ShipCraft 04 - Type VII U-Boats.pdf

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A new Type VII boat leaving the shipyard for sea trials, late 1940.
S
HIP
C
RAFT
4
TYPE VII
U-Boats
Roger Chesneau
Copyright © Chatham Publishing 2005
This edition published 2012 by Seaforth Publishing,
An imprint of Pen & Sword Books Ltd, 47 Church Street, Barnsley,
S Yorkshire S70 2AS
A CIP data record for this title is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-84832-123-6
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced
or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording, or any information storage
and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing of both
the copyright owner and the above publisher.
Typeset and designed by Roger Chesneau
Printed in China through Printworks Int. Ltd.
CONTENTS
Design
Careers
Model Products
Modelmakers’ Showcase
Schemes
Appearance
Plans
U 995: Last of Many
Selected References
Design
I
N
common with all naval construction of World War II, the design heritage of
German warships and combat craft can be traced directly to the experience
garnered during the first great conflict some twenty-five years earlier. Unlike the
rest of the world’s navies, however, the overbearing influence of the inter-war
years was not the Washington Treaty of 1922 but rather the Treaty of Versailles
of 1919, the harsh terms of which not only bred resentment within the German
naval heirarchy but also brought about a clandestine industry determined to keep
alive the technical expertise built up during 1914–18.
In March 1935 the British National Government published a White Paper
entitled Statement
Relating to Defence,
which in effect discarded the terms of
Versailles and recognised the right of Germany to rearm; three months later
Ramsay MacDonald’s ministers signed the Anglo-German Naval Treaty, one of
the most important provisions of which was that permitting Germany to build U-
boats once more, nominally up to a strength of 45 per cent of the British
submarine fleet but perhaps, ‘in case of danger [from Russia]’, to par—in effect,
a blank cheque.
This treaty, castigated by some writers as signalling the end of all hopes of
peace with Adolf Hitler, in fact did little more than recognise officially what was
taking place and inevitably would continue to take place—the build-up of the
German military machine. What it did not acknowledge, nor probably did it
tacitly understand, were the overbearing single-mindedness of the German
leadership to nullify what were construed as the injustices and indignities of the
Treaty of Versailles and Hitler’s arrogant determination to achieve unparalleled
German hegemony.

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