The Dutch scuttled O 11 in 1940, but Germany raised the fifteen-year-old submarine and continued repairing it for years. The boat never returned to useful service before being scuttled again as a harbor obstruction. In this assessment, the steel, labor, and yard capacity could have produced more value elsewhere than in a prolonged attempt to recover an aging foreign design. O 11 becomes a concrete example of institutional inertia and the opportunity cost of wartime repair programs.
Notable Point · 48:13-50:18
O 11 exposes the resource inertia of German salvage plans
Germany spent years trying to restore the scuttled O 11, prompting a critique of resources trapped in an obsolete salvage project.