2 U-boat campaign - was defeated and could not have won the war in any case except maybe in conjunction with more general British defeat in 1940 (i.e. battle of Britain and war in North Africa).
I think you're seeing this in retrospect - Britain actually came very close to defeat in 1940 and further destruction of shipping and resouces arriving in the UK could have led to starvation and difficulty maintaining morale and material. The RAF could only fly with fuel....
It came close to defeat in 1940, but that had nothing to do with the submarine. Arguably things like the introduction of rationing increased national unity at the time and made defeat less likely. The prospects of the UK being starved into submission in ww2 were very remote. I mean Britain was sending food to the USSR by 1941 and feeding the American military by 1942. Same goes for fuel, sure the u-boat campaign could have been ratcheted up to prevent the vast quantities of fuel needed for the invasion of Europe being stockpiled or forced a cut in strategic bombing but Germany never had the capability of preventing the fuel required for Britains defence getting in. Maybe if they delayed Barbarossa a few years and threw everything into u-boat production, but now we are way into speculation territory.
There is a big difference between "winning the war" and "staving off defeat in the war". If they were capable of winning the war it was by destroying convoys heading to the USSR from Britain in 1941/42 when the arrival of key battlefield supplies arguably did make the difference at Moscow and Lenningrad. There is no comparison with ww1, Britain was on the edge of actual starvation. She was importing a greater proportion of food, had increased that proportion even more due to mass conscription of agricultural workers (people exempt in ww2 but often conscripted in ww1) and less automation, was sending a vast amount of that food to France, had far less leeway for losses and was experiencing a greater rate of losses.
I believe at one point almost half of the Allied shipping in the Atlantic was lost, which had the losses continued at that rate meant Britain may well have been starved into submission. The breaking of Enigma was the main thing that saved us.
I think that without any doubt, this is your best video. Congrats!
Not sure how I haven't seen this until now but I have to say it's very well done, thank you for your hard work.
While the ship tonnage lost is large, I've often look to see if there was a breakdown, even an incomplete one, of the amounts of cargo lost with those ships? For example X number of tanks, Y # of aircraft, Z tons of steel, etc...
There is the the general belief that Germans didn't know anything about radars and hadn't realized that enigma was broken.
Both are wrong.
Germans were also using radars after the first years of WWII and knew their potential from the beginning of the war. However they were not as advanced as British.
Also they had realized that something wrong was going on with enigma and had improved their codes quite late.
Germans knew that their U-boats were detected by radar by air and sea.
At the end of the WWII Germans had developed ballistic rockets, jet fighter,s and improved snorkels for their submarines. All of them were too little too late. Like with the first war the introduction of Americans with their vast resources and the safety of distance were detrimental.
The Germans weren't fool and from the beginning knew that only blitz crieg, a very fast war could ensure the victory. After failing the first year, they didn't have the recourses for a long war no matter how innovative their were. Hitler stubbornness made things worst. However somehow they were lucky. If Soviets were slower and unwilling to sacrifice so many millions fast, many Germans cities would have faced American atomic bombs.
Something you might find of interest is Nomohan the Russian Japanese war from 1937 to 1939 in Manchuria. I only recently read about this and the various political alliances that surrounded it. Would make and interesting video.
Bob1942ful
The Japanese had two plans for their conquest. First plan involves the army pushing through Manchuria and into the Mongolian steppes. Second plan involves naval expansion to Southeast Asia and other Pacific territories. The Battle of Kaklin Go between Imperial Japan and the USSR was an very important battle between the two nations, both in technical and political advancements.
Strange but true about the Battle for the Atlantic: No convoy escorted by Dirigibles lost a ship. This is perhaps more of a tribute to the spotting platform that a dirigible is than is combat effectiveness, still compared to a submarine, a dirigible is pretty fast. And I am not sure that dirigibles operated singly or in small groups.
Great video, you are great at researching this stuff and sharing it with us!
I could have been a U-boat captain
"Fast and Fuhrious" Lol.
Hi!
