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Well, my view is the bismark was a mistake from the get go and one that may have lost the war for germany, thank god.

Consider: Bismark masses 41,770 tons. A type 7 Uboard masses 769 tons. This means bismark consumed 247 times the material of a Uboat.

Bismark's crew was ~2,000 men. A Uboat crew, ~50.

One sees quickly that it would have been quite feasible to construct 50-100 uboats for what was sunk (figuratively and literally) into the bismark, with plenty of material left over.

There were single Uboats that did more actual damage to the enemy than the bismark.

The only thing the bismark could do a Uboat couldn't was shell targets up to 20+ miles inland with high explosive artillery rounds. But the bismrak was meant to be a 'commerce raider" by the german admiralty.

A dozen or two Uboats would have done many many times more damage as commerce raiders than the bismark did.

Had the bismark not been built and even a good fraction of the resources wasted on her used for uboats and strategic bombers (Another disastrous blunder the nazis made, they had no heavy bombers at all) I think the war would have gone seriously worse for the world.

i disagree, moslty due to the fact that more engines = more oil wasted.

Also the statement as a surface raider is wrong, the bismark was planned according to Z-Plan armamament programm, which was to rebuild in essence the highseasfleet.

Not to mention that, as we've been through already, submarines can't tie down battleships to keep them off the Regia Marina's back.

Plus, you can't just do a tonnage conversion like that. Germany does not have the drydocks to build 100 extra subs instead of the Bismarck, for one. As mentioned above there's also fuel to consider.

The main reason that German didn't have a heavy bomber was that their aircraft were seen as a tool to support a moving infantry force, which is part of the reason so many fighters (including the ME-262) were required to also be able to be light bombers as well. Strategic bombers don't really do this. They started to see the errors of their ways near the end of the war, but too little too late.

 Matt Swain wrote:
Well, my view is the bismark was a mistake from the get go and one that may have lost the war for germany, thank god.

Consider: Bismark masses 41,770 tons. A type 7 Uboard masses 769 tons. This means bismark consumed 247 times the material of a Uboat.

Bismark's crew was ~2,000 men. A Uboat crew, ~50.

One sees quickly that it would have been quite feasible to construct 50-100 uboats for what was sunk (figuratively and literally) into the bismark, with plenty of material left over.

There were single Uboats that did more actual damage to the enemy than the bismark.

The only thing the bismark could do a Uboat couldn't was shell targets up to 20+ miles inland with high explosive artillery rounds. But the bismrak was meant to be a 'commerce raider" by the german admiralty.

A dozen or two Uboats would have done many many times more damage as commerce raiders than the bismark did.

Had the bismark not been built and even a good fraction of the resources wasted on her used for uboats and strategic bombers (Another disastrous blunder the nazis made, they had no heavy bombers at all) I think the war would have gone seriously worse for the world.

Well, the war certainly would have gone a lot worse for the Italians, that's for certain. Without the surface raiders to pin down a large chunk of the British fleet the Italians would have lost their fleet in short order, and their African holdings would have followed soon after. So no Rommel, no El Alamein, no battles around Malta, and not much interdiction of supply coming through the Med.

The Japanese would likely have also suffered some reverses with more of the British fleet available to serve away from the North Sea.

I mean you can make the argument that they should've built more pocketbattleships? More specific raiding ships , with big enough guns to threaten BB's and BC's?
That might've been a possibility though i don't know how well the Panzerschiffe did overall, and cost effectiveness is an issue, not to mention that you then also run into the more engines = more fuel used = ressources you allerady got issues with even moer strained.

The Panzerschiffe did pretty poorly overall and are, as far as I am aware, generally considered a dead end. Guns are nice and all, but they had ridiculously light armour.

 AlmightyWalrus wrote:
The Panzerschiffe did pretty poorly overall and are, as far as I am aware, generally considered a dead end. Guns are nice and all, but they had ridiculously light armour.

I believe that is the core issue , beeing still planned and built under Versailles did Make them rather akward in that regard.

Building them bigger basically gives you Scharnhorst and Gneisenau though. Then again, if they'd gotten the 15" replacement guns in place that might not have been a bad plan. It's essentially Battlecruiser 2.0 at that point though.

Yeah, the Panzershiffe were 1920's era designs of the Weimar era that had to work their way around various legal/treaty obligations Germany had at the time, and like a lot of ships of that era (from many nations) ended up being awkward as a result. Really, they're not really even "pocket battleships", they're really just basic heavy cruisers, they just carried six 11" guns of a recycled pre-WW1 vintage instead of the more typical (and generally more modern) eight or ten 8" guns.

