soc.history.war.world-war-ii

David Thornley wrote:

(large snip)

> The Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine had problems coordinating their
> navigation, and it won't be easy reporting a course from what
> a sub can see in a periscope.

I'd like to read about examples of such successful coordination in
which a U-boat spotter would generate a Luftwaffe strike on a naval
target before I believed in it.

I'm aware of cases where Luftwaffe spotters, loitering for hours over
a slow-moving target (convoy) provided contact reports on which U-
boats could home in but I can't think of a U-boat providing more than
contact information.

A U-boat contact report usually goes like this:

1. U-boat sights enemy TF
2. U-boat makes tentative identification (enemy TF is faster than
submerged sub, so unless the skipper is really lucky the range will
never close enough)
3. U-boat has to dive if enemy TF gets close enough for good ID
4. After enemy TF has left, U-boat surfaces again and sends contact
report i.e. 3 CV + escorts spotted two hours ago in grid square ABC/
123, heading ENE.

That's not enough to generate a successful air strike. Hence my
question: are there examples of submarines successfully acting as
spotters for air strikes ? Maybe US submarines might have done it off
Japan in 1945, but I can't think of a U-boat example and suspect that
this whole issue is being made up, like the anti-ship missiles and a
lot of the rest.

> The biggest threat the subs would provide would be torpedo attack.
> Of course, in 1940, German torpedoes didn't work very well anyway.
> Better than contemporary US torpedoes, but they're still less
> of a threat than they should be.

In 1940, the only German planes that were equipped to launch torpedoes
were He-115 seaplanes, with which the Luftwaffe was loathe to
coordinate and of which any self-respecting US carrier task force,
even with 1940 technology, should make short shrift.

IIRC the force didn't even have enough torpedoes for intensive
attacks, though in that particular case I suppose that the torpedo
stockpile wouldn't be a problem as it would run out of aircraft forst.

It's not possible to jury-rig a Luftwaffe bomber as a torpedo plane on
short notice.


> Why not? There are other methods to communicate ship-to-ship.
> As a general rule, ships at sea do not transmit unless they
> don't care about being spotted.

There would likely be radio traffic between the ships and the aircraft
anyway. I'm not sure how useful that would be for German RDF, though.
Some of the transmissions would be short - here, the difference
between the 1940 & 1945 USN would be real as radio discipline improved
- and more importantly a 1945-sized US carrier fleet would cover a
large area, with its aircraft spread over an even larger one. So
German RDF operators would be getting bearings from everywhere, making
it hard to accurately pinpoint a target without excellent traffic
analysis.

Now let's indulge Andrew and assume that the Germans would adapt and
all that, so their RDF operators pinpoint the location of a particular
carrier group. A bomber raid is sent. How likely are they to actually
find their target, as opposed to overflying tons of non-carrier US
ships (being shot at for their trouble), possibly getting lost, etc?

I'm thinking of the US vs Japanese carrier battles off Guadalcanal
here in which portions of air raids would find the wrong part of the
enemy force and give the carriers a break. The 1940 Luftwaffe could
hardly be expected to do better than the 1943 USN.

(snip)

> Remote-controlled drones are tough to get right anyway, given WWII
> technology. Getting them to hit anything at sea at night is
> ridiculously difficult.

How many cases are there of a WWII belligerent hitting any ship,
anywhere, at night with a remote-controlled drone anyway?

As far as I can tell, the answer is none but I'm willing to be
enlightened.

Regarding another point you made about the Luftwaffe learning to hit
undefended ships by 1941, I think it would be more accurate to write
that only a few German units could hit naval targets in 1940
(maneuvering or not, shooting back or not), with that number becoming
significant in 1941. However, Luftwaffe units trained in anti-ship
duties lacked a proper weapon until 1942. The Stukas were survivable
and reasonably lethal but had too short a range, the level bombers had
the range but to be lethal they had to use tactics (low-level bombing)
that wouldn't be survivable against a US carrier group.

(snip)

> If the Germans get there first, the US can kick them out again. How
> are Britain and France going to stop US occupation? If we're going
> to assume that Britain and France are de facto German allies, we're
> torturing history to the point of uselessness.

I can't think of a situation in which the US might want to occupy
Iceland while simultaneously the British and the French wouldn't want
it to.

I can think of scenarios - not likely ones, mind you - in which
Britain & France wouldn't want the US to occupy that island, but in
such a case why should the US want the place that badly anyway?

> >Does Iceland have the large sheltered harbours in which a very substantial
> >replenishment fleet can take shelter?
> >
> I don't know in detail.

It looks like "very substantial" means "of unspecified size but large
enough that if you come up with examples to the contrary I'll claim
that your examples aren't close".

I don't know how large the replenishment fleet for a US carrier fleet
was, it seems to me that it was more a succession of small task forces
than one large fleet, but I could be wrong.

In any case, the Murmansk convoys to the Soviet Union staged from
Iceland and some of them were quite large (including escorts) so yes,
there are large sheltered harbors in Iceland. Waiting now for the
reply that they wouldn't be large enough to meet the (unspecified)
criteria.


LC