Submarines and their Weapons - Aircraft of World War II

CHAPTER ELEVEN
Submarines and
their Weapons
By the time World War II was halfway through, Germany (and in particular the Führer
himself) had largely given up on its surface navy, but the submarine arm was another
matter entirely. U-boat veterans knew, however, that much still remained to be
developed in the boats themselves, and a well-funded programme was put into
effect. Yet again it proved to be just too late, however, for by the time the newgeneration
boats were coming off the ways, the war was already lost.
If the Luftwaffe was the Nazi Party favourite in prewar
and wartime Germany, the Kriegsmarine
(Navy) was, for a variety of reasons, very definitely
not. Some of the reasons were historical and political,
and went back to the dark days of near civil war in the
1920s, but others were more recently rooted, and had
to do exclusively with the poor performance of
German capital ships. At one point, an enraged Hitler
actually ordered all the surface fleet to be scrapped.
The exception was the submarine service which,
under the talented leadership of Karl Dönitz, had
Above: The Type XXI U-boat was one of the most
influential naval developments of the twentieth century.
Left: Germany also developed midget submarines, like this
'Biber' putting to sea from Rotterdam at Christmas 1944.
actually come close to cutting Britain's vital lifeline
to the United States and to its colonies. Most of the
few funds for development that did find their way to
the Kriegsmarine were destined for the U-boat arm.
HOMING TORPEDOES AND MAGNETIC MINES
By the end of World War I, the submarine torpedo, the
first really successful model of which had been produced
by the Anglo-Italian Whitehead in 1868, had
been developed to the point where it was a reliable,
practical weapon. During that war it had been used to
sink thousands of ships (German submarines alone
accounted for 5556), and we can hazard a guess that
the individual success rate (expressed as hits per torpedo)
probably made it one of the most effective
offensive weapons of the whole conflict. However, it
was a relatively simple, unsophisticated weapon, and
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