An impetuous expansion of the Kriegsmarine followed on the heels of the ratification of the Anglo-German Naval Treaty in June 1935. In 1938 the ‘Z Plan’ was worked out: it approved by Hitler on 27 January 1939 and came into force on 28 April that year following the Führer’s renunciation of the Naval Treaty. In principle, the Z Plan envisaged the construction and commissioning by 1945 of:
Ten capital ships (Bismarck, Tirpitz, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, plus six diesel driven 50,000-tonne battleships) armed with 40.6cm guns;
Nine 20,000-tonne Panzerschiffe and three 29,000-tonne battlecruisers of mixed steam/diesel drive capable of 34 knots and armed with 38cm guns;
The three existing, nominally 10,000-tonne Panzerschiffe (pocket battleships)—Deutschland, Admiral Scheer and Admiral Graf Spee;
Four 20,000-tonne aircraft carriers;
The five heavy cruisers—Admiral Hipper, Prinz Eugen, Blücher, Seydlitz and Lützow;
Six2teen 8,000-tonne light cruisers;
The existing 6,000-tonne light cruisers—Emden, Königsberg, Karlsruhe, Köln, Leipzig and Nürnberg;
22 5,000-tonne small scouting cruisers (Spähkreuzer);
68 destroyers;
90 torpedo boats;
27 U-cruisers;
62 Type IX U-boats;
100 Type VII U-boats;
60 Type II U-boats; and
300 other units, including minelayers, S-boats, minesweepers, submarine-chasers and escort vessels, together with a corresponding number of auxiliaries.
Theis was a Utopian programme which, even had it been fulfilled, would still not have made Germany into a sea power in the true sense of the term. The nation lacked overseas bases and the wherewithal to support and defend such a system: in short, the ‘Z Plan’ had no logistic component, and, if it came to the crunch, the Fleet would have suffered the same fate as that of the Kaiser—blockaded, useless.
With the outbreak of war on 1 September 1939, the plan was consigned to the waste-paper basket.* The hasty naval rearmament exposed Germany’s weakness. German industry, its shipyards, heavy industry, the weapons manufacturers and supply firms were simply not in a position to meet the demands of this enormous programme. They lacked the necessary capacity, materials and workforce, and in the event this caused bottlenecks and delays.
The problems affected destroyer construction. The first of these units into service soon revealed their design flaws in heavy-weather trials. Their construction was weak and their use limited. Outwardly they looked quite impressive, but that was all. In heavy seas their behaviour was evil, which major refits did little to alleviate. The difficulties were never fully overcome, even with the later types. Another design failure lay below the waterline, particularly at the stern, where wooden patchwork proved no answer. The standard 12.7cm weapon in five single gunhouses was good. No benefit was gained from the later idea—for whatever reason it was realised—to upgrade the calibre to 15cm and fit a twin turret on the forecastle deck. These modifications, together with an enhanced anti-aircraft battery and the heavy radar ‘mattresses’ aloft, contributed to the problems of stability. As a consequence, speed restrictions had to be introduced and operations tailored to weather conditions. That German destroyers always put to sea without regard to safety instructions and in full recognition of the dangers, whatever the wind and weather, remains a credit to the officers and men.
The standard armament also included two quadruple banks of torpedo—to maintain the picturesque old tradition in which destroyer flotillas ran through the battle line to deliver a massed torpedo attack. That there was no longer a battle line, and that the last occasion when it had been tried (in May 1916 at Jutland) it had not been a great success, were ignored. For commerce warfare in near-coastal waters or for other tasks, one set of tubes would have been sufficient and gained a saving in weight.
The choice of high-pressure hot steam for the machinery was correct, bearing in mind the original idea that the destroyers were designed for use in the Baltic or southern end of the North Sea and would not be sent further afield. The engines were too sophisticated, the step to high-pressure hot-steam too precipitate. The boiler rooms were too narrow and the steam-driven auxiliaries, though all were essential, too many in number. Because of the narrowness of the workspaces, they tended to be inaccessible.
The idea of having diesels work the auxiliary machinery had been found unacceptable for some reason, so that in the event of a hit in the boiler room the auxiliaries were also likely to be unserviceable if the current failed. As they had to be kept running at all times, the quantity of steam required to keep one or two boilers permanently fired for this purpose was enormous. The use of high-pressure hot steam placed heavy demands on the structural materials, which were often not adequate to the demands of the frequent changes in loading. The challenge of the numerous breakdowns in the machinery was never met. Aboard Royal Navy destroyers, machinery breakdown was rare. One can only wonder why their example of wet steam with superheating was not followed.
