Best World war two warships?

[renrich]

No Del, I don't blame machinery totally for their war record. No major unit in the KM had much of a stellar war record. Too few and poorly used for the most part. The Hippers were over sized and over designed and over complicated IMO. If they had been forced to serve in the ways that the US, IJN or British CAs they would probably have been poorly suited. The Hippers IMO were not nearly as well designed as the much earlier designed Pensacola or Kako class. They were handsome though.

[syscom3]

"Boston" class?

Dont you mean the Baltimore Class cruisers (the epitomy of heavy cruiser design in WW2)?

[delcyros]

Agreed, Renrich. But I am not quite not agreeing with stellar records to all ships: Scheer is the cruiser, which still holds the title for sinking most enemy merchants tonnage in ww2. The two BC´s also sunk over 100.000.t. of enemy shipping including one of only two aircraft carriers lost to surface forces in ww2.
I think the KM got much in return for the money spend on the PBB´s and BC´s but much less for the ressources spent in CA´s and BB´s.

[parsifal]

Yes, the baltimores....I mistakenly always refer to them as Bostone fopr some reason that even escapes me. Thanks for the correction

[renrich]

Agree Del, in the early war when the KM was employed aggressively there were some positive results in traditional ways. Also, the "fleet in being" concept had an impact throughout the war. For those purposes it did not matter too much about engine reliability as long as the British were not aware of any problems.

[parsifal]

I think the biggest problem in the german navy was not their ships. In fact I would argue that their ships were first class. In my opinion it was in the nature of their employment, and this was brought about by their limited numbers, obsessive care to avoid casualties, and lastly the imbalanced nature of the fleet itself. The fleet lacked an effective carrier based air arm (I have often wondered what might have happened if the germans had embraced carrier warfare in the same way as the army embraced blitzkrieg for the ground battle. What might have happened if the Germans had the use of four carriers instead of none, with a proper support base and a doctrine on their use.

Alternatively some time many years agao, I calculated that if the Germans in 1937-38 had opted for submarines in place of the BBs and the CAs that they were building, whether this might have resulted in some greater level of success. I remeber estimating on the basis of unit costs and crew training, that instead of the Bismarck-Tirpitz, and the Heavy Cruisers Seydlitz and Lutzow (not the Pocket battleship) the Germans may have entered the war with an additional 60-80 fleet subs.....what effect might this have had on the first year of the war????

But it is unfair, and innaccurate to try and blame the KMs failures on some design failures of the ships.....i believe the ships themselves to be first rate, at least from a technical point of view

[renrich]

With respect, Parsifal it is rather fruitless to speculate about the size of the KM. Germany was not and is not a maritime country and expended huge sums of money and effort to build a navy before WW1 which still could not defeat the Grand Fleet. WW2 was not supposed to begin until 1945 and even then plans for the KM would not have brought it on par with the RN, much less the USN. Might as well speculate what would have happened if the population of Germany had been twice as large. Her CAs had mechanical difficulties, her true BBS have been criticised for poor arrangement of armor, Scharnhorst and her sister were undergunned for BBS, the Scheers were innovative but the answer to them was several cruisers. Again, Germany was a relatively small, continental power with not much maritime capacity, a little like the South in the War Between the States.

[parsifal]

Richard

You raise many good points, most of which i agree with. However, the comment that generated this sub-strand of the thread was whether the German cruisers were failures due to their design.

I dont think either myself or Del are arguing that they were not failures. The question is whether this was due to their design and specifically their engine reliability.

I dont have much information to support the reliability argument. This leads me to suspect that they were not suffereing nearly such reliability problems as you might think. If you have supporting information to suggest otherwise,, I would love to know about it.

[Henk]

Yes, the Germans did use their Surface Naval Vessels fot all the wrong things, but they were verry skilled in their work. The Royal Navy sailors had lots of respect for the Germans because they were very good gunners.

The German vessels were very good in their own way and used correctly they could have done a lot, but the big problem was Hitler did not care about the Navy and they lost quite a few destroyers in the Norway invasion and they never had enough naval forces to see the war through.

Hitler said himself; "on land I am a hero, but on sea I am a coward".

[BombTaxi]

As renrich has already mentioned, the KM was built on the basis that the war would not start until 1946. Therefore, it was nowhere near ready for hostilities in 1939. If things had kicked off in '46 the KM would theoretically have had the H class BBs and at least one carrier, and would have had some experience in using them together.

Having said that, the ships that the KM did have were not best in class by any means. Although Tirpitz kept the RN paralysed with fear for most of the war, she and Bismarck were closely based on the superdreadnoughts that would have been built had the Imperial Navy carried on building it's fleet through WW1. As such they were old technology - fortunately for the KM, many of the RNs BBs and BCs were WW1 veterans themselves, which helped to level the playing field.

The Panzerschiff, such as Graf Spee and Scheer were the development of Wolfgang Zenker's plans for 'cruiser killers' of the mid 20's, which were ultimately put on hold by the Great Depression. By the time Hitler built them, they were anachronistic. The Battle of the River Plate proved that the 8-inch gun 'Treaty Cruisers' that they were designed to destroy (i.e HMS Exeter) could give the type a hard time, and they had neither the speed or firepower to face the RN's BCs. Likewise, Scharnhorst and Gniesenau were really neither one thing or another - too small and weakly armed to fight a BB, and probably to lightly aremed to sucessfully face a BC either. So really, the KM's major fleet units were noting to write home about.

And as an aside, following renrich's comments on Germany's maritime aspirations, I would contend that the Imperial Navy's failure to defeat the Grand Fleet was more to do with leadership than technology. In fact, German ships were far tougher than their British counterparts - especially the BCs, which bore the brunt of the actual fleet combat in the North Sea. Had they have been deployed more aggressively, things may well have turned out differently. Anyone who is after a one-volume history of the Great War as fought between the RN and Imperial Navy would be well off to read Castles of Steel by Robert K. Massie. Dreadnought, by the same author, covers the dreadnought arms race prior to the war, and shows that pre-1914 Germany was indeed a country with very serious naval aspirations - so serious in fact that they played a large part in the international tension that lead to the Great War.