redesign the thing from the ground up >all or nothing armor scheme >AA armament and fire control that doesn't suck ass ( which they theoretically could have done)
3x3 or 4x3 gun layout would have been nice but the Germans couldn't do that with their 15" gun. None of this fixes the fact that the Bismarck was doomed by not having a proper escort and sailing alone into a vulnerable position.
>The design was fine, the idea of putting so many resources into something vulnerable to air attack was outdated.
Wouldn't have been so vulnerable if the design was fine.
Remove the battle part and turn it into a aircraft carrier.
Graf Zeppelin would have been pretty ass had it entered service, so they're probably better off starting smaller and from scratch with carrier development.
Daily reminder that Bismarck was scuttled, not sunk.
Scuttled as a response to being rendered ineffective by enemy fire and incapable of surviving further. I don't see how this really changes anything.
>Wouldn't have been so vulnerable if the design was fine.
The problem with the Bismark wasn't the design of the ship, it was the fact that they only had 4 capital ships for the entire fleet, rendering the things essentially useless. If the Germans had the four iowas instead, it would have gone down exactly the same way.
>The problem with the Bismark wasn't the design of the ship
The problem with Bismark wasn't ~>just<~ the design of the ship. The design was antiquated and confused and overweight, but even an actually competent battleship wouldn't have helped them.
Yes, they could have taken the time and money and spent it on getting to Type XXIs deployed in big numbers by 1942 and in conjunction with not being moronic and not declaring war on the US, they’d have closed the Atlantic and been able to build her later, using her as a fine location in the Thames to sign Britain’s articles of surrender.
But Wehraboos were moronic so they lost the war and rightly so
>getting to Type XXIs deployed in big numbers by 1942
The U boat fleet would be even less effective then. Even in 1945 the technology for these vessels wasn't ready the grade A example of wunderwaffe. Boats of this design were not ready for another 5-10 years, not because Germany was so far ahead, but because the ideas required manufacturing processes that weren't yet invented.
No it wasn't but when the UK.US and USSR took the remaining vessels after the war it took them years to get them to work. They leaked, the batteries were lethal navigation was a huge problem and would continue to be until INS was invented.
>with not being moronic and not declaring war on the US
US "secretly" supplied bongistan with infinite amount of supplies. Declaration or not, the ships have to be sunk and the sea blockade have to be made.
However attempting to blockade two major naval powers from each other is a questionable task on its own of course but ...
You could have had both Yammato class ships and the Royal Navy would still sink them. There was no way for a small force to get out into open ocean by force.
idk why but germans in ww2 loved sending their big battleships on solo one way adventures to the bottom of the ocean. scharnhorst got the same treatment, where the frick were the german escorts? i thought the story of warspite singlehandedly erasing the entirety of the german's destroyers in norway was a meme
Fuel. The Kriegsmarine had to skirt a long way around British waters to get anywhere; the RN has no such limitation. Bismarck had to sail out of range of destroyer escort.
Scharnhorst had a screen of destroyers but they split up to look for the convoy, Scharnhorst solo in one, the destroyers in the other.
At the beginning Hitler supported very ambitious surface fleet modernization program.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_Z
After Battle of the Barents Sea in 1942 Nazis went full U-BOAT.
The surface fleet spend most of the war stick in port being bullied by the RAF, and virtually every time they did sortie out resulted in losing the ship for minimal if any gain. Subs got results and were a fraction of the cost in men and material.
>Could Germany have done anything to make this battleship design more successful?
getting away from battleships and build more destroyers and submarines. They were murdering the british and all their shit with submarines. Bismark and Tirpitz were a waste of money, time and resources.
>submarines
This was a no-go as well really.
The reason why both Britain and Hitler expected a surface raider strategy is because the US was expected to step in if unrestricted submarine warfare was enacted, and unrestricted submarine warfare would have been the only way to effectively starve out Britain. And both knew that the US stepping in would make it unwinnable for its opponent - as proved to be the case.
Hence U-boats were more effective tactically, but when considering the political-strategic impact, it was really just as pointless.
If germany wanted to maintain a naval presence they had to seriously dissuade any of the RN from attacking onto their shores. That's why they spent so much time with sea mines and uboats previously. They clearly should have used more because it was devastating to their supply lines.
Also larger ships than Eugen or Hipper were excessive and wasteful. Even though Sharnhorst and Gneisenau had good campaigns initially they were basically huge vulnerable assets. Even the US and Japan knew this when they got into their massive fleets. They had a large number of capital ships when they could have had many many more smaller ships that could have been way more potent.
German battleships were meant to counter the French fleet in a hypothetical Franco-German war. Germany did not plan for a war against every single major power because that would be a moronic thing to do.
>They clearly should have used more because it was devastating to their supply lines
Did you not read?
It also brought the USA into the war and doomed Germany.
How many more U-boats could
Also larger ships than Eugen or Hipper were excessive and wasteful. Even though Sharnhorst and Gneisenau had good campaigns initially they were basically huge vulnerable assets. Even the US and Japan knew this when they got into their massive fleets. They had a large number of capital ships when they could have had many many more smaller ships that could have been way more potent.
