Comments by "doveton sturdee" (@dovetonsturdee7033) on "Plan Z, or How Not to Prepare for The Battle of the Atlantic" video.

It doesn't perhaps occur to you that the British would view German U-boat construction as being aimed solely against them, and would act accordingly, by using their vastly greater shipbuilding resources to turn out escort in even larger numbers than they, historically, did?
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Of course, whilst the Germans were building 'all those U-boats' I suppose the British would have sat around saying 'I wonder why the Germans are building all those U-boats,' and not stepped up their own naval production to a greater extent than the historically did, I suppose?
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@alexalbrecht5768 Have you actually read the full details of the damage which the 18 inch torpedo caused to Bismarck? It was far more than simply jamming of the rudder, there were also extensive tears in the structure of the ship, serious internal flooding, and significant weakening of the stern. You can look up the full details for yourself, should you so choose. Repulse performed better, in that she was able to avoid torpedo hits for a while. Barham was hit by three or possibly four torpedoes closely adjacent to each other, something which any capital ship, let alone one 25 years old, could be expected to survive. By December, 1941, the Kriegsmarine had 250 boats in commission. Sinkings in Nov., 1941 were 76056, and in December 93226. As the monthly target was 600,000, this rather demonstrates the extent of German failure. The only times the Germans actually reached their target was after the US entered the war, when U-Boats had their second Happy Time off the East Coast of the United States because Admiral King chose not to organize convoys, and shore lights were not extinguished. You may be aware that the British & Canadians detached escorts from their own groups to help the US navy out and bring the slaughter to an end. Yorktown was hit by three bombs at Midway, and later by two torpedoes. Illustrious was hit by six bombs. Yorktown was subsequently scuttled. Illustrious was still able to steam at full speed, and subsequently reached Malta. In total, I would agree that Yorktown took heavier damage, but as she ended up a crippled wreck, I fail to see how her performance was superior to that of Illustrious. Are you familiar with the comment made by a US Navy Liaison Officer aboard HMS Indefatigable on 1 April, 1945, when she was hit by a Kamikaze? 'When a Kamikaze hits one of our carriers, it's six months in Pearl. When one hits a Limey carrier, it's 'sweepers, man your brooms.' Exactly how did British designs fail so catastrophically in WW1? Tell me in full of a British battleship lost in action as a result of naval gunfire. 'The design and employment of British vessels in WW2 was the worst of the allies and was only compensated for by sheer numbers.' Simply making such a comment doesn't make it so, although it does rather illuminate your prejudices.
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Might have been difficult. Graf Spee had been sunk in 1939, Scharnhorst & Gneisenau were both in Brest, damaged, Hipper was under repair between March & November, 1941, Scheer was repairing between April & July, 1941, Lutzow was repairing & refitting between April 1940 & December, 1941, and Tirpitz was not declared fit for operations until January, 1942.
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Firstly, if sufficient resources had been allocated to provide these, then the build up of the German army & air force would, of necessity, have been scaled back, with the result that the conquest of France & the Low Countries would almost certainly not have occurred, the Kriegsmarine would not have had the Atlantic bases from which to operate these boats, and Hitler's over-riding priority, the destruction of the Soviet Union, would have been out of his grasp. Secondly, should major construction of U-boats commenced, then the British, with vastly greater shipbuilding resources, would have begun producing escort corvettes, sloops, and destroyers in greater numbers.
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In point of fact, the German surface fleet achieved very little in WW2, and almost nothing from mid 1941 onwards.
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This would be the same Ernest King who refused to consider a convoy system off the US East Coast because convoys were a British idea, and Ernie was Anglophobic because apparently he had not been treated politely enough when, as a junior officer, he served with a US Battle Squadron attached to the Grand Fleet in WW1, would it? How many US merchant seamen were lost just because Ernie didn't like Limeys? Fortunately, the RN & RCN provided enough escorts to permit the establishment of a convoy system until US new construction arrived, but, seriously, for an opinion on the RN in WW2, Ernie is not the authority to pick. One of his daughters said of him "he is the most even-tempered person in the United States Navy. He is always in a rage." He even instituted the court-martial of Captain McVay of USS Indianapolis in 1945 because McVay's father had reprimanded him early in his career. To be fair to him, though, apparently he detested the US army almost as much as he detested the British!