Likewise, it helps to remember that many of Germany's interwar ships were not necessarily originally designed as foils to the Royal Navy, but rather for use primarily against the French, and a lot of ships make way more sense in that light. The Scharnhorsts couldn't be built with their planned 15" guns (as such industry was still being rebuilt at the time), making them unable to directly challenge the RN battle line, but that was ok as the enhanced 11" guns they were armed with (much better than those on the Panzershiffe) were capable of dealing with a Dunkirque just fine.

With regards to the Bismarck losing Germany the war, there are a million other things that would have contributed more to that course of affairs. For the war that did break out, it was not the correct tool, but that couldn't be foreseen entirely, and the resources used in its creation wouldn't have directly translated to hundreds of submarines had it never been made, though probably certainly more than otherwise were built. The Tirpitz certainly had an effect as a fleet-in-being even as it just sat in fjords doing nothing, how valuable that is is up for debate, but a lot of that is only possible with hindsight.

Not Online!!! wrote:
I mean you can make the argument that they should've built more pocketbattleships? More specific raiding ships , with big enough guns to threaten BB's and BC's?
That might've been a possibility though i don't know how well the Panzerschiffe did overall, and cost effectiveness is an issue, not to mention that you then also run into the more engines = more fuel used = ressources you allerady got issues with even moer strained.

That would have required redesigning them entirely. 11" guns are not a serious threat to WWII era battleships, even the older refitted ones. Heck, three cruisers not only survived 11" gunfire but did significant damage in return with 6" and 8" gunfire.

The Scharnhorsts had more potential, being big enough to trade 9-11" guns for 6-15" guns that were a threat to modern battleships.

To put it bluntly the Bizmark didn't have enough AA guns to survive much longer than she did.

She had what, 16x 10.5cm Flak 38s, 16x 3.7cm SK C/30's and 12x 2cm FlaK 30 guns.

The Yamato has 162x 25mm guns and was bombed and torpedoed to pieces.

Now the FlaK 38 and SK C/30 vastly out performed the Type 96 25mm guns, and many of the Yamato gun positions were unarmoured and affected by strafing runs, but the simple fact that strafing runs can get through 162x25mm guns and a handful of 13mm guns too shows how vulnerable ships can be to aerial attacks.

If she wasn't sunk outright she'd have eventually suffered the same fate as the Tirpitz

As I understood, bismark's AA guns were basically taken directly from an older cruiser and simply bolted onto her hull wherever they could be. I think I read that there wasn't even an intercom to the AA guns from the bridge.


Some people claiming a degree of naval expertise have some things to say on the status of Bismarck's AA capacity here:

https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-British-torpedo-planes-got-through-the-Bismarks-anti-aircraft-guns-because-they-were-not-designed-or-adjustable-to-shoot-down-the-slow-manuevering-British-planes

As for myself, I see that the big B didn't shoot down a single obsolete swordfish bomber that attacked her and put the torpedoes into her that sealed her fate.

On a similar track, aircraft, often launched from carriers, took a heavy toll on battleship and cruisers in ww2. The two biggest and most heavily armed battleship ever built, the Japanese Yamato and Musashi, were both sunk by aircraft.

Japan's Admiral Yamamato declared two things early on in ww2. One, that in modern naval warfare a battleship was about as useful as a samurai sword, and that the attack on pearl harbor would awaken a sleeping giant.

Looks like history proved him right on both counts.

The Swordfish that attacked the Bismark were hit quite often by Bismark's AA fire. Several returned to their carriers with dozens of holes in them.

But that's all they were, holes. The fabric-covered Swordfish offered little resistance to shells hitting them. Thus, the fuses were never activated, and the shells never detonated. Damage done was minimal, if not trivial.

A more modern aircraft, with aluminum skin, would have been damaged much more heavily by Bismark's guns. Now the question is, would it have been enough to stop the attacks? Probably not. But the casualties would have been significantly heavier.

Which was the case even when biplanes were the new hot thing. The only way to really shoot down a biplane is to hit the engine or the pilot. Doable but you basically have to have a perfect shot. I don't think it was till you had metal skinned planes that shooting up the wing was enough to reliably down a plane.

Actually, this discussion (and a question about how to make a baneblade seem more like it was a PDF baneblade) cross polinated. My idea to have an older baneblade tank not quite with all the armor it is supposed to have was directly taken from the Hood sailing out without its upper deck armor, and having the little guy painting "PDF1" on the turrent while in battle seemed a reasonable way to convey that things were not quite done prepping.
I originally thought maybe make the top armor all tore up, and then cut up a bunch of one ofthose cargo carries that they use as terrain and put bits of it over the broken parts of armor, would be a way to make the baneblade look "Hood like" .. but a blasted off sponsoon and being painted seemed more subtle.

 Matt Swain wrote:
The worst part of the Bismark's story was over 2,000 men on her died so needlessly. The captain must have known after here rudder was jammed by that torpedo plane hit she was doomed. He could have scuttled the ship after evacuating it. A portion of c=]his crew might have reached a friendly port, many may have been taken POW but most would have survived.

