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> if the enemy knew its rough location In these words you hit bull eye. During WWII, submarines was just very special type of boat. You could check wikipedia about German u-boats - exist about TEN subtypes, from which only latest types have really significant underwater range, but all others was extremely limited in underwater activity. But, surface ships of that time was even more limited, many could not achieve even half of surface speed of u-boat, so become easy prey. But if you will try to find some artificial object on sea surface, that is really hard question. Just because sea is huge, so you need to check extremely large space in short time. Radars are better to spot artificial object on sea surface than visual, just because radar easier to automate. But nothing more. Radar is also have problem of square distance, very similar to visual. So, as it is hard to spot partially surfaced submarine visually, it also hard to spot such sub with radar, because much less part will be on surface, so radar will have much less signal to detect. Periscope size is nearly undetectable on surface, if it used carefully, just outside detection range of radar. So, to conclude, Ukraine problem is, we cannot detect partially surfaced submarines on open sea, but they could fire missiles. Fortunately, Russians have very few submarines on Black sea, and after they was hit at harbors, their usage become very limited. |
Agree with most of what you said, but U-boats generally had top surface speeds under 20 knots and were thus slower on the surface than most naval vessels of the time. They could certainly move faster than most convoys, but they couldn’t outrun pursuing destroyers or corvettes.