The colossus Graf Zeppelin was a German aircraft carrier armed with over 60 guns
and room for over 1,700 people and 60 aircraft. It was widely regarded
as the definitive German vehicle that could have turned the tide of the war.
Impressively enough, most world superpowers had plenty of aircraft
carriers participating in the war, but the technologically-advanced Germany didn’t.
Hitler and his Admirals eventually envisioned four aircraft carriers that were going to
be built and finished by 1947 as part of the naval expansion of the Kriegsmarine.
However, the early breakout of the war forced the Wehrmacht to focus on more pressing matters,
leaving the project to the side.
Graf Zeppelin, the incomplete 33,000-ton lead ship in a class of two carriers,
would remain stationed in Poland for almost two years.
It wouldn’t be until the war raged on and aircraft carriers from other nations played a pivotal role
in winning crucial battles that Hitler ordered the Kriegsmarine to carry on with the project.
It was now a race against time...
A Defenseless Nation
The Treaty of Versailles signed in June of 1919 humiliated all of Germany,
especially its military. The country was now forbidden from developing military technology,
and the war industry quickly vanished.
Worst of all, the German armed forces were reduced to a mere 100,000 men, resembling
more of a police force than a proper army. The country was pretty much left defenseless
against other foreign powers, and coupled with the economic downfall, social unrest followed.
The naval branch of the German armed forces, or Kriegsmarine, suffered the most, as they were
forbidden to develop warships or dreadnoughts like the ones the British and French had.
The Kriegsmarine was only allowed to upgrade pre-dreadnought battleships
with a maximum tonnage of 10,000 tons. Like their ground counterpart, the German Navy
was defenseless against any other European power. However, German engineers managed to work around
the restrictions imposed by the Kriegsmarine and came up with the idea of pocket battleships.
Although the German re-armament was already underway before 1933,
Adolf Hitler was committed to fully supporting the military, including the creation of a worthy navy.
He wanted all branches of the military to return to their former glory.
The Navy Reemerges
Born again as the Kriegsmarine, the first objective was to produce a small but capable
force to challenge the British and French naval powers. At first it seemed unlikely,
but the German industry kept working under the patronage of the Third Reich.
Although all the global powers from the First World War had signed the 1922 Washington Naval
Treaty to limit an arms race of naval nature, only a few actually obliged.
The treaty established a tonnage limit to naval vessels, but it was repeatedly altered
to fit the interests of the allied victors. This led the Third Reich to negotiate the
Anglo-German Naval Agreement to grant permission to construct heavier vessels for the Kriegsmarine.
On April 1, 1939, Hitler presented Admiral Erich Raeder as the Kriegsmarine's chief
to the military staff during a gala ceremony aboard Scharnhorst, a new
battlecruiser anchored at Jade Bay Wilhelmshaven. During the ceremony, Hitler brought up Plan Z,
a strategy to expand the Navy and be able to finally challenge the British and French navies.
Both Hitler and Raeder dreamt of building a naval force with10 battleships, 4 aircraft carriers,
15 pocket battleships, 250 U-boats, and more than 100 destroyers and cruisers.
The plan was achievable, but only in the long run, as the fleet could not be completed until 1948.
Still, the Führer was delighted. However, Britain and France
declared war against Germany after the annexation of Poland in September of 1939,
and at this time, the Kriegsmarine was not even at its minimal combat readiness.
There was no way Germany could beat the combined fleets of France and Britain with what they had,
so the top brass was forced to come up with unconventional ideas.
Admiral Raeder only had the Bismarck and Tirpitz 15-inch gun battleships at his disposal,
three 11-inch gun pocket battleships, two 8-inch gun heavy cruisers, two 11-inch
gun battle cruisers, 34 destroyers, over 60 U-boats, and not a single aircraft carrier.
The clock was ticking, and the Kriegsmarine had to hurry to
finish the only aircraft carrier it had begun building in 1935: the Graf Zeppelin.
A Heavy Aircraft Carrier While most world navies began
converting ships into aircraft carriers before the end of World War 1, Germany
would join them too late in the game because of the restrictions imposed on its armed forces.
Still, after negotiating with its adversaries the disclosure of the naval agreement,
Hitler approved the construction of the Navy's first aircraft carrier on November 16, 1935.
The ship was awarded to the Deutsche Werke shipyard in Kiel as Aircraft Carrier A
and laid down in December of 1936 after work on the Gneisenau battleship was finished.
The carrier was named after Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin,
who had risen to fame for creating the colossal dirigibles made famous during World War 1.
Graf Zeppelin would not be launched until December 8, 1938, during the anniversary
of the Battle of the Falkland Islands. She was christened by Von Zeppelin’s daughter, Helen.
