When sailing together in a wolf pack, they had enough AA fire to keep aircraft at bay.
Convoy escorts with SONAR were their undoing.
At the beginning of the war, U Boats sat on the bottom of New York harbor and picked off leaving convoys.
The main difference between Donitz and the rest of the Nazi leadership is that Donitz was actually extremely competent in his own right, unlike most of the other Nazis put in charge of military formations and services.
Let’s take these in order.
1: Wolf Pack having enough AA to fend off a/c. The problem was two-fold. First, submarines are incredibly fragile, as surface ships go. Damage that even a DE would shrug off would be enough to sink a U-boat. Second, even the flak boats couldn’t pack enough AAA to seriously fend off a determined aerial attacker. So, an aerial attack that something like a -44-ish BB South Dakota would laugh at would still have a pretty good chance of sinking the u-boat. Even if the Allies trade 1-1 Beaufighter/Sutherland for a U-boat, the Germans are coming out on the short end. Donitz went with the snorkel and “Spanish” route to try and ameliorate as much as he could the problems U-boats had with aerial attack.
So, no, they couldn’t fend off serious attacks. Maybe the first foray by a lone Liberator, but not follow on attacks. The problem is that WW2 diesel subs just couldn’t cover than much water unless they were on the surface. And if they were on the surface, they were getting spotted. If the hypothetical, shot-up Liberator breaks contact, just report the position of the wolf pack and keep orbiting aerial reinforcements, while a destroyer H-K group steams to the area. The sub should be spotted if it was on the surface, and if it stayed submerged, the area the Allies would need to sweep would be really small.
(~80 nm radius for a u-boat traveling completely submerged, equals a potential area of ~20,000 sq. nm. Sounds huge, but airplanes can cover a giant amount of area in a sortie. Say the aircraft can see ~5nm to each side of it’s path. Not unreasonable, considering a lot of the Allied radars had a 10 mile range with a 60 degree field of view. Then, a ~200 mph cruising Lib, on a 12 hour sortie, would sweep out 2400 x 5 = 12,000 sq. miles. And it’s not like the Allies were limited to sending one plane.)
Short version. Bad things happened when the U-boat was spotted by aircraft, especially when the aircraft were associated with other assets that could continue to prosecute the contact.
2: SONAR was really important. For attacking submerged submarines, like in the First World War. Second World War U-boat packs got around it by attacking on the surface, at night. SONAR/Asdic was ineffective on a surfaced submarine at that time. Then came Radar… Night turned into day, and the Happy Time came to an end. Force a u-boat to submerge and break off its attack, and it’s about as good as a kill as far as the convoy’s safety is concerned.
It’s Radar, both on the hunters (Atlantic) and the subs (U.S. forces in the Pacific) that was the true force-multiplier. Ships are hard to see on the horizon. Radar makes acquisition in all visibility a whole lot easier.
- Considering that WW2 started in Sept 1939 and the U.S. didn’t enter in earnest until Dec 1941 (though see Neutrality Patrols, etc…) U-boats stomping convoys right outside NYC wouldn’t go over all that well. That is though a pretty good description of the first few months of 1942 when Donitz set the wolfpacks lose on the U.S. Atlantic shore.
Sounds like the flight profile of the Me163 Komet (rocket-powered). It burned up its fuel getting to altitude and then could only make a few gliding passes through a formation before having to land:
How the heck have we ended up in the u-boat war ?.
Donitz, as I am sure you are aware, carried on for 3 weeks after Hitler’s death. Given what was left of his country by then, let alone his sub fleet (it’s not as if he charged into battle with them) this guy deserves lumping in with the rest of them.
Yes he was highly competent, but there is no way he didnt know what had been going on in Poland.
Re Auschwitz. I have since been told that alas, it’s just too far for the mosquito to attack in 44 when we find out exactly whats going on. Doing it via russia isnt feasible, largely cos Joe didnt want us there.
To add further data : convoys crossing the Atlantic were steaming at around 15 knots cruise speed, and could push further than that if they had a reason to (such as a submarine looking to put a torpedo up their ass). A surfaced U-boot could fly close to 35 if it put the pedal to the metal, but 20 wasn’t much of a hassle.
A submerged submarine however limped in the single digits (except for the Type XXIs, designed to run submerged 100% of the time, but those came too late, and there never were many of them).
Which is why forcing the U-boot to submerge, then changing course (if it was waiting for the convoy ahead of it, as was usual) was good enough, as it would never catch up. It might try and surface once the escort destroyers had given up the chase, and race the convoy again if the sub skipper was really aggro… but that would take days and exhaust a lot of its fuel. Most chose instead to simply try and find another convoy - not like there was ever a shortage of them.
