by Dr. Randy Papadopoulos
Between Fleet Scouts & Commerce Raiders Submarine Warfare Theories and Doctrines in the German and U.S. Navies, 1935-1945
Photo courtesy of the National Archives
The German Type VIIC submarine U-569 is shown here under attack by a plane from the USS Bogue (CVE-9) in the mid-Atlantic in May of 1943.
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S U M M E R 2 0 0 5 U N D E R S E A WA R F A R E
Writing in late 1942, Rear Admiral Kurt Aßmann, head of the German Kriegsmarine’s Historical Office, authored an article entitled “Transformations in the Conduct of War at Sea” (“Wandlungen der Seekriegsführung”). In that piece, Aßmann argued the naval power of Germany had finally overcome Allied maritime superiority by pursuing its new strategy of economic warfare, called cruiser warfare (Kreuzerkrieg). The prime agent for the execution of that transformation of naval warfare would be the German submarine force, its U-boats. Responding to the German experiences of the First World War, Aßmann argued that the National Socialist state would win the Second World War by better using its naval technology, in spite of its overall naval weakness.1 Since the U-boats of the Second World War were essentially improvements of their First World War predecessors, the prime change in German warfare would be in its methods, in this case its submarine doctrine.2 But the U-boat force would neither transform naval warfare nor win the Second World War. Instead it would be up to the United States Navy’s submarine force, at first trained to play a junior role in its own service, to revolutionize naval warfare by demonstrating the full potential of what a subsurface force could do.
