WHAT SHALL WE DO WITH A DRUNKEN SAILOR?

I saw the Black Sam special , I enjoyed the details of the ship.

McT, Is the square rigger an "Iron bottom"? We sailed a repro sardine hauler (130 footer) and were constantly cold below decks because of the poor insulation that an iron bottom presents. You will be sailing N Sea summer waters and I have to say that, in our little boat on the bay of Fundy in mid summer we often have the heaters blowing high. Dress warmly.

Well she has a steel hull and was built in the 1930s I think as a sail training ship for the Norwegian merchant marine.

I've been on her twice and I must say though the night watch on the North Sea can be cold, we were toasty in the banje- in our hammocks.

The Delaware Overfalls Shoals lightship, one of a few remaining small ships that were used to stand as either inside or outside "light stations" has been in a state of decay. Its hull has been rusting and it sits atop a mudbank in Lewes Del near the entry point for the U of DElaware Marine SCiences Port. Its been cosmetically restored and maintained by the Lightship society and, one couldnt tell its state of corrosion. The society has raised about a million to have it moved, repaired and set up with full cathodic protection . Theyre waiting for a shipyard to provide bids on getting the job done.
Lightships were interesting vessels. The recent ones (they stopped being used in the late 70's) were modified pocket freighters and were beamy ships that rode weather quite well. Theyd be moored on station with no more than 2 "mushroom" anchors(picture a mushroom) these anchors and their chains were about 25 tons and needed to be stowed in a manner that turned the ship into a big circular spool. (weight distribution was critical) The anchors were about 20% of the ships weight and could capsize the boat if stowed in an imbalance. The ships stayed on station for months and would be tended by little 50 ft oilers and the lightship would have a pilot boat on davits so the crew could go ashore periodically.
The history of Overfalls SHoal is in this linkOVERFALLS LIGHTSHIP

U-boats news article

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/europe/hitlers-lost-fleet-of-uboats-found-in-the-black-sea-780701.html

Interesting background:

Actually, Hitler wanted to sell some U-boats from the German Navy (Mediterranean flotilla) to Turkey and get in return some Turkish U-boats stationed in the Black Sea.


Not only due to the Turkish neutrality this didn't work (fast enough).

So, six training U-boats ( B II type) were transported from Pilau and Gdingen on the Baltic Sea the 2.500 km to the Black Sea.
At first, via Kiel Channel to Hamburg, then the Elbe river down to Dresden.
And then ...







... via Autobahn and roads towards Ingolstadt on the Donau river.

From Vienna onwards, the U-boats then swam on their on - before they were tugged.




(Source: photos/story published @spiegelonline. Story by Hans Michael Kloth, the last comanding officer of U-24; he wrote a book about all this, and there had been a documentary tv-film in German tv.)

Quite fascinating thanks. The bravery and ingenuity of some German forces never ceases to amaze me.

Yes but they never managed the concept of "supply lines".

You're accusing the Germans of lack of planning? What are you, CRAZY?

:wink:

Although i suspect that this is not what FM meant, in fact, the failure of German submarine warfare in both world wars might be ascribed to their failure to properly support the effort. Alfred Thayer Mahan was the great American historian and theorist of naval warfare. His The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 was avidly read by influential people all across the globe, and well after his death in the first months of the Great War.

At the end of the work named (one of but a few long dissections of the influence of sea power), he comments on commerce raiding as a method of naval warfare. He holds that it can be, but rarely is effective. He states that commerce raiding can only be effective if at least three conditions are met, and those are: That large numbers of raiders be deployed, and maintained at sea, or regularly replaced (a good example would be the French privateers in her wars with England, which frequently were more numerous that the ships of the Royal French Navy; or the privateers of the Americans in the War of 1812, when so many men went to sea in privateers to raid the English, that U. S. Navy warships were usually unable to fill their crews with Americans, and had to rely upon foreign nationals in American ports, mostly the Portuguese). That the nation which indulges in commerce raiding be able to deploy sufficient naval forces to fix the attention of enemy forces on their fleet, allowing the commerce raiders the freedom to operate with a high degree of impunity. And finally, that bases of operations and supply be available to the commerce raiders on the coasts of the waters in which they operate.

Mahan was, of course, writing just at dawn of the era of submarine warfare, and submarines were originally envisioned as a threat to surface fleets. However, this does not negate the principles to which Mahan alluded, and i think they can reasonably be applied to the Germans. In the Great War, German submarines enjoyed only a limited success in deep blue water--their greatest success was in the Mediterranean. Lothar von Arnauld de la Perière was the most successful u-boat commander in the Great War, and he operated in the Mediterranean (and his record has never been surpassed, not even by commanders in the Second World War). There, German u-boats had access to Austrian and Turkish port and supply facilities. Although the High Seas Fleet could not provide them any support, the Austrian fleet provided a form of limited sanctuary for u-boats operating from ports on the Dalmatian coast.

