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 Grey Templar wrote:


Really the only people to embrace Carriers was the US and Japan, and even Japan still built the Yamato and Musashi.

The US was largely still committed to battleship doctrine as well in terms of planning. We kind of stumbled into carriers because in 1942 we didn't have any battleships and carriers are faster to build, especially our little aux carriers. We built hundreds of the dang things and by the time the war returned to the Phillipines we noticed carrier planes were sinking boats left and right before big gun battles got to start most of time.

 LordofHats wrote:
Realistically one could say 6th Army did capture Stalingrad. By October of 1942 the entire city infrastructure was either destroyed or in German hands. Issue was there were still reds everywhere and the Germans never managed to clear the city cause the Red Army kept throwing bodies into it. One way to look at it is the world's most drawn out, and ultimately futile, clean up operation because neither side was willing to quit and one had more bodies to throw at the problem

I would say they never captured it. You only "capture" something when you control it. The Germans never were able to establish any sort of control over Stalingrad. Most importantly, they were never able to secure the Volga river bank or cross the river anywhere, which meant that the Soviets could continue to send in reinforcements without interruption until winter hit and ice floes made the river unnavigable. The Germans came close to capturing the city, they controlled about 90% at one time (although fighting continued even in parts they supposedly controlled), but that was just before the big Soviet counteroffensive came and surrounded and wiped out the almost entire 6th army and supporting formations in a few months. So the Germans never managed to capture the entire city. Of course, you could argue that by that time, there really wasn't any city left to capture though. It was just a pile of rubble.

 Iron_Captain wrote:
So the Germans never managed to capture the entire city. Of course, you could argue that by that time, there really wasn't any city left to capture though. It was just a pile of rubble.

There is that famous picture of the city center after the battle's conclusion where it looks like they were fighting over two buildings and a shed rather than a city.



I don't think even Berlin, or Warsaw were so leveled as Stalingrad. You have to basically go to Dresden or Leningrad to find corresponding amounts of destruction.

One does need to remember something in conjunction with the prewar 'carriers vs. battleships' debate. In general, prewar carrier aircraft lacked the range, payload, and speed to deliver a fatal blow against a battleship before said battleship could close the range and kill the carrier. As late as 1940, carrier aircraft simply could not be relied on to kill a battleship fast enough.

And as often happens with technology, that changed with such speed it caught many naval officers flat-footed.

Yes, Billy Mitchell sunk a WWI German battleship with post-WWI bombers. It should be noted that said battleship was anchored and unmanned (so no damage control, no evasive maneuvers, no AA fire). It also took quite a lot of bombing, with land-based bombers, to sink. His 'victory' was considered by naval officers of the time to be a freak circumstance you'd never be able to duplicate in actual battle... and at the time, they were 100% right. It wasn't until the aircraft of the (very) late thirties and early forties came online that Mitchell's theories of airpower finally came true.

 LordofHats wrote:

 Iron_Captain wrote:
So the Germans never managed to capture the entire city. Of course, you could argue that by that time, there really wasn't any city left to capture though. It was just a pile of rubble.

There is that famous picture of the city center after the battle's conclusion where it looks like they were fighting over two buildings and a shed rather than a city.



I don't think even Berlin, or Warsaw were so leveled as Stalingrad. You have to basically go to Dresden or Leningrad to find corresponding amounts of destruction.

Warsaw was something like 97% totally flattened in WWII, because the Germans started systematically demolishing the entire city. I doubt any major city in WWII was as flattened as Warsaw, excepting some of the Japanese cities (which were largely wooden and considerably more vulnerable).

 Grey Templar wrote:

 Techpriestsupport wrote:

But Hitler was making bad decisions free on day one. WW2 was the age of the submarine and the aircraft carrier. Hitler demanded battleships like the Bismarck. He never authorized a carrier and he underfunded the uboat program.

Well, the Naval decisions of Germany weren't really Hitler's doing. Everybody, not just Germany, at the time the Bismarck and Tirpitz were built still believed naval warfare would revolve around Battleships. Once the Bismarck went down, Hitler did abandon Plan Z and shift towards Karl Dönitz's plan for U-boats. He can't really be blamed for the early focus on Battleships, everybody was focused on battleships at the time. The Germans, the British, and even the Japanese. The U-boat program wasn't really underfunded so much as it was just late to the party.

Really the only people to embrace Carriers was the US and Japan, and even Japan still built the Yamato and Musashi.

Pre-WW2 German naval strategy was two-pronged: main aspect was the trade war which would have been undertaken mostly by long-range raiding cruisers like those of Deutschland class. Second, Kriegsmarine wanted a battleship fleet both for strategic purposes vs French and UK navies, and also to help aforementioned raiding cruisers to break through Royal Navy blockade. Submarines, by contrast, were thought to have only auxiliary role in this doctrine. Many naval officers thought that convoy system and ASDIC had much reduced submarine effectiveness and that great tonnage war of WW1 had been an anomaly not to be repeated.

Hitler had nothing to do with any of the above. In 1935 he negotiated Anglo-German Naval Agreement which limited German surface fleet to 35% of the Royal Navy tonnage. Admiral Raeder, C-in-C of Kriegsmarine, did not like the treaty as he was very much a battleship admiral and thought that the fleet allowance was too small. Hitler didn't care as with the treaty he achieved amazing double score - he both repudiated the Versailles treaty AND appeased the Brits. It turned out to be irrelevant - before the war broke out Hitler told Raeder to ignore the treaty and aim for parity with the Royal Navy. This led to famous 'Plan Z' which never materialized.

Hitler was somewhat of a battleship skeptic. As Great War infantryman, he held some disdain to hugely celebrated and hyped but in practice quite inefficient Imperial Hochseeflotten. He did see great warships as signifant prestige assets for a nation but he was hardly a big ship fanatic (unlike Stalin who had truly hare-brained naval expansion schemes). Even before the infamous 'Scrap the Kriegsmarine!' fit in 1943 he thought that the services of the surface fleet had been modest compared to submarines. In which he wasn't totally wrong.

By the way, Hitler authorized not one but TWO aircraft carriers before the war, first of which was nearly completed:

 Haighus wrote:

 LordofHats wrote:

 Iron_Captain wrote:
So the Germans never managed to capture the entire city. Of course, you could argue that by that time, there really wasn't any city left to capture though. It was just a pile of rubble.

There is that famous picture of the city center after the battle's conclusion where it looks like they were fighting over two buildings and a shed rather than a city.



I don't think even Berlin, or Warsaw were so leveled as Stalingrad. You have to basically go to Dresden or Leningrad to find corresponding amounts of destruction.

Warsaw was something like 97% totally flattened in WWII, because the Germans started systematically demolishing the entire city. I doubt any major city in WWII was as flattened as Warsaw, excepting some of the Japanese cities (which were largely wooden and considerably more vulnerable).

Yeah, I think Stalingrad wins.....there is a museum in the city that has a 3-d model of the city before and after the battle. essentially there was one building and one tree left surrounded by rubble.