In the end the captain scuttled her after she was a flaming wreck and just out of spite to deny the British the honor of sinking her. Out of 2200 men onboard only 114, and possibly a cat, survived. The rest died pointlessly over vainglory and the nazi's twisted concept of honor and valor.

If the captain of the Bismark gave up to easily his family and those of his officers may have been punished by Hitler. Also they sank Hood, so they were not without hope, Bismark also didnt know what she was facing until it happened.
Now at the sinking about 700 men entered the water, so few survived because one of the rescuing ships detected a periscope and the rescuers broke contact. 111 were rescued prior to this. The next morning U-71 made a surface search and rescued five more. A late search by the Royal Navy was abandoned after a Luftwaffe strike which cost a destroyer, though in fairness the Luftwaffe were likely unaware they had disrupted an operation to look for Bismark survivors.

Now there was a U-boat that manoeuvred to protect Bismark but she had had a good hunt and had no torpedoes remaining and could only do spotting for her. Lucky for the Royal Navy as she came upon and had a clear line at the aircraft carrier HMS Victorious during the battle. This may have been the same U-boat spotted by Dorsetshire.

 Matt Swain wrote:
Well, my view is the bismark was a mistake from the get go and one that may have lost the war for germany, thank god.

Yes and no. Bismarck was part of an overall plan for Germany's navy. A primarily surface force that never really materialized. Plan Z consisted of 230 ships of all types, of which, 82 were finished, because Hitler assured the fleet that the war wouldn't begin before 1948. As we all know, it started a lot sooner than that, and so two battleships and two battlecruisers were rushed into readiness. Which was the actual mistake, not that they built them, but that they had not been intended as heavy raiders at all.

And, further, to be fair, Gneisenau and Scharnhorst both proved fairly effective at this regardless.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Matt Swain wrote:

On a similar track, aircraft, often launched from carriers, took a heavy toll on battleship and cruisers in ww2. The two biggest and most heavily armed battleship ever built, the Japanese Yamato and Musashi, were both sunk by aircraft.

This one is a particular item I see come up a lot and wish to address.:

Musashi: Both Musashi and Yamato both had a structural defect in their torpedo protection. Musashi was struck by 19 Torpedoes and 17 bombs. Which would have sunk... anything. The Yamato, despite being the most powerful individual warship in the world at the time, was attacked by over 400 aircraft from CVs who displaced something like 20 times it's own.

For those occasions where the Yamato caught US carriers inside it's range, see the Battle off Samar and the fate of Taffy 3.

Carriers don't beat BBs on a ton for ton basis. Aircraft at the time actually struggled to kill BBs, outside lucky hits (Roma) or stationary targets (Tirpitz and Pearl Harbor). The real secret to US carriers victory over the battleships was that the US was able to produce 151 carriers during the war, most of which were cheap escort carriers that were barely seaworthy by the end of the war, and every last one of them had been scrapped by the 1960s.

 Matt Swain wrote:
Well, my view is the bismark was a mistake from the get go and one that may have lost the war for germany, thank god.

Consider: Bismark masses 41,770 tons. A type 7 Uboard masses 769 tons. This means bismark consumed 247 times the material of a Uboat.

Bismark's crew was ~2,000 men. A Uboat crew, ~50.

One sees quickly that it would have been quite feasible to construct 50-100 uboats for what was sunk (figuratively and literally) into the bismark, with plenty of material left over.

Cost of Type VII Uboat was about 4.1 million Reichsmark, Bismarck costed 197 million RM. So you would get about 45 to 50 ocean-going Uboats with the cost of one battleship.

Having said that, with one enemy battleship less, it also means Royal Navy could free crews and escorts for convoy war. So it is not so simple tradeoff "build 1 less battleship and get 50 more submarines which will win the war" but more complicated question.

 Matt Swain wrote:

Had the bismark not been built and even a good fraction of the resources wasted on her used for uboats and strategic bombers (Another disastrous blunder the nazis made, they had no heavy bombers at all) I think the war would have gone seriously worse for the world.

Germans were smart in that they did not waste money to heavy bombers, not stupid.

A large number of military experts believe not building the 'eurobomber" was a big mistake for germany. I find their logic sound.

Without a fighter to provide long range escort, not sure what a big strategic bomber for Germany would have done, especially considering that the only real reachable target would have been the UK (they weren't going to be bombing the US or deep into the interior of the USSR in any minimally realistic scenario) which was far more defensible than what the Germans had to defend during the war, while such bombers turned out to be unnecessary for other campaigns.

It should also be remembered that WW2 wasn't exactly planned to unfold in the way it did, with hostilities opening between great powers years earlier than even the most aggressive nationalists had planned and in very different ways than was initially imagined, with pretty much every power involved being in the midst of some sort of crisis or reorganization or re-equipping when hostilities began.