>they could have had many many more smaller ships that could have been way more potent
Battleships were still the best AA platforms until very late into the war, more survivable, and more concentrated. A battleship is a hundred 40mm barrels concentrated in one patch of sea; although you can theoretically build 16 destroyers for the same amount of steel, you can't stuff 16 destroyers into the same battleship-sized patch.
>How many more U-boats could
Germany have built? Would it be enough to offset the construction rate of Liberty ships and ASW escorts that the US and UK achieved?
11 months ago
Anonymous
>Would it be enough to offset the construction rate of Liberty ships and ASW escorts that the US and UK achieved?
germans would need to sink 300kt of merchant shipping a month to cripple the british navy
they were only able to meet that target 4 times
the addition of the US merchant shipping fleet raised the target to 700kt a month
this was only achieved once
they slowed replacing ships after 1943 due to lack of ships being sunk, U-boats were no longer a threat
it would take a literal 10x increase in german submarine production to hit the 700kt a month target
and it is very questionable if they could ever do it, U-boat production already consumed twice as much steel as their tank production
increasing production further would have major impacts on procurement for the eastern front
11 months ago
Anonymous
>U-boat production already consumed twice as much steel as their tank production
you could say the same about the other capital ships. If bismarck and tirpitz weren't built think about what else they could have had?
11 months ago
Anonymous
I would also apply this to other meme weapons like Gustav the railway cannon and many of their excessive tank projects.
11 months ago
Anonymous
>If bismarck and tirpitz weren't built think about what else they could have had?
700 type-7 u-boats were made, with a combined tonnage of more than a 500,000 tons
the bismark had a displacement of 40,000 tons
turning them into u-boats at 100% efficiency would increase the entire type-7 submarine fleet by a negligible amount
not including the other types of u-boats
11 months ago
Anonymous
>If bismarck and tirpitz weren't built
then the RN would have realised they were going for a U-boat strategy, and would have increased their own production of escorts.
This is a Flower-class corvette. It basically only had one deck gun, an AA cannon, sonar, and a pile of depth charges. They were roughly the same weight as a U-boat, and easier to construct. They bulit 300 of these.
In addition other classes were built: >40 Castle-class corvettes >150 River-class frigates >30 Loch-class frigates >80 Hunt-class destroyers >80 Captain-class frigates (US Lend lease)
>Battleships were still the best AA platforms until very late into the war, more survivable, and more concentrated
I don't agree. While they had more AA guns, they were highly susceptible to planes purely because of their vulnerability. Survivability is questionable when Bismarck was disabled and sunk so easily. If part of the survival of the ship relies on its escort fleet then thats just about the fleet itself not the ship in question. Bismarck and Tirpitz were failures the same way Yamato and Musashi were. They weren't potent, they didn't do anything and their countries were more concerned with protecting them than actually using them. Very few of these massive battleships saw any real action.
11 months ago
Anonymous
>they were highly susceptible to planes purely because of their vulnerability
This sentence makes no sense. >Survivability is questionable when Bismarck was disabled and sunk so easily
Bismarck was a poorly-constructed interwar battleship.
All battleships were greatly upgraded in AA capability as the war went on, and destroyers too, because destroyers had even more token AA than a battleship at the start of the war.
The AA firepower of a US battleship in 1943 was formidable. >If part of the survival of the ship relies on its escort fleet then thats just about the fleet itself not the ship in question
Combined arms means all components play their role, and in part the role of the battleship was to provide a massive concentration of AA. >Very few of these massive battleships saw any real action
US battleships saw plenty of action in the AA role against kamikaze waves.
>U-boat production already consumed twice as much steel as their tank production
you could say the same about the other capital ships. If bismarck and tirpitz weren't built think about what else they could have had?
>If bismarck and tirpitz weren't built think about what else they could have had?
90,000 tons more of U-boats?
That would be 105 more Type VIIs, the most numerous type, out of 703 built, not counting other classes.
Not insignificant, but again, would it have turned the tide against the USA? No.
lots, remove the 6 inch secondaries and the 105mms and replace with HA/LA dual purpose guns, use weight saved to either up armour, increase speed or actually stay within treay limitations. replace as many as possible of the 37mm and 20mm AA guns with 40mm bofors.
german radar was still worse than RN and the german armour was less resistant for a given thickness than british or american but it would have been more capable.
going with 3x3 gun layout would also have been better if german tech was up t doing that with 15 inch guns.
The Germans already had an automatic 37mm AA gun, but, for some moronic reason, the Navy got stuck with the insanely shit manually-loaded one.
Unless I'm mistaken, Seetakt had an issue with muzzle blast, because its equipment wasn't properly blast-hardened.
