Germany, WW2, and Aircraft Carriers

My understanding was that Germany's plan was to have several carriers that would team up with the Bismark /Tirpitz and their bigger brothers to create several task forces that could take on the Royal Navy but the plan was to build them by the 1944 1945 time frame but Hitler couldn't wait and went to war sooner As a result the proposed carriers and the follow ons to the Bismark got no further than the drawing board Once the war got started the resoures to build these ships were diverted to other needs U boats were much easier to build and cheaper Even the Brits couldn't build many major capital ships once the war started as evidenced by the cancellation of the Lion class and it taking until 1946 to finish the Vanguard To my knowledge neither Russia nor Italy had any real attempts to build a carrier once the war got started but I'm sure better minds than mine will fill in the blanks

Graf Zep was not completed beofre wars end and went to Russia as war booty. Not sure of it's fate. German Navy was not ready for war when it came, it needed about 5 more years to finish build it's fleet. U-boat were it main source of offensive sea power.
Not sure of all the reasons why Italy and Russia didn't use them, but believe Russia didn't see a need for them, since they were mainly a land power at that time.
John
helicopters don't fly, they beat the air into submission

Hey all,

here is an little bit of history i took from my website on Graf Zeppelin.

Near Swinemünde, Graf Zeppelin was expended as a target ship by the Soviet navy on August 16, 1947. Dive-bombers pounded the ship with bombs and charges placed inside the ship were detonated causing massive damage. Torpedo boat OE-503 and the destroyer Slavniy fired two torpedoes in the flaming hull, finishing her off. Graf Zeppelin succumbed to her wounds and sank 25 minutes later.

if anyone needs any additonal information on the Graf Zeppelin, please feel free to email me at grafzeppelintrager@yahoo.com

best regards,

joe

Hey Joe ... I still owe you those drawings of the Navalised Stukas. I haven't forgotten ... just got overrun by alligators for a little while. Thanks for your patience and hang in there. I do have a good sttart on them.

War came too fast and too hard for the kriegsmarine. It had no time to build up the fleet necessary to crush the Royal Navy.

I think it might have also be partly because of the Treaty of Verisiles that ended WW I (my spelling is prob off)....

Germany at first had to rearm in secercy. their air force trained as members of "glider clubs" bombers were disquised and built and tested as airliners... ect ect...

It might have been hard to find a place in germany away from prying eyes to hide a ship designed to become an aircraft carrier...

You must remember the cost and technology that goes into a carrier.The U.S.Britain and Japan were willing to spend money in the pre-war era to devolop a carrier or design with tech to make the best.It is hard to devolop planes and equipment for a carrier without resreach.The main reason that Germany did not have a carrier was due to this fact and the training of pilots with crews plays into this.This should have been started by Hitler in 1934 in order to get there first carrier up and runing by 1940.Also a lot of heads of states did not want the carrier to seceed and bogged down progress not only in the U.S. but in England as well as devolopment went.Japan proved what you can do with a carrier and did it.They say it as the weapon of the future.
As far as the wolf packs go,what killed them was the capture of an omaga machine.This was used for code encription,when we(Allies)got a hold of one and found out what the u-boats were doing,that sealed there fate.If that did not happen,then England would have been starved into submission and would have been under German rule.We during WWII carried out the same thing against the Jappiness and prove that Subs could take out the way militarys who needs to supply themselves.This was how Gaum was taken in the late stages of the war as will as other islands.Digger

Also, bear in mind that warship design is a product of overall naval strategy, which is a product of national interest.

The United States, Britain, and Japan were all making plans, beginning at least as early as the 1920s, for a war in the Pacific, where over-water distances are greater than anywhere else on earth. (The British had always perceived their navy as a means of sustaining a vast empire that was connected to its mother country by sea lanes. The U.S. Navy's War Plan Orange assumed that the next big international conflict involving the U.S. would be against Japan. And Japan's leaders, having established that a war with the Soviet Union was a bad idea, knew that their ambitions in China and Southeast Asia would inevitably bring them into a confrontation with the British and American navies.) So each of those nations poured a high percentage of its national budget into building long-range battleships, cruisers, and carriers.

