U-Boat

Jeremy Daoussis : U-Boat
June, 15th, 2011

Pre-War:
- The first submarine built in Germany was the two man submarine Brandtaucher, which sank to the bottom of Kiel harbor during its first test dive.The vessel was designed in 1850 by the inventor and engineer Wilhelm Bauer and built by Schweffel and Howaldt in Kiel for the German Navy. Brandtaucher was later rediscovered during dredging operations in 1887, and subsequently raised sixteen years later and placed into a museum in Germany, where it rests today.



The Battle of The Atlantic:
- German U-Boats in the Battle fo The Atlantic was the longest battle of the Second World War, beginning from the first day of hostilities and ending on the very last day of the war. It was also the most important battle during the entire Second World War because the success of every other campaign in every other theater of war depended upon its success. - The Battle of the Atlantic was not about the most powerful navy; neither was it about glorious battles fought between battleships and submarines. But the Battle of the Atlantic was a commerce war waged by German U-Boats against Britain’s merchant marine. For nearly six years, Germany launched over 1,000 U-Boats into combat, in an attempt to isolate and blockade the British Isles, thereby forcing the British out of the war. It was a fight which nearly choked the shipping lanes of Great Britain, cutting off vital supplies of food, fuel and raw materials needed to continue fighting.

**World War 1: **
At the start of World War I, Germany had twenty-nine U-boats. In the first ten weeks they destroyed five British cruisers. On 5 September 1914, HMS Pathfinder was sunk by a German U-boat, the first ship to have been sunk by a submarine using a self-propelled torpedo. On 20 October 1914, SM U-17 sank the first merchant ship, the SS Glitra, off Norway. On 4 February 1915, the Kaiser assented to the declaration of a war zone on the waters surrounding Britain. The British felt that this was a retaliation for the minefields and shipping blockades. Germans in the U-boats were told by there captains to sink merchant ships without warning. This angered the British and put them on even worse terms. On 7 May 1915, SM U-20 sank the liner RMS Lusitania which claimed 1,198 lives, 128 of them American civilians. This frightened and angered the Americans because the Germans were becoming even more ruthless and taking out civilians. It has been confirmed that the Lusitania was in fact carrying ammunition for the allies to use against the Germans, so the attacks were appropriate. The sinking of the ferry SS Sussex had a large response from the U.S. The U.S. showed its concern to German submarine warfare whenever U.S. civilians died as a result of German attacks, which limited the effectiveness of the U-Boats. Although the Germans claimed victory at Jutland, the British Grand Fleet remained in control at sea. The U-boats sank 1.4 million tons of shipping between October 1916 and January 1917 which seriously hurt their opponents. On 17 March, German submarines sank three American merchant vessels, and the U.S. declared war on Germany in April 1917. Of the 360 submarines that had been built, 178 were lost but more than 11 million tons of shipping had been destroyed. They were very successful in the first world war.

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