How did WWII surface ships battle submarines?
>>65170940depth charges
>>65170940Depth charges and ramming.
>>65170940Hedgehog mortars
>>65170940Submarines were mostly surface ships back then, they were not meant to operate underwater for long, in fact they did most of their merchant ship hunting on the surface and sunk them with deck guns. They were dead slow under the water and regular slow above it. Being noticed was huge trouble as they could not outrun pursuing Destroyers so they had to dive and dodge depth charges, if they stayed under too long they ran out of air and launching torpedoes would give away their hiding spot.Patrolling aircraft could spot them on the surface and even submerged in clear conditions and bomb them or direct forces to intercept. They also could not chase a warship underwater, they had to be ahead of it and ambush it. Ships traveling through zones suspected of submarine activity would rapidly change course to avoid potential torpedoes too, if the sub missed its first salvo they would never catch up. If the ship they were hunting had ASW escorts they would be hunted.Submarines were incredibly effective in WW2 but it was also a very high mortality job. Out of the 40,000 Germans who served on U-boats, about 3/4s died, a terrifyingly high casualty rate.
shoot the sub sitting on the surface
>>65170947didn't appear until much later.
>>65170940asdic (sonar)HFDF (RDF)short-range radio (yes really)maritime patrol aircraft
>>65171077they appeared in 1942 which still gave them time to sink near 4 dozen subs
>watch world at war>show is just top nazis shit talking Hitler and saying what a retard he was
>>65170944why couldn't the submarine just move out of the way?
>>65171172Try escaping while going less than 8 knots.
>>65170989>incredibly effective in WW2USN won the Pacific war with submarines.
>>65171172a submerged WW2 sub is as slow as a slow merchant ship, which is why it was possible for even slow convoys to get away from a submarine forced to dive by an escort, and why fast transports such as APDs and converted ocean liners could travel unescorted without fear of submarines - at 20 kts no submarine could get into attack position and they could probably dodge torpedoes
>>65170945I never understood the ramming.why couldn't a sub at 'scope depth see it coming?I don't even understand how whaling could work with little row boats, at least not after the first harpoon.
>>65171495subs bagged fast ships all the time, as ambush predators.
>>65171529>sub at 'scope depth>8 kts submerged>destroyer at ramming speed>30 kts>>65171532almost always in the coastal or harbour approaches where they had to slow down. you may have heard of the Lusitania. which is why the approaches would have guard ships and patrol aircraft.
>>65171532RMS Olympic took a submarine out. Hell RMS Queen Mary accidentally tore a cruiser in half.
>>65171544>>>65171529 (You)>>sub at 'scope depth>>8 kts submerged>>destroyer at ramming speed>>30 ktsbut the sub is already ALMOST fully under the draft of a destroyer.all it has to do is dive another maybe 10ft and be safe at least from ramming.
>>65171495There's a reason they were called wolf packs. They hunted in packs by spreading out so one of them would get a good shot. They didn't chase them down
Just fucking watch Das Boot.
>>65171544>>65171568Did german ever think of building fast attack sub at all?
>>65171610Yes. Very late in the war they had snorkels subs and redesigned hulls to be more hydrodynamic underwater.
