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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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I wrote a book a while back called An Unreliable History of the Second World War. In the normal way (for me) this was written in daily posts in the Reading Room section which is not available for the ordinary run of AEL readers. This thread gets some traction for other WW2 posts which deserve a wider airing. Here.
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Boreades
In: finity and beyond
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Flotsam and jetsam (part 1)
The Third Reich's Surface Fleet
Or how Germany's naval ambitions failed in its naval strategy, but (fortunately for us) also torpedoed (sic) its land strategy as well.
How so?
In September 1939:
| The Kriegsmarine touted the famous “Z-plan†to construct a fleet of over 700 ships, capable of defending fortress Europe against the British (or American) navies, the German Navy in fact began the war with only a handful of capital ships, and its most famous operations generally involved only a single vessel, or at most a pair, desperately running for dear life. |
There are few equivalent examples of such a yawning gap between military ambitions and reality.
When were these 700 ships supposed to be ready?
| In many ways, the German surface fleet became something like the perfect black hole for resources. In the prewar years, it began a nominally ambitious building program which was still in its infancy when the war began. Naval planners were explicitly preparing for a mid-century war, with construction programs targeting fulfillment in 1948. |
Explicitly preparing for an non-explicit date? Maybe 1950? What ever the exact date might be, the navy was entirely unprepared for war in 1939. Yet the scale of the building program was sufficient for the navy to siphon huge industrial resources away from the ground forces and the Luftwaffe.
| The result was a force expensive enough to cannibalize the rest of the Wehrmacht (and itself) but far too immature and small to do anything useful on a strategic scale. |
In the one German campaign where the navy did play a pivotal role, the limited fighting destroyed most of the surface fleet. That was the invasion of Norway. Which was initially a brilliant tactical success, serving the strategic aim of securing control of Norwegian high-grade iron ore, to be used for German steel production.
| Germany’s ability to launch a successful amphibious invasion of Norway shocked the British, who presumed that their overwhelming naval superiority would make such an operation a nonstarter. |
Why was it such a shock?
| The British Admiralty believed, fundamentally, that British naval superiority would make it impossible for the Germans to operate on the Norwegian coast. Yet Germany, despite this terrible British overmatch, did manage to launch a combined sea and airborne invasion of Norway right in the face of the Royal Navy, including at far flung places like Narvik, more than a thousand miles from Germany’s meager naval bases. |
But to do so, the German Navy had put nearly all its eggs in one basket.
| Finally, as German preparations for what would eventually be called Operation Weserübung began to accelerate, it was the Navy’s suggestions which created the urgency to pull the trigger. The scale of Weserübung was such, they pointed out, that the “complete concentration of the whole navy†was required, which implied a complete halt to all other naval operations: recalling all available submarines, halting minelaying operations and cruiser raids, and denuding the German coast of its defenses. |
Why did they take such a huge risk?
| This was only justifiable, they argued, if Weserübung was initiated in a timely manner. Speed was of the essence, not only to improve the odds of success, but also to free up the navy for other tasks afterwards. Raeder expressed this view to Hitler on March 5, 1940. Two days later, Hitler signed the Weserübung directive. |
But move swiftly they did, even while the British were bumbling about with Operation Wilfred at the same time.
| On the first day of the operation, the Germans had small forces ashore (initially no more than 2,000 men at each landing) at Oslo, Kristiansand, Bergen, Trondheim, and Narvik, and German paratroopers had captured airfields at Oslo and Stavanger, where the Luftwaffe almost immediately moved in and set up shop to provide close air support. Meanwhile, a mixed overland, amphibious, and airborne assault on Denmark toppled that country in only a few hours, with fewer than 50 men killed in total. | |
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Before WW1 and WW2 the Germans had ideal opportunities to go toe-to-toe with the Brits (and the Americans) because everyone's navy had gone back to square one:
* WW1: dreadnoughts had made everything else obsolete
* WW2: aircraft carriers had made everything else obsolete
Both times Jerry screwed up by building just enough ships to force the others to gear up but not enough to fight it out successfully at sea. The Brits did their best to screw it up on their own account but that's another story.
The wonder is that both times Germany was able to dominate on land and in the air initially and compete at sea.
