German Submarine Campaign in American Waters

HM 29: New Interpretations in Naval History: Selected Papers from the Nineteenth McMullen Naval History Symposium Held at the U.S. Naval Academy, 17–18 September 2015, 2022

During World War I, imperial German submarines operated mainly in the North Sea, around the British Isles, and in the Mediterranean Sea with a high degree of success. Unknown to many, they also operated out in the Central Atlantic around the Portuguese Atlantic islands of Cape Verde, Madeira, and the Azores. Some of these U-boats even went all the way to the east coast of North America. The Imperial German Navy was able to conduct these long-range operations without additional logistics facilities, although there were suspicions that neutral countries, such as Spain, were assisting it. These submarine operations in the Atlantic are being studied by the Portuguese Navy Research Centre (CINAV), in a project related to an incident in April 1917 in which the U-35 sank four vessels off Cape Sagres, Algarve, well inside Portuguese territorial waters. Lothar von Arnauld de la Perière was the submarine’s captain, and the tonnage he sank is still unsurpassed. To give a sense of how the war at sea was fought in the vast Central Atlantic area and of the role the Portuguese navy played in it is the aim of this paper.

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Journal of Universal History Studies (JUHIS), 2019

The development of weapon technologies had reached remarkable momentum with the industrial age. One of these new weapons systems is the submarines. The navies were originally planned to be used for coastal defense purposes only because of their insufficient capacities. But submarines have been transformed into a serious striking force by increasing their capacities and range thanks to generators operating with steel, battery, and gasoline. In the First World War, the Germans used the submarines for the first time in order to attack the enemy logistic convoys in the high seas instead of the coastal protection mission. In 1917, this new war concept would force the United Kingdom to surrender, which would almost succeed. At this point, the comparative analysis of the German Navy' s success with the U-Boats in the first and second world wars will be examined in this study.

Wars have often given rise to new technologies that have changed the face of war. Development of newer and powerful weapons resulted in paving way to search for countermeasures. The World War I saw the emergence of submarines that added a new dimension to naval warfare. These silent killers were difficult to detect and hence measures to search and locate submarines became the need of the hour. The World War II saw an effective but devastating use of 'U' boats (the acronym for 'Unterseeboot', which means "undersea boat " by the German Navy. The difficulty was to locate the submarine before it could be attacked and destroyed or sunk. It was only when advances were made in anti submarine warfare that the German U boat actions could be retaliated and later halted. The World War 2 and the Battle of Atlantic: The declaration of war on Germany by Britain in 1939, initiated the longest war ever in human history i. e WW2. The war was fought in various parts of the world the 'Battle of the Atlantic' was the longest battle that went on almost six years. The Battle of Atlantic saw its culmination in May 1945, with the surrender of Germany. Britain, an island country, had to depend on imports to survive through the war. The key to defeat Britain was to starve it by blocking its supplies. The Germans made an all out effort to block the supply ships where as the allies made every attempt to maintain the supply. This war is also referred as 'tonnage war'. Winston Churchill had said " The Battle of the Atlantic was the dominating factor all through the war. Never for one moment could we forget that everything happening elsewhere, on land, at sea or in the air depended ultimately on its outcome ". To primary strategy of the Germans was to starve Britain and for this it unleashed the programme of unrestricted submarine warfare against British shipping and had almost succeeded by sinking 282 allied ships and 1,489,795 tonnes of merchant shipping from July to October of 1940. The U boats dared and attacked in daylight. The ASDIC directed attacks by the British surface fleet forced the submarines attack independent ships rather than convoys. Grand Admiral Karl Donitz of German navy came up with an unconventional idea of use of submarines. He advocated an attack strategy known as 'Rudeltaktik' or the Wolfpack, which involved 'U' boats spread along possible convoy route and upon sighting the target convoy all the U boats to attack together and overwhelm escorts. When the escorts chased individual submarines and the rest in pack would attack merchants without any hindrance. He calculated that 300 submarines would create enough damage to get Britain out of war. This was strategy was in stark contrast to the traditional view of submarine deployment up until then, in which the submarine was seen as a lone ambusher, waiting to attack ships entering and leaving enemy ports. The fall of France in June 1940, the Germans acquired naval bases on the French coast giving them a strategic advantage as they now

This bibliography is a revised and expanded version of Submarine Warfare in the 20th Century, 2002. It is a selected bibliography listing books, periodical articles, and web sites related to submarine and antisubmarine warfare in the 20th century. Some entries have brief annotations taken directly from library cataloger's notes. To ensure a compact citation format, the series statement(s), when present, are in parentheses following the publisher statement and before the pagination. The letters "NPS/DKL," followed by location and call number information, identify the books held by the Naval Postgraduate School’s Dudley Knox Library. Many of the journal articles are also accessible in the Dudley Knox Library. Consult with the Reference or Interlibrary Loan Department of your local library for advice on obtaining materials of interest to you.