How come only Germany used submarines to their full potential but other larger naval powers like USA and UK neglected them so much?
U-Boote
Oliver Russell
Ethan Mitchell
UK kind of neglected. US was pretty successful at their sub campaign but a large part due to Japanese lack of anti-sub warfare. But yea, Germany had a huge U-Boat force. Even if 75% them never made it back to port. :(
William Ross
Bentley Peterson
What the hell are you talking about? Pacific submarines were devastating.
And how exactly would the UK have used submarines in Europe? They already had all the conventional naval advantage they could ask for. A u-boats primary advantages are similar to that of an insurgent in modern asymmetric warfare: Sure, they don't hit that hard and they're slow, but they're hard to spot and eradicate and thus can pop up all over the place. They're a great weapon for a weaker party.
But when you're the UK vis a vis Germany, when you have 15 battleships to their 4, you don't need that. If the Germans were stupid enough to actually ship stuff in the open, they'd just sail over with big, nasty, much more heavily armed warships and obliterate it. It's why Germany's only real overseas stuff was in the Baltic, behind mines and coastal guns, where the Royal Navy couldn't get at it.
Gabriel Green
Germany used them to make up for an inadequate conventional navy.
Kevin Jenkins
What?
The US waged unrestricted submarine warfare against Japan and rekt their shipping.
Liam Ross
The US used them with great accuracy.
There wasn't really too much of a point for the brits to use them during ww2. Germany didn't really have any surface naval forces to contend with.
Adam Bennett
Neither USA nor UK neglected their submarines.
Kayden Williams
We had this thread on /k/ like a little bit over a week ago. The USN actually had more success with their subs compared to the Kriegsmarine.
The U-Boats weren't actually all that devastating in the overall view as the majority of allied shipping had made it across the Atlantic.
Meanwhile in the Pacific, the USN subs had a stranglehold over the merchant ships in the latter half of the war. And even more than that, USN subs were actually responsible for sinking a good deal of the IJN's Capital ships.
Logan Walker
Das Boot is a great film.
It made me wonder, how are Destroyers able to find submarines so easily? Do they have wallhacks or something?
Hudson White
because submarines attacked convoys which were being escorted by destroyers.
Wyatt Sanchez
Are you fucking kidding me? Nimitz ran such a successful submarine campaign that when he heard Donitz was on trial, he dropped everything to go and defend the man for doing the exact same things he did.
Zachary Morales
You do have to factor in how much weaker Japan was as a target than Great Britian, nevermind the UK+ U.S. shipbuilding in the convoy war.
And I mean, even the submarine success was limited in the context of just how badly overwhelmed the Japanese were. Airplanes in the last 3-4 months of the war sank more merchant tonnage than all the USN submarines did throughout the entire pacific war.
Thomas Fisher
Going to need a source for the claim of airplanes sinking more merchant tonnage than the subs.
Most say that USN subs contributed to sinking 55% of merchant ships
Noah Jones
>how are Destroyers able to find submarines so easily?
Until the Nazis deployed the Type XXI U-Boat (of which they only ever built a handful), submarines were surface ships that could occasionally submerge for a short time to attack, rather than primarily underwater vessels.
They were easy for scouting aircraft to spot, which would then radio to destroyers warning them where the submarine was and which way it was going. You could look to see where the submarine's path would intersect the convoy's path and calculate more or less when you'd be attacked by the submarine.
Ryan Morgan
I was about to throw one at you, but upon re-reading The Joint Army-Navy Assessment Committee report, I get 4,779,902 tons sunk by submarines, and only a bit more than 3.7 million sunk by planes* (and this is attributing to the planes if the ship was sunk by a mine deployed aerially), so the subs do have it.
Sorry, I could have sworn it was the other way around. Must have just misremembered.
Kayden Lee
Planes sunk a lot more of the IJN, but submarines were the primary destroyers of the Jap's merchant marine, so that's probably what confused you.
Michael Diaz
but they can just dive underwater and go away, there is no way the destroyer can find it?
Justin Rogers
Submarines are super fuckin slow while underwater. Depth charges exist.
Also Sonar was developed in the war, and was the primary reason that U-boats had their asses handed to them. They couldn't run once they were found, they simply died.
Gabriel Hill
>stuck in a coffin in the bottom of the sea
>die of no oxygen
Is that how it mostly went?
Luis Rivera
Why don't the subs just target the destroyer first, then the unarmed convoy?
Brody Myers
No, I was clearly thinking of aerial attacks, especially those last few months of Operation Starvation, which got a bit north of a million tons in a few months for virtually no losses. I just flipped a few numbers around in my head. Sorry.
Not him, but again, how are you going to do that. Most submarines from the war time were slower than just about anything else on the water when moving underwater, which meant that if you wanted to catch a ship like that, you had to either be incredibly lucky, or know in advance where they were headed and wait for them.
And I mean, it did happen on occasion. Just looking at wiki
en.wikipedia.org
You have 153 CW destroyers sunk during the war, and 23 of those were from submarines. That's about 15% of all destroyer losses. But the destroyer is bigger, faster, and better armed and armored. It might lose that fight sometime, but if it sees the u-boat first, it'll almost certainly kill it. Even if the u-boat sees the destroyer first, it might miss with its torpedo attack (admittedly unlikely) or the destroyer might hang on long enough to hit back and kill or at least drive off the submarine. Tangling with destroyers was dangerous stuff.
Plus, there was usually more than one destroyer. Infamous PQ 17 was guarded by 6 destroyers and 11 smaller combat vessels. A sub sinking one destroyer would probably be turned on by the others.