Royal Netherlands Navy Submarines

[Jakko Westerbeke]

In Europe, when Germany invaded the Netherlands, most of the navy’s submarines evacuated to the UK, where as I recall, their most modern piece of kit, the snuiver,¹ was soon removed by the British because they saw no use for it. The Germans, though, captured a few subs with this device and pretty quickly copied it for their own boats, calling it Schnorchel.

Just looking at a list of Dutch submarines shows that many in both Europe and Asia remained in use after the surrender of the Netherlands and the Netherlands East-Indies, respectively, and several even until after the war (the English-language equivalent doesn’t show dates in the list, making it a lot more work figuring that out).

This seems to be a fairly good look at the subject, though I haven’t watched all of it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tA3r7ZxuS9s


¹ Which, I just learned, was the reason for the Dutch navy to distinguish between the duikboot (lit. “dive boat”) and the onderzeeboot (lit. “undersea boat”): the former is capable of submerging but not of staying underwater for extended periods, the latter can.