However, in both wars, the Germans were unable to provide naval support to their commerce raiders (and the submarines were the only continuously successful commerce raiders--German surface ships operating as commerce raiders were largely knocked out early in the conflict, with a few notable exceptions) which operated in the oceans. Furthermore, they were unable to deploy their commerce raiders in the numbers necessary to have a profound effect (although they came close in the "Battle of the Atlantic" in the Second World War, but were unable to maintain a large force over time, and without support of a significant surface fleet, could offer no protection to their commerce raiders).

Finally, the Germans were unable to rely upon bases of operation and supply on the further coasts of the Atlantic Ocean. Even on the easter shores of that ocean, their only refuge was in the Bay of Biscay, which meant that submarines leaving port for their cruises had to run a gauntlet of air and surface forces. Arriving on the coast of North America, their operations were limited to the range of the fuel with which they had left port, because there were no reliable sources of resupply on the western shore of the ocean. By Mahan's criteria, the German commerce raiders, in the form of the submarines, failed of all three necessary elements for success.

being linked to a resupply facility that could be easily targeted, and the having the fuehrer disband the capitol fleet , mostly because he failed to irculate the memo that the original date for warabout 1945, was moved up by a few years. The Kreigsmarine was not prepared at first, this whole production and supply plan, left the NAZZIS with a concept that was technologically neat but operationally short.(Doenitz wasnt a real techno-geek anyway) In the last 3 years of the war, the Allies were taking out U boats at the rate of about 250 a year and this exceeded Germany"s capacity to replace the workhorse typeVII's. I wonder what the target field maps show about whether the U boats were hit while on station or on their way to or from stations.

Of course today it is changed strategy .Today, US submariners say that there are 2 kinds of ships on the water

''Submarines and Targets". And its all like one big video game.

Technology has always altered the detailed terms of military operations, but i consider that people such as Sun Tzu, or Clausewitz or Mahan articulated basic principles which can be applied to modern practice.

In the case of the Germans in the Second World War, the lack of a surface fleet to fix the attention of the enemy fleets and to offer protection was profoundly debilitating for them. The worst time for the Atlantic packs was leaving or returning to the French ports on the Bay of Biscay from which they operated. There are deep spots in the Bay, but basically it's thousands and thousands of square miles of continental shelf. The RAF and RNAS, as well as USCG units had long identified u-boat targets for air and surface forces, but no concerted effort was made until the u-boat threat became critical in late 1942. The RAF and RNAS then concentrated on perfecting search and attack techniques. It took some time to pay off, but eventually it became a nightmare for the Germans. By the late summer of 1943, u-boats were creeping along the north coast of Spain, and then up the coast of France to their home ports near or in Brittany. Often, they were forced to dive and spend most of the daylight hours on the bottom. In the summer of 1943, 27 u-boats were sunk in the Bay, and 24 of them were sunk by air attack. From thousands of feet in the air, a u-boat stands out like a sore thumb, even at its maximum operational depth.

One can alter the terms of Mahan's dictum by adding air power to the equation. German e-boats were not sufficient to prevent Allied surface forces from attacking submarines, and no credible opposition at all was put in the air to protect the submarines. In his memoir of the war, Adolf Galland, who headed the Luftwaffe fighter service by the end of the war, tells of how he planned and executed the air cover operation when Scharnhorst and Gneisenau "ran" the English Channel in broad daylight in February, 1942. The battlecruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau and the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen (which had "escaped" into the Atlantic with Bismarck in 1941) had been unable to operate as commerce raiders in the Atlantic because the Royal Navy was constantly on the hunt for them, and the RAF and RNAS constantly (although at that time, rather ineptly) attacked them in the their berths in Brest. The "Channel Dash," as it was known, was accomplished almost entirely because of a concerted German effort to assure air superiority and protect the ships as they ran for the North Sea. English radars had been "left alone" for several months, because daylight air attacks had ceased, and the Germans were able to determine the microwave frequencies at which the English predictably (and therefore carelessly) habitually operated. When the three German capital ships ran the Channel, the English radars were effectively jammed as soon as it became evident that the English were aware of the operation ("Operation Cerberus). Galland states that he was able to keep 50 fighters in the air over the ships at all times during daylight hours for the duration of the operation.

Hitler wanted more and more bombers, all the time. The German jet, which eventually flew in 1945 as the Me 262, was first test flown in late 1943, but its deployment delayed because Hitler wanted it for a close-support bomber. He was contemptuous of the fighter service, and they got the short end of the supply stick constantly. It is reasonable to assert that a concentrated effort by Galland and his fighters could have successfully contested the air forces which the Allies increasingly deployed to attack German submarines, especially in the Bay of Biscay. Throughout the entire course of the war, three out of four German submariners were lost.

