U-boats were German submarines used in World War I and II. The Type VIIC U-boat was the primary type used in the German U-boat Campaign. The British merchant convoy system and destroyer escorts helped defeat Germany, as did cracking the Enigma Code.
A U-boat is a type of submarine invented by the Germans for use in World War I and World War II. The initial “U” in U-boat stands for “unterseeboot”, or submarine boat in English. Holland hosted a “Submarine Development Office” in 1922 which was made to look like an ordinary shipbuilding company. German U-boat designers had to secretly stockpile special parts when they worked to improve their U-boats.
The Type VIIC U-boat was the primary type of U-boat used in the German U-boat Campaign. VIIC contained a crew of 56 and 14 torpedoes. The first U-boat military campaign involved 20 U-boats. When the United Kingdom (UK) declared war on the German Empire on 4 August 1914, the Germans sent 10 U-boats on 6 August 1914 and the remaining 10 later that month. None of the U-boats sank any British vessels, but suffered heavy German casualties.
The German’s second U-boat campaign did much better, sinking 3 UK ships and killing 1,460 British sailors by 22 September 1914. The U-boats were proving their might and the Germans were sinking enemy shipping faster than than the British could build them. Since the British had little defense against powerful U-boats, they invented the “Q-ship” designed to sink U-boats. The Q-ships worked, but the German skippers soon learned how to avoid the Q-ships, so the Q-ships destroyed less than 10% of all U-boats.
However, when the British merchant convoy system was introduced, it worked for the UK in successfully destroying German U-boats. British destroyer escorts (DE) helped defeat Germany with technologies such as sonar, radar and depth charges. U-boats had caused heavy damage in the Battle of the Atlantic until the DEs arrived. The Battle of the Atlantic took place along the coast of the United States (USA) to the Gulf of Mexico.
Even cracking the Enigma Code, known as the “German U-Boat Code”, eventually helped defeat the Germans in WWII. The Enigma code was cracked by Polish cryptanalyst/mathematician Marian Rejewski in 1933 and given to the British. The Germans used typewriter-like machines to encrypt the codes in their U-boat communications.
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