So I read this rather interesting, if sometimes overwrought, account of some American scuba divers recovering a German submarine off the New Jersey coast.
Part of the interesting backstory was a history of one German sub’s commissioning, initial crew training period, and launch on its maiden voyage. What struck me most was that this took a year, maybe a bit more, from the time the boat was completed and commissioned, in 1944, to the time it embarked on its first mission.
Now, I’ve never trained for submarine duty, but I know from those who have, especially in today’s subs, that it’s incredibly difficult and time-consuming to figure out just how to get the sub to surface roughly as many times as it dives (as one bit of Navy dive-officer gallows humor apparently has it). And I know that the efficiency and training of the German U-Boat crews, though their boats were obviously not nearly as complex as the ones afloat today, was nothing to be scoffed at, involving as it did elements of surface navigation, underwater armaments training, submerged sailing and evasive tactics, and survival in an insanely dangerous underwater death trap. So I’m not saying it’s easy or should be quick.
It just struck me that by 1944, when Germany was so clearly in desperate straits, subs were being lost all the time, and yet the military was committed to continuing the submarine war to the bitter end, they might have rushed the training a bit more. It’s not just how long the training and shakeout period took; it’s that the surviving crewmen seemed to have a lot of anecdotes about going home for leave, visiting wives and kids, hanging out in the bars of Hamburg, and so forth during the year of preparation – not exactly a 24/7 schedule of racing to sea. Again, easy for me to say, and given the fate that these guys faced, and the tremendous mortality rates that had already taken place in the U-Boat service, maybe it’s not surprising that they were neither eager, nor logistically able, to put together a sea-ready crew (though it’s noteworthy that the crew, though scarily young, seemed to have a good number of guys with U-Boat service; a mixed crew, but hardly greenhorns).
1944 had seens Stalingrad and was approaching the time when the Nazis would be manning the barricades with 14 and 60 year old Volksturm conscripts (though I realize, to be callous, that there was less materiel and investment at risk in sending a kid with a rusty blunderbuss to get killed by a Cossack than in jeopardizing a multimillion dollar U-Boat by sending it out before it was ready).
And it doesn’t rival the somewhat-odd descriptions from, say, the early days of the Civil War, when dashing young cavalry officers were taking time out from battle to squire ladies to the balls of Richmond (as in Henry Kyd Douglas’s excellent narrative of his time on Jackson’s staff. But then, the Civil War, at least at first, wasn’t a “total” war, as WWII had become by 1944.
Am I just unrealistic in thinking that things could have moved somewhat faster in launching a U-Boat, in a war when the U.S. was churning out bomber planes by the thousands each month? Was U-Boat training and shakedown that complicated and time-consuming? Or were there aspects of the war, even in the last days, that moved at such a “comparatively stately” pace out of necessity, inattention, inefficiency, . . . .?