Germany, having lost its Pacific island holdings due to the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations mandate, which gave most of those islands to Japan, had no such interests. Historians generally agree that Hitler's primary strategic target was the Soviet Union, against which a fleet of aircraft carriers wouldn't have been particularly helpful. Furthermore, the experience of World War I had convinced many German thinkers that a big surface fleet was a bad investment, due to geography. A German surface fleet, by definition, could only get out of the North Sea and the Baltic by fighting its way through the British Navy, which was so big that Germany had little chance of catching up to it.

Interesting stuff. There are some intriguing "what ifs" available here for speculation.

jtilley brings up a good point about "what ifs." pertaining to this subject, i've always kinda wondered "What If" ...

1. Germany had had a carrier (escort size even) to accompany the Bismarck when she broke out, to provide air cover.

2. Germany had carriers to accompany the Wolfpacks as they approached the US coast or even up the GIUK gap during convoys.

Maybe there are some wargamers out there who have used the scenarios and can enlighten us...

Thanks all for the info, by the way.

Before WW2, the superpowers were governed by military leaders who managed with horses and battleships.
Britain, Japan and the US had carriers because, although many of their leaders wanted infantry and battleships, they were interested to expand the capabilities of the airplane as a weapon. The British saw the versatility of the carrier to supply the battle fleet with large numbers of recon and support aircraft. When Billy Mitchell proved that a Battleship was vulnerable to aircraft, the US saw the need to have at least a carrier in its battleship dominated fleet.

The British took Mitchell seriously and began designing fleet carriers to use as offensive weapons. Since Japan was modeling their navy after Britain’s, they too took interest in the carrier as a primary offensive weapon, hence why these two powers had large primary carrier fleets before WW2.

Now, with France, Germany, Italy, and Russia, these are countries that were dominated by leaders who were determined to use traditional weapons (Hitler’s lack of understanding of science caused a 5 yr setback on Germany's rocket and atomic programs because he dumped more resources in tanks and infantry technology). Hitler and Mussolini never understood the Navy, if it wasn't for the constant determination of the Naval leaders to pressure Hitler, they would had never had U-Boats and the Graf Zeppelin would have never even been put on paper. Hitler liked battleships because he understood big guns, and thought that the bigger the gun, the easier to dominate the enemy.

France was constanly broke due to WW1 and managing it's colonies around the world. They invested in Battleships because it was a proven technology. Same with Italy. They didn't have the resoources to invest into designing carrier battle fleets.

Russia was in a defensive state since they just finished a civil war, had gone to war with Finland, and was expecting an invasion from Germany and Japan. To build a Navy with carriers at a time when they needed strong land defenses would have been pointless.


Scott

QUOTE: Originally posted by rockythegoat Riddle me this. Why did Germany not use aircraft carriers in WW II? I believe they only had the Graf Zep, of which I don't think ever saw service. (right?) Was the strategy to depend on the U-boat wolfpacks and commerce raiders? (Which admittedly, gave the Allies a run for the money for awhile) Always thought it strange that one of the major combatants/belligerents didn't have any carriers. (I assume Russia didn't as they were not geared for blue water ops?) (Italy, not sure of )

I think it's important to mention the interservice rivalry going on - Goering wanted control over the Kreigsmarine's naval aircraft and saw them as competition. There was no benefit to him to having this project fulfilled. In fact, IIRC, he did his utmost to have it scuttled (pardon the pun).

The Kreigsmarine's mission was one of commerce raiding - it was not designed to go toe to toe with the Royal Navy. Their job was to interupt England's supplies to the point where the British would be unable to wage war and sue for peace (which the U-Boats almost accomplished).

