Uboat question

Carl, this is one for you. It's been bothering my quite some time:

What is the deepest depth ever reached by a German Uboat in WW2?

That it survived of course...

 

Hello Andreas, and thanks, that is a good question. I will get back to you as soon as I have a good answer for you.

 

Excellent!! I believe one of the runners-up may be U96 stranded on the bottom of the Gibraltar Strait (I believe it did really happen?), at 280 m.

 

Hello Andreas, im still looking for that answer. The library has been closed since jan 5th and now im on my way to work. If I get out early today--I can look some more for you.

 

Ship icon......

Guys, didn't a XII boot make an incredible deep dive on an experimental test ? I cannot remember and cannot find my files for this......any thoughts, and what I remember it was not on an operational cruise, of course I think this is what Andreas is looking for though......

questioning E

 

Any cruise is acceptable. For example, for top speed of a u-boat, I would always say the 28 knots achieved by V80.

 

OK Andreas, here is all I could get.

It was a type VII-C that made the longest plunge and it was somwhere in the Mediterranian.

It went 326 Metres by accident. This roughly equals about 1,000 feet.

I do not know exactly which Uboat it was or who commanded it.

Erich, I dont know if a XII did or not, I couldnt find anymore info.

Sorry it took so long but, I wanted to post it here yesterday but the internet wasnt working and I had to go to work.

[ 10 January 2002: Message edited by: C.Evans ]</p>

 

Damn, that's VERY VERY deep. Thanks a lot!!

 

I agree and your quite welcome, my friend.

 

Rülps !

any of our "newer" members come up with the answer(s) on this and yes I am going to bring back some of the golden oldies of 2001.

Herr Kaleun any info on this possibly ?

 

I ran across this on uboat.net - Re: deepest dive by u-boat:

 

With regard to the U96 sunk at 280 meters at the Strait of Gibraltar (See Das Boot - if all details are 100% true), the ship lay at the bottom of the ocean for 15 hours, during which the damage was rectified and the boat saved all its men. I guess this was the difference between the Uboat and any allied ship, if any ship was torpedoed by a U boat , in most cases , the ship and her crew were gone [ except for the faulty Norwegain campaign of the Uboat due to failed magnetic torpedoes], but in contrast, in this case, the U boat has been depth charged , sunk to the ocean and is still rectifiable. The engineering designs of the U boat must have been too good. I really have to salute the design engineers of the U-boat

I have a question for you guys. Much before the war, the british had developed a technology called [ASDET - Anti Submarine echo detectors], was the technology a failure? Else, how could the U boats have been so successful?

 

Sorry, it is ASDIC and not ASDET

 

You corrected yourself on the name so I'll put up an answer (as I see it) here to this question. ASDIC wasn’t a failure really, it was improved from its inception on post-WW1 and became one of the legs of the ASW (anti-submarine-warfare) systems of the allies. It was known as SONAR in the American lingo, and is still widely used in its newest forms. While it has become more and more sophisticated, the basic premise and workings remain as the original. Hardly a failure.

See:

uboat.net - Fighting the U-boats - Technical pages

And BTW, the U-Boats weren't all that successful really.

 

U-boats were used quite succesfully in world war 1, because although they were very primitive, the allies had absolutely no way to detect them. So if the Germans had cast their lot on the untersee boats at this time, the first war might have ended differently.

The problem of detecting submarines got a little better between the wars but not by much. Meanwhile the u-boats had made remarkable strides in marine technology, with greatly improved engines, armament, depth, and range. when world war 2 began no country was really as ready as it wanted to be, including the belligerents. (Admiral Erich Raeder and the other high-ranking officers in the German navy, wanted to wait for their ambitious ship-building programs to be complete before Germany started another war, and planned for war no sooner then 1950 - Hitler's rash strategy naturally dashed this faint hope.)

For the first 2 years of the war German u-boats ran wild, sinking hundreds of ships carrying vital cargo, and at one point in 1942 the U-boats were sinking British shipping faster then it could be built. Only the entry of the USA into the war, and the technology they brought to the problem, enabled the U-boats to be eventually neutralized.

When war begain in 1939, British technicians had very little to offer in the way of u-boat detection, what there was was primitive, inaccurate, and delicate. Little by little the u-boat detection technology got better but it was seldom or never the primary or most accurate way of finding the u-boats. What sunk the u-boats, literally, was Admiral Doenitz' manic need to stay in communication with his u-boats all the time. Even though his messages were encrypted by the famous enigma machine, the allies could still detect these radio transmissions and use them to home in the general area of the u-boats, as soon as the subs sent a return signal from their own radios.

The U-boats didn't fear surface ships as much as aircraft, until late in the war. When radar-equipped US B-24's and British Sunderland aircraft equipped with searchlights appeared mid-war, things got really hot for the u-boats. The boats depended on the cover of night to recharge their batteries while on the surface, allied airborne radar took away this cover and resulted in many u-boat sinkings.

but again most anti-submarine devices and tactics did not appear until well into the war. No country was really ready for anti-submarine warfare when they entered the war, even the US, which entered over 2 years into it.

 

success to failure depended on the faulty torpedo system under the Kriegsmarine belt this was just not for the U-Boot arm but the Zerstörer, Torpedoboot and Schnellboot arm as well.........

 

The U-boats had their best year in 1942, with 1321 ships hit, damaged or sunk. This was up almost double from two years before when 564 ships hit in 1940, and then the ships damaged or sunk dropped back to the pre-1942 levels, down to 579 ships hit in 1943, 246 ships hit in 1944, and in the truncated year of 1945, only 99.

 

i dont think the faulty torpodeos could have been a problem. Documented information says that magnetic torpodoes was a failure only in the norway campaign. Once Germany switched to "explode on contact" torpodoes, she never had a problem.

The problem lay mainly with England having captured and cracked the Enigma ciphers. So, any info between the uboats and German Navy H.Q was easily cracked by the British, the locations known and also the U boats were subsequently sunk.

Can someone give us more details about the "METOX" - the system used by the U boats to detect the presence of aircrafts hovering in their vicinity?

 

Yes 1942 was the "second happy time" when Germany began to attack America. Infact, the U boats have a better "second happy time" record than the "first happy time" which was against the British.

 

This links are a superb source: metox site:www.cdvandt.org - Buscar con Google







Jan.