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Boreades
In: finity and beyond
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Pressing pause on the transfer of text.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Excellent. Why not try for a few hundred words a day sine die. That way you'll find yourself scraping barrels full of gold. I could match you day for day from my own Medium etc barrel with relevant stories. (Everyone else can chime in from their own cracker barrels). Like this one for instance:
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Getting What You Wished For [excerpt]
Ever since the Anglo-Dutch Wars of the seventeenth century, the British had prided themselves on having more warships than anyone else. Just to make sure, the Royal Navy had to be bigger than the next two navies combined. In case they combined. This policy was known as the Two Navy Rule. It was very expensive but since Rule Britannia was very profitable they had no trouble paying for it.
In 1919, the policy was greatly assisted when the next biggest navy, the German Kriegsmarine, scuttled itself. Not only that but 1919 was when the British Empire reached its territorial zenith. All seemed right with the world.
In the first half of the twentieth century battleship design had gone through various peregrinations. At first it was simple enough. The British stuck as many big guns (12-inch) and as much armour plate (thick) on HMS Dreadnought, built as many dreadnoughts as money could buy and they could blaze away at anything that stood in their way. Much the same in fact as the way the Anglo-Dutch wars and all naval wars since had been fought.
Except there was a new factor, speed. There was no point in blazing away if your opponent was disappearing over the horizon and since the other fleet would, as a matter of policy, likely be smaller than the British fleet, it was all too likely to be disappearing over the horizon.
So the British came up with the battlecruiser concept in time for the First World War. All the big guns as before (now 14 and 15 inch) but faster than a battleship. To achieve that speed the armour (thick) had to be armour (thin) so when your battlecruisers caught up with their battleships, your battlecruisers blew up after a few minutes and their battleships resumed disappearing over the horizon.
After the Great War (and after the restrictions of Versailles had been waived by the British) the Germans found another solution with their Scharnhorst class battleships. Very fast, very well armoured but, since something else had to give, not such big guns (11-inch). They were annihilated whenever they came up against ordinary 14-inch battleships.
The British had stopped building battlecruisers in time for the Second World War but their new battleships turned out to be duds. On the first occasion they were called upon to engage battleships, when the Bismarck came out in the spring of 1941, they discovered the Germans had squared the circle by putting in bigger engines. The Bismarck was a battlecruiser, with armour!
To take on this innovatory leviathan, the British sent out two of their finest, the battlecruiser HMS Hood, ‘the Pride of the Fleet’, and their newest battleship, Prince of Wales. One salvo blew up the Hood, a few more forced the Prince of Wales to retire, and Bismarck disappeared over the horizon, shadowed by a pair of British (8-inch) cruisers. The British called up their nearest aircraft carrier which mounted a textbook attack on... the British cruisers!
Once this had been corrected, the flukiest torpedo of the war jammed the Bismarck’s rudder and she was obliged to sail round in circles while the British lumbered up with various heavy units to encircle the hapless ship. Still nothing. After hours of raining death and destruction on the defenceless hulk, a cruiser had to be sent in to sink the Bismarck with torpedoes.
The British accounted this a great victory which, like Jutland, it was because despite being on the wrong end of so many technical shortcomings, the British were there at the end of the battle and the Germans weren’t. And, as with Jutland, were never there again. Bismarck’s sister, Tirpitz, was kept in its Norwegian fjord, not least by four jolly jack tars putting explosives underneath her.
This was all proving irrelevant — the battleship had come to the end of her four hundred year reign as the arbiter of naval power. Replaced by the aircraft carrier. This was not as clear then as in hindsight. The British had the unenviable record of losing the only direct battleship vs carrier engagement ever fought when the Scharnhorst sank HMS Glorious in 1940 returning from Norway.
Even so the Royal Navy had set about building, in its time-honoured fashion, more aircraft carriers than anyone else, and had achieved this by the start of the Second World War.
Neither the Germans nor the Italians had aircraft carriers which was luckier than the British knew because, just as Dreadnought had wound the clock back to zero, allowing the Germans to build a rival battle fleet from scratch, so the advent of the aircraft carrier meant the Germans could have done the same again.
They did not and for an all too familiar reason: the Luftwaffe controlled German air assets, including those on putative German aircraft carriers, and there was no way they were going to allow the navy to win the war.
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Boreades
In: finity and beyond
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Flotsam and jetsam (part 2)
The Norwegian Weserübung campaign offers several instructive facets. The first, very obviously, was the enormous advantage that the Germans derived from speed and surprise. Compared to the Royal Navy’s fighting power, these German assault forces were genuinely tiny, dissipated task forces, but the Wehrmacht had correctly gambled on speed and aggression. Every German objective had been achieved by the end of the first day.
