1940 British Minelaying

British Newsreel. January 29, 1940. During World War II the RAF Home Command laid 48,158 mines during the entire war in enemy waters and these sank 545 merchant ships of 591,143 tons gross and 217 assorted warships of 147,264 tons displacement. Over 20,000 additional mines were laid by surface ships and submarines. The success of these additional mines is not broken out, but "Naval Weapons of World War Two" claims that British mines in total sank 1,050 Axis warships and merchant ships and damaged a further 540. As opposed to the successes achieved via offensive mining, it appears that the British greatly overrated the effectiveness of mines as defensive weapons during World War II. Some 170,000 mines were laid in protective fields by surface ships, the majority in the Iceland and Faeroes passages. This massive effort resulted in exactly one U-boat (U-647) being sunk and had no appreciable effect on the number of U-boats engaged in anti-commerce operations. This might have been forecasted by a study of the 1918 Orkney to Norway mine barrier (also known as the North Sea Mine Barrage) which was an expensive failure. In some ways, these defensive fields restricted the Royal Navy more than the Kriegsmarine. For example, although the German small battleships Gneisenau and Scharnhorst were able to traverse the Dover Straits in 1942, the first British capital ship to do so was HMS Warspite, which passed that way only after the Normandy invasion in June 1944.(ref: www.navweaps.com)

Category:

News & Politics

Tags:

• British
• Royal
• Navy
• Naval
• Mines
• Minelayer
• Minefields
• North
• Sea
• English
• Channel
• 1940
• World
• War
• II

[BarondePencier]

Do you happen to know who read this newsreels?

[glaucon14]

Such happy music.

[frazzz1170]

@TheMrJamesG probably not, at the time people just went to cinemas to watch the news

[TheMrJamesG]

Was this broadcasted on television?

Thanks.

[itseasyforyou]

Nice video!