BBC Battle of the Atlantic

[Thanas]

A great BBC documentary, with testimony of many of the greats of the Battle. If you have a passing familiarity with subs and cryptography you will recognize many names, if not, you will learn a lot. I for example did not know before that the Germans were able to decode 80% of British naval transmission and use that to discover routes.

Well worth watching.

[Sea Skimmer]

German communications security was comically inept by 1943. Utter faith in a fixed piece of technology, no attention to practical problem what so ever. Indeed strict following of procedure only made it worse, which is an impressive feat in this sort of thing. It didn't matter in the end though, comm security might have bought the Germans a few more months of success but the small U-boats were far too limited of weapons to be effective with the US in the war. As it was the US cancelled about half the DEs and two thirds of the patrol craft it had planned for ASW, in favor of amphibious craft, and while CVE numbers were not reduced mostly simply went right to the Pacific. And that doesn't even consider the land based air situation. The British situation wasn't much different.

The whole U-boat campaign strategy was flawed anyway, the Doenitz tonnage war failed to account for the fact that any given ton of shipping was not equal to another. Only tonnage inbound to the UK really counted. The allies could physically afford to have large numbers of ships sunk after one way trips and would still win in the long run. Sinking outbound ships or ships on secondary routes, such as the 1942 diversion of U-boats to the US coastline and Brazil didn't actually accomplish anything strategically towards winning the war. It only slowed down the allied buildup for an invasion of Europe. It was the same story in WW1, when the US actually just physically began building wooden and concrete ships only intended for one way trips (in economic terms, they were strong enough to last a couple runs).

A lot of mathematical evidence suggests the U-boats were nearly defeated in 1940 as it was, regaining ground only because of the fall of France, then were nearing defeat again in 1942 when the US entry into the war opened up a huge new area of operations for sinking tonnage, but not accomplishing decisive strategic results. And then yet again fell to defeat in 1943 from which they could not recover, late war U-boats averaging a horrifically roughly 1:1 exchange of merchants to subs lost.

[Thanas]

All of what you wrote is pretty much covered in the documentaries (although not always in much detail, but then again time concerns).