QUESTION:
Who would win in battle The Imperial German Navy of WW1 and the Kriegsmanrine of WW2? 🙂
If they had to fight one against another
Good vid . Very well researched & presented. I grew up in a city with an extensive naval tradition so I have lot interest in this subject plus museum based information . A Canadian fan . P.S. the city is Victoria BC . Pacific fleet base Esquimalt
Great information, very well thought out. However the accent could use improvement, I'm having trouble understanding some words :(
17:40 Fast & Führious, too good 😂
I found your information that the British Admiralty was reluctant to use the convoy system in the early stages of the First World War due to the contrast with the Australian experience. While the Royal Australian Navy was independent of Britain by 1914 I would have expected a strong influence from London on the young Australian Navy doctrine at that time. However, Australia did use the convoy system from the inception of the war. This can be seen from the Battle of Cocos, one of the first German defeats of the war. In that case a convoy of Australian and New Zealand troop carriers bound for Egypt was defended by two Australian light Cruisers, the HMAS Sydney and HMAS Melbourne, a British heavy cruiser, HMS Minotaur and a Japanese battlecruiser, the Ibuki. The flagship was the Melbourne. At the time the German cruiser SMS Emden had sunk or captured 27 ships in the Indian Ocean including a French destroyer and a Russian cruiser, and had shelled Madras. The Emden had entered the Indian Ocean due to the presence of the Australian battlecruiser Australia in the eastern Pacific where it had been previously. This extreme danger forced the use of the convoy system.
When the Emden attacked the radio station at Direction Island the attack was broadcast and Melbourne ordered Sydney to break off and engage the German ship which it did on the morning of 9th November 1914. British intelligence had determined that the Emden's gun had a smaller range than the Sydney so it was a surprise when Emden opened fire at 10,000 yards and Sydney had to sail 10 minutes directly into the German fire with shells landing every 6 seconds. Both forward and aft gun sighting mechanisms were hit on the Australian ship before it was in range to open fire. Despite firing by dead reckoning the Sydney's guns were far more accurate than the Emden's guns and were larger. The Emden was hit in the magazine and engine room and started sinking. Von Muller, the German captain, ordered the ship run onto the beach of the island. 134 German sailors died in the battle, and 4 Australian sailors died. Following the battle the other main German ship in the Indian Ocean, the SMS Konigsberg became blockaded in the Rufiji River in Africa and German power in the Indian Ocean was neutralised. As a result there was no need for convoys in the Indian Ocean until 1917 when the German navy returned to operations there in a last ditch effort to try to stem food and manpower supplies reaching Britain from India and Australia and convoys were reintroduced.
I walk past a gun from the Emden which is positioned near my apartment. It is there as a memorial for the dead. The thick steel of the barrel has gouges out of it where shells have melted the steel testifying to the ferocity of the battle. Most people walk past it without giving it a thought, but I often see flowers left on the railing in memory of those who died, and I often pause in respect for those who fought so bravely and those who paid the ultimate sacrifice.
Perhaps the Australian Navy, being younger, was more open to more flexible ideas in naval doctrine than the more tradition minded Royal Navy and so adopted the convoy strategy earlier. Perhaps being a smaller navy it felt more vulnerable than the massive RN and so was forced to be more adaptable in meeting naval threats. But I think it more likely that the influence of the Admiralty was strong, even in Australia, and that they were more adaptable than is given credit here. Most of the history books focus on major events in the main theater of war and thus produces a view of actions that might be a little different if taking a more global view. Thus I think that the early adoption of the convoy by Australia may have had an element of new-guy new-ideas but was almost certainly a strategy carried out with the full cooperation of the Admiralty. This is supported by their contribution of RN ships to the Australian convoys.
One weakness of early active sonar not covered here was that you could only ping on a single bearing and had to maintain that bearing to hear the return. It wasn't until later on that it was possible to scan an entire arc like you would imagine active sonar doing.
Fascinating video. Thanks for this. Feel smarter after watching this. Not something you can say about most RUclips videos.
Thank you for this excellent history. My Dad of 1st mate on a Liberty ship on Mermansk runs. His ship was torpedoed in the White Sea and towed to shore where it became a Russian fishing boat after the war and was scraped in the 70's.
Homing torpedos were just used by Germany in ww2 ("Falke-Zaunkönig I-Zaunkönig II") and you talk about Submarines in ww2 and you didnt talked about the Type XXI........
'Fast and Fuhrious' that killed me
The merchant marines in WW II Atlantic may have had a more hazardous time than that of the naval combat ships of that era. A couple of decades ago I spoke with an old-timer that served on merchant ships in WW II, where he had three of the ships he was on sunk from U-Boats.
Quality presentation. You obviously did your research.
Thanks.
0:47)In WW I, the German Embassy had warnings printed, in the US newspapers, next to the sailing schedules.The Lusitania was an armed merchant vessel (AMV). To get limey government loans the ship, & others in the class, had to be built with gun mounts. Divers have located war material. One million rounds of .303 caliber. WW I ended 28 June 1919. If the war ended 11 Nov. 1918, why the Paris Peace Conference that went on for 5 months?
I have often heard that early in the Second World War is the Germany did not enough long range U-boats early during the war. Had both the German both had RADAR and enough a sufficient number of boats to employ the wolf packs prior to the USA entering the confict things may have been very different. Both, my mother's family ( Linneman ) and father's family ( Kläne ) came to the USA in the 1860s from the Duchy of Oldenburg.