>Torpedoes outrage DP guns.
the only torpedo that could outrange the standard US 5-in gun was the type 92 torpedo which used pure oxygen, with an unprecedented 22km range
but this was only its mechanical limit, japanese doctrine was to fire them within 11km of the target due to limitations in sighting and aiming, which would be within engagement range of the 5in gun
german torpedos could only do about 8km with their electric G7 torpedo and 12km on their earlier non-electric torpedos
even the japanese had difficulty getting within the combat envelope of DP guns with their long range torpedoes so its unlikely you could simply ignore a battery of DP guns
the british and the germans both apparently considered that the anglo german naval agreement meant the germans would respect the london treaties tonnage limits for capital ships
LMAO. Dude, siwtching to a unified secondary battery isn't going to give you enough tonnage to seriously increase armor, speed or somehow make the damn boat 15k tons light to hit treaty limits.
>Ironically, Rodney's own main guns firing at low elevation had damaged her more extensively than had Bismarck.
, urinals and water mains had broken, while the shock of firing had loosened rivets and bolts in the hull plating, flooding various compartments.
Ironically, Rodney's own main guns firing at low elevation had damaged her more extensively than had Bismarck. >Deck plates around the main-gun turrets had been depressed by the effects of the guns' muzzle blast, and some of the structural members supporting them had cracked or buckled.
obliterating every german in the superstructure is officially less important than nelson's plumbing
Nelson and Rodney were kinda infamous for that. They took All or Nothing a bit too far.
>LMAO. Dude, siwtching to a unified secondary battery isn't going to give you enough tonnage to seriously increase armor, speed or somehow make the damn boat 15k tons light to hit treaty limits.
probably not but it would at least get closer, switching to 3x3 would also have helped a lot with that and they werent that far over the escalator clause limits
firstly that claim is dubious at best, she was 'scuttled' pretty much the same time as HMS Dorsetshire put 3-4 torpedoes into her.
secondly nobody on either side disputes that she was sinking before she was 'scuttled' and that at absolute most scuttling made her sink in 20 minutes not 2 hours, if the RN had fricked off and left her alone 5 minutes before she 'scuttled' and her crew had tried their very level best to keep her afloat she would still have sunk, the germans scuttled a sinking ship, this tragically does indeed represent the high point of german naval achievement in WW2
>Daily reminder that Bismarck was scuttled, not sunk.
The crew could have done that in port, no? I am going with, the Bismark was hunted down at all costs and destroyed with extreme prejudice.
>lots, remove the 6 inch secondaries
But if you are attacked by destroyers? Torpedoes outrage DP guns.
That's what escorts are for. All navies quickly realised air attack was the number one enemy and every possible gun that could was converted to a DP gun.
https://i.imgur.com/G9pgSTT.jpg
Could Germany have done anything to make this battleship design more successful?
>Could Germany have done anything to make this battleship design more successful?
Yes, plenty, it was an exceedingly inefficient design comparable to a treaty battleship while being 15% heavier.
>Bismarck sinking
There are no good books, as Bismarck was scuttled, not sunk.
never got why wehrabooss seem to think this is a win for them?
but to humour you, Please describe for us the condition of Bismarck when the order to scuttle was given. How many of her crew were still alive, how many of her guns still worked? how extensive were the fires and flooding? what is your understanding of the reason given for the scuttling order?
I suspect you are an idiot, I am willing to be proved wrong.
Yes, but it would have require a very different approach to every battleship they have previously built. Which is always going to be a difficult ask. Bismarck was a very heavy design for what the end result was- a ship where others within treaty limits, or coming out in the same year, had better performance.
At the least, they could have tried to recognize the importance of AA and fire control for it.
>Rodney closed to point-blank range and continued to engage, starting to fire full broadsides into Bismarck on a virtually flat trajectory, and added three more torpedoes at a range of 3,000 yd (2,700 m) beginning at 09:51; one of these malfunctioned but another may have struck Bismarck.[45][46] According to the naval historian Ludovic Kennedy, who was present at the battle in Tartar, "if true, [this is] the only instance in history of one battleship torpedoing another." >Rodney fired 378 sixteen-inch shells and 706 six-inch shells during the battle before Dalrymple-Hamilton ordered cease fire around 10:16, while Dorsetshire was then ordered to finish Bismarck off with torpedoes. Ironically, Rodney's own main guns firing at low elevation had damaged her more extensively than had Bismarck. >Deck plates around the main-gun turrets had been depressed by the effects of the guns' muzzle blast, and some of the structural members supporting them had cracked or buckled. >Piping, urinals and water mains had broken, while the shock of firing had loosened rivets and bolts in the hull plating, flooding various compartments. >One gun in 'A' turret permanently broke down during the battle and two others in 'B' turret were temporarily disabled
>Ironically, Rodney's own main guns firing at low elevation had damaged her more extensively than had Bismarck.
, urinals and water mains had broken, while the shock of firing had loosened rivets and bolts in the hull plating, flooding various compartments.
Ironically, Rodney's own main guns firing at low elevation had damaged her more extensively than had Bismarck. >Deck plates around the main-gun turrets had been depressed by the effects of the guns' muzzle blast, and some of the structural members supporting them had cracked or buckled.
obliterating every german in the superstructure is officially less important than nelson's plumbing
>why didnt the allies put a giant underwater net across Gibraltar?
