Battle Of The Atlantic

[gavmeister13]

[roughly] How many boats/men were lost in the Battle Of The Atlantic?

[G-man]

If You mean U-boats.............put it this way, the U-boat arm had the highest fatality rate of any of the German fighting arms in WW2.

Out of the 842 U-boats...........779 were lost

this site may be of intrest to you

http://www.uboat.net/

[cuski]

And roughly 30,000 men.

[Lawrence Tandy]

Canada lost 2000 men in the battle for the Atlantic.

[Lobscouse]

Canada lost 2000 men in the battle for the Atlantic.

Fifteen hundred were merchant seaman. While the Battle of the Atlantic is often cited as their graveyard, many were victim to u-boats, pocket battleships, commerce raiders, mines and air attack on many trade routes.

[Lawrence Tandy]

Thank you for clearing that up for me.

LT

[Lobscouse]

LT.

Just read your other post on Canada's contribution to the allied side, and realized that the figure of 2,000 lost in BofA were RCN. So my mention of the 1,500 merchant seaman who lost their lives at sea can be added
for a total of 3,500.

[Lawrence Tandy]

LT.

Just read your other post on Canada's contribution to the allied side, and realized that the figure of 2,000 lost in BofA were RCN. So my mention of the 1,500 merchant seaman who lost their lives at sea can be added
for a total of 3,500.

Well thank you still, we both learned something.

LT

[HagenVonTronje]

Just on the side - the majority of the boats were sunk in the time after the British were able to decipher the Enigma messages after breaking the Shark-Code and developed improved means for submarine hunt by providing tighter air surveillance and employing better convoy techniques), however, the latest sumarines Germany fielded (namely Type XXI) were able to nullify that advantage nearly (on the paper anyway), so no sub of Type XIX was lost (Which essentially doesn't say much, since there were only very few of these and due to their late introduction they only saw very few engagements).

Another interesting fact is that the British got rather lucky in the days of Unternehmen Weseruebung, as the Germans just had introduced the earliest magnetic fuses for their torpedoes (which nearly always turned out to be duds).... so they often got away (the Warspite if I remember correctly was attacked several times by submarine while operating in Norwegian waters, and even hit by a dud, but never even damaged)

Just something for information...

for more info on types of German subs, this is a rather good page (however, it's in German): http://home.t-online.de/home/grey-wolf/utypen.htm

[bouldarie]

In the movie Das Boot was the crew and boat fiction or was it modeled after the real thing

[Tiornu]

It was fiction--but very good fiction.

[subskipper]

In the movie Das Boot was the crew and boat fiction or was it modeled after the real thing

It was roghlly modelled after U-96, commanded by Kptlt. Heinrich Lehmann-Willenbrock. L-G Buchheim joined U-96 for a patrol as a war correspondent and his experiences aboard the boat became the foundation for his novell Das Boot.


~Henric Edwards

[Takao]

The same author also wrote a non-fiction work called "U-Boat War". Which contains most of his experiences aboard U-96.