You May Be A WWII Junkie

I mean according to the battle of Castle Itter, there was a SS officer that helped the allies out.

@CWO:

@RJL518:

Considering what is going on in America today, and i am NOT looking for a discussion on today’s political situation mind you, do you guys agree with what America did 75 years ago with Japanese, German and Italian-Americans at that time?

Without getting into the highly charged question of “Considering what is going on in America today,” which is a subject that pertains to present-day politics rather than history, this should actually say “with what America did 75 years ago with Japanese-Americans at that time” because German-Americans and Italian-Americans were not interned – or to put it more bluntly thrown into concentration camps – during the war.  There’s a scene in the movie Midway in which the Charlton Heston character meets with the young Japanese girlfriend of his son, who like his dad is a naval aviator.  She and her parents have been interned, and at one point she turns to Heston and says angrily, “Damn it, I’m an American!  What makes us different from German-Americans or Italian-Americans”?  The Heston character, who has the decency to look embarrased, answers, “Pearl Harbor, I guess.”  Yes, that was part of the answer…put another part of the answer is that Japanese-Americans were much more visible as minorities in the U.S. than German-Americans and Italian-Americans, both of those latter groups being European rather than Asian.

It is false to assert that German-Americans and Italian-Americans were not interred. Those who’d immigrated to the U.S. from Italy or Germany were in many cases placed in concentration camps. (I saw a television documentary about this.) But it was apparently felt that assimilation was more possible for Germans and Italians than it was for Japanese. Someone of German or Italian blood who’d been born here would not be interred; whereas someone of Japanese blood who’d been born here might.

Conditions in the concentration camps were bad. The inmates were thin. Not so thin as to be in danger of death. But still clearly malnourished. Given that the U.S. as a whole was not experiencing any sort of food shortage during the war, this failure to adequately feed the concentration camp inmates is a black mark upon our record; quite apart from the justice or injustice of interning these people in the first place.

I voted advantage Axis. As others have explained, the Allies didn’t have very good methods of detecting u-boats–at least not after the first year of the war. However, that changed as the war progressed. The Germans did not anticipate the Allies miniaturizing radar to the point where it could be equipped on board an aircraft. (Even though they later duplicated that feat.) When the British began using such aircraft against u-boats, it fundamentally altered the equation in the Atlantic.

During the last year of the war, the Germans were taking steps to reclaim the edge in the war of the Atlantic.

One of those steps involved torpedoes. A standard-issue WWII era torpedo involved a diesel engine, as well as fuel and compressed air so that the engine could work. The compressed air took up plenty of space. Early in the war, Germany’s torpedoes were based on this model. But there are problems with diesel-powered torpedoes. They are noisy, and can be detected by enemy ships. As they burn diesel fuel, they leave a telltale trail of bubbles in the water. If this trail is observed from the air, it alerts the target ship a torpedo is coming, and guides planes back to the sub which launched the torpedo in the first place. Something better was needed–or at least desired.

The Japanese dealt with these problems by providing their torpedoes with compressed oxygen, not compressed air. Separating the oxygen out from the rest of the air was very difficult, and the Japanese closely guarded their secret of how to do it. A diesel engine requires only 1/5 as much compressed oxygen to burn a given quantity of diesel fuel as it would compressed air. Due to the enormous space savings gained by using compressed oxygen, Japanese “Long Lance” torpedoes had about triple the range of anyone else’s. Also, the air bubble trail they left was much less pronounced than typical for a WWII-era torpedo. This was particularly important for the South Pacific at night, because the presence of luminescent algae meant that those bubble trails glowed in the dark!

The Germans dealt with the torpedo problem in a different way. As the war progressed, they began making use of battery-powered electric torpedoes. At first these torpedoes represented a very serious trade-off. Their range was much shorter than a standard-issue diesel torpedo’s. On the other hand, the electric torpedoes left no bubble trail, and were very, very quiet. They were therefore a mixed blessing–at least until the Germans began to improve their range. Later in the war, Germany’s electric torpedoes had about the same range as standard-issue diesel torpedoes. (Japan’s torpedoes, of course, had a much longer range than anyone else’s.)

