German U-Boat Flotillas, 1939-45

German U-Boat Flotillas, 1939-45
v.1.0 April 7, 2002

Information extracted from U-Boat.net, with the permission of gummi@uboat.net, Mr. Gudmundur Helgason of Iceland. The site, among other things, a complete list of all U-boats with all known details.

The correct German notation for, say, 1^st Flotilla would be 1.Unterseebootsflottille

Combat Flotilla	Base	Training Flotilla	Base
1^st	Brest	4^th	Stettin
2^nd	Lorient	5^th	Kiel [See Note]
3^rd	La Rochelle	8^th	Danzig
5^th	Kiel [See Note]	18^th	Hela
6^th	St. Nazaire	19^th	Pillau
7^th	St. Nazaire	20^th	Pillau
9^th	Brest	21^st	Memel
10^th	Lorient	25^th	Libau
11^th	Bergen	26^th	Pillau
12^th	Bordeaux	27^th	Gotenhafen
13^th	Trondheim	31^st	Hamburg
14^th	Narvik	32^nd	Konigsberg
23^rd	Salamis
29^th	La Speiza
30^th	Konstanza
33^rd	Flensburg

Note: The 5^th Flotilla was disbanded as a combat unit and then reconstituted as a training unit.

The importance of French and Norwegian bases to the U-boat war can be seen from the list of combat flotillas. The US, Japan, and the British used their navies to project force from the sea to the land. The Germans used their army to help their navy project force at sea.

We may speculate that the high ratio of training to combat flotillas was due not just to the German passion for detailed training, but also to the high U-boat loss rate.