A minefield is more practical, and the reasons why not for both is Spain.
Not that it was necessary, because the RN controlled the straits and it was the Allies that wanted access, not the Axis.
>did that layout work
Excellently. The French also had similar ships, picrel.
The advantage and purpose of this layout was to save space and weight; on a battleship you mainly need to armour the turrets and magazine. If the turrets and magazine is all forward, you don't need to armour the aft as well. This was very important when these ships were built, because of the Naval Treaties limiting the total tonnage allowed to each navy.
This idea was not new, the disadvantage is that the ship can't fire aft, making it helpless in a getaway scenario and suboptimal in manoeuvreing in battle. At the time it was considered an acceptable tradeoff to squeeze a couple more ships out.
It was a way to shorten the area of the ship that needed to be armoured by basicaly putting all the magazines att the same location and only armouring that and it would in theory not affect the firepower too much unless you where a pussy and try to run away
To do what, exactly? They didn't have that much range but Scandanavia through the tip of France can cover that area. I guess it would've been cool to have a German airfleet more present in the outer reaches during the North African campaign.
>German airfleet more present in the outer reaches during the North African campaign
Not sure it would have helped.
The RAF dabbed on the hundreds of DAK land-based air, what would another thirty or so carrier fighters matter.
>Could Germany have done anything to make this battleship design more successful?
getting away from battleships and build more destroyers and submarines. They were murdering the british and all their shit with submarines. Bismark and Tirpitz were a waste of money, time and resources.
>Could Germany have done anything to make this battleship design more successful?
They could have spent the steel and other resources on more U-boats because those were actually effective for a while.
>turn it into an aircraft carrier >turn all battleships into aircraft carriers >turn all u-boats into carrier aircraft >turn all your wunderwaffe projects into aircraft fuel
You just won the Battle of the Atlantic
The Atlantic war was different from the Pacific because of the size of the oceans. European theater aircraft carriers would be vulnerable to attack from airbases on land. An airbase on land is by default stronger than an aircraft carrier- it can't be sunk and is much longer allowing heavier aircraft and more frequent sorties.
I'd say that would be true for all operations close to the shore, but aircraft carriers would still be superior as commerce raiders in the mid Atlantic.
>commerce raiding
The problem is that England by virtue of position makes this impossible. Land-based sorties from the UK can easily intercept German fleets leaving the Baltic, even the French Atlantic coast is vulnerable to intercept from England. For example Bismarck went to raid but was obviously spotted and hounded by attacks thereafter and had to steer well wide of the UK. This is the big reason the Germans went to U-boats, so they could slip by the English patrols.
Lol the Germans didn't have enough fuel to keep their ground base Luftwaffe flying or their tanks moving. On what planet do you think they could have outfit carriers and planes. Especially when they couldn't get to sea without the Brits harassing them, had no Atlantic service ports that could handle their ships, and would have had to deal with the USN and RN attacking them. Also their hilarious ignorance of radar would have furthered screwed them
All or nothing armor.
Bigger guns or more guns and/or thicker armor to take advantage of the significant weight saving from the all or nothing layout.
Better AA. More more more and better better AA.
But in the end that would still stick them with a battleship, in an era where aircraft had rendered them far less important than the days of the High Seas Fleet. More more more submarines, to strengthen the blockade of the island dwellers and cut off lend lease to the subhumans.
coolest thing about WWII naval battles is the use of smokescreens and fog/mist generators to obscure capital ships but no one ever seems to mention it and wikipedia is full of trash sources
No, because they fight as systems of systems and numbers matter. The stupid idea surface ships don't need aircraft carriers died the death it deserved.
The Kriegsmarine could only have defeated Britain with sufficient submarines. It failed to build them unlike the US which thoroughly fricked the Japs.
Germany built hundreds of submarines. The difference is they built them against an island nation with strong seafaring allies and experience in anti-submarine warfare (Britain) instead of an island nation with useless allies and no anti-submarine capability at all (Japan). If American torpedoes had worked from day 1, the war in the Pacific might have been markedly shorter.
The design was fine, the idea of putting so many resources into something vulnerable to air attack was outdated.
>The design was fine
No it wasn't.
It was hideously inefficient
redesign the thing from the ground up
>all or nothing armor scheme
>AA armament and fire control that doesn't suck ass ( which they theoretically could have done)
3x3 or 4x3 gun layout would have been nice but the Germans couldn't do that with their 15" gun. None of this fixes the fact that the Bismarck was doomed by not having a proper escort and sailing alone into a vulnerable position.
>The design was fine, the idea of putting so many resources into something vulnerable to air attack was outdated.
Wouldn't have been so vulnerable if the design was fine.
Graf Zeppelin would have been pretty ass had it entered service, so they're probably better off starting smaller and from scratch with carrier development.