Personnel were good throughout. Less good and advantageous was the endless procession of sometimes comprehensive personnel changes. In peacetime, a straightforward routine of regular switching between ship and shore service for the purpose of training was acceptable; it was less profitable in wartime, even though necessary. The standing time aboard ship was too short, and the constant chopping and changing meant an endless succession of new training schedules from scratch—shipboard drills, operational training, getting the crew welded together as a team, then battle training. Eventually it began to string out and became sporadic. Here the ship’s officers had to rely completely on the veterans, while hoping for ‘initiative’ from the new men (which, on the whole, they got). The same applied in the engine rooms. The boilers, with their automatic regulators, needed a highly qualified staff, and the Chief relied on the willingness of the engine-. room hands, whose pride it was to throw themselves wholeheartedly into the task of serving ‘their’ ship.
German destroyers were fully deployed from the outbreak of war onwards, interrupted by breakdowns, mainly in the engine room. The Norwegian campaign involved, at a calculated risk, virtually any ship or boat capable of movement in the water. Ten of the twenty German destroyers had Narvik as their goal, where they were to land mountain troops. On the way there a hurricane raged, and after the troops had been disembarked there was a pause to repair storm damage. At this stage their luck changed for the worse. Of the two expected tankers, only one arrived, the Kattegathaving been intercepted and sunk by the Norwegian Navy. The surviving oiler, the Jan Wellem, had insufficient fuel and inadequate pump capacity. When a numerically superior British naval force arrived, the fate of the German destroyers at Narvik was sealed. The objective of the occupation of Norway was to pre-empt a British invasion. The casualties, which included one heavy and two light cruisers and ten destroyers, were disastrous, though at that time not indefensible. However, the losses made heavy inroads into Kriegsmarine numbers and could not be made good.
The ‘After Narvik’ routine of destroyer warfare saw the surviving ten units and the new ships entering commission in action continually, not only in the Baltic, North Sea and Kattegat but now also in the sea areas off the French Atlantic coast, in the Bay of Biscay and in the waters around Norway. Here they tended to be prone to collisions and groundings. The harbours and river estuaries on the French Atlantic coast and the Norwegian fjords and coastal skerries were quite different from German waters. There were plenty of charts, but many were inaccurate and at the time there was no question of carrying out new surveys. The local pilotage authority, understandably, tended to be uncooperative and, where possible, was not used. Operations took place by day in beaming sunshine, but also at night, when coastal beacons and navigational lights were extinguished. Then destroyers were expected to keep to narrowly defined, swept channels, often in close sailing order, and frequently at high speed when passing through areas where unseen dangers were expected. Weather conditions can change very swiftly, not only in narrow coastal tracts such as the German estuaries of the Elbe, Weser, Jade and Ems but also in Norwegian waters. Within minutes one can suddenly be enveloped in thick fog. And that requires great alertness. It is no surprise, therefore, in the sudden advent of fog for example, that a small flotilla running at high speed might suddenly find itself in difficulties. Perhaps one destroyer would throw her rudder hard over to avoid a shadow in the fog (if not too late), or there would be a collision; or a commander might be forced to accept a collision as an alternative to running aground or on the rocks. Added to all these perils there were the unforeseeable shipboard breakdowns—engine trouble, rudder failure and so on. These things happen at sea; groundings, collisions and suchlike occur amongst all fighting and mercantile navies in peace and war. In January 1994, in a fjord near Bergen, the Norwegian frigate Oslo ran aground and sank after engine failure. Collisions and groundings are therefore not the special preserve of wartime German destroyers and arise from a multitude of situations.
* But what were the logistic components of the 1938 wargame which convinced Admiral Schniewind it would work? If Spain, which allowed German warships to refuel in breach of her neutrality, had permitted German forces to capture Gibraltar from the land side, this would have enabled the German Navy to bottle up the Mediterranean and given it a true Atlantic base. The other clue is supplied by the Admiral Graf Spee mystery. No convincing reason has ever been offered why Langsdorff put into the trap of Montevideo, Uruguay, instead of the naval base at Bahía Blanca in friendly Argentina. As the author himself pointed out in his earlier volume Pocket Battleships of the Deutschland Class, Langsdorff was told that flight to Japan was out of the question for fear of compromising a then neutral Tokyo. It may be that both Japan and the Peronist regime of Argentina had earlier given secret conditional undertakings to supply full bases to Germany in certain contingencies. Argentina may also have been interested in assisting a German invasion of the Falkland Islands, which would have given Germany control over merchant traffic coming round both Capes. These possibilities, with Gibraltar, would surely have put the situation in a new light.—Tr.)