Comments by "" (@VersusARCH) on "The Drydock - Episode 040" video.

  1. Russia didn't focus on capital ship production simply because of priorities. They were a huge country with most of the raw materials at home, with few if any friendly overseas trade partners to have sea trade routes with that needed guarding but were not yet a superpower who could challenge much of the rest of the world for world domination. Instead they were a huge mostly pariah state that could expect a broad coalition to gang up against it from land at any moment, so powerful land army and air force were the absolute priority - and that asset can spoil any crazy Galipoli 1915 style amphibious attack since unlike during such successful foray named the Crimean War, by 1930s USSR had a powerful rail network and land vehicle industry so sea supply system could be countered by a well organized land supply system. They were also bottled up by geography with no faraway depliyment bases, so their navy had no need to be more than a coastal defense force whose old Imperial Russia era dreadnoughts outclassed the Nordic neighbor's coastal defense battleships and the Turkish Yavuz Sultan Selim (ex Goeben) battlecruiser. In the Far East - just forget about competing with Japan at the time in naval terms, better keep them in check with land power via the Trans-Siberian railway - finished, greatly modernized and double tracked since its failure to ensure land victory during the Russo-Japanese war (cough compare to Khalkhin Gol) . So there was little point in building capital ships. All that said they started getting into capital ships in late 30s but never finished them due to the German 1941 invasion (in retrospect they would have mattered little to nothing in the war that followed had they been completed)
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  2. German plan for war with the US obviously aimed to achieve several things at the same time: 1) try to force usn into an early decisive battle 2) regardless if it succeeded or not demonstrate force 3) take out the busiest US port 4) this is what you missed: CAPTURE A BASE FOR FUTURE, IF NEED BE CONTINUOUS NAVAL OPERATIONS AGAINST US EAST COAST - which would probably be a blockade along the British lines, obviously not total as the US West Coast would not be affected (then again the Germans held the Marshall islands 🤔 some commerce raiding could be organized from there for a time) but re-routing all imports to go via West Coast and then shipping most of it to the industrial base on the East Coast and in the Midwest would be a MAJOR transport strain and cost rise. The British plans did not involve any conquests of US ports since they already had nearby ports in Canada and the Carribean.
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