Wow, I never realized how immense the U-boat threat was in WW1. I only read the stories about WW2 and I knew how flimsy and small the U-boats were during WW1. So the U-boats in WW1 did a tremendous job, while in WW2 propaganda was far more effective I guess. Perhaps the British propaganda made the situation during the early years of WW2 more desperate to win over American support while during WW1, British kept 'mum' about the disastrous losses. But of course, the British couldn't brag about the fact they had broken the German naval codes during WW2.
Schrage musik and the faults if the later bf 109 videos?
Surface...fire naval cannons... Submerge. Alpha wolf kill confirmed...
You could benefit from looking at Linybeige channel, he has 3 videos on WATU, Western Approaches Training Unit based in Liverpool in WW2. In particular Jean Laidlaw. There is some discussion on U Boat tactics you should find interesting
Oh come on, you place too much confidence in those wolfpack stuff. It sounds cool but it is not something that really changed anything, as history has proven. U-boat by its nature is best suited and utilized for independent operation and can perfectly operate against convoy alone. All that Germany lacked is more U-boats in 1939-1940. Or type XXI to be prioritized and done sooner.
The British considered the use of submarines as cowardly and tantamount to piracy and the British said that they'd consider submarine crews to be pirates. By World War III, every country had them. We used the same tactic the Germans did in the Battle of the Atlantic___the wolfpack___against Japanese merchant ships which weren't organized into convoys. By the end of World War II, the British pioneered the hunter-killer submarine.
Question: the Kriegsmarine used a lot of its founding to built the super-battleships, Bismark and Tirpitz, which accomplished little. I am sure that money would have been better spent building the Type VII or even the Type XXI. My question is, what was the price difference between a Bismark-class battleship and a Type VII U-boat, and how many more U-boats could the Germans had built had they not wasted their money on battleships that were sunk early in the war, or force to stay in dock?
You should do an in-depth video bout general naval strategy in both world wars. I mean on strategic, operational and tactical levels. Keep up the good work, this channel is awesome!
Und vergessen nicht: frankreich ist ein baguette, aber Deutschland muss sein eine kartoffen!
(sorry for my awful german...)
"Fast and Führious" XD
It's often thought all mercantile shipping concerning the UK was from overseas. A lot of British mined coal was transported by coastal barge ( collier) to the the blast furnaces, along the coast, as it was less costly than by train or canal barges. Captain Cooks ship, the HMS Endeavour, was originally built and used for this purpose. Did the E-boats, U-boats or Luftwaffe target this internal mercantile trade.
Can you make video about TYPE XXI IT CHANGED SUBMARINE WARFARE FOR EVER
I am thinking Herr Fritz here is wishing HE had been Wolf Pack Kriegsmarine U-boat commander....no? Blasting British and American cargo ships with his deck guns?
I had no idea the Allied shipping losses were so similar in both wars. That is a remarkable statistic that I don't remember ever seeing before.
Have you made a video comparing U-Boat to the US Submarine operations in WW2? Some of the things U-boats were criticized for were also practiced by American submarines. It's also interesting that the Japanese and I think the Italians made excellent submarines but were not able to use them as effectively as did the U.S. and Germany. And British subs? I know almost nothing.
Some of the first hand accounts of American submariners are some of the most interesting and exciting first hand accounts of war. I recommend them.
One of my high school teachers was in US Naval Intelligence during the war, stationed in China. They were plotting Japanese ship movements. He said that commanders were so embarrassed they weren't reporting losses, so Japanese Naval command was ordering around ships that no longer existed. He said they'd order a convoy of ships and almost none of them showed up. Of course I don't know how his memory of what his unit observed matches the historical record. If the Japanese were not reporting losses, they certainly weren't mentioning that they were embarrassed by radio.
It's also interesting that all the U.S. Submarine captains at the beginning of the war had to all be replaced by more aggressive captains. (This both supports your Mattis video and to a lesser degree my snarky remarks. In that video when you mentioned 'agressiveness' I scoffed, yet here is a clear example. The captain's were indoctrinated to one way of thinking (fleet submarine operations) But apparently were not capable of shifting to the more independent and aggressive way of thinking.)
One way of looking at the U-boat becoming unimportant is that it was extremely important early in World war 2 (roughly 1940) had Germany started the war with more U-boats (for example rather than battleships) they could well have led to britian being defeated before the advances in ASW were introduced. One other thing that you didn't mention was improvements in drilling - a rigorous system of simulatiors and and drilling for escort captains was introduced replacing the rather amateurish preparations prior to the outbreak of war.
This video earned a subscription. Great work and thanks!!