Scuttled as a response to being rendered ineffective by enemy fire and incapable of surviving further. I don't see how this really changes anything.
>Wouldn't have been so vulnerable if the design was fine.
The problem with the Bismark wasn't the design of the ship, it was the fact that they only had 4 capital ships for the entire fleet, rendering the things essentially useless. If the Germans had the four iowas instead, it would have gone down exactly the same way.
>The problem with the Bismark wasn't the design of the ship
The problem with Bismark wasn't ~>just<~ the design of the ship. The design was antiquated and confused and overweight, but even an actually competent battleship wouldn't have helped them.
>all or nothing armor
>uniform secondary battery of Flak 40
>turning back to the Baltic or Hamburg instead of pushing for France after sinking Hood
Yes, they could have taken the time and money and spent it on getting to Type XXIs deployed in big numbers by 1942 and in conjunction with not being moronic and not declaring war on the US, they’d have closed the Atlantic and been able to build her later, using her as a fine location in the Thames to sign Britain’s articles of surrender.
But Wehraboos were moronic so they lost the war and rightly so
>getting to Type XXIs deployed in big numbers by 1942
The U boat fleet would be even less effective then. Even in 1945 the technology for these vessels wasn't ready the grade A example of wunderwaffe. Boats of this design were not ready for another 5-10 years, not because Germany was so far ahead, but because the ideas required manufacturing processes that weren't yet invented.
Probably fair but developing manufacturing improvements probably wasn’t aided by strategic bombing
No it wasn't but when the UK.US and USSR took the remaining vessels after the war it took them years to get them to work. They leaked, the batteries were lethal navigation was a huge problem and would continue to be until INS was invented.
>with not being moronic and not declaring war on the US
US "secretly" supplied bongistan with infinite amount of supplies. Declaration or not, the ships have to be sunk and the sea blockade have to be made.
However attempting to blockade two major naval powers from each other is a questionable task on its own of course but ...
You could have had both Yammato class ships and the Royal Navy would still sink them. There was no way for a small force to get out into open ocean by force.
>Slaps your ass with a torpedo
>Nice looking ship you got there, be a shame to lose a rudder
Yeah. By giving it bigger escort.
idk why but germans in ww2 loved sending their big battleships on solo one way adventures to the bottom of the ocean. scharnhorst got the same treatment, where the frick were the german escorts? i thought the story of warspite singlehandedly erasing the entirety of the german's destroyers in norway was a meme
Because they didn't have any boats.
Fuel. The Kriegsmarine had to skirt a long way around British waters to get anywhere; the RN has no such limitation. Bismarck had to sail out of range of destroyer escort.
Scharnhorst had a screen of destroyers but they split up to look for the convoy, Scharnhorst solo in one, the destroyers in the other.
Is it true that Hitler held a very negative view of the surface fleet and almost had it scrapped?
At the beginning Hitler supported very ambitious surface fleet modernization program.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_Z
After Battle of the Barents Sea in 1942 Nazis went full U-BOAT.
The surface fleet spend most of the war stick in port being bullied by the RAF, and virtually every time they did sortie out resulted in losing the ship for minimal if any gain. Subs got results and were a fraction of the cost in men and material.
>Subs
>submarines
This was a no-go as well really.
The reason why both Britain and Hitler expected a surface raider strategy is because the US was expected to step in if unrestricted submarine warfare was enacted, and unrestricted submarine warfare would have been the only way to effectively starve out Britain. And both knew that the US stepping in would make it unwinnable for its opponent - as proved to be the case.
Hence U-boats were more effective tactically, but when considering the political-strategic impact, it was really just as pointless.
If germany wanted to maintain a naval presence they had to seriously dissuade any of the RN from attacking onto their shores. That's why they spent so much time with sea mines and uboats previously. They clearly should have used more because it was devastating to their supply lines.
Also larger ships than Eugen or Hipper were excessive and wasteful. Even though Sharnhorst and Gneisenau had good campaigns initially they were basically huge vulnerable assets. Even the US and Japan knew this when they got into their massive fleets. They had a large number of capital ships when they could have had many many more smaller ships that could have been way more potent.
German battleships were meant to counter the French fleet in a hypothetical Franco-German war. Germany did not plan for a war against every single major power because that would be a moronic thing to do.
>They clearly should have used more because it was devastating to their supply lines
Did you not read?
It also brought the USA into the war and doomed Germany.
How many more U-boats could
>they could have had many many more smaller ships that could have been way more potent
Battleships were still the best AA platforms until very late into the war, more survivable, and more concentrated. A battleship is a hundred 40mm barrels concentrated in one patch of sea; although you can theoretically build 16 destroyers for the same amount of steel, you can't stuff 16 destroyers into the same battleship-sized patch.
>How many more U-boats could
Germany have built? Would it be enough to offset the construction rate of Liberty ships and ASW escorts that the US and UK achieved?