It’s also why the Germans had to resort to wolf packs : while one sub attacked, submerged and got chased, drawing the destroyers to him like angry wasps ; the other wolves in the pack were free to pounce on the now defenseless cargo ships on the surface from different directions. If the escorters turned around to chase them, the first could pop back up. And if the escorters split to try and cover every sub, they had little chance to score an actual hit on them because depth charges relied on triangulation, saturation and statistical odds to work.
Your figures are a bit too fast for both convoys and submarines. I’ll be brief, as this is already way off the OP’s topic. Atlantic commodities convoys in WW2 between Britain and the US/Canada were divided into Slow, Medium, and Fast convoys. These convoys traveled anywhere from 8-10 knots.
Specially designated “fast” troop convoys and Curacao oil convoys (CU/UC), OTOH, did move at least at the 15 knots you stated. And suffered very few casualties, seven out of 4,000 ship/journeys for the CU/UC convoys. The large passenger liners—called “Monsters” at the link—such as the Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth cruised without escort, often at over 20 knots. QM and QE would do 28 knots.
The U-boats, on the surface, were slower than even the US fleet attack submarines (Gato-class could do 21 knots surfaced, Tambor-class 20.5). The Type VIIC/42 U-boatcould do 18.5 knots surfaced, 7.5 knots submerged. That’s flank speed, giving it everything it has and leaving nothing to charge batteries. Running at flank’s also going to wreak havoc on its bunkerage. Range for that VIIC/42 is 12,600 miles at 10 knots. Given that power is roughly proportional to the cube of the speed, it takes a lot of power to go from 10 knots to 18.5, and that power takes fuel. Even today’s modern nuclear attack submarines aren’t doing 35 knots on the surface, though they probably can do it submerged. Being nuclear powered though, they can do it for the entire patrol if they want to. Despite the numerical quibbles I don’t disagree with the gist of what you wrote in the rest of your post.
Returning to the OP, the Mosquito and the Lightning were compared earlier in the thread. Was the Mosquito acrobatic enough to dogfight? It certainly had speed and power galore to boom and zoom, but how was it in turns?
If I’m reading your convoy link correctly, the QE and the QM between them transported around 312000 troops across the Atlantic in 1944 alone. :eek: That’s impressive.
Not very good, from what I understand; in Aces High (whose dev team takes especial pains to get everything right) it can’t turn like a smaller fighter like the Spit, and the engines on the wings inhibit roll rate as well.
At that point in time, did US multi engine aircraft counter rotate, and RAF aircraft engines rotate in the same direction?
I doubt that I can find the book I read when working at a library twenty years ago. 
Only something like this (USS Atlanta) can discourage a WWII aircraft from swooping in to attack --and it’s not always guaranteed.
We could give Billy Mitchell a shot at it.
The truth be known, torpedo planes are effective only against three types of ships:
- an unarmed merchantman,
- a warship with little or no AA weapons (Prince of Wales and Repulse, nearly all the old Italian warships),
- a warship whose AA batteries have been blasted out of action by bombs or gunfire (Yamato and Musashi).
Bismark was a fluke.
From an article I was reading only yesterday (linked from a few posts back by someone else) it could, however, handle better than an Fw190 at extreme speed: The 190 would bounce the Mossie from height to give it the extra speed, but the Mosquito pilots learned to counter by going into a shallow dive, putting on extra speed of their own, and at those speeds the Focke-Wulfs’ controls became very heavy while the Mosquito remained manageable. Similar to the tactical doctrine in the PTO about engaging the Zero at speeds over 300 knots.
AFAIK counter-rotating props were never adopted in the RAF, while the P-38 certainly did have them, and that meant that pilots moving on to Mosquitos from P-38s had to learn to cope with take-off swing at the least. I don’t know that it posed major problems in sustained flight - the aircraft most noted for asymmetrical handling properties were the WW1 biplanes with rotary engines that conferred massive engine torque.
http://www.mossie.org/stories/Norman_Malayney_2.htm
By all accounts you did need very high flying skills, but in any plane if you werent proper good you would have been in serious trouble.
Not true ! There is also :
4. a warship whose AA batteries are fully functional but can’t take out enough planes attacking it at once that some can’t metaphorically crawl on the bodies of their dead to deliver their payload. In other words : throw enough men and materiel at the wall, see what sticks.
This is the basis of all military thinking.
They ORDERED (not bought) P38s because they were desperate to get any military aircraft they could from the United States.
This was before the Mossie came into service and anyway you are not comparing like for like. The P38 as designed was a fast long range fighter, the Mosquito as designed was a fast, unarmed, light/medium bomber. It was only later the Mosquito was adapted as a heavily armed fighter.
IIRC the Bismarck’s guns couldn’t depress low enough to hit its wave-skimming attackers.
I thought it was more to do with its flak-predictors not being designed to track an aircraft that was flying marginally faster than an elderly village postman on a bicycle.