Quote:
Originally Posted by johndallman
He seems to have felt that making the passage out past Gibraltar would extremely risky, not worth attempting. Which is why the Italians doing it 28 times with no losses is interesting.
The straits are more than 7 miles wide, with depths up to 3000 feet. Not ultra-tight quarters - and the commonest U-Boat, Type VIIC, was only 769 tons, which is not huge. I suspect he felt that going out submerged, which is against the current in the surface layers, would be slow and allow them to be picked up on active sonar. That is fairly plausible, which makes the Italians' feat even more interesting.
|
The Germans tried to send 62 subs into the mediteranean, 9 were sunk while attempting and 21 had to abort due to damage or turned back due to high risk.
One reason why it is hard was that the british did patrol the Strait quite alot and that the currents going eastwards, into the med, was lighter in density and thus any sub trying to use the current to drift had to be closer to the surface. The current heading west out of the med can be quite strong with speed up to 4 knots and reduces the speed of any sub trying to go deep into the med and thus drains the battery as well as makes it easier to detect. Of course a sub drifting deep out from the med had alot of help from that current and it apparently took 5 hours to drift using no engines and with the current only if heading east. The strait is also at most 300 m deep while it at places is only 100 m deep
see
http://formontana.net/uboats.html and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strait_...ow_and_outflow