>>65170989>surface shipsthe correct term would be "submersible boat"
>>65171610 yeah, but they were all fucked up due to poor quality due to attempt to build modular and slap together."completed" 118 but only one ever did one War Patrol at the very, very end.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_XXI_submarine
>>65171610If you count 'prototype', then the idea for 25 knots submarines using the Walter turbine was already proposed in 1925. Yet somehow Walter Hellmuth did not receive the funding needed for the V80 technology demonstrator boat until the late 1930s. U-1407 actually performed reasonably well with the Brits in post-war trials, albeit quite noisy at high speeds, mostly due to the lack of anechoic tiles, being still an experimental boat by the end of the war along with a severe shortage of rubber. That said, a boat capable of sustaining 20-25 knots for hours (a reminder that Type XXI could only manage 17 knots for no more than an hour and could only remain submerged without a snorkel for any meaningful amount of time at a coping 3 knots) could have allowed the Kriegsmarine to actively engage Allied warships and easily disengage from convoy escorts, most of which comprised corvettes and escort destroyers with flank speeds of no more than 25 knots. You have to venture far into mid Cold War era for the likes of Mk 48 or Spearfish to have something that could counter fast submarines effectively, and let's not pretend the cold war wasn't filled with the same paranoia about the supposedly soviet submarine supremacy.The Reichsmarine/Kriegsmarine high command during the interwar period probably did no less harm to the German war effort than Hitler even in his final years. Heck, the one moment he decided to pay attention to the navy, he actually made a good call by allocating their already scarce resources to the U-boat arm with Donitz as the chief, and the development of the Walter boats was actually sped up from the V80 to the XVII in like three years. Meanwhile Reichsmarine supposedly brilliant minds spent one and a half decades wasting most of valuable resources on useless white elephants like carriers and H battleships, despite knowing fully well germany had no chance of contesting the Royal Navy dominance with a surface fleet at all
>>65170940make your gunship look like a merchant vessel and blast their ass when they engage
>>65171573>They didn't chase them downwatch a documentary on wolf hunts, the principle is quite similaranywaythe typical WW2 German torpedo had a range of about 15km at 30 knots (time to target 16 minutes), or 7km at 40 knots (time to target about 6 minutes)a zigzag every 10 minutes at 20 knots means the fast liner is random-walking faster than a torpedo at economical cruise speed can anticipate unless you get really closeyes you can fiddle this basic equation based on angle of attack and firing a spread, but in turn, a fast liner can also usually manoeuvre and dodge a torpedo attack, if the lookouts can spot the periscope or the bubbles left by the torpedo's wakeand all the time the fast transport is squawking your position and probably sailing away at 3x your submerged speedall in all, it's far far easier to attack slow transports>>65171568>all it has to do is divewhich would make it a sitting duck for depth charges>>65171610famously, yesWalter submarines weren't built in time to do anything but were a real headache as the Cold War got underway because IIRC the Soviets got the bulk of the research and captured near-complete units, so they could easily reverse-engineer the designand the hundreds of slow escorts the Allies had built in WW2 were suddenly obsoleted, like another Dreadnought moment>>65171747>modularthe Germs even overreached themselves building modular regular subs and probably spent more time and resources per sub than if they'd built them the regular way
>>65171920>somehow Walter Hellmuth did not receive the funding needed for the V80 technology demonstrator boat until the late 1930sthe German war machine only kickstarted in 1933 (although contrary to popular belief, it did go full bore from the start)it had to go from Versailles zero to overtaking the French and Brits in just six years, so all in all, they did spectacularly well as it was, without spending excess funds on experimental submarines.also, a Walter submarine cost twice as much as a regular type. and a regular submarine was already as expensive as a destroyer. part of the reason the Uboat campaign faltered was because the Allies could build massive numbers of convoy escorts. adding destroyer-speed machinery to a Flower-class corvette would make the ratio between convoy escorts and Walter submarines even higher than real life.
I love the early WWI British idea, just yeet sea mine with pressure fuze from the back of your destroyer
>>65170940acoustic homing torpedos
>>65171920>That said, a boat capable of sustaining 20-25 knots for hoursthere needs to be a distinction between submerged and surfaced speeds, submerged even modern subs can barely make a short dash for less than an hour at the low end of those speeds, for example the US Barbel-class and its copies can go 19-20 knots at the absolute most, as do the soviet kilo-class subs with similar performance. so submerged speed racing was strictly the domain of nuclear subs even for short distances. surfaced speeds are another story though, it's probably possible to make a "submerging high speed torpedo boat" that can dive and hide or pop to the surface and zoom around either chasing ships or running away within the limitations of ww2 tech, especially since basically all torpedoes needed to be optically aimed and launched when surfaced, not submerged.>You have to venture far into mid Cold War era for the likes of Mk 48 or Spearfish to have something that could counter fast submarines effectivelyactually Mk46 torpedo was the first one that was designed exactly for that purpose, which is hard to do because the faster a torpedo is moving the worse it can listen to its surroundings. Mk46 is from the mid-60s while the subs themselves had the nuclear-armed and wire-guided Mk45 ASTOR with 11kt depth charge warhead that was also very fast and capable of catching up to subs moving that fast even without considering the kill radius of its warhead. Mk45 dates to even earlier, with the first subs being outfitted with it in the late 50s. then there's also the more long-lived SUBROC missile that launched a short range missile into the air that dropped a depth charge over the projected location of enemy submarine, with obviously vastly more speed, extreme range and an even bigger 25kt warhead, entering service in 1964. so the threat of fast nuclear subs was apparent but not insurmountable either.