>Would it be enough to offset the construction rate of Liberty ships and ASW escorts that the US and UK achieved?
germans would need to sink 300kt of merchant shipping a month to cripple the british navy
they were only able to meet that target 4 times
the addition of the US merchant shipping fleet raised the target to 700kt a month
this was only achieved once
they slowed replacing ships after 1943 due to lack of ships being sunk, U-boats were no longer a threat
it would take a literal 10x increase in german submarine production to hit the 700kt a month target
and it is very questionable if they could ever do it, U-boat production already consumed twice as much steel as their tank production
increasing production further would have major impacts on procurement for the eastern front
>U-boat production already consumed twice as much steel as their tank production
you could say the same about the other capital ships. If bismarck and tirpitz weren't built think about what else they could have had?
I would also apply this to other meme weapons like Gustav the railway cannon and many of their excessive tank projects.
>If bismarck and tirpitz weren't built think about what else they could have had?
700 type-7 u-boats were made, with a combined tonnage of more than a 500,000 tons
the bismark had a displacement of 40,000 tons
turning them into u-boats at 100% efficiency would increase the entire type-7 submarine fleet by a negligible amount
not including the other types of u-boats
>If bismarck and tirpitz weren't built
then the RN would have realised they were going for a U-boat strategy, and would have increased their own production of escorts.
This is a Flower-class corvette. It basically only had one deck gun, an AA cannon, sonar, and a pile of depth charges. They were roughly the same weight as a U-boat, and easier to construct. They bulit 300 of these.
In addition other classes were built:
>40 Castle-class corvettes
>150 River-class frigates
>30 Loch-class frigates
>80 Hunt-class destroyers
>80 Captain-class frigates (US Lend lease)
>Battleships were still the best AA platforms until very late into the war, more survivable, and more concentrated
I don't agree. While they had more AA guns, they were highly susceptible to planes purely because of their vulnerability. Survivability is questionable when Bismarck was disabled and sunk so easily. If part of the survival of the ship relies on its escort fleet then thats just about the fleet itself not the ship in question. Bismarck and Tirpitz were failures the same way Yamato and Musashi were. They weren't potent, they didn't do anything and their countries were more concerned with protecting them than actually using them. Very few of these massive battleships saw any real action.
>they were highly susceptible to planes purely because of their vulnerability
This sentence makes no sense.
>Survivability is questionable when Bismarck was disabled and sunk so easily
Bismarck was a poorly-constructed interwar battleship.
All battleships were greatly upgraded in AA capability as the war went on, and destroyers too, because destroyers had even more token AA than a battleship at the start of the war.
The AA firepower of a US battleship in 1943 was formidable.
>If part of the survival of the ship relies on its escort fleet then thats just about the fleet itself not the ship in question
Combined arms means all components play their role, and in part the role of the battleship was to provide a massive concentration of AA.
>Very few of these massive battleships saw any real action
US battleships saw plenty of action in the AA role against kamikaze waves.
>If bismarck and tirpitz weren't built think about what else they could have had?
90,000 tons more of U-boats?
That would be 105 more Type VIIs, the most numerous type, out of 703 built, not counting other classes.
Not insignificant, but again, would it have turned the tide against the USA? No.
Yeah he called it the Battle of Narvik the top lad.
>The single battle of Narvik
Have it sail in a fleet unlike how the idiots in Germany did it...
Not send a battlecruiser out to sea basically alone with no AA armament during WW2.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH ITS A WW1 BIPLANE
lots, remove the 6 inch secondaries and the 105mms and replace with HA/LA dual purpose guns, use weight saved to either up armour, increase speed or actually stay within treay limitations. replace as many as possible of the 37mm and 20mm AA guns with 40mm bofors.
german radar was still worse than RN and the german armour was less resistant for a given thickness than british or american but it would have been more capable.
going with 3x3 gun layout would also have been better if german tech was up t doing that with 15 inch guns.
The Germans already had an automatic 37mm AA gun, but, for some moronic reason, the Navy got stuck with the insanely shit manually-loaded one.
Unless I'm mistaken, Seetakt had an issue with muzzle blast, because its equipment wasn't properly blast-hardened.
>lots, remove the 6 inch secondaries
But if you are attacked by destroyers? Torpedoes outrage DP guns.
but are easy to avoid unless launched from closer ranges, ranges well within the range of DP guns
>Torpedoes outrage DP guns.
the only torpedo that could outrange the standard US 5-in gun was the type 92 torpedo which used pure oxygen, with an unprecedented 22km range
but this was only its mechanical limit, japanese doctrine was to fire them within 11km of the target due to limitations in sighting and aiming, which would be within engagement range of the 5in gun
german torpedos could only do about 8km with their electric G7 torpedo and 12km on their earlier non-electric torpedos
even the japanese had difficulty getting within the combat envelope of DP guns with their long range torpedoes so its unlikely you could simply ignore a battery of DP guns
Which treaty? Definitely wasn't a signatory to Washington. Versailles?
the british and the germans both apparently considered that the anglo german naval agreement meant the germans would respect the london treaties tonnage limits for capital ships
LMAO. Dude, siwtching to a unified secondary battery isn't going to give you enough tonnage to seriously increase armor, speed or somehow make the damn boat 15k tons light to hit treaty limits.
