Cooper - True Stories of German UBoats & Their Dangerous Missions

Thank you for downloading this book, WWII Submarine Stories 2: True Stories of German U-boats & Their Dangerous Missions.

This introductory e-book will provide you with the basics you need to know about the German U-boats in the Second World War. We hope that it leads you to further in depth study of this fascinating topic.

In World War One, the German Navy (Reichsmarine during WWI and Kriegsmarine during WWII) deployed submarines on a large scale for the first time in warfare. Though their cumulative effect turned out to be marginal due to lack of numbers and effective counter-measures, the German submariners of the First World War opened the undersea door for the use of submarines on a mass scale in the next world conflict.

In an earlier e-book written by my colleague WWII: Tales from the Undersea Warriors of World War II ( http://www.amazon.com/World-War-Submarine-Stories-Battlegrounds/dp/1507556187 ), He discussed the evolution of submarine technology from the Renaissance to the Second World War and gave accounts from the often overlooked Allied side of the submarine war.

Though by 1945 the more effective submarine force belonged to the US Navy in the Pacific, to this day it is the German U-boat captains and their crews which capture the popular imagination.

The primary reason is that the German U-boat fleet came quite close to bringing the English to their knees. Though this was done in the Pacific to Japan by the US Navy, the historic dominance of the British Navy and the challenge to it captured the imagination and fears of the public on both sides of the Atlantic. German U-boat commanders and their crews were seen as Aces of the Sea and feted throughout the Reich, in much the same way that fighter pilots were.

By the time the war began in Europe in 1939 the Germans had been hard at work attempting to build a surface fleet that could challenge the British Royal Navy at sea, most in Germany knew that this was a nearly impossible task. The expenditure, time, manpower and resources necessary to even come close to rivaling the British were beyond the ability of the Third Reich, especially considering the massive build-up of land forces in which it was involved.

The Germans built a number of strong surface vessels which did at times present problems for the British, in the long run these vessels were no more than a temporary threat reaching the apex of their influence on the seas in early 1941 before the sinking of the giant battleship Bismarck.

Outgunned and outnumbered on the surface of the oceans by the Royal Navy, along with the Royal Canadian Navy, a number of vessels of Western European governments in exile and later the United States Navy, the Germans had only one real opportunity to win the war at sea the U-boat (U-Boot or Unterseeboot in German).

There was a reason that the Royal Navy had been the most powerful on Earth for centuries. The life of the island of Great Britain and the security of its empire depended upon it. The British knew that they could retain a relatively small army and still maintain their supply/trade routes and govern their empire, but without a navy both their empire and perhaps their independence were at risk. Correspondingly, the policy of British government was to maintain a naval force greater in size than the next two largest navies combined. This policy is what gave the British such an overwhelming advantage over the Germans on the surface of the Atlantic and elsewhere when the war began.

However, the dire straits that Britain experienced for a time during WWI illustrated the island nations' vulnerability, and among those who saw this most clearly was a German naval officer named Dnitz.

Karl Dnitz (1891-1980) ended WWI in a British POW camp, having been taken prisoner when the submarine under his command was forced to the surface off of the Mediterranean island of Malta in 1918. While in captivity, Dnitz pondered upon more effective usage of submarines and how they might be able to alter the outcome of any future war. Luckily for Dnitz, he was able to remain in the post-war German Navy, unlike a lot of his comrades who were forced out due to restrictions placed on the German armed forces by the Treaty of Versailles.

In the inter-war years Dnitz commanded torpedo-boats which were akin to the British corvette or the American destroyer escort and continued to work on his theories of naval warfare, which were centered more and more on the possibilities of submarine warfare. When the Nazis came to power and repudiated the Treaty of Versailles, Dnitz was put in charge of officer training on the cruiser Emden and was given command of a U-boat flotilla in 1935.

During Hitler's military build-up, Dnitz argued in vain for the emphasis of German naval construction to be focused on the submarine. Unlike most of the German naval hierarchy, most notably, its commander Admiral Erich Raeder (1876-1960), Dnitz believed that a large submarine fleet might be able to bring England to its knees or at least the negotiating table without the use of large surface vessels.

Dnitz was on the losing side of the many arguments going on within the Naval High Command and between it and Hitler. Some believed that it would be possible for Germany to build a surface fleet able to rival the British, but not until 1945 and provided the nation remained at peace. Admiral Raeder was one of these people.

Raeder and Hitler, when he thought of the Navy at all, also believed that a large surface fleet with powerful and prestigious battleships was much more likely to influence political events and/or win the naval war.