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Japan/Germany - they couldn't REACH us to do much damage, even if they'd wanted to.

That's just not true. The German u-boats in particular were very much able to reach us, and cause significant damage. Operation Drumbeat in particular was able to do a surprising amount of damage. With only 5 u-boats, they were able to sink 25 American ships, many of them within sight of major US cities such as New York and Boston, all in the span of a single month.

Over the next few months, they managed to sink 22% of our tanker capacity, and well more than 2 million tons of cargo shiping.

It got to the point where the u-boat commanders were calling the time from January to August in 1942 the "American Shooting Season," and east coast cities and towns had to be blacked out after dark for most of the remainder of the war.

They couldn't invade, but Germans could certainly reach us all right.

The First Battle of the Atlantic
British submarines in World War One
His German Imperial Majesty's U-Boats in WWI
WWI German submarine has underwater Lake Michigan grave
German WWI Submarines (Pictures)
U-boat Attack, 1916
Anti-Submarine Measures from World War I
Depth Charges

You seem to be making a noise but it bears no relation to known fact

http://www.uboat.net/boats/listing.html

To quote Neal Stephenson: "ABANDON SHIT! ABANDON SHIT!"

In Nazi Germany, however, toilet malfunctions sink U-boats : http://www.uboat.net/boats/u1206.htm

http://uboat.net/boats/u110.htm
Google for U-110.

RAF pwn3d Brest only in 1944. :)

Interesting. Here's the fate of that particular boat, BTW:

http://uboat.net/boats/u264.htm

Put them on one side. Take the HMS Ark Royal, a small aircraft carrier from the modern Royal Navy. Put that on the other side. Which side wins?

The German in the Type XXI submarine packing active and passive SONAR, accoustic and wireguided torpedoes with power assisted loading, a truely effective whisper mode that defeats allied passive sonar and accoustic torpedoes and the capability to remain submerged for days on end? The Royal Navy got a very rude shock when they finally got their hands on one of them. Thankfully these boats came to late but they are the early ancestors of modern subs.

Doenitz was a GRAND ADMIRAL (Grossadmiral), not a mere ADMIRAL.

The term Wolfpack will forever be associated with the Nazi German Kriegsmarine.

The captain of U-81 responsible for sinking the Ark Royal, Herr Guggenberger, did not perish with it; he was transferred to another U-boat before its sinking, then badly wounded and taken prisoner by the Americans. He later escaped and fled through Arizona, to be recaptured. He died in 1988 in Germany when he simply disappeared in the woods.

I also am surprised at the idea of German POW running loose in the continental US.

I forgot that trivia fans have everything out there, some of it accurate.

The U-81

Note that it came up again, too!

i was a tour guide on the hudson for new york waterway for awhile.

there is supposedly pirates treasure.

it would be nice to find one of these, called "General Washington's Watch Chain."

maybe a german u-boat?

or relics from the age of steamboats.

the hudson is also pretty deep in places. off of west point, for example (206 feet), or near bear mountain bridge (165 feet). it is an ancient river, as old as the appalachians. some of it was carved during the last ice age, and is similar to a norwegian fjord. plenty of room down there.

check this gem out, bannerman's island. an old arms dealer from the spanish american war blew up the castle he built with his business profits by locating his arsenal right next to his castle on his private island. oops. i've kayaked around it and can make out weird shapes in the shallow muck between the island and the shore. wonder what you would find near there! ;-P

The U-570 had a history more bizarre than any movie. She was actually captured in 1941 by an aircraft. The captain raised the white flag after the sub was damaged by depth charges from an RAF Hudson. The aircraft circled her for several hours until Royal Navy and Canadian Navy ships arrived although by that time the crew had destroyed all the crypto stuff.

She was eventually brought back to the UK, renamed HMS Graph and comissioned into the Royal Navy. She did several combat patrols but never managed to sink anything. Around the end of the war, she ran aground on a Scottish Island and was abandoned.

link

Since the subject somewhat changed from Readhat 7.3 to submarines...

a group of Poles stole the machine and gave it to the Brits

May have been true for the first version of the Enigma (the one with 3 barrels), but the version used my the Reichsmarine (navy) had indeed four barrels and it was not until the British captured U-110 (Kptlt. Lemp) before they could crack the German sub's code. The Polish secret service provided a great deal of mathematical background for cracking the Enigma code. Computing power came from specialized machines called "bombs".

There was U-boat activity along the east coast of the U.S. during WWII. See this link .

Yes, they broke some codes. For instance, the Germans read British naval traffic for most, if not all, of the war.

But it's not as black-and-white as people usually put it. For instance, some German codes were never broken, despite Ultra. For more information, see this page at uboat.net. No doubt something like this will also have been true in the other direction.

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There are also some interesting Enigma pages at uboat.net. Unfortunately, that site seems to be having some database problems at the moment.

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