Early Imperial Germany U-Boot
Posted by Mitch Williamson in Submarine on Thursday, October 6, 2011
U-5 CLASS (1910)
U-5 (8 January 1910), U-6 (18 May 1910), U- 7 (28 June 1910), U- 8 (14
March 1911)
Builder: Germania
Displacement: 505 tons (surfaced), 636 tons (submerged)
Dimensions: 188900 x 18940 x 119100
Machinery: 4 Körting kerosene engines, 2 electric motors, 2 shafts. 900
bhp/1040 shp = 13.5/10.25 knots
Range: 1900 nm at 13 knots surfaced, 80 nm at 5 knots submerged
Armament: 4 x 450mm torpedo tubes (2 bow, 2 stern), total 6 torpedoes
Complement: 29
Notes: Hans Techel designed this class, bringing
together the best features of earlier Germania and
Unterseebootkonstruktionsbüro boats. Apart from the continued use of kerosene
engines for surface propulsion, they were the equals of, or superior to, their
foreign contemporaries, and were in front-line service at the outbreak of World
War I. The U- 5 was mined off Zeebrugge on 18 December 1914. The U-22 torpedoed
and sank the U-7 in error on 21 January 1915; the British destroyers Ghurka and
Maori sank the U- 8 near Dover on 4 March 1915; and the British submarine E- 16
torpedoed and sank the U- 6 off Stavanger on 15 September 1915.
Despite Bauer’s early work and the considerable effort
expended on submarines in both Russia and France in the later nineteenth
century, there was little German interest in the type until the dawn of the
twentieth century. The Krupp industrial conglomerate, however, saw the
potential for a new market and began working aggressively to stimulate it. It
began by building a small boat designed by a Spanish engineer, Raimondo Lorenzo
D’Equevilley-Montjustin, whose ideas owed much to Nordenfelt’s submarines. His
Forelle proved moderately successful but did not attract German naval
attention. Fortunately for Krupp, lack of U.S. Navy interest in his designs led
Simon Lake to turn to Europe as a market for his boats. He attempted to
negotiate a license arrangement with Krupp, in the process transferring much of
his design information to the firm as an inducement. The deal fell through, but
Krupp retained the data; D’Equevilley exploited this knowledge to produce a
very competent design that found buyers in Russia, Norway, Austria- Hungary,
and Germany. This activity stimulated official interest, leading the Torpedo
Department of the Imperial German Navy to set up the
Unterseebootkonstruktionsbüro in 1904, led by Gustave Berling; it developed its
own somewhat similar submarine design, which went into production in 1907.
The departure of the non-German D’Equevilley and his
replacement by Hans Techel on 1 July 1907, opened the way for cooperation
between Krupp and the navy and rapid design development in the years before
World War I. The result was technical improvement and growth in size and
capabilities, although it is notable that the navy was slow to adopt diesel
engines in place of gasoline or oil engines.
During World War I the Imperial German Navy accepted some
100 new boats of the Mobilization type, a largely standardized design subject
to continual improvements culminating in the Mittel-U type, which proved very
capable. These standard submarines were supplemented by mass-produced coastal
boats particularly suited to the geographic advantage of operating from
Flanders against enemy shipping from 1915. The UB series of conventional submarines
evolved, from very small UB-I boats of 127 tons with 14-man crews, to the
516-ton UB-III boats that were essentially diminutives of the Mittel-U type.
The parallel UC series of coastal minelaying submarines followed a similar
evolutionary path. In addition, the navy also commissioned a few full-size
minelayers and a series of very large, long-range boats, the U-cruisers.
Post WWI Influence
German submarine designs exerted a major influence, either
directly or indirectly, on most of the world’s submarine development in the
years between the two world wars—except in Britain and, to a lesser extent, the
Soviet Union. All the major navies of the victorious Allies—Britain, France,
Italy, Japan, and the United States—received examples of the latest German U-boats
under the terms of the Armistice and the Treaty of Versailles. They intently
examined and analyzed these German craft to determine the applicability and
suitability of their features for incorporation into their own types and, in
several instances, commissioned former German submarines into their own
services to acquire operational experience in their use. Both Italian and
French designers were very much influenced by studying and operating examples
of the later Mittel-U and UB-III types prior to developing their first new
postwar boats. The big U-cruisers had even more impact. The first French
oceangoing submarines, the Requin class, benefited substantially from their
designers’ study of U-cruisers. The big U.S. Navy fleet boats owed a great debt
to the German boats (including even their diesel engines, in some cases), and
German engineers were intimately involved in the development of the early
Japanese kaidai and junsen types.
German design influence spread to lesser fleets too, largely
through the activities of the Ingenieurskantoor voor Scheepsbouw (IvS). The IvS
was established in July 1922 at Den Haag in The Netherlands by a consortium of
the Krupp and Vulcan shipbuilding yards to circumvent the Versailles Treaty’s
prohibition on submarine design and construction. The engineering staff was led
by Hans Techel, who had headed Krupp’s submarine design team since 1907, and
the firm also received clandestine financial support from the German Navy,
which was desirous of maintaining German submarine design expertise despite the
treaty. IvS engineers produced submarine designs that were constructed for
Turkey, Finland, the Soviet Union, Spain, and Sweden, and also served as
prototypes for the German Navy’s Type IIA coastal, Type IA long-range, and Type
VII oceangoing U-boats.
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