Nelson and Rodney were kinda infamous for that. They took All or Nothing a bit too far.
>LMAO. Dude, siwtching to a unified secondary battery isn't going to give you enough tonnage to seriously increase armor, speed or somehow make the damn boat 15k tons light to hit treaty limits.
probably not but it would at least get closer, switching to 3x3 would also have helped a lot with that and they werent that far over the escalator clause limits
>They took All or Nothing a bit too far
I think the designers underestimated the blast effect of the 16"s, the biggest guns in the fleet at the time
Remove the battle part and turn it into a aircraft carrier.
Daily reminder that Bismarck was scuttled, not sunk.
firstly that claim is dubious at best, she was 'scuttled' pretty much the same time as HMS Dorsetshire put 3-4 torpedoes into her.
secondly nobody on either side disputes that she was sinking before she was 'scuttled' and that at absolute most scuttling made her sink in 20 minutes not 2 hours, if the RN had fricked off and left her alone 5 minutes before she 'scuttled' and her crew had tried their very level best to keep her afloat she would still have sunk, the germans scuttled a sinking ship, this tragically does indeed represent the high point of german naval achievement in WW2
>Daily reminder that Bismarck was scuttled, not sunk.
The crew could have done that in port, no? I am going with, the Bismark was hunted down at all costs and destroyed with extreme prejudice.
>that hentai
what the frick?
That's what escorts are for. All navies quickly realised air attack was the number one enemy and every possible gun that could was converted to a DP gun.
>Could Germany have done anything to make this battleship design more successful?
Yes, plenty, it was an exceedingly inefficient design comparable to a treaty battleship while being 15% heavier.
I had to google it (hentai)
Thought it was funny, in a non pornograghic way
Doesn’t matter. She was blasted into a burning hulk that had 0 chance of survival. The Brits sunk her, the Germans just saved some time.
>that vatnig shooting himself because a drone blew his legs up doesn't count as a kill for Ukraine because his fatal wound was self-inflicted!
moron
never got why wehrabooss seem to think this is a win for them?
but to humour you, Please describe for us the condition of Bismarck when the order to scuttle was given. How many of her crew were still alive, how many of her guns still worked? how extensive were the fires and flooding? what is your understanding of the reason given for the scuttling order?
I suspect you are an idiot, I am willing to be proved wrong.
I just post it because it makes bongs seethe.
nice to be proven correct
Boat autists are here for the boats, not the countries
bow manouvering propellers?
Yes, but it would have require a very different approach to every battleship they have previously built. Which is always going to be a difficult ask. Bismarck was a very heavy design for what the end result was- a ship where others within treaty limits, or coming out in the same year, had better performance.
At the least, they could have tried to recognize the importance of AA and fire control for it.
*blocks ur path*
>Rodney closed to point-blank range and continued to engage, starting to fire full broadsides into Bismarck on a virtually flat trajectory, and added three more torpedoes at a range of 3,000 yd (2,700 m) beginning at 09:51; one of these malfunctioned but another may have struck Bismarck.[45][46] According to the naval historian Ludovic Kennedy, who was present at the battle in Tartar, "if true, [this is] the only instance in history of one battleship torpedoing another."
>Rodney fired 378 sixteen-inch shells and 706 six-inch shells during the battle before Dalrymple-Hamilton ordered cease fire around 10:16, while Dorsetshire was then ordered to finish Bismarck off with torpedoes. Ironically, Rodney's own main guns firing at low elevation had damaged her more extensively than had Bismarck.
>Deck plates around the main-gun turrets had been depressed by the effects of the guns' muzzle blast, and some of the structural members supporting them had cracked or buckled.
>Piping, urinals and water mains had broken, while the shock of firing had loosened rivets and bolts in the hull plating, flooding various compartments.
>One gun in 'A' turret permanently broke down during the battle and two others in 'B' turret were temporarily disabled
>Ironically, Rodney's own main guns firing at low elevation had damaged her more extensively than had Bismarck.
, urinals and water mains had broken, while the shock of firing had loosened rivets and bolts in the hull plating, flooding various compartments.
Ironically, Rodney's own main guns firing at low elevation had damaged her more extensively than had Bismarck.
>Deck plates around the main-gun turrets had been depressed by the effects of the guns' muzzle blast, and some of the structural members supporting them had cracked or buckled.
obliterating every german in the superstructure is officially less important than nelson's plumbing
Can you even fricking imagine what would it feel like to get blasted point blank with 16in guns?
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
fricking cargo ship ass boat
Hauling a load of whoop-ass right into your fricking conning tower!
this thing looks crazy, did that layout work?
also semi related to this thread why didnt the allies put a giant underwater net across Gibraltar?
>why didnt the allies put a giant underwater net across Gibraltar?
A minefield is more practical, and the reasons why not for both is Spain.
Not that it was necessary, because the RN controlled the straits and it was the Allies that wanted access, not the Axis.
