The 3.7cm AA gun wasn't standard armament on the type VII U-boats at the beginning of the war (although it was on the type IX's). They were typically added later in the war, as overall AA armament was beefed up.

Of course, there were different models of 20mm and 37mm AA guns as well, but that would just be taking things too far

Isn't U-505 a type IX and not a VIIC as mentioned in the article? I might be wrong.

I would have liked to have seen the dispelling of some myths like the one that U-boat captains shot at survivors in the water and justified it as a requirement under the concept of unrestricted submarine warfare. It is true that one U-Boat captain (Eck was his name I believe) was executed after the war for firing at wreckage and people in the water but he was the one and only exception.

At the U-Boat.net site the somewhat problematic movie U-571 has been attacked not only for its innacuracy of displaying an early Enigma capture by Americans in the war (although the US did capture U-505 later) but also for the order by the fictional captain to kill British merchantmen in the water after a successful sinking. Those who do not know anything about the U-Boat service might watch this movie and come out of the theater believing the massacres of seamen in the water to have been a common occurance. It was not.

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Klaatu Barada Nikto

Your choice is simple. Join us and live in peace or pursue your present course and face obliteration. We shall be waiting for your answer. The decision rests with you.

This picture:

It isn't the controls. The clock was set to Berlin time. It is in the electric motor room. There isn't too much in the way of controls, but of gauges.

This is the U-boats controls:

Tomorrow I will go through the text. I hope the article isn't as poorly written as the pictures.

And yes the U-505 is a Type IX. It was the only boat to have a captain commit suicide on. It sunk a sailing ship, which was considered bad luck.

About 15 minutes to 3-4 hours worth of mercy sooner, depending on the season and latitude...

That said, if I were Doenitz, I'd shoot any moron that 'got busy' with survivors just on general principles of there being 'bigger and better fish' (and muzzle flash attracted threats) in the ocean.

The HP boat's biggest drawback was the simple fact that the Walter cycle was massively inefficient. The 7,300nm quoted was only about /halved/ under operational testing conditions in the Baltic. The equivalent of juicing your street car once every other block with topfuel + nitrous.

And yes, it was toxic and hypergolic and a general pain for high school 'trained' children to be trusted with.

You can make other arguments about the XXI. Sabotage and bombing of the canal systems made Hitlers desires for a 400 boat fleet impossible. Doenitz should have seen this and made adjustments for 'quality over quantiy and timeliness before all'.
Especially given the number of men he was uselessly keeping pinned down in naval service after September 1943.

Given a mere 20 boats, hand-built and manned by picked crews, that could only have been stopped by deep Baltic air patrols and the 'Garden' system of mines (as was actually the case in most XXI kills) he could have still waged slaughter like never before seen.

Even just 17 boats surviving the gauntlet to reach the midsea hunting ground, firing with the submerged echolocator fire control and the circling Lut or wireguided (duuuh) torpedoes would be still able to knock out a convoy per patrol, even if they only fired once without a single reload.

Lastly, the Germans knew what centimeter wave was. Even if they weren't exactly sure what 10 vs. 3Ghz bands we were using. That they didn't expand to Naxos-II was as good as shooting their crews. That they insisted on 'fighting it out at the surface' with naval bombers that could be built and crewed in a tenth the interval was even more butcherous.

If they had /instead/ stuffed Type-VII hulls with half-crews and equivalent batteries/fire control from the XXI. Plugged half the needed freefloods and retrimmed some of the worst motor/rudder interaction knuckling and installed CO2 scrubbers (again available, experimentally).

With only a _single tube load_ they could have made a valuable contribution to the German war effort, but for one thing: brains.

For all it's victimization, the Type VII series was not defeated by technologic expediency so much as tactical and strategic employment stupidity.

1. EMCON
You /never/ _ever_ employ a regular omni-OTH comms 'discipline' from a platform whose entire survival depends on surprise! Gads do you make a ninja yell back 'contact reports' from every sentry he sees?

Yet Doenitz insisited on this as a means of massing U-packs in a time (and with a service branch) when radio DF was a commonly known 'aid' to both simple radio navigation as well as ELINT, to both sides of the conflict.

The Condor system worked. Even with a poor airframe that had minimal alitude:horizon range, it was only a matter of using the weather and the Hirschgeweh tuned arrays to their maximum for 'convoy spotting' (not attacking). Even with CAM and later escort carrier systems in place the sky is a mighty damn big place.

And exploitation of Enigma (itself sporadic against the Kriegs) was nothing compared to simple signal-trace sourcing via land and naval huffduff.

From the time we finally got the Convoy system back in place after the gawdawful muckup the Brits had made of it and used this to bring the boats /to us/ with triangulated GIUK df, the convoys knew what was coming and especially if an HK group was available, the U's did not.

2. Here or There But Not ****ing Everywhere!
Doenitz should have had the stones to stand up to Hitler and simply say NO!

To being forced to revector his packs, _three times_ to the Russian SLOC's, the South Atlantic/Carribean/Horn routes and then the Mediterranean in the insanity of a mined lake.

By comparison, TWICE, long before the key month of April/May '43, his U's came within inches, of killing Britain's 2-week reserves and putting them on a 'day to day' resupply basis that would have knocked the English out of the war as major foreign-soil fighters.

Indeed, since the majority of 'their war' importance was in fact outside the ETO and that war was fought by Commonwealth troops reliant on Merchant Marine resupply, Britain's entire internal alliance could have been threatened if she could not maintain 'her end of the bargain'.

Just by keeping the boats in the main Atlantic corridor.