Good torpedoes were useful, but not alone enough to swing the Battle of the Atlantic back in Germany’s favor. What it needed was a submarine much harder for the British to detect than the submarines it had. In addition, the submarine in question needed a long range, and it needed to be mass produceable in large quantities. The Type XXI u-boat was all these things and more.

The Type XXI was fast. Its hydrodynamic shape allowed it to actually travel faster underwater than it could on the surface. It had a very advanced (for the time) electronics suite and sonar system. Its electric torpedoes had a range comparable to most diesel-powered torpedoes of the era. Its hull was coated in a layer of rubber, making it very difficult to detect via radar or sonar. It had a very large complement of batteries–batteries which allowed it to remain submersed for 2 - 3 days at a time. When it did finally have to emerge, it didn’t need to come all the way to the surface. Instead, it would go most of the way to the surface, then raise its snorkel. With the snorkel above the surface it could run its diesel engines. (Necessary to recharge its batteries.) This submarine was much, much quieter than almost any other sub of WWII. The Type XXI u-boat and associated models were by far the most advanced submarines of the war. In many ways they had more in common with nuclear submarines of the postwar era than with their WWII contemporaries.

Albert Speer began producing this type of submarine in large quantities in 1944. These subs were built in sections to make them easier to mass produce. However, there were some initial glitches in the production process, slowing things down. Also, a submarine this sophisticated required a relatively long working up period. No Type XXIs saw action before the war ended. Had the war lasted another six months, the story would have been very different. :o

A sister ship–the Type XXIII–was put into service, in limited numbers, before the war ended. The Type XXIII was very similar to the Type XXI in most ways, except much smaller and with a shorter range. The Type XXIII could hold only two torpedoes (compared to twelve for the XXI). The Type XXIII was intended for use in coastal waters. Type XXIIIs sank or damaged five Allied ships; and the Allies did not sink or damage any Type XXIIIs. The rather one-sided track record of the Type XXIII reinforces the suspicion that it would have been very, very difficult for the Allies to detect or destroy the Type XXIs.

From the OP: please explain what you do at this time if you are the Axis or Allies?

Am I allowed to use 20/20 hindsight? If I am, my choice would be to accelerate the development and production of the Type XXI as quickly as possible. Had the Type XXI appeared in the Atlantic in large numbers in 1943, it could have decisively tipped the Battle of the Atlantic in Germany’s favor.

@wittmann:

Waterloo (200 year anniversary in June), by Bernard Cornwell.  Is an easy read and right up my alley.

Apologies Worsham: I have just noticed you said WW2 material.
I still have: Hitler’s Panzer Armies on the Eastern Front (by the bed), but have not opened it for 10 days. It is not the sort of book you can read cover to cover.

Any books are fine. I like to get pointed to good reads.

@strategic:

I may would have been a proponent of continuing the war to Moscow to obliterate Stalin after 1945, so communism would be nothing but a fad and dead.

If I remember correctly, the USSR had something like 300 divisions in Eastern Europe at the time of the Potsdam Conference – a rather large figure compared to what the Anglo-Americans had in Western Europe.  I doubt the Americans and the British could have beaten those kinds of numbers.  I also don’t imagine that a radical move like expending one of America’s rare and priceless A-bombs on Moscow would have done anything other than get those 300 veteran Soviet divisions (who had just helped whip the Wehrmacht) really, really angry at them.  The US and the UK being democracies, they would have also found it a trifle hard to convince their war-weary voters and servicemen to start a whole new war against the country which had just helped them defeat Nazi Germany, and which was getting ready to help them finish off militarist Japan.

At any rate, if you exclude Cuba and China and North Korea, Communism today is in fact pretty much a dying fad…espcially when you consider the amount of free-market capitalism with which China has been flirting for the past decade or so.

@Imperious:

http://www.wanpela.com/holdouts/list.html

They even had one on Gilligan’s Island.

Yeah, but that one only lasted 3 hours.  Well, it was supposed to anyway…

I proclaim this thread Worthy.

Rommel praised the fighting ability Australian troops in North Africa, he considered 9th Australian the best division in Africa.