While even Great Britain began the war with marginally more submarines, the German performance, from 1940 on, far surpassed anything the British managed, as you will notice from the graph below (unfortunately, I think, Quora users do not like answers that contain graphs). But that is not exactly what it appears…
I should mention that different sources provide approximately different figures. Those that I have used below are the best I can find in relation to annual build numbers.
British S-class submarine – HMS Stonehenge. She had been launched in March 1943 and was lost, a victim probably of being mined, off the Nicobar Islands in March 1944, with all 48 man complement.
There was large mass production of U-boats by the Germans during WW2 as their war strategy with Western Allies as part of the Allies relied greatly on western allies being destroyed in Battle of Atlantic. They finally saw, and unfortunately too late in the war, that U-boats were their best hope of doing this. This meant that U-boat production skyrocketed from 1941 dwarfing British production.
We however, must consider losses. During WW2 the British lost 76 of their submarines while the Germans lost 784 U-boats on the side of Allied nations. Thus while the British lost approx. 34% of those submarines built, the Germans lost over 68%.
Despite of the peak of German production in 1943 that produced 286 U-boats, they lost the same number in 1943, so, their fleet was net increased by only 42 U- boats. In the same year the British built 36 new submarines but lost 13, so gained a net total of 23. Germany only succeeded to produce in net terms much more than the British in 1941 and 1942.
The bare truth is that submarines were not absolutely necessary to the British war effort while for Germany the U-boat was vital to their efforts at war. Given the extraordinarily high losses sustained by the U-boats Germany was forced to build them in very large numbers in order to have a chance at maintaining that effort in the Battle of the Atlantic.
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