September 17, 1940.
The German leader Adolf Hitler has just indefinitely postponed Operation Sealion, the plan to invade
the United Kingdom by land.
Hitler begrudgingly admits to himself that invading this pesky little island nation will
be a bridge too far, even for his formidable military machine.
The question is, would an aircraft carrier have helped with this operation?
If the answer is yes, why the hell didn’t the Germans build one, or why hadn’t they
already built one?
We’ll come back to Operation Sealion soon, but first, let’s look at another case when
Germany could have certainly made use of an aircraft carrier.
Let’s take you back to May 1941, when the German behemoth of a battleship, the Bismarck,
had just sortied from the French port of Brest.
Its mission was to wreak havoc on British shipping lanes in the North Atlantic Ocean.
First launched in 1939, this ship was supposed to become one of the most feared weapons in
European history.
As you’ll see later, for a few years before this, the Germans had high ambitions of competing
with the seafaring nation of Britain when it came to ruling the waves.
Along with its sister ship, the Tirpitz, the Bismarck was bigger than anything Germany
had ever built for its navy, aka, the Kriegsmarine.
The two of them, on paper, were as good as anything seen in the whole of Europe.
The Bismarck was a monster armed with eight 38 cm SK C/34 guns, twelve 15 cm L/55 guns,
sixteen 10.5 cm L/65 guns, sixteen 3.7 cm L/83 guns, and twelve 2 cm anti-aircraft cannons.
a displacement of 50,300 t (49,500 long tons) fully loaded, it was indeed bigger than anything
in Europe at the time, carrying a total crew of around 2,200 officers and enlisted men.
Even so, the British were confident that their Royal Navy was superior to the German Navy.
This came to a head on May 24, 1941, in what’s become known as the Battle of the Denmark
Strait.
The Bismarck, along with the German heavy cruiser, the Prinz Eugen, got into a scrap
with the British battleship HMS Prince of Wales, a formidable ship in itself.
The British also had the huge battlecruiser HMS Hood, aka the “Mighty Hood.”
These British war machines were about as good as it got, and the Brits were damned proud
of them, especially the Hood, which, when it was first launched back in 1918, was the
largest warship on the planet.
That May, it became somewhat less invincible when the Bismarck hit it with several shells
and sank it to the bottom of the Denmark Strait, a stretch of water between Greenland and Iceland.
There were 1,418 crew on the Hood, and only three survived.
This battle was called one of the greatest humiliations in British Navy history.
A newspaper report at the time stated, “Germans Gloat Over Sinking of HMS Hood: British Victory
Hopes Crumble.”
It wasn’t all bad news, though.
The Prince of Wales had hit the Bismarck.
It was nothing too serious, but the Bismarck needed to get to the French port of Brest
for some fixing up while the Prinz Eugen carried on with its mission, Operation Rheinübung,
to interrupt British shipping.
To say the British were rattled would be an understatement.
They threw the kitchen sink at trying to chase down the Bismarck before it could get to safety
in France.
Things didn’t look good for the British.
The weather was horrible for one thing, which isn’t great when you’re in pursuit on
the high seas.
The Bismarck only needed to get within a safe distance from France.
German warplanes would be in range, maybe 100 miles from the coast, which could then
fire at the British entourage.
The Brits would then have to turn around.
Humiliation number two.
They might not even have gotten that far since the Germans had laid a trap with a mass of
U-boats waiting for the British ships in the Bay of Biscay.
Could Germany really outfox and outgun a historically brilliant navy it had never even been close
to in terms of prowess?
In a scene befitting an action movie, the Bismarck got closer and closer to safety,
with German bombers at the ready to send the Brits running away with their tails between
their legs.
On May 27, British flying boats reported the Bismarck’s position.
She was now just 12 hours away from safety or thereabouts.
The Bismarck would have made it if it hadn’t been for the fact that on her tail was Britain’s
HMS Ark Royal aircraft carrier, the kind of ship the Germans didn’t yet have but surely
wanted.
