General Discussions
This is the place to discuss general issues related to the U-boat war or the war at sea in WWII.
Inflation of Tonnage
Posted by:
Ying
()
Date: January 11, 2001 08:56AM
<HTML>Hi Rainer,
I have thought of discussing the inflation of tonnage by uboat commanders in a new post, but since you have brought up the question here¡ we may well start the discussion here.
I don¡¯t know before that Hardegen was notorious for his overclaims, I know that Schepke was. The degree of discrepancy between Hardegen¡¯s claimed and actual tonnage, as Gannon said, ¡°was not unusual in the Ubootwaffe and as a rule Admiral Doenitz accepted the inflated figures uncritically.¡± Also Gannon has provided us with a very good example here: ¡°BdU accepted 325,000 GRT as the ¡®colossal success¡¯ figure for the ¡®Night of the Long Knives¡¯ (17-19 October 1940) when the actual tonnage was 152,000 GRT.¡±¡ªA much greater discrepancy than that of Hardegen¡¯s case! Thus if one could regard Hardegen as a ¡°braggart¡± according to his degree of discrepancy regarding tonnage, I¡¯m afraid that a lot more aces would also have to be labeled as such.
The problem here was whether commanders intentionally did so to win fame and honor or they overestimated their victims by mistake, but this is really hard to judge.
Best regards,
Ying
P.S. Gannon¡¯s book also had it that the same degree of discrepancy ¡°was also found in US Navy¡¯s submarine force, where skippers¡¯ total claims of 4,000 ships and 10 million tons were revised downward after the war to 1,314 ships and 5.3 million tons.¡±
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I have thought of discussing the inflation of tonnage by uboat commanders in a new post, but since you have brought up the question here¡ we may well start the discussion here.
I don¡¯t know before that Hardegen was notorious for his overclaims, I know that Schepke was. The degree of discrepancy between Hardegen¡¯s claimed and actual tonnage, as Gannon said, ¡°was not unusual in the Ubootwaffe and as a rule Admiral Doenitz accepted the inflated figures uncritically.¡± Also Gannon has provided us with a very good example here: ¡°BdU accepted 325,000 GRT as the ¡®colossal success¡¯ figure for the ¡®Night of the Long Knives¡¯ (17-19 October 1940) when the actual tonnage was 152,000 GRT.¡±¡ªA much greater discrepancy than that of Hardegen¡¯s case! Thus if one could regard Hardegen as a ¡°braggart¡± according to his degree of discrepancy regarding tonnage, I¡¯m afraid that a lot more aces would also have to be labeled as such.
The problem here was whether commanders intentionally did so to win fame and honor or they overestimated their victims by mistake, but this is really hard to judge.
Best regards,
Ying
P.S. Gannon¡¯s book also had it that the same degree of discrepancy ¡°was also found in US Navy¡¯s submarine force, where skippers¡¯ total claims of 4,000 ships and 10 million tons were revised downward after the war to 1,314 ships and 5.3 million tons.¡±
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