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Do you really think that, if Germany began a major U-boat building programme, the British would have smiled complacently and done nothing? Britain had vastly greater shipbuilding capability than Germany, and was able to produce convoy escorts in large numbers. When the Kaiser expanded his fleet in the years prior to WW1, look how the British responded then. In any case, by the way, Hitler always intended his true enemy to be the Soviet Union, and U-boats are of little use against such an opponent.
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Between the wars, the Admiralty mothballed a large number of older destroyers of the V & W class. These were to play critical roles at Dunkirk, in anti-invasion flotillas, and as convoy escorts.
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The Bismarcks were built as German answers to the Richelieus, just as the Scharnhorsts had been the German response to the Strasbourgs. German between the wars naval planning, dating back to the time of the Weimar Republic, had assumed any future European war involving Germany would be against France and/or Poland. Hence, the building of the Deutschlands, intended to intercept French troop convoys, and the French response. There really was no German attempt to challenge the Royal Navy, for obvious reasons.
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They did. There were 60 boats in commission in 1939, with nine building. RN submarines don't get much mention because there was no equivalent of a 'Battle of the Atlantic' involving German shipping. As the world's dominant sea power in 1939, the Royal Navy had effectively swept the German merchant marine from the seas within days. RN submarines were particularly active, and effective, in the Mediterranean against Italian shipping, when operating from their Malta & Alexandria bases, and had major success against the German surface fleet in 1939-1940 in Northern Waters.
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Really? It doesn't occur to you that, had Germany begun a policy of U-Boat construction, the British (and Canadians) would have responded by accelerating their own escort vessel building programme even more rapidly than they historically did? After all, even we British might have been able to deduce that a U-boat fleet was not intended for use against the Soviet Union, don't you think?
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What arms race were they winning? The British were outbuilding the Germans in aircraft production from as early as mid 1940, and comparisons between Anglo-Canadian and German naval production are simply absurd.
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There isn't really much to know about the ships of Plan Z. Other than a badly designed aircraft carrier, they only existed on paper.
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Except of course if the Germans had built 300 boats by 1940 then the resources to expand the army & air force wouldn't have been available, France would not have fallen, and therefore the bases from which to operate these boats would not have existed. Oh, and as soon as the British learn that, by building U-boats, Hitler considers them to be his main enemy (which, historically, they weren't) they would commence construction of large numbers of atlantic escorts. The British had much larger shipbuilding resources than did the Germans, and would win any warship building race, exactly as had happened before WW1.
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Not really. German battleships could not survive for long at sea? How would heavy cruisers or destroyers have fared any better?
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How would he have done that?
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The problem is that it takes many years to plan, build, and train a large navy. Armies can be expanded much more rapidly.
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Schleswig-Holstein firing at the Westerplatte Fortress, I believe.
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RN warship building in WW2 was concentrated on the construction of escort vessels.
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@daseinzigwahrem Not until November 1942 they didn't.
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Well, in that case the rumour was wrong. The Anglo-German Naval Agreement happened in June, 1935. Development of Plan Z only began in 1938.
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Don't you know what the US submarine force did to the Japanese Mercantile Marine in the Pacific? Imagine the Battle of the Atlantic, with the U-Boats winning. Oh, and carriers never became the dominant force in western waters that they did in the Pacific.
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@GreenShadow03 How exactly? PE was detached to carry out attacks on Atlantic convoys but, as usual with the Hipper class, she developed engine problems and returned to France.