As soon as the Bismarck was spotted, the Brits launched 15 of their Swordfish biplane torpedo
bombers, a slow and outdated piece of machinery by the time WWII was up and running.
Still, they did the job.
They flew about 40 miles to reach the Bismarck, which was now sitting like an open duck.
As darkness descended on the scene, and the German crew started wishing their ship had
been just that much faster, a Swordfish got very lucky when its torpedo hit the Bismarck’s
rudder, jamming it and made it so the giant ship was only able to sail around and around
in circles.
The German ship reported that night, “Ship unmanoeuvrable.
We will fight to the last shell.
Long live the Führer!”
The Führer was probably thinking in German something along the lines of, “You have
got to be kidding me…Remind me, how much did that frickin’ thing cost!’
The Bismarck was in some serious trouble.
The next morning, now just 300 miles from the French coast, British ships unleashed
holy hell on it, causing the Germans to issue an abandon ship order.
She was on fire and sinking as four British ships fired off a total of 2,800 shells, with
400 of them hitting their target.
Of the 2,200 Germans on the ship, only 114 survived, many of them later picked up by
the British to be taken as POWs.
This was one of the single most important events of the start of the early war on the
European front.
If there was any good news for the Germans, it was that the ship’s cat, Sam, survived,
although the Brits got their hands on it, too.
This story we can’t ignore.
It adds a bit of levity to a story featuring over 2,000 dead men.
The HMS Cossack picked Sam up and named it Oscar.
It then became the ship’s lucky cat…or maybe not so lucky, because the Cossack was
sunk later in October, when 159 of her crew, died after being hit by a German U-Boat.
Unbelievably, the cat survived and gained the nickname Unsinkable Sam.
Sam then went to the MS Ark Royal, which was sunk by a U-boat in November 1941.
All but one of the crew survived, as did Sam, who was found “angry but quite unharmed”
floating on a plank.
Right, back to the main story, which isn’t quite as amusing and uplifting.
Germany had lost its quite amazing ship to the British, who, in part, had used an aircraft
carrier to take it out.
Hitler was embarrassed, and he was furious.
It’s also said he suffered from a bout of extreme depression because of this one loss.
Not just because the Bismarck was a symbol of Germany’s fairly new naval pride but
also because over 2,000 men is a lot to lose in one fight.
The entire Kriegsmarine never really got over this loss.
It was a matter of national pride.
You need to understand this and Hitler’s downcast mindset to properly understand the
rest of this show.
The Germans had already proved its land forces, the Wehrmacht, were an almost unstoppable
force, while in 1941, when the Bismarck sank, its air force, the Luftwaffe, was the most
powerful land-based air force on the planet.
Hitler might have felt like he had the power of Gods at his fingertips at that point in
time, and yet he couldn’t save his precious Bismarck.
He must have felt the vulnerability of Achilles with his unmatchable strength but a very dodgy
heel.
Hitler knew very well that if he had an aircraft carrier when the British ships hunted down
the Bismarck, his Me-109 fighters would have no doubt chewed up those painfully slow British
Swordfish planes.
Sure, we are aware that landing Me 109s, aka “cadet killers,” on an aircraft carrier
was always going to be problematic given their not very suitable for a carrier, but let’s
give the Nazis the benefit of the doubt here.
At the worst, the Germans would have been able to upset the Swordfish party and send
them off packing back to the MS Ark Royal, enough for the Bismarck to get within 100
miles of the French coast and possibly for the British to fall into Hitler’s trap.
Had this gone that way, it would have been a remarkable moment in the war.
Even today, there are analysts who say that if Hitler had aircraft carriers in 1941, even
just one or two of them, the war would have looked quite different.
Had he sunk ships in that British hunting party or at least turned them away, he’d
have had a very different mindset when it came to his navy.
Ok, so we can agree that an aircraft carrier would, at times, have come in handy for the
Germans.
We’re not saying carriers would have won Germany the war, far from it, but they would
have become a useful addition to Germany’s already exceptional military machine.
