U-boats of the Kaiser's Navy (New Vanguard) Review

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U-boats of the Kaiser's Navy (New Vanguard) ReviewU-Boats of the Kaiser's Navy is a brief survey of the early development of the German submarine service in 1906-1914 and operations in the First World War. Much of this thin volume is focused on the technical characteristics of the early U-Boats, and it does succeed in detailing the main features of the various early German submarine classes. Various sections cover the early development years, the various U-Boat classes, power plants, weapons and optics. German U-Boat operations in the First World War are covered in the last 13 pages of this volume, with sections covering one year at a time. The illustrations in the center of the volume mostly depict the various U-Boat classes, as well as a 2-page interior cutaway diagram of a Type UBIII submarine. Overall, U-Boats of the Kaiser's Navy is an adequate survey of its subject, but the coverage of some areas is marginal to nil.
A major deficiency of this volume is the lack of much statistical compilation effort by the author. While the author does mention the total number of U-Boats built, he fails to mention that a total of 178 were lost in the First World or that 5,000 crewmen were lost with those boats. The cause of U-Boat losses in the First World should also have been included, but it is not. The author does not ever bother to tally up total U-Boat achievements in either terms of tonnage or vessels sunk, nor are several top U-Boat commanders even mentioned. None of these statistics would have taken much space, just effort. Finally, the author's narrative ends at the armistice in 1918, without even bothering to mention the ultimate fate of the Kaiser's U-boats. The fact that Germany lost its entire U-Boat arm as a result of the war is not even mentioned.
The author provides very little assessment of the U-Boat campaign, but what he does provide is faulty; he notes, "the U-Bootwaffe [service] had represented Germany's only real chance to achieve a successful conclusion to the war." This assessment is ridiculous because it ignores the fact that Germany's idiotic decision to pursue unrestricted submarine warfare was the primary cause of American intervention in the war. Had the Kaiser forbidden unrestricted submarine warfare, the United States would have remained neutral and after 1917 Germany would have been fighting only a one-front war against the exhausted French and British armies. Without unrestricted U-boat warfare, Germany had a very real chance to achieve a military stalemate and a favorable negotiated peace in 1918. Furthermore, the great German U-boat campaign that the author promotes completely failed to stop the shipment of 2 million American doughboys to the Western Front; only 56 American servicemen were lost to U-Boat attacks. The author's final conclusion that the Kaiser's U-boats were not militarily defeated rings hollow; 50% of the boats commissioned were lost and while they inflicted serious damage, German U-boats failed to achieve their strategic objectives.U-boats of the Kaiser's Navy (New Vanguard) Overview

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