In the case of Bismark, her role in commerce raiding was actually to be used as bait to draw heavy escorts (British BB's) away from convoys and let the Prinz Eugen go in for the kill (according to what Mullenberg says in "Battleship Bismark"). The original plan for the Bismark's sortie called for her to be accompanied by either Scharnhorst or Gnesineau - both if possible. But since those ships were under constant attack and repair in Brest, Raeder decided it was better to contest the convoys with just Bismark and Prinz Eugen than wait until he had a larger force to do so - even though the smaller force was probably doomed to failure.

Italy had the carrier Aquila (Eagle?) - a conversion from the liner Roma - which was about 80% complete when they capitulated in 1943. Dephis makes a nice resin model of her. Check out the following article on her: http://www.regiamarina.net/arsenals/ships_it/carrier_us.htm

I just completed a "What if" project and sent it to FSM as a story submission. What if the Washington Naval Treaty of 1920 was never ratified and the USA built the largest, most heavily-armed and armored surface combatant that could fit through the Panama Canal? The Naval Design Bureau actually planned a beast like that, called the Maximum Battleship, so I took their theoretical projections and built one in 1:350 scale.

It's an 80,000-ton dreadnaught, circa 1942, that is 1,000 feet long and mount fifteen 18" guns in five triple turrets.

As most have stated previously, war came too soon for the Kriegsmarine, and she was not prepared to fight a war against England 1 to 1, much less the United States. Hitler believed (as the Vietnamese did in the 1960s, and world terrorists do today) that they do not have to win the military war against the US, they simply have to win the war of public opinion. Hitler felt that if he started knocking on the door if the USA (Operation Paukenschlag), sinking US ships and killing US merchant sailors, that the public opinion would force the US to terms, or at least adopt a more neutral stance. Obviously, that didn't happen, and the overwhelming shipbuilding capacity of the US simply buried that of the German submarine arm.

Germany's surface fleet was also at a disadvantage because of Allied airpower. England was at the extreme west of the theatre, so her navy could operate without the constant fear of heavy raids on places like Scapa Flow. On the other hand, in Germany, the North Sea, and Biscay, Allied airpower had the ability to seek out and destroy the Kreigsmarine surface units while they were still in harbor... German heavy units also had to run the gauntlet of either the North Sea passage, or the Channel, to get back to home waters. In essence, they were boxed in from the start.

Her aircraft carrier production was limited to Graf Zeppelin, and even she was not of the same quality of her contemporaries, the US Yorktown Class, the Japanese Shokaku, or the British Illustrious Class. Again, when you consider the overall situation, any large surface unit capable of mounting a threat, especially an aerial one, would have been a high priority target. Graf Zeppelin wouldn't have lived long were she operational.

As for the U-boats...well, it wasn't any one solitary thing that caused their downfall, it was a combination of things...

Type VII boats were outclassed and outdated by 1942...they were not designed as long range boats, period. The Allies had radar, to pick them up on the surface, and sonar, to sink them. We captured and Enigma machine from U-110 early on, so we knew where and when they were deployed. Lastly, Doenitz refused to believe that the code could be broken, and with his strangle-hold methodology of command and control, continued to radio instructions and daily reports to his operational boats, so their locations, destinations, and objectives were clearly laid out to the Allies. Even when the 4th rotor was added, and the U-boats enjoyed a reprieve, Bletchley Park built the Bombe and Colossus, and were reading German codes again within months.

Again, war came too soon for the U-boat arm as well...when the war started, Hitler felt that it would, and could, be won with the weapons in the arsenal at the time...the Bf-109, Panzer IV, Type VII and Type IX U-boats. All of these systems were outclassed by 1942, but labored on until 1945. Development and production of superior systems, such as the Fw-190D-9, Ta-152, Panther, Tiger and King Tiger, and the Type XXI and XXIII U-boats should have commenced as early as 1942 and taken precendence over the older systems, but didn't. As a result, they were too few, too late.