What was the British response to the German invasion of Norway?
| It was indecisive, dissipated, and clumsy. In fact, the general incompetence displayed by the British in Norway was later given as a cause for the fall of the Chamberlain government, with aged former PM David Lloyd George ranting in the House of Commons about the “half-prepared†and “half-baked†British response. |
Curiously, the First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill escaped most of the scrutiny, despite his personal micromanaging of the operations in Norway. Funny that?
For example, troops which had boarded in Scotland for conveyance to Norway were offloaded, then reloaded before being sent to Narvik without any winter clothing. The British carrier HMS Furious was dispatched in a hurry - such a hurry in fact that she failed to load her fighter wing, and carried only torpedo bombers.
In classic Royal Navy tradition, some disasters were heroic.
| On April 6, the destroyer HMS Glowworm encountered a pair of German destroyers after dropping out of her task force to search for a man overboard. In the ensuing skirmish, the German ships were joined by the battlecruiser Admiral Hipper, which catastrophically damaged the Glowworm with a series of direct hits. Crippled and cornered, the Glowworm’s skipper, Lieutenant Commander Gerard Broadmead Roope, turned into the Hipper in a last ditch ramming attack, which sheared off the Glowworm’s bow and sank her. |
The manoeuvre so impressed the Hipper’s officers that Captain Helmuth Heye wrote to the British admiralty (using the Red Cross as an intermediary) recommending Roope for the Victoria Cross, making Roope one of only a handful of British fighting men to receive the award on a recommendation from the enemy.
Side note: Curiously, this wasn't the only time during WW2 when a member of the Royal Navy got a VC thanks to the praise from a German Captain. During the St Nazaire Raid or Operation Chariot in 1942, more VCs were won, more quickly, than in any other battle before or since.
Other disasters were less heroic.
| On June 8, the British aircraft carrier Glorious and her escort destroyers, Acasta and Ardent, bumped into the twin German battlecruisers, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. The two British destroyers put up a vicious fight, but the mathematics of mass were strongly against them, and the Germans sank all three British ships. |
Because of more bumbling.
| This encounter was a debacle and an embarrassment to the Royal Navy on a variety of levels. It was not simply that an aircraft carrier was an expensive and valuable asset that was difficult to replace; the near-ambush of a carrier by surface ships was an anomaly, made possible only by British carelessness: |
Because every carrier was supposed to be screened by frigates or destroyers, and have its own air cover overhead.
| on the morning of the battle, the Glorious had no combat air patrols in the sky, nor even a single man in the crow’s nest. Furthermore, the British battlegroup were out of radio contact with the rest of the fleet, which meant the Admiralty (thanks to its own orders for radio silence) did not even know of the sinkings until they learned about it from German radio broadcasts. | |
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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At this stage in their development--and given the Royal Navy's hidebound attitudes--aircraft carriers were given over to superannuated battleship captains. The Glorious's captain was constantly rowing with the 'Air Officers' and, or so the story goes, he was anxious to get back to Scapa Flow to start court martial proceedings against them. He was warned it was unsafe to do so without proper, i.e. battleship, escorts but set off anyway.
The whole thing was hushed up during the war, which is understandable enough. And afterwards, which isn't. The full story still hasn't come out.
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Boreades
In: finity and beyond
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Flotsam and jetsam (part 3)
At this point, everything seemed to be going the Kriegsmarine's way. But then came the result of putting so many eggs in one basket.
| The Germans had committed a disproportionate naval task force to Narvik, which was the critical port for the seaborne export of iron ore to the Reich. The German force, consisting of ten destroyers, had arrived in the fjord at Narvik on April 9, in heavy fog and snow. |
The fjord at Narvik was a good safe place (to begin with)
| The following day - April 10, 1940 - the First Battle of Narvik was fought when a British destroyer flotilla arrived at the mouth of the fjord and launched a surprise attack. A spirited duel between the destroyer fleets ensued, with two ships sunk on either side. |
A 2-2 score-draw, but no decisive outcome? The match went into extra time.
| The critical fact, however, was that the British ended the day in control of the mouth of the fjord, and were thus able to trap the remaining German destroyers inside. On April 13th, the hulking battleship HMS Warspite cruised into the fjord and fought the Second Battle of Narvik, which was really more like a shooting spree. The powerful battleship methodically moved into the Narvik Fjord, mowing through the undergunned and trapped German destroyers. After the first three had been sunk, the remaining five simply evacuated their crews onto the shore and scuttled themselves. |
For once, a British win on penalties.
