German Battleshipbuilding program

[Karl Heidenreich]

I´m studying now that Germany produced a whole fleet of dreadnought battleships, battlecruisers, cruisers and destroyers between 1905 to 1914, enough to be called and operate as the High Seas Fleet (König, Groser Kurfurst; Seydlitz... etc.). That was made in only nine years. But between 1933 and 1940 (seven years) the Germans can only put in operation two main BBs (Bismarck and Tirpitz), two BCs (Schanhorst and Gneisenau), the 2 Hippers and some lesser warships.
Was that due to insuficient docks (but, again, there had to be because prior to WWI there were enough), a bad building program, or simply because the ships were bigger and more complex?
The other explanation was that they set a priority to U-Boats. But this theory is shred to pieces because they never had enough of these small but highly profitable weapons.

[marcelo_malara]

Different policys I think. In the last years of the 19th century Tirpitz started building a powerfull fleet to compete with England, race which ended in fact in the First World War. But in the 1930s Hitler (who was an Army man) had no equivalent naval policy.

[Dave Saxton]

There was the Z-Plan. The Z-Plan was to build a large balanced battle fleet, that was to be diesel powered. The Z-Plan was based on the assumption that Germany would not become involved in a major naval war untill 1945 at the earlist. The Z-Plan was centered on the construction of six 16-inch gun battleships designated the H-class. The first two were just being laid down when war really began in 1939. After awhile they just cancelled the ships, as they couldn't spare the workmen or the materials for further construction. In addition to the six H-class battleships, they planned on a few diesel powered "battlecruisers", armed with six 15-inch guns. These BC's were not to be a repeat of the Scharnhorst class, but were true high speed and minimal armour designs. The Scharnhorst class was to be converted to 15-inch guns, beginning in, IIRC, 1942, and along with the Bismarck class comprize a reserve force to the main Z-plan battle fleet. It was a pretty ambitious plan....

[Ulrich Rudofsky]

Recently, Joseph Gilbey published a book on the Z Plan: Kriegsmarine: Admiral Raeder's Navy - Z, a broken dream. It can be obtained directly from the author, who has also written a book about the Graf Spee and Captain Langsdorff. For further information http://www.grafspee.com

[Karl Heidenreich]

The Z plan was, in few words, awesome. But in this topic there has to be some History Learning for the Germans.
What I´m going to say is hard (very, very hard) for a Battleship and Battlecruiser lover as myself. Let´s see.
1. In WWI the U Boat flotilla accomplished a lot more and were more a threat to Germany´s enemies than the huge High Seas Fleet.
2. At the very beggining of WWII the small U-47 commanded by Günther Prien evade detection, got into Scapa FLow and sunk the BB Royal Oak. More or less on that very same time the Graf Spee was failing to achieve her main mission, failed to confront her adversaries and finally got scuttled in foreign waters. To this defeat the Germans had in their memory WWI Admiral Spee´s fiasco at the Falklands and the ghost of lost opportunities at Jutland.
If Germany sole objetive was victory, and indeed it was, then Z plan was an expendable luxury, at least for an early war in 1939.
Having into account only nominal displacement (and not considering financing, design, industrial effort, scientific development, man-hours, dry dock, docks, crews, fuel, special amunnition, logistics in general, sea trials, etc. etc. etc) the Bismarck and Tirpitz added 83,400 tons between the two; the Schanhorst and Gnesineau added 68,000 to a total of 151,400 gross displacement built by 1940. Now, a Type VII U-Boat displacement was about 650 tons, and a medium battle tank was about 50 tons. So, considering only displacement from this four surface vessels the Germans could had, easily, 232 combat operational U-Boats in 1940 or 3,028 tanks for Barbarosa. Let´s have those numbers cut in half: 130 U-Boats or 1,500 tanks. Can you imagine the British trying to cope in 1940 with at least 75 U-Boat plus the already existing ones in the North Atlantic? Can you imagine the Wehrmacht at November 1941 with 1,500 additional tanks fielded outside Moscow?
It was Doenitz´ U-Boat arm or Guderian´s panzer force the ones called to give a victory to Germany, not Raeder´s surface fleet.
And what about a later date to beggin the hostilities: 1945-46, when the Z plan was already a reality? To that date the Japanese and the Americans had already show that the aircraft carrier and air power were the masters of the seas. Probably the PoW and Repulse had been sunk anyway, Coral Sea, Midway and Guadalcanal fought and BBs and BCs assigned to escort carrier forces. The Z plan was, again, an obsolete luxury. For a 1945 hostilities they needed not only the U-Boats but an aircraft carrier force (and thousands of tanks) to try to do the imposible task of knock out Great Britain out of the war (ask Napoleon, the "Invincible Armada" and the Dutch) or to conquer Russia (another nearly impossible dream).
But, on the other hand, had a Z surface fleet existed (and probably got sunk or scuttled) they would have looked beautifull and have provided an increible quantity of scale models, books, movies and followers in the early XXI century... providing the allies won the war.

