The chase and ultimate sinking of Germany’s
monster battleship Bismarck (24–27 May 1941) involved no less than five RN
battleships, two aircraft carriers, nine cruisers, and 18 destroyers. Bismarck
had completed its sea trials the previous month. (Captain Ernst Lindemann was
granted special permission to refer to the ship as “he,” in honor of former
chancellor Otto von Bismarck.) In the initial stages of the battle, fire from
Bismarck’s consort, the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen (some claim that the fatal
fire came from Bismarck), caused the British super-battle cruiser Hood to
explode with the loss of all but three of its 1,500 crewmen. It was only Hood’s
second serious combat in her 20-year lifespan. Although by 1941, Hood was
elderly and unmodernized (plans to thicken its armor protection had been
aborted with the onset of war), its loss was considered a national tragedy.
Hood was the fastest and largest capital ship of the time, actually weighing
some 5,000 tons more than the new Prince of Wales class of battleships. Prince
of Wales, in its first engagement, and with workmen still aboard, did not fight
efficiently and was the target of both German warships; it broke off the
engagement and fell away under cover of a smokescreen. (Bismarck was also a new
battleship, but it did have the advantage of several months of work-up
cruises.) As if losing Hood were not bad enough, now a Royal Navy battleship,
part of a superior British force, had retreated in the face of the enemy.
Actually, the RN side of the battle had been badly handled, with Admiral
Lancelot Holland in Hood allowing Bismarck and Prinz Eugen to cross the T of
his two main warships; Holland paid for this blunder with his life. But King
George V (sister ship to Prince of Wales) and Rodney had devastated Bismarck’s
upperworks with concentrated fire. It was finally dispatched some 600 miles off
the French coast by torpedoes from the cruiser Dorsetshire. There is even some
persuasive argument that its own crew scuttled Bismarck in a final act of
defiance. (Prinz Eugen managed to escape the British net, later made the
Channel Dash with Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, was used as a target vessel after
the war [surviving two atomic explosions at Kwajelein/Bikini Atoll in July
1946], and sank after an accident disabled its stern.)
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The Third Reich’s battleship ambitions were
every bit as grandiose as those of any other naval power. Germany’s naval
chief, Eric Raeder, was in close harmony with Adolf Hitler’s global goals.
Raeder and Hitler foresaw Germany eventually going to war with Great Britain,
the United States, and even Japan, and envisioned a fleet for those
eventualities. As a temporary deterrent to Great Britain, the aborted Plan Z
(1939) envisioned 10 (some sources say six) super- Bismarcks of 56,000 tons,
three battle cruisers, four aircraft carriers, and 249 submarines, with top
priority over air force and army requirements, all to be completed in six
years. Plan Z was the basis for the even larger blue-water battleship-based
navy programs of 1940 and 1941, drawn up to take on the rest of the world’s
major naval powers and featuring capital ships of 98,000–141,500 tons armed
with 20-inch guns. It is also indicative of German battleshipmindedness that
its navy never completed an aircraft carrier.
Thanks to post-World War I Allied policies,
the Third Reich entered World War II with only fast and modern battleships (not
counting those two nearly-valueless pre-dreadnoughts). Its three pocket
battleships laid down in the late 1920s and early 1930s (and thus predating
Hitler’s assumption of power in 1933) were Lutzow, Admiral Scheer, and Admiral
Graf Spee. (Lutzow was originally named Deutschland, but Hitler, worried about
the domestic reaction if a warship named after the German nation were sunk,
ordered it renamed.) Although high speed
was supposed to be the main advantage of these small capital ships, their
average of 28 knots was soon enough surpassed by the following Scharnhorst
class’s 32 knots. Nonetheless, the Deutschlands/Lutzows, a well-balanced
pioneering design, served as the embryo of many later, much larger warships,
such as the Scharnhorst class, and Germany’s first and only true post-World War
I first-class battleships (Bismarck and Tirpitz), as well as for the Royal
Navy’s King George V class, and even for the last three U.S. Navy battleship
classes. The Lutzows were also notable for their pioneering of welded
construction and unique diesel propulsion, the latter a feature never repeated
in any other capital ship. They could also be called cruisers (and were actually
reclassified in 1940 as heavy cruisers), but their six 11-inch guns were not
matched in any other cruiser until the U.S. Alaskas, which were officially
classified by the U.S. Navy as large cruisers. Whatever the nomenclature, these
were the Kriegsmarine’s most successful heavy units. Specifically designed as
commerce raiders that were to be more powerful than any faster warship, the
three destroyed some 300,000 tons of Allied shipping. Thus the Scharnhorsts and
the Lutzow/ Deutschlands did what battle cruisers were supposed to do— attack
enemy commerce—and avoided what battle cruisers were supposed to avoid—enemy
battleships—something the Royal Navy, to its cost, never learned.
The Scharnhorsts (Scharnhorst and
Gneisenau) were both laid down in 1935. There is little question that these two
units were true battleships, but even with more than twice the displacement of
the Lutzows, they mounted only the same 11-inch main guns. The German admiralty
planned to up-gun these warships at the beginning of World War II, but the
complexity and the costs not only of the bigger guns themselves but also of
their intricate mountings precluded this proposal in the German Navy (or in any
other navy, for that matter).
Bismarck and Tirpitz were the last and by
far the most powerful battleships built by Germany. Although nominally still
bound by the London Naval Agreement, they exceeded its tonnage limitations by a
wide margin. In this case “wide” can be taken literally; they were the
broadest-beamed of any contemporary capital ship, which gave them outstanding
stability. (Only the aborted U.S. Montanas would have measured wider.) Their
intricate internal subdivision made them extraordinarily difficult to sink. Yet
at the end of the war, and in sharp contrast to World War I, not one German
capital ship survived to be turned over to the Allies.
