Merchant Navies of WW II

I could have sworn this topic heading had been created much earlier, but I could not find it.

http://www.marad.dot.gov/education/history/d_day.html

 

The courage and skill of the men of the various merchant services often goes overlooked, since the freighters are not nearly as sexy as the warships, nor were there any stirring naval battles in the conventional sense, just a lot of misery, hardship, and boredom that were interspersed with mortal danger.

 

Absolutely!

 

Read recently that also their pay stopped the moment the ship headed for the bottom. Drifting around in a lifeboat apparently didn't count as work.

 

Regarding the Merchant Marine, which nation in general had the best transports, and which had the fastest, I have always wondered...

 

Best depends on your point of view.
Apparently British sailors absolutely loved the Liberty ships because they had a laundrette, so no more 'dhobying' (washing clothes by hand).

 

Your average merchantman was not fast by most standards. This was especially true of the Liberty ships. As for "best", that would depend upon what criteria you were using. For general utility and reliability, I'd go with the Liberties.

 

I have always been told that Norway had the most modern merchant fleet in the world when Norway was invaded in 1940 but the source may have been biased.

But Norway had a very modern tanker fleet which came in very handy during the Battle of Britain, and it's a fact that not a single ship of the Norwegian merchant fleet followed Quislings orders to return to Norway after the German invasion. Every ship turned to Allied harbours except for a few which turned to neutral harbours. None turned to Norwegian or any other Axis held territory.

 

i'm sure that such a thing pissed of the germans. all those extra ships would come in handy. even when they are no longer needed you can use the steel to make tanks and kanons

 

Hitler inadvertently did the British a favour when he occupied Norway and Holland by playing two of Europes largest merchant fleets right into their hands.

 

and thus the U-boat crews had to do overtimes to destroy the convoys to Britain. i wondr, if those merchanst never joined the British, how long would it take before the U-boats would have blokked Britain by sea??

 

About as long as it took them without those extra merchant ships.

The U-boats never had a realistic chance of blockading Britain, especially after Dec 11, 1941.

 

but if america wasn't joining the war then radar would be develloped slower and thus the air attacks against subs at night would be less frequent as the germans got detection devices like "Naxos"

+ without america, there wouldn't be a mass production in destroyers that turned the tide of the war. the battle of the Atlantic was won by that mass production

 

Perfectly true about mass production winning the war (along with intelligent use of the results of that production). Would radar have been developed as quickly? Perhaps, perhaps not. Hard to say.

 

The Americans brought escort carriers, long range aircraft and warships to the Atlantic War which without it would be hard to tell when the tide had turned. If at all.

 

Again, perfectly true. The fact that all of these were produced in massive numbers helped. What also helped was the fact that the Japanese submarine arm, despite some impressive individual kills, never developed into a real threat, as the U-boats did. This reduced the need for escorts in the Pacific, allowing more to be used in the Atlantic convoys.

 

Private venture, and initiative, resulted in the great Mosquito aircraft. Another clever venture, though not so glamorous or famous, was THe British MAC convoy ships which looked much like a CVE, but with no elevator, carried only 4 Swordfish. However, this ship carried cargo as well!
Normal cargo (bulk cargo at least, such as grain), plus patrol/ASW aircraft also, I thought it was ingeneous.
Hats off to sailors & pilots who served in North Atlantic conditions, where life expectancy in the water could be as little as a mere 30 seconds.

 

The MAC ships were indeed a brilliant idea. No U-boat was ever sunk by planes from a MAC ship, but no convoy which had a MAC ship in it suffered any losses from submarine attack. It's too bad that they weren't available in 1940 or 1941; they might well have cut the heavy Allied merchant ship losses. at least to some degree.

 

And I should have mentioned that the Merchant Aircraft Carrier MAC ships were not all British crewed either. At least some were Dutch, possible Norwegian and Canadian also? Does anyone know?

 

The entire Norwegian merchant fleet sailed for the Allies during the war. The number of Norwegian sailors that sailed (and died, IIRC) are in the tens of thousands.