Theocrat said:
Not just another pretty face!
Hagie Sophia said:
can I get a few tips to make them more effective in starving out the British Isles?
The link given by
Edzako and
Theocrat (click on the picture) leads to a thread called "Are Submarines Worthless?", in which I used U-Boats to put the UK completely out of the war in less than a year.
No matter how effective your U-Boat campaign becomes, don't expect to cripple them by running them out of resources, though... the UK's pre-war resource stockpiles are large enough to last for years.
It works the other way: by destroying their Convoy ships, you can prevent the UK from supplying any military forces outside the British home islands, thus reducing them to a world-spanning empire which can only fight on the home island... the rest of their empire (Egypt, India, Gibraltar, Malta, Singapore, etc) will be left out of Supply. Since they cannot supply an invasion of Europe without Convoys, you will be free to concentrate 90% of your forces against the USSR, while Militia hold the European beaches. Britain's overseas forces will starve-off and be eliminated due to lack of Supply, without costing the Axis a single casualty.
Another bonus is that the UK will not have the Convoy ships to move resources out of the colonies... so when you capture some distant British outpost (eg: India), you will harvest thousands of units of Rares and Oil.
My U-Boat strategy was based on the Distant Blockade: instead of using my U-Boats
near the British islands (where both Convoys and ASW-forces are common), I sent them to patrol-lines as far as possible from the UK. The essential point is that Convoy routes have to run
somewhere... so as long as I deployed my U-Boats to completely seal off the Atlantic from shore to shore, it didn't matter how far away from the UK they were positioned.
I used a double patrol-line strategy: an inner line running from the Grand Banks - the Seamounts - the Azores - the Portugese Coast; and an outer line running from the Coast of Recife - Cap Verde - Coast of Bissao plus Cap St Vincent (outside Gibraltar). This ensured that any British Convoy must cross
two lines of U-Boats in order to carry resources inbound to Britain, or Supplies outbound to the colonies. Because the patrol lines were far distant from the British Ports and Airbases, they were relatively safe from both ASW forces and Naval Bombers.
I initially used stacks of six U-Boats, and later deployed them each into two groups of three U-Boats. With eight areas to cover, six U-Boats per area, and a 25% reserve to replace lost and damaged boats, sixty flotillas of U-Boats were required.
Read the thread linked above for more details.
