U boats!

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#21

It’s the U-505 at the museum in Chicago. It is a Type IX and many veterans of the boats have gone there to see it.

It is acknowledged that the Type XXI was the culmination of submarine development during the war far and away from any other sub. The real invention of the submarine war was the Walter system used in Type XVII coastal boats. It was a completely closed propulsion system with no need for Schnorkels or air at all.

The XXI boats were designed to be fitted with the Walter machinery in larger scale but that did not see fruition. The 4 XVII testbed boats with the system were launched in 1943 and scuttled at the war’s end having performed well. The 5 XVIIBs launched in 1944 served without damage to the end and were also scuttled.

If the nearly 150 Type XXI boats had been launched beginning in 1943 with the Walter system the submarine war would have been quite interesting.

#22

Maybe. IIRC the RN played with the concept after the war (under far better conditions) and had a lot of trouble. So much so that IIRC the crews referred to the boats as HMS Exploder and HMS Excruciator.

#23

From a previous job I have much experience with Submarines and their wily ways.

The XXI would have faced the same problems that modern Nuclear Subs face. However I dont know enough about the XXI to say how deep it could dive and what its Sonar Suite was capable of.

Because of their apparent noise they could only have been used in deeper waters in the Atlantic.

A great concept that was experimented with post war but as has been said, a very tricky technology. I wouldnt want to have been depth charged on one of these boats, imagine a leak in the propulsion system!

#24

The Walter catalytic closed system produced no exploding boats. Allied tinkering to “make it their own” is what screwed up retrofitted, half assed rigged up copycat systems. No one attempted to develop and refine the concept with nuke power on the horizon but the Amis thought they could build a better system and failed too. A couple of the scuttled Walter boats were salved by GB and the USA in 1947 and promptly “improved” by our wonderful Anglo technology and were promptly duds. All the German boats worked, fought and survived the war. What better testament is there?

Type VII and IX could dive past 600 feet- far deeper than any other sub from any country of the world. Closed systems would offer little more risk than battery and diesel fumes or water leak. A boat with a Walter system could sit down there for 2-3 days while the surface vessels “knew” they were dead cause they were down too long.

Why should we think XXIs were noisier than VIIs and IXs?

The Walter-propelled boat concept was the forerunner of the true submarine, the nukers.

#25

None, or at least there wouldn´t be but for the point that they didn´t. The Germans never succeeded in getting a Walther boat out on operational patrol - the prototype boats they built had an endurance of about 24 hours or so and were ruinously expensive to refuel. As such, they never built more than prototypes. All the Electroboots they built were of the Walther design but with all the H2O2 space filled with conventional lead acid batteries

Have you ever actually dealt with high purity H2O2? The stuff is absolutely lethal, and will explode if you so much as look at it in a funny way. The RN lost HMS Sidon while tied up in harbour to a minor H2O2 leak, and the most probable cause for the loss of the Kursk also involves a H2O2 leak. No modern western submarine would dream of carrying such a dangerous chemical.

Hunts - particularly late in the war - often lasted that long. The allied hunters (Frigates, Corvettes and DEs) would never assume a kill because the submarine had been down for too long. They would either leave because they were needed elsewhere, they would lose contact, run out of depth charges or find evidence of a kill. The former was initially the most common at the start of the war, the rest at the end of the war. By the very end escorts often acted in shifts to continue a prosecution until definate results were achieved.

We shouldn´t necessarily, at least not for a given speed. However since by the end of the war the allied escorts were capable of tracking U-boats passively and the Type-XXI routinely operated at higher speeds than the VIIs and IXs thus generating more noise it isn´t an unreasonable assumption.
Secondly I have the comment from Stuart Slade on another board that they were very noisy. Stuart works as a naval analyst for Forecast International, so there is reason to assume he knows what he´s talking about.

Not to all that great an extent. SSNs were inevitable once people realised that nuclear reactors were practical in small sizes. As for high underwater speed/endurance that isn´t all that new either. The UK had a boat of that type in about 1930 (IIRC Ben Bryant mentions it in his book on commanding an RN submarine - I forget the title and can´t check it right now). The USN Guppy class postwar are also good examples - refitted WW2 fleet boats, and rather better than the type XXIs into the bargain.

#26

Yes, the thing that was the biggest problem was the noise and the fact that the U-boats had to have a snorcle to operate and that they did not have great radar and sonar on the subs that was keeping them down. The idea of the XXI was to make up for all the former problems and thus made it possable for submarines today to run verry softly and have greater speads under the water where subs normally had bad speed under water than on the surface. The only problem was it was too late to have any effect on the outcome of the war.

So the XXI gave a lot of info to the world when it came to subs or did the woeld made their own things as they whent along after the war? Is it treu or false can you help me with that, because I know it helped the way subs are build today but did it give the secret to sub builders after the war.

Henk

#27

The plain fact is, that unless the Germans could sink ships faster than the US could build them, they were always going to lose the war, with or without the XXI.

Escort carriers, better SONARS, better Anti Sub aircraft, would have taken its toll on XXI, just the same.