The tactical operations of targets would only apply to the fast attack boats--that of hunter killers in addition to covert missions. Boomers on the other hand use a strategy that is based upon stealth, as their targets tend more toward ground based civil and military targets.

As for Mahan's analysis of Naval power it is still required reading at the Naval War College along with studies of the gentlemanly commerce raiding tactics of LaPerière (always allowing a captured crew safe passage).

As for support, comparison of Nuke boats to Diesel Electrics (even the more modern Trench class boats) is completely different. Surface ship support for nukes tends more toward recovery and decontamination in the event of major incident as the boats are fully capable of completing their missions without relying on resupply. In other words, nuke boats are more geared to tactical and strategic tactics than commerce raiding.

But then even a little nuclear war can completely ruin my day.

Rap

My comments, which i'm sure you understood, about support referred to Mahan's remarks about support of commerce raiders.

The success of U. S. Navy submarines as commerce raiders against the Japanese (once they got a reliable torpedo) was definitely a product, more than anything else, of the ability of the Navy to support them both in terms of protection, and of continually deploying advanced bases as they fought their way through the central Pacific. It is true that the American submarines did not have bases on the western shores of that ocean, but the ability of the Navy to continually advance bases toward the Japanese home islands more than made up for that lack of bases.

Churchill said after the war that the convoy battles of the of the Atlantic were the one thing that came closest to Britain loosing the war. Had Britain been forced to make a peace with Hitler, would America launch an invasion fleet from the eastern seaboard of the US to liberate nazi europe? I dont think so. Nor would I blame them. Of course I dont know but I suspect this was in Hitlers mind when he declared war on the US, knowing the ball would then be in his court to offer a peace deal when the time was right, and that in the meantime it would take a year or so to wind up the US war machine in Britain. If[/i] and I must confess to being no particular fan of counter factual history, Hitler had succeeded, I believe the Americans would have recognised the geopolitical reality, and concentrate on Japan. The world would be a very different place.

My goodness yes, it would an' all.

Roosevelt was certainly interested in intervening in Europe, but he was an apt student of realpolitik, and knew he could do nothing if the Germans did not either declare war on the United States, or provide a casus belli with submarine warfare. I think it might have been possible for Hitler to have invaded England, but his only prospect of success would have been in the latter half of 1940, when England was reeling, and had no credible force to oppose the Germans. He wasn't ready, he hadn't planned that far, and i believe that he took counsel of his desires rather than of reality. He pretty well had the French pegged when he decided they would fold, but he was badly wrong about the English, and as it turned out, the Norwegians weren't terribly charmed about their uninvited guests, either. At the time he was invading Norway was the time when an invasion of England had its best prospect of success, and even then, it was probably too late. Hitler was an idiot. He little understood principled people (a truly foreign race to him), and he little understood that he could not motivate people to surrender through fear.

One of his biggest failings, though, was complete ignorance of naval affairs, and a concomitant fear of the Royal Navy, and a feigned contempt for naval matters. It was sheer insanity to have first-class ships of the caliber of Bismarck, Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, Tirpitz, Prinz Eugen, Admiral Hipper and Blücher, and to think to use them as commerce raiders. Frankly, the Royal Navy had no battleships or battle cruisers which could match the first four named ships, and even by the end of the war, had no cruisers to match the last three ships mentioned. Worse still, Hitler threw away those resources. Bismarck was, or course, famously lost in the failed attempt to "break out" and operate as a commerce raider in the Atlantic, after sinking Hood--a relentless hunt for revenge by the Royal Navy was guaranteed. Sharnhorst was sunk when attacking convoys to Murmansk. Gneisenau and Prinz Eugen were used to shell the Russians along the Baltic coast late in the war, after largely providing target practice for Allied bombers. Even more idiotic, they were both used to ferry refugees out of the path of the Soviet troops. Using them in those two roles is rather like firing up the Maserati to run down to the corner for a pack of smokes.

The Germans also had a first-class destroyer, probably second only to the Japanese Kagero class destroyers which went into service in 1940. These were (both the German and the Japanese destroyers) superior to anything the Americans or the English had; in fact, the English ought to have been embarrassed by just what pieces of crap their destroyers were. Nevertheless, the Royal Navy sailed out to interfere with the invasion of Norway, and the Kriegsmarine suffered irreparable losses, especially when their destroyers courageously sacrificed themselves to protect the operation to take and hold Narvik in the teeth of the English.

Hitler was, as i have so often said, an idiot. His naval idiocy particularly suited the situation vis-a-vis England.

Interesting post Set thanks. I agree the Royal navy should have been embarrassed by the state of its destroyers, especially as most of them were bought from the US.