Some of you military historians out there watching this show will recall that Germany
did actually have a plan to build four aircraft carriers.
Those were the Graf Zeppelin-class.
If you know that much, you’ll also know about Germany’s many ambitions to become
the regional superpower prior to WWI, which, in the world of balance of power politics,
led to that war.
Under Kaiser Wilhelm II, Germany wanted a powerful navy, something the Kaiser planned,
with Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, to be at least two-thirds the size of the great British
navy.
This is why he passed the five Fleet Acts of 1898, 1900, 1906, 1908, and 1912.
To become a great colonial power Germany required a formidable navy, it was necessary, or at
least he thought it was.
But as the balance of power shifted toward Germany, there was that war, which Germany
lost only to be hit with crippling reparations.
The Anglo-German naval race was no longer a thing because Germany had accepted limitations
regarding the size of its navy, and even if they did try and sneakily build ships, such
great hulks of machinery were not exactly easy to hide.
In 1935, the Brits and Germans signed the Anglo-German Naval Agreement, in part to improve
relations between the nations in a balance of power that included France and the Soviet
Union.
The Brits inked this agreement without asking the French, which was a big deal considering
it allowed Germany to build much more than was stated in the Treaty of Versailles.
It was after this agreement was signed that Germany got to work, now with a focus on building
those new aircraft carriers.
This fell under Plan Z, Germany’s 1939 expansion of the Kriegsmarine, something the country
hoped would, over several years, lead to a German Navy that was able to defeat the British
Navy.
The plan was to build 10 battleships, of which only four were finished in the end.
It also consisted of building four aircraft carriers, of which none were finished.
A whopping zero of the three battlecruisers ever saw service.
That’s what you might call a failure.
So, what went wrong?
Building such massive machines and operating them is not like opening a sandwich shop.
Germany struggled with the construction of the aircraft carriers.
The country didn’t have the requisite expertise, and neither did they have the raw materials
and labor.
Even if it were possible, Germany was never quite sure what it would do with aircraft
carriers, so materials and labor were used elsewhere.
In 1937, two of the aircraft carrier projects were shut down, but the other two remained.
Adolf Hitler’s aspirations were all about land and air, not water.
When WWII broke out in ‘39, that’s where his focus lay, while the country also focused
on building its famous U-boats.
Work on one carrier, Flugzeugträger B, was stopped, and in 1940, the work on Flugzeugträger
A also stopped.
At the same time, the Luftwaffe unit that was trained for aircraft carriers was disbanded.
We’ll just say here that the carriers were to take 10 Me-109s, which were difficult to
land on such ships due to narrow-based landing gear and the hard landings required for carriers.
The Germans also planned to have 13 Ju 87Cs on the ships, which were slow and vulnerable
planes.
One fighter could easily take out a dozen Stukas in one pass, which is not ideal for
the type of warfare carriers usually engage in.
In 1942, that changed to a complement of 15 Messerschmitt Me 155 fighters and 28 Junkers
Ju 87E dive bombers.
It didn’t matter.
The carriers were soon to be thrown on the scrap heap.
Let’s also remember that the only thing Germany was concerned about was getting bang
for its buck.
The aircraft carrier program might have been expedited if the Germans thought it would
help win them the war.
They obviously held back because many tens of thousands of tons of scarce steel had to
be used intelligently, not to mention all the fuel it would have taken to build those
carriers.
They could have built around 100 Type VII U-boats with all that time, manpower, and
material, not to mention all kinds of land weapons.
Hitler finally put an end to his aircraft carrier ambitions and, for that matter, any
of his previous surface fleet ambitions in 1943 after the Battle of the Barents Sea.
This was when German ships tried to attack a British convoy off the coast of Norway.
The convoy consisted of fourteen British merchant ships carrying a huge number of weapons and
other war materials to the Soviet Union where Hitler was now busy finding out why Napoleon
had failed so badly there.