>did that layout work
Excellently. The French also had similar ships, picrel.
The advantage and purpose of this layout was to save space and weight; on a battleship you mainly need to armour the turrets and magazine. If the turrets and magazine is all forward, you don't need to armour the aft as well. This was very important when these ships were built, because of the Naval Treaties limiting the total tonnage allowed to each navy.
This idea was not new, the disadvantage is that the ship can't fire aft, making it helpless in a getaway scenario and suboptimal in manoeuvreing in battle. At the time it was considered an acceptable tradeoff to squeeze a couple more ships out.
thanks for the qrd no cap
It was a way to shorten the area of the ship that needed to be armoured by basicaly putting all the magazines att the same location and only armouring that and it would in theory not affect the firepower too much unless you where a pussy and try to run away
Treaty ships were wild.
Taken all the labor and materials and put it towards U-boats.
No, its miraculous she did as well as she did.
towers
Yes, by converting her into an Aircraft Carrier with a full complement of effective combat aircraft.
To do what, exactly? They didn't have that much range but Scandanavia through the tip of France can cover that area. I guess it would've been cool to have a German airfleet more present in the outer reaches during the North African campaign.
>German airfleet more present in the outer reaches during the North African campaign
Not sure it would have helped.
The RAF dabbed on the hundreds of DAK land-based air, what would another thirty or so carrier fighters matter.
Hey, I said it'd be cool. Not effective.
>Could Germany have done anything to make this battleship design more successful?
getting away from battleships and build more destroyers and submarines. They were murdering the british and all their shit with submarines. Bismark and Tirpitz were a waste of money, time and resources.
>Could Germany have done anything to make this battleship design more successful?
They could have spent the steel and other resources on more U-boats because those were actually effective for a while.
>more successful
at wasting resources?
make a 41.700 Ton submarine instead.
better protection for rulevaya mashinka
(steering mechanism)
>turn it into an aircraft carrier
>turn all battleships into aircraft carriers
>turn all u-boats into carrier aircraft
>turn all your wunderwaffe projects into aircraft fuel
You just won the Battle of the Atlantic
The Atlantic war was different from the Pacific because of the size of the oceans. European theater aircraft carriers would be vulnerable to attack from airbases on land. An airbase on land is by default stronger than an aircraft carrier- it can't be sunk and is much longer allowing heavier aircraft and more frequent sorties.
I'd say that would be true for all operations close to the shore, but aircraft carriers would still be superior as commerce raiders in the mid Atlantic.
>commerce raiding
The problem is that England by virtue of position makes this impossible. Land-based sorties from the UK can easily intercept German fleets leaving the Baltic, even the French Atlantic coast is vulnerable to intercept from England. For example Bismarck went to raid but was obviously spotted and hounded by attacks thereafter and had to steer well wide of the UK. This is the big reason the Germans went to U-boats, so they could slip by the English patrols.
Lol the Germans didn't have enough fuel to keep their ground base Luftwaffe flying or their tanks moving. On what planet do you think they could have outfit carriers and planes. Especially when they couldn't get to sea without the Brits harassing them, had no Atlantic service ports that could handle their ships, and would have had to deal with the USN and RN attacking them. Also their hilarious ignorance of radar would have furthered screwed them
>some Germans still cope about WW2
>I'm on the winning side
All or nothing armor.
Bigger guns or more guns and/or thicker armor to take advantage of the significant weight saving from the all or nothing layout.
Better AA. More more more and better better AA.
But in the end that would still stick them with a battleship, in an era where aircraft had rendered them far less important than the days of the High Seas Fleet. More more more submarines, to strengthen the blockade of the island dwellers and cut off lend lease to the subhumans.
Battleship bros, what's a good book about the Bismarck sinking, from either German or ~~*allied)) perspective?
>Bismarck sinking
There are no good books, as Bismarck was scuttled, not sunk.
>Bismarck was scuttled
this is pure ancient copium, Bismark was dead in the water and razed to the waterline when she was "scuttled"
If you just want the facts, the 3 related wiki pages have all the data you need.
If you want some fancy animation, BazBattles does a good video
If you want a fictionalised account, CS Forester's Sink The Bismarck is a dramatic read.
coolest thing about WWII naval battles is the use of smokescreens and fog/mist generators to obscure capital ships but no one ever seems to mention it and wikipedia is full of trash sources
Devote all of their submarines into picketing for the kind of break out it attempted, make it a Jutland at least.
No, because they fight as systems of systems and numbers matter. The stupid idea surface ships don't need aircraft carriers died the death it deserved.
The Kriegsmarine could only have defeated Britain with sufficient submarines. It failed to build them unlike the US which thoroughly fricked the Japs.
Germany built hundreds of submarines. The difference is they built them against an island nation with strong seafaring allies and experience in anti-submarine warfare (Britain) instead of an island nation with useless allies and no anti-submarine capability at all (Japan). If American torpedoes had worked from day 1, the war in the Pacific might have been markedly shorter.