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@suryaprakash2126 The German Naval Ordnance Department, on 31 December, 1938, produced a report entitled 'The Feasibility of the Z Plan' which described the problems involved in such a programme. The demands in manpower and raw materials were such, that the whole of German Industry would need to have been placed at the disposal of the Kriegsmarine, with the army & air force starved of investment. Thus, the successful German campaign in the west would have been impossible, not to mention the fact that this would have been politically impossible for Hitler. Even had this impossibility become fact, then just imagine the German fleet you have proposed, in attempting to break out of the North Sea (without, of course, access to any French or Norwegian ports), sailing straight into a new Jutland, as the RN would have six Lions (9 x 16 inch guns) five KGVs, (10 x 14 inch guns), and Vanguard (8 x 15 inch guns), supported by Ark Royal and up to six Illustrious class carriers, four Audacious class carriers, and four Malta class carriers, and a vast array of cruisers and destroyers. As France would not have fallen, and would presumably have remained Britain's ally, you can add to the mix the four modern French battleships of the Richelieu class ( 8 x 15 inch guns.) I hope that whoever led this German fleet would have been well aware of Admiral Scheer's 'Battle Turn Away' tactic. Sorry, Plan Z was simply a pipe dream
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It Germany had concentrated on U-boat production, this would have meant giving much fewer resources to the army and air force. As a result, the campaign in France would not have been possible, and the U-boats built would have, effectively, been trapped in the North Sea, and obliged to make the long, difficult, voyage round the north of Scotland even to get out into the Atlantic. Furthermore, why should Hitler institute a major U-boat building programme when his main enemy was the Soviet Union?
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At the time you were building your huge U-Boat fleet in your game, I assume the British simply sat back, said, in effect, 'I wonder why the Germans are building a huge U-Boat fleet?' and did nothing.
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@alexalbrecht5768 Force Z didn't sail to a war zone, but was sent in the hope that it would deter Japanese aggression in the area. Considering that the Royal Navy had based all pre-war planning on the support of the French Fleet in the Mediterranean, they actually, with the support of Canada, handled the U-Boat threat rather effectively. In point of fact, Doenitz took von Holtzendorff's estimate of the need to sink 600,000 tons of shipping per month in order to starve Britain out, but in the event only achieved 50% of this target on for or five occasions prior to January, 1942, and on several occasions the figure was below 100,000 tons. In point of fact, no British armoured carriers were sunk. Only one modern carrier, Ark Royal, was lost, to U-boat attack, and she wasn't armoured. The KGVs did not suffer a design flaw. The torpedo hit on Prince of Wales would have had a similar effect on any other battleship in existence at the time, the Bismarck being the obvious example. PoW was actually sunk by four torpedoes, by the way. Which two battleships were lost to damage control failures? Finally, compared poorly to which other navies? The German? hardly, The Italian? don't be silly!. The US? In terms of major fleet actions possibly, but there again the British won the major fleet actions which they did fight, and the two navies weren't in competition in any case. The RN & RCN, with some US support, did, of course, win the one major battle in the west which really mattered, the one in the Atlantic.
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@alexalbrecht5768 You might wish to compare the warhead weights of Japanese aerial torpedoes with that of the German G7e, before claiming that the German weapon was inferior. The three battlecruisers at Jutland were lost not because of design flaws, but because of the foolishness of the commander of the Battlecruiser fleet, who insisted upon rate of fire, and encouraged the stowage of cordite above the blast doors, and even around turret interiors. The practice was discontinued after Jutland, and was never followed in the Grand Fleet itself. The Royal Navy, just like every other major navy, was not immune from fools in high places, although these were, fortunately, few in number. Hood was more a fast battleship than a true battlecruiser, and her loss was not a result of the same circumstances. She was, of course, 20 years old in 1941. I enjoyed your comments about the Nelsons. Even with their hull problems, they served successfully for 20 years. In terms of speed, they were actually the fastest capable of 23 knots. The best that a US battleship of the time could manage was 21. The Japanese Nagato was four knots faster, but her armour was seriously inferior. The British, within the terms of the Washington Naval Treaties, had been able to build two capital ships with superior firepower and armour to anything else which put to sea in the next 12 years, other perhaps than the slower Colorados. Bismarck, despite an extra 15,000 tons of displacement, was inferior in armour design, weight of armour, and weight of broadside. Of course their only surface action successes were against Bismarck. After her sinking the German surface fleet was conspicuous only by absence and the Italian Navy, when presented with an opportunity to take on the Nelsons with their own modern battleships, preferred not to make the attempt. Nelson remained in service until late 1947, by the way. Her scrapping was not because of poor material condition, but because she was no longer needed. Oh, and which 'battleships' sunk by mines in WW1? Unless you wish to refer to pre-dreadnoughts, that is?
