Yes and no. ;')
Posted on 05/21/2016 6:33:24 AM PDT by C19fan
A century ago, the two greatest fleets of the industrial age fought an inconclusive battle in the North Sea. The British Grand Fleet and the German High Seas Fleet fielded a total of fifty-eight dreadnought battleships and battle cruisers, ships over the twice the size of most modern surface combatants. Including smaller ships, the battle included 250 vessels in total.
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalinterest.org ...
The British “could have” built and tested the worldest best gunnery aiming and control system.
But they played office politics, and selected what the admiral decided HE wanted as a favorite.
If your aim is off, if your telescopes and sights are poor, if you can’t calculate the enemy’s future position, your shells miss.
When their shells hit ... The battlecruisers were dead.
Perhaps so. And perhaps you could get someone to explain redundant to you.
It appears that it is you that needs a dictionary.
Hardly.
The Germans couldn’t really tactically coordinate subs with surface units by WW2 either despite concerted attempts to disrupt the Murmansk convoys.
Even operating battleships with differing cruising speeds & tactical turning radii was difficult — which is one reason that the US stuck with the “Standard” battleship for interoperability reasons. (This changes with the “fast battleship” concept)
British battleship divisions were kept to a single class/type and really couldn’t operate in a common battle line due to speed & turning differentials.
Once countries get caught in an arms race their acquisitions tend to get out of hand. I don’t think England or France was going to poach Germany’s colonies, and the Germans didn’t need to build a navy that could potentially challenge Britain’s naval supremacy to deal with local colonial insurgencies. Building a navy that was big enough and powerful enough to take on Britain was precisely the one thing that would win Germany Britain’s enmity.
Jeremy Clarkson:
If you are a German and you have any complains of the film you just seen do please feel free to write to us. Our address is: 1966 El Alamein Square, 1939-1945 Jutland Street, London W.E.1.
Yes and no. ;')
After Britain backed France in the First Moroccan Crisis which almost kicked off a European war that no one was really ready for, the Germans didn’t have much choice other than starting to arm with the Brits as prospective enemies. If the Brits had stayed out of the German-French confrontations, the Germans probably could have gotten by with a much less threatening navy to deal with the French and Russians.
The buildup was proven to be the correct course of action when the British fleet forced the Germans to back down in their confrontation with the French in the Second Moroccan
Crisis 5 years later.
And the German policy was never to match the British. The plan was for a fleet 2/3 as powerful as the British, with which they had to face the French and Russians as well (When war broke out, they were actually a little ahead of this, but the British construction after the outbreak of war greatly exceeded the Germans. The Austrians weren’t much help; they had 4 dreadnaughts and 9 pre-dreadnaughts by the beginning of World War I, while the Turkish fleet was such a joke that the Germans had to give them 2 ships to patrol the Black Sea. (The French had 4 and 15, respectively; the Russians were in slightly better shape than the Turks.)
Germany needed an ocean-going fleet once it had an empire; there was no way around that.
Thanks!
It was no accident that the revolution that caused the abdication of the Kaiser started with the idled seaman of the High Seas Fleet. They had come out ahead in Jutland in terms of total casualties yet then had to sit out the war in worsening conditions (rationing and such).
I believe when we were testing naval aviation and bombing (with Billy Mitchell) we used some of those German ships as the unlucky targets.
As I understand it the only reason we kept battleships so long was because Marines insisted on having the big guns prep for and support amphibious landings; not the task for which they were designed, but a task they did extremely well. Aircraft and missiles have made large ships practically obsolete (with the possible exception of carriers); nowadays much naval construction is just about keeping people employed (or on stand-by, depending on your POV).
Yep. Battleship Ostfriesland was bombed repeatedly by Mitchell’s planes and almost became `the ship that refused to die’. They pounded it and pounded it; finally she turned turtle. He barely won the argument about naval air power & still got court-martialed.
Jutland had proven that German naval architecture emphasized damage control & survivability, which must have been incorporated into U.S. combat ships in WWII. The Japs thought the carrier Yorktown was two ships, her damage control & emergency repair capabilities were that good.
I remember reading somewhere that repairs on the Yorktown were done while it was en route to base and after it left to re-join the fleet; incredible. I also read a book on Jutland in which described one of the older German ships having the ability to angle its guns higher than others (which were really initially designed to fight in the North Sea); it was able to hit the British fleet while the Brits couldn’t reach it in return.
The Kriegsmarine knew how to shoot. Proved decisively again on 5/24/41.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Denmark_Strait
Some people think that the last battleships were struck from the fleet because they could replace several aircraft squadrons for coastal support. This in turn might obviate the need for another carrier. That would reduce the number of Admiral slots since the Battleships don’t need so much screening. There is not a single conventional anti-ship missile that can penetrate the bridge armor of an Iowa class Battleship, much less penetrate the hull.
It could be less expensive to use a couple of battleships for artillery support than fielding squadrons of aircraft. The battleships have incredible accuracy and enhanced munitions can reach up to 50 miles with +/- 50ft accuracy as I recall. There is much to be said about the advantages of using battleship to support marine amphibious operations. It is not clear cut that aircraft are automatically better. You need a forward spotter in either case.
That war destroyed every empire that fought in it including the British empire. In those 2 world wars plus the Cold War - linked the way the 30 years wars or the 100 years wars were linked later on by historians - should be viewed as one large European civil war that destroyed the continent and the European peoples.
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