A WWII Raider in the Bay?

I think any submarine attempting to hide in an inlet or river runs a real risk of running aground. There is also the real risk of the U-boat being captured.

Plus, once the attack is carried out, the whole countryside is alert. Sailing back out through the mouth of the Chesapeake would be near impossible. If the local watermen join the hunt, odds of spotting the U-boat go up a lot.

Michael
It's possible to get away with it. Morton did. OK, probably not quite so hazardous getting out, but he took a shot at an IJN tincan in the harbor, first...
 
One wee bit of a problem with raiding in Chesapeake Bay - USS Wyoming spent all of WWII there, and she was always shooting - training guys on fire control. Trying to raid in Chesapeake would see that U-boat have to run like hell once the battleship found it - and the BB was faster, 21 knots versus 17.5.

No U-boat captain on a raid would be so stupid to attack anything in the Chesapeake, especially surfaced, if a loaded with a ammo battleship is in the bay. If the Captain has guts, he might try a repeat of U-47 attacking Royal Oak, but then again, for all the Germans knew it was a training vessel.
 
Would the german subs have range enough fuelwise to reach Baltimore?

With motherships active in the Atlantic, German u-boats could reach the Mississippi Delta, so yes. It would still be a foolhardy stunt to pull, especially given how easy it was to stand off and shoot merchant hulls in the early months.
 
Possibily given that Admiral King wouldn't listen to advice from the RN a battleship would be little use against a submerged submarine however if it was feasible why didn't they try it?
 
One wee bit of a problem with raiding in Chesapeake Bay - USS Wyoming spent all of WWII there, and she was always shooting - training guys on fire control. Trying to raid in Chesapeake would see that U-boat have to run like hell once the battleship found it - and the BB was faster, 21 knots versus 17.5.

No U-boat captain on a raid would be so stupid to attack anything in the Chesapeake, especially surfaced, if a loaded with a ammo battleship is in the bay. If the Captain has guts, he might try a repeat of U-47 attacking Royal Oak, but then again, for all the Germans knew it was a training vessel.

surfaced, probably so... however, submerged, a submarine has nothing to worry about from a battleship, as no battleships were equipped with Sonar or depth charges or any other method of attacking a submerged submarine. That is what destroyers, corvettes, destroyer escorts, sloops etc are supposed to do.
 
Well, submerging in the Chessie is a one-way trip.

As listed (uncited) in the always accurate Wiki:

Much of the bay is quite shallow. At the point where the Susquehanna River flows into the bay, the average depth is 30 feet (9 m), although this soon diminishes to an average of 10 feet (3 m) from the city of Havre de Grace for about 35 miles (56 km), to just north of Annapolis. On average, the depth of the bay is 21 feet (7 meters), including tributaries;[5] over 24% of the bay is less than 6 ft (2 m) deep.

As listed here:

The average depth of the Bay, including tributaries, is about 21 feet. The deepest part of the Bay, "the Hole," is 174 feet deep and located off Bloody Point southeast of Annapolis, Md.
 
Possibily given that Admiral King wouldn't listen to advice from the RN a battleship would be little use against a submerged submarine however if it was feasible why didn't they try it?

It's feasible the same way that the Skorzeny raid to free Mussolini or the sinking of the Droits de l'Homme were feasible - bloody insane, but not entirely against the laws of physics. I don't think any military planner would have touched it with a bargepole. A commander with a serious testosterone overdose, on the other hand, might just decide to find out just how bad American coastal defenses really are.
 
This caught my eye as I live in Delaware, just north and a bit east of Dover. And I would suspect that for an operation such as this, "success" in a conventional sense would not be the key issue, rather that the propaganda value of coming right into the heart of American might: Norfolk/Newport News, Washington DC (!!!), Baltimore, and, if they got through the Canal, on to Wilmington and Philadelphia!! Now THAT would have been a propaganda coup!!

For what it's worth, I did see a German sub go through the Canal back in, oh, 1988 or so. Only thing I saw (I was fishing near St. Georges) was a Conning Tower & 2 officers. And flying a German flag.

Bobindelaware
 
Top