>>65170940Uhmm...they didn't sweety.
>>65171098Also Bletchley Park.Knowing their orders before they knew them was useful.Thanks to all those that made Enigma interception possible.
>>65171920That's very nice but it's complete lack of useful sonar and the Germans ignorance of radar really means that you get a few years of wins and then angry Allied sub killing planes
>>65172365Uhmmm....you're an idiot, sweetyU.S.S. England put 6 on the bottom alone. There were several others that put 4, or 5 down in both the Atlantic and the Pacific. There's a reason U-Boat duty was considered a death sentence after the allies figured out how to fight them, midwit.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_England_%28DE-635%29
>>65172380>bletchley parkMOD did NOT share that information with Royal Navy Fleet Command at any time during the war. They were too concerned the krauts would figure out their der-maester-race! enigma encoder was broken.
>>65172541They didn't say go here kill them.They did however ensure someone be there to spot movement.Never show your hand.
>>65171967>Walter cost twice as much as a regular typeA VII cost about 4.2m RM.Its Walter successor (in displacement and range) would be the 900t Type XXVI.While there's no available figure for XXVI,I doubt it would cost much more than XXI at 5.8m RM,since XXI is twice as big as XXVIOld designs like VII isn't that cheap despite being way inferior in every aspect.The real bottleneck in deploying Walter boats came mostly from shortage of HTP,which V1/V2 operation and Me163 to a lesser extent already ate up most of the supplies.Bombings also slowed down HTP production massivelyThere was actually a small article on how a wolfpack of Walter boats could look like on p.78>https://s36124.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/1993/Fall/1993-Oct-OCRw.pdfTLDR on that: attack on a typical large convoy could be mounted with fewer boats and higher convoy casualties.>>65172106>mk45Underwater nuclear isn't nearly as effective as you thinkThere was an actual test with WW2 subs using an 8kt charge.At literally knife-fight range,the sub is literally unharmed,on p.5>apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA995305.pdf>there needs to be a distinction between submerged and surfaced speedsThe likes of Kilo or VII/XXI,in basic principles,still follow diesel-electric design,with diesel running to charge the battery while surfaced and the battery as the sole underwater propulsionWhile a Walter boat can be considered 1st gen AIP design,with a hybrid of diesel+battery for low speed operation and Walter turbine for high speed maneuver.In fact,the turbine can also be operated at lower speed; applying the cube law,moving at half of your flank speed only consumes about an eighth of the powerEg: XXVI designed endurance at 24kts top speed was about 6h.At 12kts, projected endurance should be 48h ~ 576nmi.Its designed submerged endurance isn’t that inferior to modern non-nuclear subs like 212/gotland,with the perk of longer high submerged speed>>65172396Could you do better instead of this low effort bait?
>>65172554>ensure someone be thereYeah, no, they didn't, moron. You're completely full of shit. There are reams of declassified reports and interviews by and of MI6 agents who knew of imminent U-boat attacks and didn't say shit. It's literally tragic lore and you're masturbating to bullshit.