For the air campaign, the problem with a lack of heavy bomber was more the limit on the size & quantity of bombs they could carry, rather than the range particularly. Medium size tactical bombers could carry a couple of thousand pounders and maybe a scattering of incendiaries, whereas something like a Lancaster could carry several times that amount. Or one stupidly massive bomb like the Grand Slam or Grand Slam, with relatively small increase in crew size. So it’s a more efficient delivery (basically buying in bulk).

As far as the naval campaign goes, it’s the mirror of the Allies issues; until we could afford to release heavy bombers for patrol duties the convoys took an absolute hammering in the mid-Atlantic. Now imagine how much worse that would have been if the Germans had had far more long-range aircraft with which to find the convoys and coordinate the wolf packs than they did.

 Vaktathi wrote:
Without a fighter to provide long range escort, not sure what a big strategic bomber for Germany would have done, especially considering that the only real reachable target would have been the UK (they weren't going to be bombing the US or deep into the interior of the USSR in any minimally realistic scenario) which was far more defensible than what the Germans had to defend during the war, while such bombers turned out to be unnecessary for other campaigns.

I think high-performance four-engined aircraft might have been useful for Battle of the Atlantic as a replacement for Condor. I do not think they would have been particularly great investment for Germany otherwise - they could have been built only at the expense of other types of aircraft, and what aircraft Germans had a surplus of? All those much-maligned dive bombers were crucial for the campaigns in Low Countries, France and Poland.

isn't the issue with replacing the bismark with that many uboats, material and manpower and not money?

Not Online!!! wrote:
isn't the issue with replacing the bismark with that many uboats, material and manpower and not money?

That and the fact that they forget that the uboat campaign went into the toilet pretty quickly once Enigma was decoded.

 BaronIveagh wrote:

Not Online!!! wrote:
isn't the issue with replacing the bismark with that many uboats, material and manpower and not money?

That and the fact that they forget that the uboat campaign went into the toilet pretty quickly once Enigma was decoded.

I mean, manpower is one, but the manpower issue is also that i need suddendly alot more technicians, repair crews, facilities for producing torpedos, electromotors, etc.
A whole slew of changes to the supply line that is, the dockyards were there for a bismark from the highseafleets time, but uboats in such a quantity more....

Now if people argue that they'd just build them before all this, and by the time the bismakrs out they allready have finished these uboats where they could be effective before the enigma accident then they might've been more effective but what would be the real issues for their main opponent?
Would 5 more hunting packs really be that impactfull?

Winston Chruchill admitted after the war the Uboat was the one thing that had him scared during the war, not the defeat at dunkirk, not the blitch, not a possible invasion, it was the Uboat that made churchill worry about losing the war.

Karl Donitz said if he'd had significantly more Uboats early on before anti submarine warfare was better developed he could have knocked england out of the war.

But hey, what'd those two know anyway?

Churchill was worried about U-boats because he couldn't do as much about them. He could shore up beach defences, he could build more AAA guns and visit bombed out districts and raise morale. He could not close the Atlanitc gap where aircraft were out of range to operate, or make submarines visible to the Royal Navy. Convoys ran a gauntlet and like Scylla the U-boats took some ships there and back.

Karl Donitz was wrong in hindsight. What he could have said was that U-boats were the most effective weapon against England, this was true for much of the war, but they would not have knocked Britain out of the war, just ramped up the difficulty for those living in Britain.
When pushed people can live on less than they expect. The UK never had the resources shortages seen in the Soviet Union or late war Germany, both fought on hard.

 Matt Swain wrote:
Winston Chruchill admitted after the war the Uboat was the one thing that had him scared during the war, not the defeat at dunkirk, not the blitch, not a possible invasion, it was the Uboat that made churchill worry about losing the war.

Karl Donitz said if he'd had significantly more Uboats early on before anti submarine warfare was better developed he could have knocked england out of the war.

But hey, what'd those two know anyway?

During the '30s, it was widely believed submarine's success in WW1 had been due to novelty factor. Uboats were defeated when convoy system was adopted. Since then, Brits had developed ASDIC, hydrophones had become much better, aircraft had much better performance, all the warships were faster...by contrast, submarine performance was about same it had been during Great War. So it seemed reasonable to believe that submarines were going to be much less of a factor in the next war. Most of the German admiralty certainly believed so. Royal Navy was also somewhat dismissive. When the war broke out, Royal Navy sent its aircraft carriers out to sub hunts. This turned out to be very bad idea.

Not entirely OT, but I am really looking forward to the Tom Hanks Greyhound movie, where a novice destroyer commander trying to protect a convoy is pitted against lots of subs in the early part of the war.

I just hope the release goes wider than the Apple channel...