Meanwhile, a new class of attack submarines was built (Tang class), which incorporated the design lessons of the German Type XXI. These were intended to be prototypes for a large class which would have been built during a future mobilization process, but the whole scheme was dropped in 1959. In 1951–2 three such submarines (Barracuda class) were commissioned. One development in early US Cold War naval strategy was a plan to prevent Soviet submarines leaving their home ports in war by positioning large numbers of specially-developed ‘hunter/killer’ ASW submarines outside the ports. Some were converted to troop transports to deliver covert parties to hostile shores, and others as seaplane refuellers. These included radar pickets, which were fitted with large radars to enable them to give mid-course guidance corrections to carrier-launched bombers and, later, to the Regulus submarine-launched cruise missile. Numbers of Second World War submarines were also converted for special roles. Greece and Turkey) they formed the backbone of the submarine service for the remainder of the Cold War. These conversions remained in service with the US navy until the early 1970s, and many were transferred to overseas, navies, within NATO in particular, where for some (e.g. Most were modified under the Greater Underwater Propulsive Power (the so-called ‘Guppy’) programme, in which they were streamlined, given much more powerful batteries, and fitted with sonars and snorkel tubes. The US navy found itself in 1946 with a vast stock of very recently built and virtually identical Second World War submarines, and a wide variety of conversions was made to these between 1946 and the mid-1950s. On receipt of these prizes, only the French and the Soviets put a few Type XXIs into service, while the Americans and British, after very careful examination and trials, used the design innovations, first to adapt their existing submarines, of which both had very large numbers, and subsequently as the basis for new designs. The Type XXIII was a smaller, coastal equivalent it too was fast and capable, although its value was limited by its ability to carry only two torpedoes.Īt the war’s end, the victorious Allies shared forty U-boats between them, with top priority being given to the Types XXI and XXIII they then scuttled the rest. Its underwater speed of 17 knots made it faster than most contemporary ASW ships, especially when there was bad weather on the surface. Compared with its predecessors, the Type XXI had a stronger and much more streamlined hull, a larger battery and new control systems which enabled it to fight underwater, and its snorkel tube enabled it to recharge its batteries while remaining submerged. Both were real submarines, whose natural habitat was below the surface and which surfaced only when forced to do so. With the memories of the German U-boat attacks in the north Atlantic still fresh, this perceived Soviet threat became one of the driving influences in NATO fleet development and deployment throughout the Cold War.įortunately for the Allies, the revolutionary new German submarines, the ocean-going Type XXI and the coastal Type XXIII, were only just entering service as the war ended, but there was no doubt as to their excellence. There was, however, one area in which they were believed to pose a significant threat: that of attack by diesel-electric submarines on Allied sea lines of communication across the Atlantic. The Soviets were outnumbered in every category, and had no ships at all to match the West’s aircraft carriers and amphibious shipping. When NATO became operational in the early 1950s the Soviet surface fleet was generally considered to be of minor importance, since it had achieved little of strategic significance during the Second World War and by the late 1940s most of its ships were obsolescent, if not obsolete. Diesel-electric submarines, which were also known as ‘conventional’ submarines, played a significant role in the Cold War from the very start.
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