Comments by "Doug JB" (@dougjb7848) on "The Drydock - Episode 243" video.
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@fidjeenjanrjsnsfh
The 1942 Design Light Fleet Carrier, commonly referred to as the British Light Fleet Carrier, amounted to 8 ships built to the original Colossus design spec and 5 built to a modified Majestic spec (2 more were completed as maintenance carriers and 1 was cancelled).
Four vessels built to the Colossus design and all five completed as Majestics were loaned or sold to seven foreign nations – Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, India, and the Netherlands – with three ships serving in three different naval forces during their careers.
The successor class to the 1942 LFC was the Centaur. One ship from this class, HMS Hermes, served until 1983 and was sold to India. She was refitted at Devonport Dockyard for a year and then commissioned into the Indian Navy as INS Viraat on 12 May 1987, and served until 6 March 2017.
The reason this didn’t happen more was not because “they were only suited for pitched fleet battles.” Far from it — minor navies don’t intend to fight major battles, and instead want aircraft carriers to extend their ability to patrol and control their territorial waters, for which aircraft ranging across hundreds of miles are far more effective than guns that can reach only 20-30 miles. In the event of armed conflict, they would likely be fighting against another small navy, or co-operating with a major navy against a common enemy.
The reason it didn’t happen more often was that, after WW2, minor navies simply couldn’t afford to purchase and operate more WW2 era carriers.
By the time these nations were able to afford it, technology advances had rendered any WW2-era carrier permanently obsolete. So the minor navies either acquired, or built, carriers capable of operating current-gen combat aircraft.
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@vincentdamienarneo369
Little to none.
A major problem facing the KM (as it was for the entirety of Germany’s war making) was lack of fuel, especially after mid-1942. Every operation was evaluated primarily by ratio of fuel required:likely gain, and eventually the shortage became so acute that several surface ships spent almost the entirety of 1943-44 in harbor (in the closing months of the war the KM resorted to draining fuel oil from freighters or commandeering Swedish tankers to operate ships against the Soviets in the Baltic). This caused serious deterioration of crew training.
Of the French ships that Germany could have captured, I consider only a few to be “current-gen.” (Both Dunkerques and Richelieu, and perhaps Algerie and a few destroyers. There was no way Germany could have completed Jean B.)
Nothing else the MN was really able to compete on equal terms. Their battleships were R-class slow and even more woeful in AA suite, every cruiser before Algerie was built of paperboard, and most of their destroyers only had sufficient range to operate in the Med — they weren’t designed for wide-ranging Atlantic operations.
Further, after the debacle at the Barents Sea, the KM’s surface warships were mostly relegated to training and “threat in being” and the majority of scarce resources directed toward submarines, of which the MN had few in 1940 that were on-par with contemporaries eg the Type VIIC, Gato or T-class.
Capturing every French warship would only have increased the number of “mouths to feed” without an appreciable increase in “aggregate combat ability.”
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@vincentdamienarneo369
No worries mate. The Allies had no idea of Germany’s fuel supply state in 1940, and could not possibly have predicted how the war would proceed and how starved for fuel the KM would be after early 1943.
If they had known / predicted, or even somehow been unable to sink the MN ships they did, I wonder how much better Anglo-French relations would have been — Mers-el Kebir really soured things between the two nations, even though they were United against the common foe.
Your second question is also the start of a great discussion.
I don’t think that directing even 💯 of the resources used for capital ships to aircraft carriers would have saved the KM.
I think the KM would have gotten, at best, perhaps 6 carriers out of the materials used for the Scharnhorsts and Bismarck pairs.
This sounds like a lot, but Graf Z was not a well-designed or executed ship — as completed she had a port list that required significant permanent ballast to correct. She would have been limited to near-shore training operations.
Of greater impact is that, if the KM started their fleet air arm in 1935-36 (abrogation of Versailles), they would have been a full 15 years behind the RN and USN in terms of carrier-based aircraft technology, doctrine and training.
Their fleet air arm was forced (by Goerring’s mantra of “if it flies it belongs to me”) to use naval versions of Luftwaffe aircraft, so the best they had in 1944 was a version of the Ju87 and ME109. These would not have been able to compete against either Allied land- or carrier-based aircraft of that time. It would have been similar to what the Allies experienced in the first six months the Pacific War, only the Allies of 1944 would have been far more capable and fearsome than the IJN was in 1941-42.
The question of “what if the KM had devoted everything to UBoots, save for whatever they needed to protect against close-shore blockade” is even more interesting.
And scary.
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