I’m afraid its another what if? The XXI while being an innovation, was I think a dead end.

#28

The XXI was no dead end. It was the logical design progression of submarine boats. It was a dead end it what way? Yeah because the war ended. How can anyone say a XXI was nosier than a VII? Of course sonar was better by the time XXIs went to sea compared to when Type IIs sailed. That doesn’t make them any more noisy than IXs or VIIs just more detectable via logical progression of a counter weapon. Why allude that the XXI was inferior? Does anyone wish to state that ANY other contemporary sub from any country could routinely out dive a U-boat?

As far as anyone’s person hands on experience on an ongoing basis who here knows jack about the Walter system? Who here has serviced one? The Germans used myriad nasty propulsion chemicals that “westerners wouldn’t use.” So what? Their loss. I didn’t see any A-4 equivilents come from the Allies.

The Walter boats were coastal boats with ranges of no more than about 200 miles. What ever anyone thinks, they were the seed of what was to be a true submersable boat. The numbers I listed in the above post were functional and in service during the war period. I have complete listings of the launch dates and fates of all the U-boats and the Walter boats all survived o be scuttled. Sorry if this is in documents and books from the 1960s researched by authors who waded through wartime documentation instead of the seemingly acknowledged authority of the ubiquitos internet teenage website.

#29

So you just disregarded Pdf27’s well thought out post then? Of course the system was a dead end, no-one uses it today and Diesel Boats are still in many ways superior to Nuclear ones in certain situations. As for the A-4, another waste of effort on the Nazis part methinks.

#30

Hydrogen peroxide in high concentration is an extremely nasty chemical. Ever wondered why more Me 262 pilots were killed in accidents than in action? Hydrogen peroxide.

Have you ever had access to reasonably concentrated hydrogen peroxide? It will set fire to anything flammable which it comes into contact with. Now I, personally, would not like to be in a metal tube with this stuff circulating in pipes and somebody chucking depth charges at me. Especially as I am flammable. One small leak could cause all sorts of problems.

#31

I’ve never seen more bigoted thinking in all my days. The Walter system was a logical stepping stone to nuke power, ie., to make a true submarine. If something isn’t Allied-conceived it is worthless or was a dead end is always the rhetoric around here. To allude that the A-4 was a failure is just assinine. Just why is pdf’s post so insightfull and not mine? I’ve been researching documents, narratives, interviewing veterans and writing articles for a very long time. The few Walter boats were comissioned, did sail for more than one shakedown cruise, were scuttled and one each salved by GB and the USA. Just why is that so impossible to believe?

Everthing in technology has to have a start. To deny the orgins of things is to be closed minded to the extreme. Weapons systems do not come popping out fully culminated in development. They progress and things are adapted from early ones for use on later or completely different ones.
WW2 wasn’t like today where things are over-developed for decades with the attendant huge cost factors that “guarantee” they fully viable. In the war days projects were rushed, dropped, begun and comissioned with little ceremony due to the impetus of the times.

Weapons like the A-4 may not have been viable to YOUR way of thinking but the Germans made it work through development and constant experimentation. NOTHING suceeds without constant trial. The 1000s killed by missiles probably thought they worked well enough to be quite efficient as weapons in the short term they enjoyed use. Also they were primary building blocks upon which the entire world’s aerospace industry was born.

Without the coming of nuclear energy there would have been further experimentation and development of a close catalyst propulsion system for submersibles. Does anyone really truly believe that the USSR, with thier track record, would have blinked an eye at using something “dangerous” if there was no nuclear energy? Does anyone bevieve that the West would have NOT used “dangerous” ways to ends if it had meant that the Ruskies would be one up on them? Get real. They’d have sent men below in similar boats in a heartbeat.

Look around and give credit where credit is due to the innovations that have molded the world around us.

I interviewed men like Adolf Galland, Erich Topp, Dick O’Kane, Gabby Gabreski, Gunther Rall and countless infantry vets before many of you were born. When was the last time YOU talked to Mackie Steinhoff, Fred Christensen or Arsenii Vorozheikin?

Man of Stoat- The Me 262 was a pure jet aircraft. You are alluding to the C-Stoff and T-Stoff used in the Me 163 rocket engine.

#32

Twitch1 I totally agree with you that every thing had to have something that only led to a perfection of it, like the nuce subs that started with flops and led to sucsess. The A-4 or V-2 was the thing that made it possable for the US and Russians to go into space and land on the moon, so to say it was worhtless is actually not tru. It paved the way to the space programs and also was quite sucsessfull for the period it was in and for the role it was used in.

Twitch1 you are so lucky to have talked to Adolf Galland. Do you know a German WW2 pilot who worked under Adolf Galland named Dieter Goetz Reh who also fought in the Me-109, Fw-190 Wilde Sau unit and the famous Me-262 up untill the end of the war where he was stationed near Berlin and thus destroyed all 64 of their aircraft. His brother also fought in a Me-262 but was shot down and killed in his parrachute by a US fighter. I do not know if he is still a live but last I know of he lived in Namibia with his wife.

Sorry for going a bit of topic please forgive me.

Henk