February 12, 1946

The U-Boat Graveyard: Or Why Germany Has To Stay in the Shallow End.

Well, we're almost afraid to show our faces around these parts lately, given this blog's laughable rate of production, but all the same we're proud to say that Lies Agreed Upon is back with a bang here in the middle of February. Call it a Valentine's Day gift to our wonderful readers, whose French sensibilities are soothed by the romantic. All the same, we appreciate your patience during this apparent "work stoppage."

We dive right back into the water today, and turn back the clock to a war ravaged Europe less than a year after Adolf Hitler's Third Reich had collapsed into rubble. One of the many steps it would take to rebuild the continent was getting rid of the countless pieces of war that Germany suddenly no longer needed. Tanks, vehicles, guns, planes (if there were any left), small arms; all the surrendered working parts of a war machine that had been dismantled. Included in the tally were over 154 vessels of the Kriegsmarine's prized U-Boat fleet.





Officers salute from the tower as U-107 sets out from Lorient, France, 1942.










U-Boats or Unterseeboote, were the scourge of the blue water at one point in the war, and for that matter, played the same role a generation before. Pan-European conflicts tend to make land powers like Germany susceptible to blockade, particularly when the British are fighting on the other side. Under both Hitler and Kaiser Wilhelm II, the Germans turned to unrestricted submarine warfare to break the blockade and cut England's lifeline to the outside world.

We enjoy the debate on the effectiveness of this tactic for two reasons, the first of which is the reaction of the United States. In both wars, U-Boats succeeded in sinking millions of tonnage and likely cost billions of dollars in losses, but in both conflicts they caused Germany to incur the wrath of a growing superpower. In 1917, knowing full-well what the response would be, the Germans unleashed their unrestricted subs on American ships and brought the U.S. into the war. Prior to Pearl Harbor, German wolf packs, or groups of subs, hunted in waters as far West as the Gulf of Mexico. This succeeded only in driving the U.S. to aid the Allies to the point of undermining her status as a neutral.

The sinking of the RMS Lusitania in 1915 caused outrage in the United States, and the Germans halted their unrestricted submarine warfare. When it resumed in 1917, it drove the US to enter the war.

To us, the cost of bringing an immensely powerful enemy into the fray is not covered by the success the subs did have. But what really pique's our interest about the U-Boat is the fact that Germany had to turn to them at all. Looking back, it was the build up of the Imperial German surface fleet that first alarmed Europe's established powers. At the turn of the 20th Century, the Kaiser's desire to launch a fleet to rival England's posed a challenge to the long recognized ruler of the waves. Yet when hostilities broke out, Germany was out of her league at sea and her new ships spent most of the war bottled up in port. As it happened, the oceans would be her downfall.

It was the oceans that brought the supplies an exhausted Britain needed to survive until 1918; that brought millions of fresh American troops when the First World War was still very much in doubt; that saved England from invasion after Dunkirk; that kept supplies from Rommel in North Africa; that carried thousands of tanks and planes to the Soviet Union on the frigid "Murmansk Run"; and it was from over the oceans that wave after wave of Allied troops came to places like Casablanca, Salerno, and Normandy.

Germany's designs on a surface fleet made her persona non grata at the European power table, but she never built an armada even close to what was feared. Because of this, she was forced to dive below the surface in two World Wars, thus creating more enemies than she could handle. On February 12, 1946, a little over nine months after the U-Boat fleet was surrendered, over 120 German submarines were scuttled in Operation Deadlight; blown up and sunk intentionally off the coast of Northern Ireland.




52 U-Boats are prepared for scuttling as part of Operation Deadlight, February 1946.









Germany had long desired a world renowned fleet, and the one scuttled in Deadlight was infamous indeed. But designs on a navy caused an exhaustive world war and planted the seeds for the vengeance-fueled second. The fleet they got might not have been exactly the one the Germans pictured, but it brought on a host of enemies just the same. When the U-Boats were finally scuttled it was the end of a sad chapter in naval history, and closed the book on Germany as a world naval power.