What stands out is that these relatively small fights in the Narvik Fjord wiped out fully half of the German destroyer fleet. More broadly, Narvik was emblematic of the Kriegsmarine’s extreme fragility.
| The heavy cruiser Bluecher was sunk by a Norwegian coastal battery; cruiser Karlsruhe was torpedoed by a British submarine; cruiser Koenigsberg was sunk by British dive bombers; Hipper was temporarily put out of action by the Glowworm’s ramming attack, and both the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau took damage and needed refitting. In the aftermath of the campaign, the Kriegsmarine had just three cruisers and four destroyers operational. In practical terms, therefore, the effort in Norway - although successful - had expended essentially the entire German surface fleet. |
The strategic aim (of securing control of Norwegian iron and steel) had been achieved. But - most ironically - by diverting iron and steel away from tank and aircraft production, into the Kriegsmarine, which was then nearly all sunk in Norway!
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Divvying Up The Neutrals (excerpt)
The occupation of Belgium in 1914 branded Germany indelibly as a ruthless invader of neutral countries that got in her way. The Second World War soon showed the Hun had not changed his spots but this is not entirely fair, or at least it is not entirely balanced. That traditional cherisher of small nations, Great Britain, was at it too.
| In fact the British started it |
by invading neutral Norway in April 1940 to mine its territorial waters. The Germans were not far behind, arriving the day after. Indeed they were already ahead in the Great Game of Neutrals because they had occupied Denmark en route. The British were not averse to serial Scandinavian invasions and started piling troops into Narvik with its easy access to some valuable iron ore fields they had spent the last few months deliberating whether to occupy or not.
| That would be the Swedish iron ore fields. |
But since they didn’t get the chance it was still 2–1 to Germany when, in May 1940, the Boche gobbled up Belgium, Holland and Luxembourg. The British were determined their opponents shouldn’t have it all their own way and attacked neutral French West Africa in September, 1940. And once again showed what amateurs they were by promptly turning tail at the first whiff of Vichy grapeshot.
| Neutral bagging was put on hold for the winter. | |
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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“Brits Sink Ship! Read All About It.â€
But not sinking another one was more important [excerpt]
Leaving Graf Spee to fight the Battle of the River Plate, Altmark had reached northern Norway by February 1940, where her captain faced a dilemma. There was no chance of evading British patrols in the North Sea so he entered Norwegian territorial waters to make his way to Germany through ‘the Leads’, the islands and fjords of western Norway. Technically, as soon as he entered neutral Norwegian waters, he would have to allow his British prisoners their freedom.
| He had no intention of doing that. |
To follow the labyrinthine events that ensued it has to be borne firmly in mind that the only actual fighting going on anywhere in Europe at this time was between Russia and Finland. Not, one would think, of central importance to the British and the French fighting the Germans, but this is to ignore another fact
| The British and the French thought they were winning the war. |
“The Germans have made no effort on the Western Front,’†crowed the French, “and everything is in place if they do. It’ll be 1914 all over again.â€
“It’s one thing stopping the Germans,†warned the British, “but they only surrendered in 1918 when the blockade starved them into domestic insurrection.â€
“Good point,’†agreed the French, “and there’s no chance of that while they can get everything they need from the Russians.â€
“What’s the solution?†wondered everybody.
| “Make war on Russia of course.†|
Or at any rate send enough troops to Finland to make Stalin think twice about cosying up too much with Hitler.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| Borry wrote: | | The strategic aim (of securing control of Norwegian iron and steel) had been achieved. |
This was crazed thinking on Hitler's part. He only needed the Narvik route in winter when the Baltic was frozen up. The Swedes could have sent everything he needed during the summer. The Germans ended up having to 'defend' Norway for the rest of the war from imaginary Allied thrusts with twelve Wehrmacht divisions needed in half a dozen more important places.
PS Hitler had also handed the Norwegian merchant navy, the second largest in the world, on a plate to Britain. Then, when that wasn't enough, he invaded Greece equally pointlessly, thereby awarding the third largest merchant marine to the Brits.
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