SaltyWaffles
I am dissapoint, son
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I feel like I should point out that German convoys would not be going anywhere near the kinds of distances Allied convoys tended to. We're talking "Germany to Norway" or "Italy to North Africa".
And, ultimately, it doesn't need to be some kind of super-extensive thing. All it takes is one instance of a battleship raiding a convoy to get surprise torpedoes from a submarine before the French navy decides against sending its capital ships on merchant raiding missions. Which is a result you could achieve with just one submarine escorting a convoy.
The reason why something like that was never attempted in WW2 was because attacks on merchant shipping by surface action were very rare (not counting carrier attack, which is different because it's by aircraft, and subs are largely useless against aircraft). Graf Spee and Gneisenau are the only notable cases that come to mind, and Graf Spee was sunk after only a brief career (and Gneisenau was sunk the one time she did attempt such an attack). And since both of those cases were against British shipping, and the British had few submarines...
I mean, there were some cases of Japanese surface warships attacking enemy merchant shipping in the days of ABDACOM's collapse, but that's hardly a good example--American subs in the area were relatively few in number, busy trying to strike back at the enemy or monitor approaches to what Allied possessions remained, or fleeing to increasingly distant submarine bases (and their commander was a total moron who squandered the submarine force and ignored all of the reports of torpedo failures...and had his submarine base within easy striking distance of enemy air attack from enemy airfields, even days after Pearl Harbor).
The reason why it isn't a crazy idea for (hypothetically) a war between Germany and France is because there wouldn't be that much French merchant shipping to attack, nor would there be much German shipping to defend. And you'd have plenty of submarines to spare even after deploying some on coastal defense and attack missions, since Germany's navy would (hypothetically) be a mostly-submarine force meant for dealing with the contingency of war with Britain. Besides, the idea isn't so much to protect the convoy from all attack, but rather to punish attackers and make the tactic of attacking a convoy with surface warships too risky to be worth it.
Regardless, the notion that German high command had good reason to believe that war with Britain (even as late as 1938) wasn't a real possibility is absurd. It's doubly absurd when you consider that Britain entered WW1 because Germany invaded Belgium (violating its neutrality)...and the German plans of invasion against France all involved invading Belgium. But once they did make the (extremely belated) realization, they should have shifted priority over to submarine construction immediately, but they didn't.
Er, what? A near-miss from a battleship gun (or any gun) won't kill one. Hell, it probably wouldn't even damage it. American and German submarines were built very tough, and they could take some astounding punishment to kill. There was even an instance of an American sub taking a hit clean through its hull, but the sub survived, escaped on the surface, and managed the flooding well enough to travel long-distance through enemy-controlled waters and past enemy-held islands on the surface.
I can't recall a single instance of an American submarine being damaged enough by depth charges that it was forced to surface and was sunk by gunfire (American subs were amazingly resistant to depth charge attack, provided they didn't explode extremely close--or right next to--the hull. They might not have been able to dive as deeply as their German counterparts, but they were built so ruggedly that depth charge attacks needed to be very accurate to deal fatal/crippling damage).
Generally, most of what forced a submarine to surface was relentlessness--keeping the sub suppressed for so long that it ran out of air or battery power and had to surface to avoid suffocating the crew. Damage by depth charges helped, but it was kind of rare that depth charges would do enough damage to force a submarine to surface but not do enough damage to fatally compromise the pressure hull (resulting in the sub imploding from the water pressure).
There was an instance where an American submarine came under depth charge attack, which caused the depth gauge to get stuck, and the officer managing the depth-control was inexperienced and made a big mistake (since the gauge was stuck at a certain depth level, he had the sub keep rising without realizing he was doing so, resulting in the submarine surfacing right in front of a destroyer). He decided to go down with the ship. But since it was operator error (from inexperience and poor judgment) that caused the eventual sinking and not the damage from the depth charge attack, it doesn't count.
Germany literally didn't care about not legally being allowed to build submarines. It started violating the Treaty of Versailles rather quickly. Germany also went to great lengths to keep its expertise with submarine construction and technology, and started development of submarines again many years before the war. It already had a substantial number of submarines before the Bismarck was even ordered, IIRC. As for why no one did it--see my posts above. We're talking about a hypothetical situation in which Germany's navy is predominantly submarines, eschewing capital ships entirely, in a war against France. Thus, it has many subs to spare, and limited shipping to protect.
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