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@benlaskowski357 Except that an accelerated programme of U-boat building would have alarmed the British, as it could only be aimed at them, and the response would have been obvious. Moreover the Admiralty (and everyone else) assumed that they would have the support of the French fleet in the Mediterranean, and that the small number of German U-Boats would only be able to operate from German ports.
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@historigraph That presupposes that, whilst the Germans totally changed their naval strategy, the British held to the one that they historically pursued. In reality, any enhanced U-boat building programme would be seen by the Admiralty and the British government as being aimed at one power only, Britain. The response would, inevitably, have been an equivalent expansion of escort production by the British, whose resources were significantly greater. Moreover, the U-boats of WW2 only achieved the degree of effectiveness that they did because of their access to French & Norwegian ports, two factors which neither the Kriegsmarine nor the Admiralty could possibly have predicted.
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Can't you just imagine the conversation within the Admiralty? 'The Germans have just laid down large numbers of Battleships, Cruisers, Aircraft Carriers, and Destroyers.' 'I wonder why?' 'Frankly, I have no idea.' I REALLY DON'T THINK SO!!
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@GreenShadow03 Yes, but the hits she received from POW forced Lutjens to abandon the operation. It wouldn't have been much compensation to the next-of-kin, but the fact is that Hood & POW, whose primary task was to ensure the 'safe & timely arrival' of Atlantic convoys, were actually successful, albeit at a terrible cost.
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@GreenShadow03 Indeed. She had a wonderful subsequent career. After getting back to Brest, she was hit by a bomb, but escaped back to Germany in Feb. 42. On 23 Feb., 1942, en route to Norway, she had her stern blown off by HMSm Trident. She then pottered around the Baltic shelling the advancing Russian forces, only pausing on 15 Oct., 1944, to ram and cripple the light cruiser Koln.
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'Didn't see it through?' They barely began it.
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If the Germans had devoted the necessary resources to building the Plan Z fantasy fleet, then they could not have expanded their army or air force as they historically did. Consequently, an attack on France and the Low Countries would not have happened, and there wouldn't have been any possibility of anything like Sealion, as the Germans, of course, wouldn't have had access to Belgian & French ports, but would have been as hemmed in as they had been in WW1. Furthermore, any expansion of warship building by Germany would ring alarm bells in the UK, as the warships could only be targeted at one power. The British would retaliate with an expanded shipbuilding programme of their own, and British yards could comfortably outproduce anything the Germans could build. It is all meaningless talk anyway, as Hitler always regarded the Soviet Union, not Britain, as his principal foe.
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@suryaprakash2126 But surely you can grasp that, if the Germans devoted their entire economy to building the Plan Z ships, then their successes in the west in 1940 couldn't have happened because they would have had neither the army nor the air force to bring them about? If France doesn't fall, the Germans don't have the French bases to launch an invasion of Britain, but it doesn't matter anyway because, being in the middle of building their fleet, which presumably wouldn't be ready until 1946 at the absolute earliest, they would have had neither the air force to bomb Britain from their airfields in Germany, nor the army to cross the Channel from the ports they didn't control anyway! While, of course all this is going on (or, more accurately, isn't going on) an undefeated France is building up her own armed forces preparatory to an offensive against Germany, and the Royal Navy is imposing the same kind of blockade that effectively starved the Kaiser's Germany into submission in WW1. The fact is, for a regime intent upon conquering the Soviet Union, a large fleet was an utterly useless luxury.