It doesn't matter that Hitler was a madman or Raeder a greedy fool. Only that Doenitz thought better of himself (or his command powers) than he did of his men and his mission.

That is criminal and that as much as any moral barbarity is why the Germans lost the war.

First off, what are you saying? That the picture of the gauges Jim used are yours?

We have a strict policy with our contributors that they are to make sure they have permission for all materials used---Jim did list bibligraphic reference material at the end of the piece.

If the picture of the gauges in our story is indeed yours (although yours that you posted look to have been taken from a different angle), then our bad. We most certainly want to have permissions first. I just assumed those gauges were from a picture in one of the books Jim listed. At any rate, I don't want to convict Jim of wrong doing until I have all the facts.

As for these other occasions where you say we used your pictures without permission, please let me know about them so we can give you credit or remove them (whatever you wish).

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Douglas Helmer
Forum Administrator
publisher@combatsim.com

As for shooting survivors in the water, I've never heard of that happening other than rumor. Sub captains of the world all state how impossible it was to take on hundreds of survivors. Though various U-boats did give people in the water rubber boats and provisions at times. They all stand by the same thing- the war was against the ships, not the men. Just like aerial combat.

[This message has been edited by Twitch (edited 12-17-2000).]

He claims that he intended to sink the wreckage of the Peleus in an attempt to get rid of all trace of the sinking. Unfortunately he spent hours firing the anti-aitcraft guns and even the large deck gun at everything on the surface. The attempt proved futile and he was forced to move on. If he had had any brains he would have left the scene immediately and put distance between himself and the location of the sinking.

It is true that U-Boat captains would often help survivors in the water by providing provisions if it seemed safe to do so. I can only assume that this became less frequent as the war went on and the Battle of the Atlantic went seriously against the Germans. Unrestricted submarine warfare was put into action in large part due to the Laconia affair which was an attempt by one U-Boat to rescue hundreds of people in the water.

In all fairness to U-boat men, they tended to be more courteous towards allied seamen than the Americans were in the Pacific toward the Japanese. In fact, it is virtually impossible to find examples of American courtesy toward Japanese seamen. Commanders like "Mush" Morton DID fire at Japanese merchantmen in the water. Of course he was never punished since he was on the winning side.

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Klaatu Barada Nikto

Your choice is simple. Join us and live in peace or pursue your present course and face obliteration. We shall be waiting for your answer. The decision rests with you.

quote:

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SkoolD,

First off, what are you saying? That the picture of the gauges Jim used are yours?

We have a strict policy with our contributors that they are to make sure they have permission for all materials used---Jim did list bibligraphic reference material at the end of the piece.

If the picture of the gauges in our story is indeed yours (although yours that you posted look to have been taken from a different angle), then our bad. We most certainly want to have permissions first. I just assumed those gauges were from a picture in one of the books Jim listed. At any rate, I don't want to convict Jim of wrong doing until I have all the facts.

As for these other occasions where you say we used your pictures without permission, please let me know about them so we can give you credit or remove them (whatever you wish).

---

No, I just ran through to check if there were any that were mine. If there was, I would have asked for credit.

At I just was pointing out that the U-505 controls weren't the controls, but some of the gauges in the Electric Motor room.

I am pretty good about only asking for credit.

I was just pointing out the locational error.

Also, the XXI didn't use 20mm cannons for AAA. It was deemed too weak, in the VII and the IX so they started to put 37mm cannons on that. In the XXI they used 30mm cannons.

And last nit picking detail, the Type VII could carry 14 Torpedos, like the author wrote, but it could carry more than 14 mines. It could hold 26.

Small details, but important details. I tip my hat to the author, for puting an article together like that.

Tim

Hmmmmm.....Gummi is pretty good about passing E-mails on to me.

Well, next time you have my E-mail.

For historical articles I only ask for notification, and credit.

quote:

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At I just was pointing out that the U-505 controls weren't the controls, but some of the gauges in the Electric Motor room.

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Roger that. Sorry 'bout the mixup.

quote:

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Originally posted by SkoolD:
Also, the XXI didn't use 20mm cannons for AAA. It was deemed too weak, in the VII and the IX so they started to put 37mm cannons on that. In the XXI they used 30mm cannons.

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Hey Skool,
My readings have indicated that while 30mm AA guns were *planned* for the XXI, they were not reaily available, so two twin 20mm turrets were used instead.

"Gudmundur,
I am a contributing editor at http://www.combatsim.com where we review PC combat simulators and allied products. As you know, Silent Hunters II is coming out and I am doing a related historical article regarding the real U-boats.

I would like your permission to use a couple of images from your pages. The colour illustration of the type VII would be great. Also the Planesman's station shot of Tim Burton from the U-505 is a good one. The on-deck snorkel photo from the U-995 would be excellent if Stephen Ames agrees.

I am attaching a scan of a newspaper article you may find interesting. It regards the fate of the U-583. The date is about 1979 from a Long Beach, California newspaper- I wish I would have written it down. It is in .TIF format and you will be able to read it if you zoom in.
Many thanks for an excellent site!
Jim Tittle"
Since no answer came I used something else. the photo of the gauges should have been the planesman station from the Chicago Museum's U-505. The gauges pic is poorer quality than yours at uboat.net. I honestly can't recall where I found the one posted in the article.

Kurt is correct; the "o" in "Doenitz" is umlauted. Adding an "e" after the vowel is what you do if you don't have an umlaut key.

I had spelled Dönitz with the umlaut over the "o" but our publishing system stripped it out.