Upsetting this convoy would have been a massive score for Germany, seeing as it included countless
tons of fuel, as well as 202 tanks, 87 fighter planes, 33 bombers, and 2,046 other vehicles.
A mass of British warships protected all this.
In short, it was a disaster for Germany or, at the very least, an embarrassment.
Shells were fired in the cold, dark night, exchanges that were as confusing as they were
accurate.
All of the 14 British ships made it safely to the Soviet Union.
Hitler again had one of his temper tantrums.
It’s said with his veins almost popping out of his head, he screamed at the Commander-in-Chief
of the Navy, Erich Rader, for a whole one and a half hours.
He then told Rader that the battleships, battle cruisers, heavy cruisers, light cruisers,
and a bunch of other ships were to be decommissioned.
They would, in effect, become scrap.
This included giving up any hope of finishing the aircraft carrier.
All that steel, all those workers, all that fuel, could go to building other machines,
including U-boats, said Hitler.
Rader argued, “The decommissioning of our major assets will hand the enemy a substantial
victory at no cost and will be seen by them as a lack of resolve.”
Hitler wasn’t listening.
All that hard work for nothing thought Rader, who soon handed in his resignation.
Admiral Karl Dönitz, the commander of the U-boat force, succeeded him.
It was actually Dontiz who became Germany’s head of state after Hitler signed his will
and did his famous death dive in the Führerbunker in Berlin as Red Army guns and bombs drove
him half mad.
So, Hitler gave up on the Kriegsmarine ever becoming anything that matched the British
navy.
He threw in the towel, although he might have been a little bit rash in his decision making.
Even so, throwing in that much manpower and so many materials would have negatively affected
his battle on the Eastern Front.
He was stuck between a rock and a hard place.
He might have been right to give up on his naval ambitions.
The British navy often made mincemeat out of German ships when the chance arose.
There’s nothing that suggests to us that even if Hitler had built at least one carrier,
he could outperform the British Navy, a navy that was already leagues ahead of the Kriegsmarine
in terms of operations, experience, and the general running of a large navy.
As for Operation Sealion, for Hitler’s invasion to succeed, the Germans knew they had to take
out the British air force, eliminate the Royal Navy to enable landings – build more suitable
landing craft – plus somehow ensure British submarines couldn’t do harm to the landing
fleet.
In “Directive No. 9 - Instructions For Warfare Against The Economy Of The Enemy,” part
1, the Germans wrote, “The defeat of England is essential to final victory.”
Part 4 was all about destroying British merchant ships and the ships protecting them by mining
and blocking the sea lanes.
The conclusion read, “We must also seek constantly to compress and shift English foreign
trade into channels which are open to effective attack by our own Navy and Air Force.”
That all sounds well and good on paper, but in reality, it would have been all but impossible,
and we’re not sure how an aircraft carrier would have helped matters.
Sticking one of those giant things in the middle of the English Channel would have been
like throwing a large moose into a lion enclosure.
Those large coastal guns could almost reach France.
Aircraft carriers are notoriously vulnerable; “glass cannons” is a term that’s been
used for them.
Then, you have a mass of British destroyers, submarines, and cruisers, which would have
always outnumbered German ships.
It would have been a slow, painful death for the German navy.
The British were more than prepared, and it would have taken Germany’s entire war effort
to invade Britain, something Hitler didn’t ever really want to do.
Stalin was a much greater threat to the Germans.
That’s not to say that Germany, at times, wouldn’t have benefited from an aircraft
carrier or two.
We’ve clearly shown that this was the case.
Germany would have had them if things worked out a different way, and perhaps the Bismarck
might have lived to fight another day, but we don’t imagine it would have had too many
fights until it was destroyed.
Given Germany’s resources, it just wasn’t possible to fight the war it fought and build
a Navy anything close to as powerful as Great Britain’s.
Now you need to see how things worked out in “Real Reason Why Nazi Officers Fled to
Argentina After WW2.”
Or, have a look at “Nazi Invasion Plans for America.”