The aircraft carrier was 262 meters long and had a beam of 36 meters, with a maximum draft of 8.5
meters. Fully loaded, Graf Zeppelin displaced 33,550 long tons, and was intended to be manned
by a crew of 1,760 sailors plus flight crews. Her propulsion consisted of four Brown,
Boveri & Cie geared turbines with 16 LaMont boilers. The ship’s power plant generated
over 200,000 shaft power, which translated to a top speed of almost 62 kilometers per hour.
Still, by traveling at about 30 kilometers per hour,
Graf Zeppelin's range could render almost 15,000 kilometers of range.
When it came to armor, the carrier's flight deck was protected by 45 millimeters of Wotan
Weich steel armor, the main deck by 60, and the waterline armor belt was 100 millimeters thick.
Graf Zeppelin would carry substantial armament for its time, including eight or sixteen 15-centimeter
SK C/28 guns for defense against surface warships.
This unique combination was meant to use Graf Zeppelin in a more offensive role to attack
cruisers, destroyers, and merchant vessels and support the aircraft that she would be carrying.
Additionally, Graf Zeppelin's anti-aircraft defenses comprised 12 10.5-centimeter SK
C/33 guns, 22 3.7-centimeter SK C/30 guns, and 28 Flak guns.
By mid-1939, the aircraft carrier was almost 80 percent complete. Expectations were high,
and it was estimated that she would be finished by the end of 1940.
Pilot training and development of specific aircraft adapted to the carrier began in 1938.
The responsibility of these two tasks fell to the head of the Luftwaffe, Hermann Goring.
However, Goring was not too keen on cooperating,
as he wished to keep control of every single project in which aircraft were involved.
Ultimately, the intention was to house 20 Fi 167 biplane torpedo bombers, 10 BF109 fighters,
and 13 Stukas aboard Graf Zeppelin, or else create an exclusive aircraft for carrier operations.
Unfortunately for the Kriegsmarine, once the war broke out in September of 1939,
the Wehrmacht resources began to run, the project quickly stalled.
A Carrier is Doomed
During the initial stages of the conquest of Norway in April of 1940, Admiral Raeder proposed
Hitler to halt the construction of Graf Zeppelin. The reason was simple: although the carrier was
almost complete, it would take another 10 months to install all of her guns.
By then, the Kriegsmarine was in urgent need of coastal batteries and anti-aircraft
guns to protect the Norwegian coastline, which comprised several port facilities,
including the future U-boat pens. The Führer agreed and allowed Raeder
to remove the few guns that had already been installed on Graf Zeppelin. Months later,
in July of 1940, the carrier was towed to Gdynia and used as a storage depot for timber until 1942.
During this period, the usefulness of aircraft carriers was repeatedly proven at the seas.
In November of 1940, the British decimated the Italian base at Taranto with a task force of
Swordfish aircraft that took off from Royal Navy carriers. Then, in May of 1941, Bismarck and
Tirpitz were heavily damaged by fire from British aircraft that did the same. More importantly,
Japanese carriers were essential in the surprise attack against the United States in Pearl Harbor.
In May of 1942, Hitler ordered Raeder to resume work on Graf Zeppelin, but several
branch problems prevented this from happening. To start off, Raeder wanted new and specially
designed aircraft for carrier use, but Goring argued that it was impossible to do so because
the aircraft industry was already overwhelmed with aircraft production to help on various fronts.
Instead, Goring suggested converting existing BF109s and Ju87s, and this led to more changes
to the existing structure of Graf Zeppelin. The modifications began immediately,
and it appeared that the carrier might be finished after all.
However, Hitler suddenly replaced Admiral Raeder with submarine expert Karl Dönitz
as the head of the Kriegsmarine. With the war slowly turning in favor of the Allied forces,
and Germany losing the supremacy of the seas, Donitz convinced Hitler to stop working on
any type of surface ship and focus those valuable resources on producing U-boats.
Work on Graf Zeppelin was suspended once again in January of 1943,
and the carrier was transferred to Stettin in Poland.
The mighty carrier languished for two years until, in April of 1945,
its crew decided to flood it to prevent it from falling into the hands of the Soviets.
An Unexpected Discovery
The Germans believed that Graf Zeppelin would never float again, but the Soviets had other
plans and refloated it for inspection. After taking away every valuable item
and used to simulate an air attack on an American aircraft carrier, Graf was sunk in July of 1947.
For decades, historians speculated about where the only aircraft carrier produced
by the Third Reich was sunk, but nobody knew, even the Soviets.
It was not until 2006 that a Polish vessel from an oil company found the wreckage of a 265-meter-long
ship 55 kilometers north of Władysławowo. The Polish Navy quickly sent a team of
divers to verify the ship's identity and were amazed at the discovery.
It was the long-forgotten Graf Zeppelin, Hitler's first and last aircraft carrier.
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Graf Zeppelin. Could it have changed the tide of the war in the Atlantic and Mediterranean?