U-Boats? Nine, Dank? Nein, Danke!

"No-one ever ran to the coast of Kent and raised two hands in the air in hopes of being spotted through a periscope..." (Alex Woolley)

Let me start with an admission: I a Kreigsmarine fan. Not just because the Navy was the most liberal of German services, but because of the challenge made by the German Navy to British naval superiority in both World Wars. The Channel Dash was a glorious adventure, while even a Brit watching that classic film Sink the Bismarck can sense satisfaction at the way smug, pompous Admiralty buffs were startled out of their starched socks by the (inevitable) outcome of the clash between the prides of two navies: Hood and Bismarck. Not in the film, but in real life, this was a time experts could thumb their noses at the upper class amateurs who ran the naval establishment of this country.

Indeed, it is precisely because I carry a torch for the German navy of those years that I resent the wretched little U-boats - not only a curse to sane naval policy in the Third Reich, but a throwback, a fixation inherited from the flawed logic of an earlier war. German wolfpacks sank millions of tons of Allied shipping in the Atlantic (though the commonly quoted figure of 14.6 million tons is in fact a whole-war figure that includes the Japanese and Italian tally, too) but theirs was a futile, desperate and ugly campaign, always destined to fail.

Inded, the Germans had good reason to know the limitations of submarine warfare. In the Great War, Tirpitz and Scheer had confidently asserted that unrestricted submarine warfare could bring Britain to its knees within five months - too fast for American intervention to make any difference should the strategy provoke that result. In their analysis, the increased risk of U.S. intervention seemed acceptable, and unrestricted submarine warfare began on 1st February 1917.

Yet the First Battle of the Atlantic followed much the same course as the Second: early U-boat successes were met with counter-measures such as the convoy, and the initial promise of the German campaign was thwarted long before Britain was starved into submission. Indeed, eighteen months after unrestricted submarine warfare began, Britain was no nearer its knees, and the only strategic outcome of the Great War U-boat campaign was American entry - which itself doomed Germany to almost certain defeat.

Far from winning the First World War for Germany, U-boats very much contributed to its defeat, so it seems astonishing that in the next major war, against the same foe, the Germans attempted the same bankrupt strategy.

Apologists claim that the U-boat strategy might have worked in the Second World War but for allied intelligence coups and research into counter-measures; yet this is rather like saying I could beat Mike Tyson in a fist fight if he wasn't allowed to hit back (and assuming I had a few days to do it). Britain invested much effort in beating the U-boat menace, precisely because they believed it might be beaten - and let's be clear, the technological advances made against the U-boats were mostly British (not American). Again, apologists point to the breaking of Enigma and argue that this one achievement won the battle; yet this is not only a dubious claim, but is matched by the German ability to decypher the British and Allied Merchant Shipping Code.

Instead of investing men and material in submarines, Germany would have been better advised to concentrate on a surface fleet that could contest the Royal Navy where it mattered: on the high seas, protecting an invasion fleet or as a threat in being. And there are three significant reasons why this shoudl be so.

An improved balance of surface naval power

First, the balance of naval power had become much more favorable to Germany between the wars. Even in the Great War, Britain had been obliged to enforce a distant (rather than close) blockade against the German High Seas fleet. British dreadnoughts could not sustain patrols off the German ports for long due to the threat of a concentrated attack by German ships on British units scattered and spread along the coast. Yet this was a war in which Germany had no significant maritime allies, and the bulk of British strategic naval resources could be concentrated against one enemy (the Austrian and Turkish navies were of little significance in the face of Italian and French sea-power).

By the Second World War Germany had pacts with both the Italians and Japanese. These were naval powers of consequence, and the Japanese very much threatened British interests on the other side of the globe.Of Britain's former allies, America was isolationist and Russia neutral. Only France was an ally of maritime consequence for Britain, at a time when the Royal Navy had to cope with threats to Singapore as well as Southend - to Malta as well as Margate.

Yet at the same time, naval cuts enforced by both budgetary and treaty restrictions auch as the Treaty of Washington (which, for example, cut the huge Nelson and Rodney battleships in half) left the Royal Navy with a relatively small head start over the Germans, compared with their respective positions before the arms race of the early Twentieth Century.

In short, diplomatic initiatives placed the German navy in a far stronger position vis-a-vis Britain than thirty years earlier, while the British navy itself was a much reduced force. A direct challenge to British naval superiority was a far more credible strategy.

