"German U-boat histories of the Second World War are dominated by the period 1940–43 and written by, or about, veterans that never saw a single operational patrol in a snorkel-equipped U-boat. Out of the top twenty-five U-boat aces of the war, only one – Heinrich Lehmann-Willenbrock – commanded an operational snorkel-equipped U-boat. However, he did not take part in the inshore campaign during this cruise. Well-known U-boat commanders including Kretschmer, Lüth, Topp, Merten, Prien, Schepke, Witt and Lemp never experienced a patrol on a snorkel-equipped U-boat nor had any understanding of its potential.
Lothar-Günther Buchheim, author of the popular anti-war book Das Boot, never sailed on a snorkel-equipped U-boat. Yet he disparaged the device in his follow-on 1976 book Der U-Boot Krieg, even though he admitted ‘it was a life saver'. The U-boat force was given an ‘orthopedic contraption', Buchheim stated colourfully, by leadership that called it an ‘epochmaking invention'. While Dönitz gave the snorkel device due credit in his post-war memoir, he also had no practical experience with the snorkel and spent only about twenty pages covering the period of the U-boat war from 1944–45. He longed only for the day his ‘wolves' could return to the heyday of convoy warfare.
The problem in German U-boat veteran historiography is that no one grasped how the snorkel fundamentally altered the nature of submarine warfare. The potential resumption of anti-convoy operations remained paramount in the minds of Dönitz and his U-boat men because it recalled the heyday of success and brought meaning to the force's sacrifices. However, there was never going to be a resumption of such operations because the challenge of submerged communications was never overcome during the war. Not even the introduction of the Type XXI ‘wonder weapon' was going to change that fact. There was never a post-war survey by German naval historians of the impact of the snorkel within the U-boat fleet, leaving the broader understanding of the Battle of the Atlantic overwhelmingly distorted towards the earlier period of convoy battles…"
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Armand
experiments to find a better way to mount aircraft for wargaming.