Jeff

Also never forget the impact of Meijer Herman Georing. His Luftwaffe was supreme, he faught Doenitz every chance he got , change the orders, change the thrust of research. He had Hitlers ear a heckuva lot more than Doenitz

This was true until early 1941, then Goering fell out of favor with Hitler after the former failed to neutralize the RAF. The situation only got worse when the Luftwaffe failed to stop the RAF and USAAF from overflying Germany itself. He did, however, understand that the need for newer aircraft designs was important, albeit too late, to have a dramatic effect.

Hitler himself proclaimed, 'On land I am hero, at sea, I am a coward.' He had no clue how the navy operated, and failed to respond to the requests for more of the systems that could alter the course of the war...namely, submarines and long range maritime patrol aircraft. Yes, Goering wanted control of the Fw-200s, but he didn't get it. In fact, he ended losing several groups of long range JU-88s to Kreigsmarine control early in 1942, which they retained up to the end of the war. Hitler instead wanted battleships, having learned nothing from Taranto and Pearl Harbor, and despite losing Bismarck early on. Instead, he punished the Kreigsmarine by restricting the operations of surface units, and not allowing for development of the Walthers boats then under development. Had he given priority to the Walthers projects in 1940, the Type XXI could have been operational by mid 1942, and caused all sorts of headaches for the Allies.

Jeff

You have it remember one thing when it comes down to the what if's for Germany.That is the man who had contorl of the whole shooting match at that time could not wait for all the developments to happen before he waged war.He(Hitler)was and still is even died a NUT! and we need to be thankfull that he did not wait.Hitler as well as Tojo for Japan both thought that America was worthless and weak.Boy were they wrong,what the British saw was a war that would go on for at least 10 years.We finished in four or less.Hitler had the weapons but not the will to use them in the right way.Digger

I agree to an extent. Yes, he had the weapons, and yes, he was a madman, but even if he was sane at the time, they were too few, too late, and usually over-engineered. Think about this...we called Shermans medium tanks, the Germans called the Panther a medium tank. And no Sherman commander in his right mind would go 1 on 1 against a Panther. Tiger I, King Tiger, Ferdinand, Maus, E-100, JagdTiger were, in my opinion, a waste of resources and engineering. The Panther could kill anything in the Allied arsenal up until the Pershing and JS-1, and if upgunned to 88mm, could take care of those as well. So, instead of focusing production on one type of vehicle, and making it reliable, they piddled around with all sorts of other designs and lessened the capabilities of the Panzer forces as a result. If Germany had been smart, they would have produced the Panther and Jagdpanther, and focused on using the Mk IV chassis for SP guns like Nashorn and Wespe. The Panther still had lots of room for developement, even if they had simply upscaled the design to accomodate an 88mm or larger gun.

The same is held true for the aircraft. Why was the Bf-109 still in production after 1942? What people don't realize, is that the G model 109, considered to be the best of the lot, entered service in 1942, and was retained until the end of the war. The Fw-190 was a superior aircraft all around, yet was an afterthought. The D-9 and Ta-152 have been categorized as the best piston engined fighters the Axis had, yet their numbers were too thin to have an impact. Aircraft similar in performance didn't reach the Allied side until late 1944, early 1945. Some of those, like the Grumman Bearcat, weren't even destined for that theatre. Jets are whole discussion unto themselves.

Same again, holds true for naval systems. The Type XXI U-boat, even without the Walthers powerplant, was a formidable system, in fact, most of the post-war Soviet navy was built around Type XXI technology (as were her aircraft). Imagine a 13 knot Flower Class corvette trying to make a depth charge run on a target that's faster underwater than you are on the surface! Imagine the immediate ineffectiveness of standard depth charges, if 17 knots underwater has you out of harms way before they can reach your depth! Imagine the ability to fire 6 torpedoes at individual targets, withdraw from the convoy at 16-17 knots, reload all six torpedoes within 10 minutes, then overtake the convoy, underwater, and attack again...and due this until all 23 torpedoes were expended. Also remember that Germany was working on the FAT, LUT, Falke, and Zaunkoning torpedoes, all of which were either pre-patterned or homing torpedoes.