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@suryaprakash2126 The peace was offered because Hitler knew that he could never successfully invade (as Napoleon said 'can an Elephant fight a Whale?) and he needed the British to give him a free had in eastern Europe. He was, apparently, willing to guarantee the British Empire, largely because he had no means of threatening it anyway. It was a major gamble on his part, and it failed. Graf Spee sank nine merchantmen in four months. She was a nuisance, but that was what allied naval superiority was all about. In the event, she encountered the weakest Hunting Group, and couldn't cope. German technology, at least at sea, was over-rated, in that the gunnery radar fitted to their ships was delicate, to say the least. Look at Bismarck. She fired off a few shells at HMS Norfolk, and in so doing put her own forward radar out of action. British & American sets were much more robust. Yes, the Germans built 1156 U-boats in six years, but only because they abandoned Plan Z more or less from the start. This number, by the way, is about 200 less than the number of destroyers and convoy escorts either in British service in Spetember, 1939, or added to the fleet during WW2. The Germans, in military terms, gave more than they got from the German Soviet Commercial Agreement of 1940. The Soviets supplied oil, raw materials (predominantly Manganese & Rubber) and grain, whilst the Germans received the incomplete Admiral Hipper-class cruiser Lützow, the plans for the battleship Bismarck, information on German naval testing, "complete machinery for a large destroyer", heavy naval guns, other naval gear, and samples of thirty of Germany's latest warplanes, including the Bf 109 fighters, Bf 110 fighters, Ju 88 and Do 215 bombers. The Soviet Union also received oil and electric equipment, locomotives, turbines, generators, diesel engines, ships, machine tools and samples of Germany artillery, tanks, explosives, chemical-warfare equipment and other items. Stalin was never going to supply the vast amounts of iron ore Plan Z would have needed, still less the manpower to build the ships. In any case, by the time of the agreement, Plan Z was history.
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Of course, in the face of a massive U-boat building programme, the British, with vastly greater shipbuilding resources, wouldn't have ramped up their own escort vessel production, would they? Perhaps they would simply have assumed that the U-boats were to be used against the Soviet Union?
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What make you think that the bulk of the Royal Navy was in the Mediterranean in 1940-1941? It wasn't.
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German heavy warships had been built of the assumption that a future war would be between Germany & France and/or Poland. The Deutchlands were built to intercept French troop convoys. The French built the Strasbourgs to challenge the Deutchlands, the Germans built the Scharnhorsts to challenge the Strasbourgs, the French were building the Richelieus to challenge the Scharnhorsts, and the Germans produced the Bismarcks to challenge the Richelieus. The German navy more or less ignored the Royal Navy in pre-war planning (at least, so Raeder subsequently claimed) until the lunatic and totally impracticable Z Plan emerged.
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@sinjimsmythe9577 The British & French had begun their own re-armament programmes from 1936. The British were expanding their navy, and especially their anti-submarine resources, were re-equipping their air force. Similarly, the French navy was growing, and the French were acquiring modern fighter aircraft from the US.
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@N0rdman Read what I posted. The Z Plan only existed on paper. Apart from Graf Zeppelin, nothing else ever came close to construction.
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@N0rdman As an engineer, I presume you are aware of the impossible pressures that the fantasy that was Plan Z would have put on a German economy already committed to major expansion of the Luftwaffe and the army? As early as 31 December, 1938, the Kriegsmarine's own Naval Ordnance Department had released a report 'The Feasibility of the Z Plan' which described the impossibility of the whole thing. What you insultingly describe as my 'primitive limitations' are better described as my greater grasp of reality.
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@N0rdman So, you are an engineer, qualified in psychology and practical experience of leadership and managing staff, yet your response to my comments seems confined simply to posting insults? Forgive me if I doubt what you say. Perhaps the training you received was simply not up to the task. I am not, by the way, offended by ' the notion that other people would like to hear more of the ideas and visions.' I am simply opining that the Z plan was, in terms of the Second World War, almost ludicrously irrelevant.
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@N0rdman So, you are an engineer, qualified in psychology and practical experience of leadership and managing staff, and from a military background? Clearly, you have been so busy, and have achieved so much in your life, that the concepts of good manners and courtesy have totally passed you by. Goodbye.
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