I dont think Hitler was ever serious about an opposed landing in Britain. He feared the Navy which was certainly not defeated. Despite Goering's boasts to wipe out the RAF, which Hitler probably took with a pinch of salt, the Luftwaffe never achieved air superiority. In those circumstances an invasion would have been very difficult if not impossible imo.

No doubt Hitler wanted Britain out of the war though. I think he believed his best chance was a combination of attacks on supplies from the US and aerial bombardment forcing a change of government (Halifax?) who would "see sense" and do a deal. It nearly worked too, there was a considerable weight of establishment opinion who thought it was utter stupidity to be in a war "again" with Germany when Hitler's real designs stretched eastwards.

I saw an interesting documentary, when after Dunkirk and the fall of France and things were looking extremely bleak (Singapore had fallen too) Churchill made a rousing speech at Cabinet. It ended with all ministers thumping the table in support to continue the struggle whatever the cost. After that there was absolutely no support for a deal with Hitler.

But having said that, Churchill probably knew that he only had to hold out for a limited period until his friend Roosevelt brought the US into the war.

(You know this story already, Steve.)

When my father was stationed for a short period in France, he had been twice "nearly" ibaded England, with a couple more, I think, and as medic and wireless operator.
The first time, they (the German soldiers) didn't believe that it was an invasion in reality - but who knew?
They turned back to the French coast just after having left the harbou(s).

The second time, my father decided not to take any equipment with him, just an empty rucksack, even left the gas-mask, only carrying the empty box.
This time, they sailed further - so some photos exist.
(Might be, one is from the first tour as well - ages ago that I saw them last. I'll have to search for them .... sometime.)

Well, they had the maps and the guide books all printed, ready.....

What was rather poignant in the subject of Hitler's stupidity is that he came very close to achieving air superiority over England. To have accomplished an invasion, he would have needed only to establish superiority over the beaches, and to escort paratroops. As for the Royal Navy, it need only have been dealt with long enough for a landing force to have established a tête du pont, which could readily have been accomplished if closely coordinated with an airborne landing just prior to an amphibious invasion. Somewhat more than 300,000 troops, English, Belgian and French, had been evacuated from the continental Channel ports, but they were almost without equipment, and were, of course, arrived in no organized form.

The tragedy for the Luftwaffe and the Kriegsmarine is that their best resources were wasted to little or not purpose. The German battleships, battlecruisers, cruisers and destroyers were lost either in the dubious invasion of Norway (which tied up German resources to no real purpose--they still got their ore from Sweden, and needn't have gotten it through Norway), or were squandered to even less purpose. Surely they would have suffered heavily in a direct confrontation with the Royal Navy, but the encounter between Bismarck and Prinz Eugen vesus Hood and Prince of Wales demonstrates that it would not have necessarily or inevitably meant a victory for the Royal Navy. Gneisenau was eventually sunk in the entrance to a Polish harbor as a block ship, for crissake.

Using capital resources such as the battleships and battlecruisers for commerce raiders was madness because it still exposed them to the wrath of the Royal Navy, and had the program been persisted in, they could have been snatched up piecemeal. It is a military axiom at sea as well as on the land that a smaller force can triumph over a larger force if they can succeed in defeating their opponent in detail. But the Kriegsmarine was the smaller force, and they were being spread all over the map on dubious enterprises.

The submarines available to the Kriegsmarine in 1940 were, the vast majority, designed for use in the shallow waters of the Baltic. They had to have extensive refits to be put to use in the Atlantic. But in an invasion scenario, Raeder would have had available to him four of the best battleships and battlecruisers in the world, barring only the Japanese, three of the best heavy cruisers in the world (once again, barring the Japanese), and the finest destroyers in the Atlantic. Supported by the submarine fleet, they could have achieved a goal of holding open the narrow and shallow waters which would have been involved in a cross-Channel invasion. The Supermarine Spitfire was certainly a fine aircraft--but it had about 20 minutes of time in the air to fight, even over England. The Luftwaffe need only have held the air over the narrowest portion of the Channel, and a small area inland.

I don't say that an invasion would automatically have succeeded. But the prospect for success was very high in the summer of 1940, if once a German army could have been landed, and it needn't even have been a particularly large force. But, as i've so often said, Hitler was an idiot. He was convinced that France and England would do nothing as he snapped up Czechoslovakia, and he was right. He then applied the same principle to the invasion of Poland, and was once again vindicated when France and England sat in their lines and did nothing. When he invaded the Low Countries and France in 1940, i'm sure he expected the Allies to cave in and capitulate. He had not prepared for an invasion because he did not serious consider that it might be a necessity, and because he took counsel of his desires rather than of reality. When he invaded Norway, he learned (or ought to have learned) that England and France could put up a stiff fight. The knowledge profited him nothing, and the collapse of France convinced him that he had been right all along. Then the jackass diddled around waiting for the English to surrender. What a complete imbecile.