[miro777]

hey
hmm i lately read a book about the naval politics before WW2 and that stated that Hitler did not want a naaval fleet at all and raeder could only persue Hitler to give consent to a fleet biuild up with the argument that the coast lines of the new greater germany must be defended by a navy.
Further on, Hitler had told Raeder that the war is only gonna start in 1947!!!! and that's how Raeder planned
When the war broke out in 1939, raeder was totally surprised and his plan was ruined.
AS mentioned earlier he had only 3 panzerschiffe, 2 cruisers and two battlecruisers ready and then the two Battleships followed on later. The hulls of the planned H-class battleship and the J-class Battlecruiser as well as the carrier 'graf zeppelin' were for military reasoned scrapped and never finished.

miro

[Ulrich Rudofsky]

There was no love between Hitler and the Kriegsmarine. Some of his distain for the navy was based on the fact that the navy in WW1 became virtually mutinous and disorderly (Matrosenaufstand 1917) and several sailors were executed in an attempt to reestablish control. The young officers were poorly trained to command their ships and the crews refused to go to sea......add to this the early losses of the Spee and Blücher......Bismarck....The whole Z Plan died before birth.

[ontheslipway]

try to do the imposible task of knock out Great Britain out of the war (ask Napoleon, the "Invincible Armada" and the Dutch)

The Dutch protest as they have managed to beat the Enlish during the 2nd Anglo-Dutch wars and winning several battles during the other wars.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Anglo-Dutch_War

[Matthias]

Indeed, the Dutchies had some very skilled admirals, like Maarten Tromp and Michiel Adrianzsoon De Ruyter, who died in the waters in front of Augusta during a battle and performed a very brave action on the river Thames stealing the vessel Royal Charles from the Britons.Both great seaman...

[Karl Heidenreich]

I stand corrected for De Ruyter who was, indeed, a great admiral. We have to acknowledge the fact that the Dutch performed great in their naval wars against the British... at least they accomplished what the french never did in a centuries. Previously I was refering only to the fact that Great Britain had (and has) never bow in rendition to nobody and put some examples of that.
Very best regards.

[Djoser]

Not only was Hitler preoccupied with land warfare, and without a Tirpitz to direct the development of a more powerful navy, but we should also consider the radically different view of the Kaiser, who had a fascination with naval matters so strong as to have a special naval uniform designed for himself. he also loved spending large amounts of time on his impressive yacht, no doubt to the detriment of its crew's peace of mind.

He was envious of british naval power, and sought to emulate or surpass them in this respect, whereas Hitler merely wished to neutralize or circumvent the effectiveness of the British navy.

Did Hitler even have a yacht, I wonder? I doubt it, though we are getting off-topic with this question.

