"German Anti-Submarine Weapons & Tactics" Topic

Not unreasonably, the efforts of the Royal Navy to devise new ways to counter the U-boat threat gets what seems to be all the publicity. So does anyone know of any good books or websites telling the story of the German Navy's efforts to fight against the subs of the British?

Apart from depth charges, did they introduce any new and novel weapons, was their detection gear as good as – or better than – those deployed by the RN. and what tactics did they use?

I've tried searching for German anti-submarine tactics in WW2, but the search is swamped with hits for how the British fought the KM. The only thing I did read was a simple comment that there was nothing particularly subtle when the Germans went into action against a sub, but that's all I found.

Can anyone help?

Thanks guys.

I have only seen a very rare couple of references to German ships picking up enemy submarines on hydrophones and depth charging them. Seems their depth charging was weak – just a few charges to keep the subs down while the potential target (small convoy or capital ship) escaped the area. The Germans seem to have put much more emphasis on torpedo and mine development than on asw development.

Yea, I agree with Sundance.

Though to be fair, Allied DC'ing was very weak as well, up until 1942 – 1943, and really only from about mid-1943 did they really get the U-Boat situation under control, even with the ability to read all those German messages.

Some details on German depth charges here: navweaps.com/. The individual pages also cite their sources.

Ron

I wish there were some good reads about the axis ASW weapons and ships. There is a definite lack of info on German, Italian and Japanese ASW.

A pity. I understand most RN loses were to the Italians. The IJN were planning on massive ASW fleet build in reaction to their staggering losses.

Just a thought, there is some literature from the British submarines point of view. It seems like I recall they had a very hard time of it. I read a book a long time ago on it. Something like this one: link

Excellent suggestion, I never thought of that. :O) I think I'll order that book in the link Russell.