Maximum Number of Operational U Boat

[EwenS]

Britain had to import more ( X million tons ) ,as this was not possible ( there were also financial reasons ) ,Britain decided to curtail its pre war imports .And this had nothing to do with the U Boats .

May I say the you are simply trying to downsize the effectiveness and importance of U-Boat

By 1942 Germany transferred all service men to U-Boat and directed the industry and shipyards to manufacture U-Boats only!!, because finally Hitler agreed to what Rider and Donitz had been tried hard to convince him in 1939 that U-Boat is more effective to war effort and the war will be decided/Ended faster through U-Boat! this is one of Hitler's/OKW fatal mistake to delay that switch.

Prime Minister Churchill had wrote the UBOAT was his scary nightmares during the first 3 years of the war!! it is simply because of the damage they produced! end of story!

Here the fair closing statement

No body can guarantee - if Donitz had 300 Boats at beginning of 1940 - Britain will be fully blockade ,or forced to armistice !!they will find a way even Air cargo backed up by the US full industry !! - Britain will never surrender !
But there is guarantee that the 300 boats will cause much more damages and more suffering to the British war industry and army.

Cheers

And in that highlighted statement is one of the biggest myths of the war. While construction of large ships, with the exception of Graf Zeppelin, may have stopped in 1942, construction of destroyer sized and smaller continued until almost the end of the war. For example:-

Graf Zeppelin - work on her continued into 1943.
Destroyers - continued to be laid down until Sept 1943 and Z43, completed in May 1944, was the last completed with others under construction.
Torpedo boats (small destroyers not E-boats) - continued to be laid down into late 1944. The last completion, T36, was in Dec 1944 and work on others continued into 1945.
Minesweepers - the last completion was in April 1945 with many more launched and incomplete or still building on the slips. How else could the Germans hope to keep their waterways open in light of the Allied aerial mining campaign if not by building more minesweepers?

While Raeder resigned in Jan 1943 over Hitler's instruction to mothball the big ships, Donitz reviewed the position immediately upon his appointment and persuaded Hitler to reverse that decision in Feb. So the likes of Tirpitz and Scharnhorst remained in Norway while Admiral Scheer, Lutzow and Hipper became training ships in the Baltic until late 1944 when they were brought forward to support the Army on the Russian Front.

It would probably be better to say that U-boat construction and manning was prioritised in 1942 but not to the exclusion of everything else.

[ljadw]

Britain had to import more ( X million tons ) ,as this was not possible ( there were also financial reasons ) ,Britain decided to curtail its pre war imports .And this had nothing to do with the U Boats .

May I say the you are simply trying to downsize the effectiveness and importance of U-Boat

By 1942 Germany transferred all service men to U-Boat and directed the industry and shipyards to manufacture U-Boats only!!, because finally Hitler agreed to what Rider and Donitz had been tried hard to convince him in 1939 that U-Boat is more effective to war effort and the war will be decided/Ended faster through U-Boat! this is one of Hitler's/OKW fatal mistake to delay that switch.

Prime Minister Churchill had wrote the UBOAT was his scary nightmares during the first 3 years of the war!! it is simply because of the damage they produced! end of story!

Here the fair closing statement

No body can guarantee - if Donitz had 300 Boats at beginning of 1940 - Britain will be fully blockade ,or forced to armistice !!they will find a way even Air cargo backed up by the US full industry !! - Britain will never surrender !
But there is guarantee that the 300 boats will cause much more damages and more suffering to the British war industry and army.

Cheers

The effectiveness and importance of the U Boats are much exaggerated : 190 million GRT of supplies were sent to Britain : probably less than 10 million were lost . This is peanuts .
The official number of 14 million GRT losses includes also supplies who were not going to Britain, as those of Drumbeat .
What Churchill wrote after the war in his memoirs is totally irrelevant . Winston was a writer,searching to make money by embellishing the dangers during the war . And he was wrong ( not for the first time ) : the losses of the British Merchant Fleet were til December 1941 more than matched by new construction and the arrival /capture of the Greek,Norwegian and parts of the German and Italian Merchant Fleets .
British controlled Merchant Shipping
Number of ships
September 1939 2999
December 1941 3616
GRT of ships
September 1939 :17,784,000
December 1941 : 20,693,000
Source : The hunters P 99
The IF of Doenitz having 300 U Boats in September 1939 is a dream : he had not 300 U Boats and could never have them in September 1939 . Besides, more U Boats did not mean more losses of MV but more losses of U Boats .That is the guarantee .

[Pasha]

300 U Boats ( operational or not ) was out of the question . It took more than a year to build a U Boat and more than a year to train its crew . And, 300 U Boats is not the same as 300 operational U Boats .

User ljadw
I don't know how you came up with these words!! You were reading sources from Mars :roll: :roll:
After Hitler finally agreed to divert all manufacturing to U Boats German industry - Shipyard reached 1 per day not one per year !!
1942 - 238 U Boats manufactured from all Shipyards
1943 286 U Boats
here read it all https://uboat.net/technical/shipyards/

excluding weekend then it is 1 x U Boat per day!!
Training and became operational were conducted in parallel!
1942 Donitz has 142 operational boats only! because of the delay decision to focus on U Boat industry

The real mass production of U Boats started in 1942 !
If it started in October or November 1939 2 months after the war started it could be different!

[ljadw]

300 U Boats ( operational or not ) was out of the question . It took more than a year to build a U Boat and more than a year to train its crew . And, 300 U Boats is not the same as 300 operational U Boats .

User ljadw
I don't know how you came up with these words!! You were reading sources from Mars :roll: :roll:
After Hitler finally agreed to divert all manufacturing to U Boats German industry - Shipyard reached 1 per day not one per year !!
1942 - 238 U Boats manufactured from all Shipyards
1943 286 U Boats
here read it all https://uboat.net/technical/shipyards/

excluding weekend then it is 1 x U Boat per day!!
Training and became operational were conducted in parallel!
1942 Donitz has 142 operational boats only! because of the delay decision to focus on U Boat industry

The real mass production of U Boats started in 1942 !
If it started in October or November 1939 2 months after the war started it could be different!

Sigh
That every day one new U Boat was leaving the shipyards,has NOTHING to do with the time needed to build a U Boat .
Other point : WHY exclude weekends ? Shipyards were working during the weekends in wartime .

[ljadw]

One example : the U 792 (small coastal submarine ) :
laid down on 1 December 1942
commissioned on 16 November 1943
To lay down 238 submarines in October 1939 was impossible .Besides, the more submarines were built, the more would be needed for training ,would be at base,would be en route .
On 1 January 1942 Doenitz had 249 submarines of which 158 were needed for training,in March 1943 he had 400 U Boats of which 178 for training ,182 were stationed in the Atlantic of which only 70 on combat patrol . Only 70 .
In January 1942 55 were available for the Atlantic ,but only 22 were on combat patrol