">This officers opinions were ignored and radar equipped ships eventually were a major part of the countering of the U-Boats.<" Thanks for confirming that Seetakt could pick up surfaced U-boats at close range. I had suspected as much. Poor Dönitz, he finally gets to prove his "Rudeltaktik" and someone rains on his parade. Had he been a truly pragmatic forward thinker like Guderian, he would have accepted the experimental evidence and immediately set up an R+D project for moving U-boat warfare fully below the surface. BTW, Dönitz's lack of foresight also showed through in his handling of the torpedo crisis, something which should never have happened.

You have identified the main problem of the Kriegsmarine, ossified leadership. Raeder and his gang of battleship admirals were hopeless, but I am slightly surprised that Dönitz did not pick up on the radar issue earlier. He was obviously listening to the wrong advisors. Radar equipped ships were certainly responsible for the initial U-boat reverses in the second half of 1941.

The root cause of the Kriegsmarine's defeat is over conservative leadership which was not questioned by the political leadership, which knew nothing about naval warfare. The only way Germany could have gotten an advanced navy was to at minimum put some promising mid level officers, such as the one you mentioned, on the fast promotion track or, at best, fire the battleship admirals and replace them with younger, forward looking officers.

As to teardrop designs, you make a good case for the situation as it existed which was that there was no time to develop such boats after the naval leadership became interested in them. Had the project to develop a true submarine started in the late 1930s, then there would have been enough time to build and test prototypes, identify problems and fix them and, BTW, to develop the necessary sonar equipment and torpedoes.

">When the Americans reviewed German hydronamic research they found that the Germans had done virtually no work on the aspect of high speed stability and control of their new U-Boats.<" I am always a bit leery of post war Allied evaluations of German technology, especially when they show up negative results. Remember the Allies often did not get all the data or hardware and sometimes they were deliberately led up the wrong path. In this particular case, assuming what the Americans found reflected the true picture, you have to see there was little time to get involved in high speed control problems. In the case of the Walter boats there were so many problems getting the drive to work that there were probably no resources left for anything else. In the case of XXI, it was take it or leave it. There was no time for anything fancy. The electoboat development was started at least 4 years too late to have a decisive effect on the war.

Regards,
SuperKraut