I dunno… I’ve been in one of the towers around Cape May that were used for that.
I wouldn’t want to try anything that was both energetic and distracting up there. ISTR they were hollow cored…
“Darwin, Party of 2!”
[QUOTE=633squadron]
I think that the “Happy Time” ended for a variety of reasons.
Yes,and the reasons you cite are all contributors.One you didn't mention was that the sub pens and fab yards were being bombed continually.I was summarizing that the Germans were too busy fighting alligators to bring their improvements to the front.By coincidence, I was just reading the June 2007 issue of Naval History magazine, and there’s reference (p. 65) in a retired U.S. Navy’s captain’s letter to Samuel Eliot Morison’s official Navy history of WW2. Morison wrote, “Some 137 ships totaling approximately 850,000 tons were sent to the bottom by German U-boats” off the U.S. coast. The retired captain wrote, “…the German Navy [Kriegsmarine] pulled off one of the greatest merchant-ship massacres in history.”
…was this ever confirmed? There is another U boat off the NJ coast-it has killed a number of wreck divers. Honestly, U-Boast off the US coast were at the limit of their range. The Germans experimented with supply submarines (that would resupply the attack boats)-did this work out?
Not in Cape Cod Bay, but outside the Cape. Probably a known wreck that got misplaced, though.
Those would be the milchcow, officially the Type XIV submarines.
They worked great so long as they lasted, but as you can imagine, were prime targets for anti-submarine forces. All ten were sunk or withdrawn by 1943.
ISTR that the sub pens built by the Germans were pretty danged hard to hit, by all accounts. Heavily protected from bombing, with some kind of covering over the entrance that kept torpedos from getting in (IIRC, it worked like a dry dock, with the locks being heavily armored).
Did anyone ever experiment with something similar for surface ships, or were they considered either too big or too cheap for this to be worth the trouble?
There is a surviving U-Boat bunker in Spain, in Barcelona. I’ve actually seen it from the seaward side. They’re pretty impressive. Built into a mountain, it’s easy to see why it would be such good protection.
I can’t think of any good reason why such a bunker couldn’t be built for surface combatants. The reasons that none were built were that by 1941 Hitler had pretty much given up on the surface Kreigsmarine as a war-fighting arm. Tirpitz remained a threat in Norway for a few more years, but the morale hit that accompanied the loss of the Bismark, and the complete failure of the attempt to break out to be a surface raider made it clear that for the purpose of starving the UK the U-Boat was the best weapon available to Germany. IOW, it wasn’t a technical decision, but one of resource allocation.
I seem to remember some story by Phillip Wylie that made reference to ships burning within sight of Miami. It might have been Generation of Vipers but I’m not sure. Hemingway had a German sub being tracked through some of the Bahama Islands in Islands in the Stream; I seem to recall reading that that tale was based on a real incident.
Easy to hit, hard to damage. I’ve seen the ones at St.-Nazaire, France - they’ll be around until the next Ice Age. A few bays are occupied by private boats now, a few others were used by the French Navy for a while and now are museum displays.
Roofs are a full ten meters of heavily-reinforced concrete (exposed rebars are only a few inches apart), only a few gouges on top where Allied bombs hit. Torpedo protection was from their being built at right angles to the harbor entrance.
But the boats had to leave sometime, and the Resistance got pretty good at getting word to London about the schedules. After a few U-boats got sunk just outside the harbor by waiting Allied planes, they took to launching only at night or in the rain.
Great book (and a heart stopping read) about the exploration of that wreck (the U-869): Shadow Divers by Robert Kurson.
That seems to be the best strategy for dealing with the U-Boats, limiting the where and when that they can operate. During WWI, the Allies built vast minefields in the North Sea, requiring U-Boats to travel out of their way to get to the open sea, limiting their range. The Americans, meanwhile, built a flotilla of wood-hulled shallow-draught gunboats, which could race across the minefield unhindered to hunt the U-Boats on the other side.
I’ll second that. It also makes clear that there might well be other wrecks waiting to be discovered. The U-869 was thought to have been sunk off Africa, for instance, not the US.