Bottom line, had Germany given priority to the Walter designs back in 1939 when Doenitz was presented with the V80, and had the Type XXI gone into full scale production replacing the Type VII and IX by late 1942, the war in the Atlantic could have been won by Germany. Even with the conventional powerplant setup, the subs only have to come up to schnorkel depth every 48-72 hours for 3-5 hours to recharge their batteries and take on fresh air. With the Walter powerplant, it only has to come to schnorkel depth for 3-5 minutes every 72 hours to take on fresh air! And it's faster underwater (17knots) than most U-boats were on the surface running on diesels!

J

Jeff I agree on what you say.German and her armed forces were pitted against each other of the ok's from Hitler.Gohring allways wanting top priority on his aircraft and so on as such it was a nightmare for the solider on the field.Like a good exsample came from the old seires the world at war,they showed where Germany was at the gates of Moscow and needed winter clothing and supplys.So what do Hitler do,he sent them salt peter and condoms to fight the Russains,real bright hey.
Just as 1939 was coming in Henkel devoloped a jet fighter and a year later Messerschmit had the 262 but then again Hitler wanted fighter bombers.This delayed the jet program for a while.If Hitler had went to the fighters he could have cleaned the skys and had domination over the air.If he had went and gave Dornitz what he needed they would have doination over the seas due to the most feared weapon in the ocean was not the aircraft carrier but the sub.Hard to find and could get in and out quickly.He should have thorwen the money at these programs and German would have been the better for it.As for as land battles went,If Hitler keep upgrading his tanks as you have said he would have had a superouior military in his hands.Boy did he devoloped the toys but toys don't win wars but sheer numbers do.The U.S. and the Russians proved that with the Sherman and T-34 which were allways upgraded...Digger

Welll...the last part is arguable...the T-34 spawned a revolution, in fact, led to the rushed development of the Panther. But the Sherman suffered the same setbacks as the Bf-109...it was kept in service far longer than it should have been.

Again...from a pure production point of view, what would have happened if the Pershing had entered service in numbers in 1944? Think of the number of poor guys in Shermans and Stuarts who would have lived... That's not to say they didn't have a place, they could have easily been used in an infantry support role, especially in urban areas.

As for the T-34, the best variant of the them all is obviously the T-34/85, upgunned and better suited to facing Panthers and Tigers. Even then, they were outclassed, and the won by sheer numbers, as you mentioned.

J

Just for some info....The us armor board which supposedly controlled what tactics the armor divisions used was of the idea that our tanks weren't supposed to hunt enemy tanks. That was the job of the Tank destroyer.
Our tanks were to support the infantry which is why they had the realitivly low powered 75mm and the TD's had High velocity 76 and 90 mm guns.
The idea sucked in actuallity but that was the original plan.

My regards to the Sherman. The way I understand it, although US commanders knew it was vastly inferrior and obsolete to the German tanks, is that we were able to build thousands of them and that the Sherman was adaptable. In other words, we took them to be expendable, if three were blown out to take one Tiger or Panther, so be it. We could build 30 dependable Shermans to one Tiger.

Sapper, I agree, the doctrine needed a serious overhaul the minute the Wehrmacht upgraded the Panzer IV to 75mm, which had the ability to kill any US tank at the time.

Scott, you're absolutely correct in your statements...the sad part is, we had the technical ability to design a superior tank to the Germans, yet, we lolly-gagged around and the Pershing didn't enter service until late in the war. The failure of this doctrine shouldn't be measured in losses of Allied tanks, it should be measured in the losses of Allied tank crews. Quite often, a hit to a Tiger or Panther resulted in the vehicle being disabled, and the crew was able to get out. When a 75mm or 88mm round impacts a Sherman, it usually enters one side and exits the other, and resulting explosion and rapid pressure change inside the vehicle, not to mention fragments of armor and internal ammo cooking off, kills the crew almost instantly.

Jeff