In most cases, submarines tended to conduct a surface attack, then dive. But for sake of discussion lets say it's underwater. Detecting where a submarine is probably the more involved part of actually destroying it.Detection Methods:Watchkeeping; Simple enough; having guys just looking at the surface with binoculars for periscopes or the wake from it if the submarine is moving.Hydrophones. They pick up noise underwater, and like Sonar or Radar, can be passive or active. Since it was possible to hear the propellers spinning. It was also why submarine crews tended to be quiet when they knew of enemy vessels being nearby when submerged. Because you could hear people talking depending on distance.High-Frequency Direction Finding; basically triangulating radio frequencies to possible locations. This provided more of an extremely general idea of where they were, and not pinpoint information. But if you knew a submarine is possibly nearby well before it does something, you're going to be more alert.Magnetic Anomaly Detection; Since submarines are mostly steel, they like every other metal hulled ship, cause a disturbance in the electro-magnetic field, thus is detectable. It only really worked when if it was at a relatively shallow depth. At the time.SONAR/RADAR; SONAR is obviously is going to be more purposed designed, but RADAR can detect them too, depending on depth.Sonobuoys; these were used more by aircraft, but same principles as a passive hydrophone that transmitted information via radio.Destruction Methods:Depth Charges; explosives that blew up at a set depth, aiming to crush the hull via shockwave.Hedgehogs; basically the shotgun version of a depth charge that used contact fuses instead.Torpedoes; There are a few types of torpedoes, but the most effective for anti-submarine warfare were acoustic ones. Since they could pick up a submarines propeller noise and follow it.Ramming; self-explanatory.
The unsung heroes of the Battle of the Atlantic. The Corvette Navy, crewed by the RCNVR. Without these lads, there would be no D-Day, you never hear about them because a success is when nothing happens, and the British/Canadians suppressed how dire things got at times to not tank morale.
>>65173249My favorite story involving the corvettes in WW2 is that the Kriegsmarine got sick of them fucking with their subs and decided to send what remaining destroyers they had out to play with the idea of scaring them off. RN sends the corvette squadron the intel they are getting intercepted thinking said corvettes are going to run away at which point they change direction and sail towards the German destroyers with the intent of having a fight. Cue RN panic trying to send a cruiser to assist the mad fucks and the Kriegsmarine thinking that the corvette force must be a secret destroyer squadron to even dare try take them on and the whole thing results in the Germans retreating back to port and the corvettes getting blueballed.
>>65172554What part of "did NOT share...at any time" did you not understand? Several thousands tons of maritime shipping went to the bottom despite British intelligence knowing exactly when and where the sea wolves would attack. This isn't new information, dumbass.
>>65173405Ultra intelligence were often passed to escort group commanders but disguised as regular intercepts, you have no idea what you're talking about>knowing exactly when and where the sea wolves would attackthat level of detail was rare even for Ultra to get>Several thousands tons of maritime shipping went to the bottom despiteANY of the ASW weapons used in the battle, does that mean that all of those weapons were not used in battle? idiot>>65173249>The Corvette Navy, crewed by the RCNVRthe Canadians crewed about half the Flower, Loch, and Castle class escorts, and the RN crewed the other halfthe RN also crewed forty Castle class corvettes, and seventy Hunt class destroyers which were designed for both fleet and convoy work and were sent on more dangerous convoy missions near the Mediterranean
While ultra intelligence was often used to determine the locations where U-boats and supply submarines met at sea, the HF/DF network was usually sufficient for estimating the position of U-boats.It is unlikely that decipherable positional information was communicated frequently when carrying out patrol operations planned before a sortie.
>>65173249corvette is such a nice way to say "trawler with two guns bolted onto it"my personal favourite tidbit is that on the flower class if you wanted to get food from the galley to the bridge you had to walk across an unprotected gangway so that literally every single meal taken while on watch was seasoned with seawater
>>65171494Probably the safest USN vessel to be on in 1945
>>65170940I wonder how events would've unfolded in the east if the IJN had dropped their autistic focus on using their subs on warships and gone merchant-hunting instead. They really wasted all their cool subs.
>>65173571they would have lost their carriers even fasterthey barely had enough subs to form a proper recon line for the fleet, as it wasand the overall rate of IJN sub production was almost exactly the same as their loss rate; they began and ended the war with ~60 subsWW2 subs spent about half their days in portthat means you, Admiral Fukyu, have only 30 operational subs across the entire Pacific at any time>>65173560>t. crew of USS Bullhead
