I’m watching a ton of WW2 documentaries and can’t help but think why they didn’t make a counter to the German Uboats other then depth charges and the hedgehog. Surely with the money and resources the US or other countries could of made a sub during that time.
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Submarines don’t make great submarine killers, even today. In fact, only one submarine in history was ever sunk by another submerged submarine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_submarine_U-864
Submarines weren’t effective in countering other submarines at the time.
The technologies needed were *almost* there, but not quite. It took just a few more years.
There was a single case of one submarine attacking and sinking a U-Boat, but it was a pretty unique set of circumstances that allowed them to do so.
Among other things, the advances in sonar and hydrophones weren’t quite there yet.
I’m not a historian, but I think it’s likely that hunting subs with destroyers was, with the technology at the time, far more efficient than relying on submarines to hunt other submarines. Torpedos at the time were fire-and-forget, meaning a sub fired them and then they traveled in a straight line until they hit something or ran out of fuel. It would probably have been quite difficult for a sub to have directly attacked and destroyed another sub. In fact, direct sub-to-sub battles are exceedingly rare in all of naval history, and to my knowledge there have only been a couple of subs that were directly engaged and sunk by another sub, even to the present day.
The US did have a capable sub fleet, but just as the Germans used their U-boots to attack British shipping, we deployed our subs to the Pacific to attack Japanese shipping and naval vesssels.
U boats were primarily employed to attack shipping from the US to Britain. There wasn’t a similar supply route of goods to Germany.
The US used submarines extensively in the Pacific to sink Japanese shipping.
How would you FIND them?
Sonar was in its infancy. Uboats patrolled at periscope depth to find floating ships to attack. Much easier to use the Mark One Eyeball to spot when you surface and sweep 360 degrees. A periscope and you can see a freighter to sink that’s MILES away.
But trying to cram very early SONAR type technologies onto an equivalent-sized anti-Uboat Uboat, and then scan the millions and millions of cubic yards of ocean around you?
That would have been an extremely serious engineering challenge given what they had at the time.
1) Most big countries had submarine long before WW2. The first US sub was made in 1775, they had 72 submarines during WW1 and by the end of WW2 they had 228 of them.
2) Submarine are horrible against other submarine. In the history of the world, only 1 submarine was ever sunk by another submarine.
3) The allies developed a lot of technologies and tactics to hunt down German submarine, by 1943 the allies were sinking on average 20 U boats by month.
The effect of this was a drastic decrease in the amount of ships sunk by uboats. German Uboats sunk 6.2 million tons of allied ship in 1942, this number dropped to 2.5 million tons in 1944 and 773 thousand in 1944.
Submarine hunting was a relatively young discipline and it took some time for the allies to perfecting it.
The US and Britain both had large submarine fleets. Submarines at the time were useful against surface ships and not very useful against other submarines. IIRC, there was ONE successful submarine on submarine underwater engagement in all of WW2. Destroyers and escort carriers were more effective, so they used those instead against submarines.
Wow I didn’t expect this response, thank you so much :), the more I learn about that history the better.
Oh okay so what I’m seeing is that the US used their subs in the Pacific because the technology on the Western front ocean was good enough to take on the Uboats?
The US was actually better at submarine warfare than the Germans. Witness the American submarine campaign against the Japanese in the Pacific.
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