[Ulrich Rudofsky]

Did Hitler even have a yacht, I wonder? I

There were at least two state yachts, the aviso "Grille" (Cricket), later converted to command ship for the Commander of Uboats. and the sailing yacht "Ostwind". But whenever you see a photo of the Führer rare presence aboard a ship, he looks very uncomfortable and apprehensive. The Kaiser had several racing sailing yachts named "Meteor" and several others steam ships like the side-wheeler "Kaiseradler", renamed "Hohenzollern I", and the large steamship "Hohenzollern II".

[ufo]

Karl – your question opens a whole pot of maggots of politics, interwoven with tradition, mingled with recent defeat, mixed up with recourses, stirred with technical questions, seasoned with personalities involved.
You might open that tin but out comes enough to fill three to four decent size books.

Some aspects:
The bottleneck was never launch ways! The bottleneck was labourers and raw materials. Through all of the thirties there was not a single German shipyard working with full workforce. Germany was in dire needs for labourers; here especially highly skilled labourers like welders or electricians.

The Z-Plan actually derived out of an X-Plan; that was the maximal possible building program at a given time. The Y-Plan then was the theoretically achievable output according to launcheways, disregarding the shortages of men and material.
The follow-up Z-Plan – strangely enough – then exceeded the Y-Plan considerable. It was in a way awesome but it was also economically complete rubbish.

The often-mentioned Versailles treaty had surprisingly little effect. The Germans hardly ever came close to violating the treaty with their building programmes – until indeed they abandoned it altogether under Hitler.

Existing stocks were not necessarily enough. The slipway Tirpitz was build on needed massive extension from WWI standarts, taking over a year to be put into place.
Furthermore the German shipyards were reluctant to cut back on civilian production and clear slipways for warships. And in this they were backed by the exchequer for ships for foreign countries brought much needed hard cash for Germany.

Then there was politics. Most German ship building projects of the 30s were delayed by months, sometimes years. Scharnhorst was laid down twice; the first attempt being broken up on the stocks just to start again all over for to include a third turret which had been bartered out between Raeder and Hitler as a compromise to counter Duinkerke without upsetting the Brits.

Then there was shortage within the Kriegsmarine, which grew massively during the mid to late 30s. There were never sufficient men to plan, design and draw. Several projects fought internally for manpower and subsequently delayed each other.

The U-Boats indeed had nothing to do with this. They started late in the 30s and to begin with at relatively low priority.


One tends to see the third Reich as an awesome military power, which indeed it was. But one has to keep in mind that the overall military expansion was haphazardly; a patchwork of solutions followed by replacements and new solutions to plaster over the cracks in the plans.
For the German tanks – three out of the ten armoured divisions that fought the western campaign were equipped with Czech tanks, captured when Germany swallowed the Czech Republic. A victory on stolen goods.
It has been said that German rearmament lacked depth. There were no wartime logistics in place, there was no plan B to fall back on. There was just masses of weapons and men but the whole of the economy was not geared up for warproduction.

For Hitler’s relation with his Kriegsmarine one has to admit that he simply saw some things a bit more realistically than his admirals did. Z-Plan or not; there was no way Germany could outbuild the Royal Navy.
Why even trying? If you look at Bismarck’s effect versus cost ratio, she was a tremendous drain hole on German recourses. Tanks instead would have done a better job, as would have U-Boats.
While Raeder and his men were toying with the idea of a return game against the British since 1934, Hitler clung to his hopes of getting ‘Germanic’ England on his side or at least to have it neutral until 1938.


On the topic – the transition from the Reichsmarine to the Kriegsmarine I do like and rely on German sources. I am afraid some key books have not been translated.
Here to mention first; Jost Dülffer, “Weimar, Hitler und die Marine”; a kind of must-read to get to grips with that time.

Ciao,
Ufo

[Ulrich Rudofsky]

I am sure you have run across this book: Gary E. Weir, Building the Kaiser's Navy: The Imperial Naval Office and German Industry in the von Tirpitz Era, 1890–1918 (1992).

[Tiornu]

David Wragg has a book on the Z Plan coming out sometime this year.