Submarine warfare could not achieve definitive victory

Second, a question mark punctuates the intended purpose of the U-boat campaign. Whenever U-philes gather there is talk of Britain almost brought to its knees by U-boats.Yet how can this be? What could U-boats achieve in the face of surface power? Let's speculate. Let's imagine a golden scenario for the U-boats...

German U-boats are sinking British shipping faster than it can be replaced. There is no sign of America entering the war. Stockpiles in Britain are dwindling, and British war workers are on strike in protest at meagre rations that leave their children starving.

However, the RAF still own the skies over southern England, and the Germans have no fleet to enforce a landing across the Channel. Even if Churchill is removed in a cabinet coup, Britain is unlikely to offer other than terms to Germany. These isles could not be occupied - the Germans have no means to invade, and British agricultural production would be sufficient for the citizenry to exist on better rations than the Dutch survived in the terrible winter after the war. Without a surface fleet or control of the skies, Germany might cause hardship and suffering in Britain, but could not enforce utter capitulation.

In short, U-boats offered no strategic solution. Indeed, contrast this with 1918, when a properly enforced Allied naval blockade (enforced with surface ships) brought Germany low: the Entente retained a means to win the war in the field of battle. The blockade alone was not enough.

Global reach

World powers need surface fleets to achieve control of the seas, protect their shipping, and project their interests. Submarines could not threaten Ameria and held no fear for Russia. The effectiveness of submarines was very limited, and in the unlikely event of Britain making peace in the wake of a successful U-boat campaign, the value of a U-fleet (built at the expense of a genuine German fleet-in-being) would have been rendered almost nought.

Indeed, U-boat folly infected the entire war strategy. At a time when carriers were about to take their place as the new capital ships of world navies, the lone German carrier project was scrapped, and excellent German surface ships like the Bismarck were wasted in surface raiding, a futile misapplication of the U-boat hit-and-run strategy that made the subs themselves such a diplomatic liability (unlike a surface fleet which can stop and search neutral shipping, U-boats sank first and asked questions later).

Against Britain, all the Germans needed was a surface fleet that could be concentrated to enforce a landing across the Channel. Compare this with what the Japanese achieved in the Pacific with a small but concentrated fleet. Two carriers, a couple of extra battleships and some assault ships: this was the Japanese advantage over Germany. A relatively small investment on Germany's part to bolster a fleet that already looked good on paper but was frittered away over months of surface raiding (two battlecruisers, two battleships, three pocket battleships and a host of excellent cruisers). Indeed, in a classic example of the fleet-in-being principle, the Tirptiz tied up a significant proportion of the Royal Navy just by anchoring in a Norwegian fiord.

U-boats? Nein danke

Before the war, in his book on submarine warfare, Admiral Donitz had estimated that 300 operational U-boats would be required to win a war against Britain - and this when he could not guess that Germany would have all the French and Norwegian airfields his reconnaissance planes could wish, and the ports of Brest, St Nazaire and Lorient (which dramatically impoved U-boat access to the key Atlantic battleground, and naturally became the primary U-boat operational bases).

Compare this target of 300 boats with the fact that, by war's end, the Germans had lost 817 U-boats.

Even with all the advantages their arch-proponent had never expected when he made his prediction, and even with three times the number of boats, the strategy never came anywhere near success. Much is made of Churchill's suggestion that the U-boats were the only thing that scared him, but Britain was never close to genuine defeat. Stockpiles might have been eliminated by submarine blockade, and drastic measures might have been necessary - but states and regimes have survived long and often in precisely such circumstances (Germany itself fell back on any number of ersatz products given no supplies, and theoretically should have collapsed like a wet paper bag long before Russian troops arrived in Berlin).

It is reckoned that the fundamental mistake of the Axis powers in the Second World War was to under-estimate the human and economic resources available to their opponents. That mistake is apparent in the German belief that they could sink enough allied shipping to make the war unviable for Britain (and later America), and appears all the more absurd given the lessons of an earlier war within living memory.

In short the U-boats were a dismal failure - if appropriate terrorist toys for a sordid regime that thrived on secracy and mean little intrigues. The democratic world should perhaps be grateful the Z-Plan was never realised, and that instead of overt power and authority, the Kriegsmarine opted for a hapless if miserable alternative. Miserable, because the cold Atlantic claimed too many lives, on both sides and in such dire ways, for anyone to feel truly grateful for the U-boats.