Posted on 01/06/2017 6:50:53 AM PST by C19fan
In the mid-1930s, the Nazi government began to plan in detail for the reconstruction of German naval power. The destruction of the German High Seas Fleet at Scapa Flow remained central to the mythology of German betrayal and defeat in World War I. Rebuilding the fleet would be a grand achievement worthy of the Nazis, but also in accord with long-term German foreign policy goals.
(Excerpt) Read more at warisboring.com ...
The best battle plan never survives the first shot.
Jutland was a victory on points, maybe, but the Germans knew very well that they had barely avoided getting smashed by Jellicoe’s Grand Fleet. They did well by catching Beattie’s scouting force separated from the main body but there was no hope of success against total British numbers and firepower. They had good reason to flee the moment they caught sight of the battleship line.
It was pure bad luck and perhaps a lack of aggression on the part of the British that permitted the Germans to escape.
And this was despite some technical advantages the Germans had over the British.
As for cooperating with submarines - this was a pipe dream, the communication problems, poor visibility from submarines and slow speed of submarines would make this impossible.
Graf Zeppelin was mostly finished and did some sea trials, but never made operational. After the war, the Soviets took her as a prize and for a while dicked around with notions of having an operational aircraft carrier. Nothing came of it.
One of the great “what ifs” is whether the Germans could have deployed a carrier/battleship/cruiser battle group in the North Atlantic to interdict the convoys. Theoretically it was possible, but you know the Royal Navy would have committed every asset they had to destroy it. And most likely they would have, simply because the Germans did not have any sort of coherent naval aviation equipment, training or doctrine.
As the Chinese are learning, and as the Russians painfully know, there is much more to having an effective aircraft carrier than just the ship. The planes must be specially built for carrier duty. Also, because of space limitations, flight operations off a carrier are extremely complicated and require a lot of training and practice.
In reality, only three navies have ever carried out effective aircraft carrier operations; the United States, Britain, and Japan.
Prototype aircraft didn’t often have all of the armament of the fielded product, or as it was modified based upon what was learned over time. Take a look at photographs of the first B-17 prototype in 1935 and compare them to the final B-17G model that was being produced in 1944. Here is a link to the Wikipedia page on the B-17 so you can see its development:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_B-17_Flying_Fortress#/media/File:Boeing_Y1B-17_in_flight.jpg
Battleships popping out of poor North Sea visibility is what happened to HMS Glorious, which had not yet been fitted with radar.
Any German aircraft carrier would have had to worry about that, much more so after British aircraft were fitted with radar.
The Germans kept them mostly bottled up in port rather than risk a fleet-fleet engagement with the British. When they did venture out, they did in small battle groups.
Bismark was most successful at commerce raiding but ultimately was defeated because of this poor strategy. Graff Spee was lost because it was a single raider boxed by a marginally more capable British fleet of cruisers and bluffed into being scuttled. Tirpitz never did anything but move throughout protected ports and was eventually sunk at anchorage in a fjord in Norway.
Scharnhorst and Gneisenau may have been the exception because they did work in unison and did significant damage to the British before they were trapped in individual sorties.
All of the warring powers had “plans.” The problem for all but one of them was that they didn’t have the ability to realize their plans. The one exception was the United States. While everyone else scrounged and scraped up resources to build what they desperately needed, only the United States had the industrial capacity to build what we wanted. We built weapons systems because we could, armed and fed the world, and still had enough engineering and industrial capacity to take arcane blackboard theories and in four years turn them into two different types of working atomic weapons, and put them on the strategic delivery system (the B-29) that we also built, which no one else did.
Plans mean nothing if you can’t carry them out.
unfortunately for Germany and fortunately for the rest of the world. “Hitler’s plans” exceeded the Germany’s production of steel and other materials and exceed its source of raw materials required for the enormous amount of planned ships, Army vehicles, and aircraft. His starting of the war at least 5 years before the Army and Navy leaders had planned for it to begin and to be fully equipped, also was fortunate for the rest of the world.
“Neptune’s Inferno” is next on my list.
Incidentally, when I emailed Hornfischer following my reading of “Tin Can Sailors”, to congratulate him on such a fine bit of research and writing, he wrote me back, told me about his upcoming “Fleet at High Tide”, and sent me an autographed copy when it came out in November.
I must say, I was, and am, thrilled.
Navy admirals are weaned on the idea of ‘preserving the fleet’. Fleets take decades to construct, yet can be lost in an afternoon.
Naval strategy is difficult to translate for that reason.
You’re right, that Nov ‘16 election WAS for all the marbles. In that sense, it was Leyte Gulf politically. I can only hope it will lead to the nuking of the left, just to complete the parallel.
Britain had quite a number of those stupid little Swordfish torpedo planes. You you, just like the one that bagged the Bismark.
I recently read “With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa”
by Eugene Sledge. It is a really good account of a Marine’s experience on those campaigns along with boot camp. It is one of the books that the HBO series “The Pacific” is based on.
After reading this book, I would have a hard time imagining the “snowflakes” going through an experience like that. My dad was of the greatest generation and served in the Navy in the Pacific in WW2. I am not sure that I or any of my peers (we are all in the gap between the baby boomers and genx’ers) could have done what he and my uncles and many family friends did. I stand in awe of them. One of my friends at works father is a Pearl Harbor survivor, one of the last 4 in Nebraska. Truly a hero and still going strong at age 96.
That's what got Adm Richardson fired and Kimmel replacing him at Pearl Harbor.
I’ve got to try that Sledge book. After Saipan, the doctrine became “Kill ‘em all; mercy is of no value to these barbarians”. Our men and officers had seen enough on Saipan to know that the sonsabitches were either going to kill themselves and their indigenous hostages, or they were going to kill you. The new doctrine was to send them to hell before they could do the latter.
And I met one of those Pearl survivors a year and a half ago; he was the grandfather of the bride at a wedding I was attending in Arizona.
“After Saipan, the doctrine became Kill em all...”
Happened long before that. Battle of the Tenaru River (Guadalcanal)... and really before that. Right after the landings a Japanese unit indicated it’s willingness to surrender, a Navy/Marine unit was dispatched in a landing craft to pick them up but were ambushed & killed to a man. Word went forth... no surrenders accepted.
I believe First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, made a comment about Admiral Jellico that he was the only man in the Empire that could lose the war in an afternoon.
Kimmel was not Starks’s first choice for the Command of the Pacific Fleet, He wanted Nimitz for that Command. Nimitz declined the assignment and instead was assigned to become the chief of the Bureau of Navigation
Notwithstanding the Guadalcanal observations on anecdotal levels (not minimizing them at all, mind you), there was still an effort on Saipan to take prisoners, and to rescue civilians, both Jap and Chammorro; but the Jap soldiers had so indoctrinated the civilians into thinking the GIs were rapist, tortuous, sadistic devils, the civilians on several occasions came out into the open with white flags, carrying, it turned out, explosive satchels.
After a meeting with the Combined Chiefs of Staff, Roosevelt and Churchill in Quebec, Sept, 1944, the Japs were referred to officially as the Barbarians of the Pacific, and that they needed to be destroyed. For by then, civilians — women, children included — along with Jap soldiers, had been seen leaping off the cliffs at Marpi Point, Saipan, by the hundreds. Such were the gruesome times.
How in the world to respond to such a skewered mindset? We did the best we could under those circumstances.
Anyway, they started it.
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