Can Germany win the Battle of the Atlantic?

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TFSmith121

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Of course if we're hoping for things...

Of course if we're hoping for things....

I'd hope for something entirely different.

Hitler gets accepted to art school, or meets a nice Jewish girl and settles down, or gets capped on the Western Front.

Things like that.
 

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I'd hope for something entirely different.

Hitler gets accepted to art school, or meets a nice Jewish girl and settles down, or gets capped on the Western Front.

Things like that.

Yeah, I phrased that very badly. I meant that in terms of coming up with a scenario, not what is over all desirable. In those terms you could just have Hinednburg not trust Hitler and accept a SPD coalition in 1932, so you avoid a military dictatorship in Germany completely and avoid any possible version of WW2.
 

TFSmith121

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Understood - although the "Dolf meets Dolley" idea could be

Yeah, I phrased that very badly. I meant that in terms of coming up with a scenario, not what is over all desirable. In those terms you could just have Hinednburg not trust Hitler and accept a SPD coalition in 1932, so you avoid a military dictatorship in Germany completely and avoid any possible version of WW2.

although the "Dolf meets Dolley" idea could be entertaining. AH as a small-town - and not psychopathic - postmaster with a loving wife and a brood of kids...

And she's part Italian, and her sister's husband is this loud-mouth named Benny...

Best,
 
How feasible would it be for the KM to say double the number of Merchant Raiders. We're their the right kind of ships available?

Also if the KM had doubled or even quadrupled the number of merchant raiders. What resources would a raider need to have a reasonable chance of taking out a convoy. If at all? As the obvious move to more raiders is convoys sooner and the counter move to that is to eliminate a convoy to force the RN to tie up resources .

What you'd need is aircraft which several of the raiders had. But maybe with torpedo carrying capacity. Plus to be able to carry an auxiliary torpedo boat I'd say .Plus a raider who could catch up with your scattering merchant ships.

It s not going to work for ever or even for very long time but if you can pull it off once it would tie up a lot of escorts and hunting groups. Probably wouldn't work in the Atlantic either. You'd need to be outside the range of supporting aircraft.
 
How feasible would it be for the KM to say double the number of Merchant Raiders. We're their the right kind of ships available?

Also if the KM had doubled or even quadrupled the number of merchant raiders. What resources would a raider need to have a reasonable chance of taking out a convoy. If at all? As the obvious move to more raiders is convoys sooner and the counter move to that is to eliminate a convoy to force the RN to tie up resources .

What you'd need is aircraft which several of the raiders had. But maybe with torpedo carrying capacity. Plus to be able to carry an auxiliary torpedo boat I'd say .Plus a raider who could catch up with your scattering merchant ships.

It s not going to work for ever or even for very long time but if you can pull it off once it would tie up a lot of escorts and hunting groups. Probably wouldn't work in the Atlantic either. You'd need to be outside the range of supporting aircraft.

Merchant raiders were on borrowed time. They really only worked on unescorted vessels. If they ran into a convoy, they'd have to be unescorted, or else the raider would be dead meat. Unescorted, and the convoy scatters, so they only get a few ships. I know that an auxiliary cruiser sank an Australian light cruiser, but if the captain of the Sydney had survived, he would have certainly faced a court-martial for incompetence.
 
I guess it would depend on the size of the escort.

I imagine a corvette or 2 and an armed trawler wouldn't be much of a threat to a raider.

The bigger escorts would be a challenge

However the idea is to tie up ships on escort and hunting raiders.

The raiders would be sacrificial pawns . All the time your putting more sea miles on your escorts and tieing up cruisers and old battleships on escort duty.
 

BlondieBC

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How feasible would it be for the KM to say double the number of Merchant Raiders. We're their the right kind of ships available?

Also if the KM had doubled or even quadrupled the number of merchant raiders. What resources would a raider need to have a reasonable chance of taking out a convoy. If at all? As the obvious move to more raiders is convoys sooner and the counter move to that is to eliminate a convoy to force the RN to tie up resources .

What you'd need is aircraft which several of the raiders had. But maybe with torpedo carrying capacity. Plus to be able to carry an auxiliary torpedo boat I'd say .Plus a raider who could catch up with your scattering merchant ships.

It s not going to work for ever or even for very long time but if you can pull it off once it would tie up a lot of escorts and hunting groups. Probably wouldn't work in the Atlantic either. You'd need to be outside the range of supporting aircraft.

AMC don't work attacking convoys. From the stuff I looked at in WW1, they tend to last less than 90 days after sinking several enemy ships on average. The key is a ship that is common looking and can be made to look like several types of common ships.

Probably more of these are a small win for the Germans, but not that large an impact unless it is a very large number of them, early on.
 
I've commented on these BoA threads several times, but here it is again a bit more tightly summed up.

There is no single magic bullet for Germany. Any single action taken is either ASB, could be countered by the Brits, or not very effective anyway. A combination of actions, including more armed merchant raiders, a small earlier acceleration of submarine construction, more attention to techniques for aircraft attacking ships, actual coordination of air and naval operations and a larger scale use of airpower vs the Brit cargo fleet and ports.

Properly coordinated all that together, and perhaps a few more items might have had a better chance of defeating Britain in 1940-42.
 
Can Germany win the Battle of the Atlantic during WWII? If so what would need to be done before and during the war to acheive this victory? What vessels would need to be built or not built? I'm generally trying to get an idea of what Germany could have done better, than they did in our timeline.

In the 1930s, Hitler's aim was to overturn the Treaty of Versailles and gain lebensraum in the east.

On a political level, his main opponents were likely to be Poland, France and the USSR. While Britain had fought Germany in WW1 there was no enthusiasm in either country for a repeat of the experience.

Particularly given that Hitler's aim was expansion in eastern Europe rather than a colonial empire overseas, it seemed there was no reason for Britain and its empire to feel threatened this time around. Thus Hitler saw little chance of the two countries coming into conflict.

On August 25 1939, just days before the war started, Britain gave Poland the "Polish guarantee". This stated that Britain would offer all the assistance in its power if Germany attacked Poland. Hitler went ahead and invaded anyway, convinced that Britain would not start another world war over Poland. He was wrong.

Thus in the Second World War Hitler found himself at war with the wrong enemy. War with Britain had never been planned nor wanted. He made several peace offers (as late as 1941 if recent books about Rudolf Hess are to be believed) but these were rejected.

It is in this context that we must consider the battle of the Atlantic. It was essentially a battle that never should have happened. Had both countries managed their diplomacy more effectively, Germany and Britain would not have gone to war.

Britain's entry into the war was a disaster for Britain, for Germany, and for Poland. Six years later the continent lay in ruins, and Poland ended up under the iron fist of Stalin, a dictator no better than Hitler.

This thread is asking the wrong question. Instead of asking whether Germany could have won the battle of the Atlantic, it makes more sense to ask how Germany could have avoided fighting it at all.
 
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