U-boats

The history of naval warfare is perhaps one of the most intriguing things, and I am not hesitant to admit that I am obsessed with reading about these things. And one cannot talk about naval warfare and not talk about U-boats (or U-boots as they were called in the Kriegsmarine). So this post is to share a bit on the effectiveness of U-boats.

Keep in mind that after WW1 Germany was forced to minimize military forces under the Treaty of Versailles. And then Hitler came along, and here Germany saw a massive expansion in the armed forces, particularly interestingly, the Luftwaffe and the Kriegsmarine. The latter developed powerful dreadnoughts like the Bismarck (lost tied to Operation Rheinubung, which also involved Prinz Eugen), Tripitz, Lutzow, and many others. But the particularly interesting class of developments were in the family of U-boats, which had two essential armaments -- a deck gun, which I think was usually an 8.8 SK/C-35, and around 14 torpedos. To quote Winston Churchill is to best describe how effective these were in raiding shipping lanes in Wolfpack operations: ``the only thing that really frightened me during the [second world] war was the U-boats peril". Eventually, of course, the effectiveness declined because of anti-submarine warfare (ASW) like Hedgehog (which had bow-forward throwing mortars), Depth charges (these were usually the more effective ones, more below) and the Leigh light among others. One more thing that happened in this period was the cracking of the Enigma from U-boat wrecks, which was a major turning point in the war.

From a purely psychological perspective, there were a number of pressures on U-boat crews. More often than not, they would be subject to hours of constant depth charging, which was a technique that turned out to be quite effective. This was because the Depth charges, thrown to the stern-backward would not have to necessarily impact the U-boat, or even detonate anywhere close to it; it only sufficed to explode in a certain radius for the U-boat to have significant damage, usually damaging ballasts, steering, sonar or the entire U-boat altogether. And since U-boats had to recharge batteries, they would have to surface, which they usually did at night in the early war periods. However, after aerial spotting and bombings of U-boats became superior, this was pushed to the day time. Before the Allies developed an effective countermeasure to U-boats (which initially did not work so well), U-boat campaigns were very successful. They referred to the time period around July, 1940 as the First Happy Time, or Die Gluckliche Zeit. There is a Second Happy Time as well, however I won't discuss this.

For that matter, U-boats in WW1 were also recognized as a threat -- however, they did not operate at the scale seen in WW2. The sinking of Lusitania and the Arabic significantly increased pressure on the American-German relations, and at that point the predictability of a move from Britain was not unseen. In the August of 1915, the Baralong incidents took place, which in a single line can be summarized by ``... [unofficially] ... take no prisoners from U-boats". While this was seen as a British war crime, many say that the provocation of the U-boats was not minor, since attacking Lusitania was in itself a crime, although the German claim was that this was justified since Lusitania could also be classified as an auxiliary cruiser. Joining the dots, it should be clear that there are many aspects of historic value involved when discussing just the one topic of U-boats. Of course, there are many other historically significant cases, like Battle of Jutland, Operation Rheinubung, and many others. In fact, the Battle of Jutland is one of three actions in a major war that involved battleships, after Battle of Yellow Sea and most notably, the Battle of Tsushima, which is famous for Admiral Togo's strategic ``U-turn", which crossed-the-T of Admiral Rozhestvensky's fleet. Tsushima is also famous for Admiral Togo's famous quote, ``Weather today fine, but high waves". However, more on these later.