Anybody know if The Allies ever sank a Milk Cow.? Or, for that matter, did The Allies ever get an opportunity to board a Cow and take a look at one of these boats.? Thank You According to Wikipedia, it looks like there were 10 of these boats, and they were all sunk by the enemy. Would still be interested to hear what you guys know about these rather unique subs.....Thanks
Found this after a quick google search; looks like two were sunk. http://www.uboat.net/types/milkcows.htm
Look at the individual web pages for those ten Milch Cows, you will find that all 10 were lost - 7 to aircraft and three to surface forces. As to the concept, it was, essentially, an attempt to prolong the patrol time of the Type VIIs. Likely the Milch Cow concept was based on the fact that returning Type XI U-Boats would sometimes transfer unused fuel and torpedoes to any nearby U-Boats on patrol. The Type VIIs lacked "legs"(compared to US "fleet" boats & Japanese I-Boats, and torpedo capacity to conduct extended patrols. Further, Germany did not possess any forward submarine bases, which Britain, the United States, and Japan all utilized. When the Milch cows were first introduced, it was still a viable undertaking, however Allied advances in technology, coupled with ULTRA intercepts quickly put an end to major uses of the type.
Thanks for the info. Bad enough (dangerous enough) to be on sub duty. Imagine being out at sea, like a 7-11 store, and waiting for a lonely sub to resupply. Were the average (guess that is type 7) German subs smaller, more cramped than the average American, or British sub.? Thank You
With your interest in subs you may want to study the Japanese who had subs that carried aircraft.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-400_class_submarine
The uboat net site linked above has a huge amount of info on the topic and many things related to it. Very good place to check first if you have any questions. Huff Duff probably accounted for more uboats than Ultra and I suspect the Milchkuh were particularly suseptable to being located that way. Since finding the location of one might net you some other uboats or shorten their patrols they would have been considered high value targets.
If you are intersted in IJN subs another good page is: http://www.combinedfleet.com/kaigun.htm inparticular: http://www.combinedfleet.com/ss.htm http://www.combinedfleet.com/sensuikan.htm Somewhere on line I've also seen an account by the Japanese pilot that launched from a sub and dropped the only axis bombs on a US state during the war. Not counting the baloon bombs of course.
