Mess Deck: General Section > Full Scale Ships

German Naval Vessels of WW2

(1/4) > >>

Colin Bishop:
 Nick’s unfortunate encounter on Facebook got me thinking about some of the things that some people unquestioningly believe such as Bismarck was a ‘supership’ and other German naval vessels were bigger and better than their counterparts abroad.
During WW1 German capital ships were certainly tough and absorbed a huge amount of punishment often thanks to their extensive compartmentation which was at the expense of liveability with the crews often in barracks when the ships were in port. The destroyers, many of them not more than torpedo boats were generally not very successful designs.
After the war however the Germans seemed to fall short with their designs, probably as a result of the armed forces being run down, and many of their vessels had quite serious faults. For example, off the top of my head:
The larger vessels had a propensity for the sterns to fall off as they were constructed with hull discontinuities where the ends of the armour belt were closed off by an athwartships bulkhead beyond which the stern was ‘tacked on. So damage in this area could result in the loss of the stern. Bismarck’s stern came away as she sank. Other ships also lost their sterns when torpedoed.
The high pressure steam plant in many ships gave constant problems, I think all the capital ships suffered to some extent as did the Hipper class cruisers and the big destroyers were notoriously unreliable
There were often serious seakeeping issues, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau had to have their bows rebuilt to give additional freeboard (the ‘Atlantic bow’). The big destroyers were top heavy and suffered from having the weight of a 5.9 inch twin turret well forward. The RN and USA had long realised that a 6 inch gun was pretty useless on a lively destroyer and unlikely to hit anything.
The ‘Pocket Battleships’ were an ingenious concept as being able to beat anything they couldn’t run away from but were of course vulnerable if confronted by a group of cruisers as at the River Plate. The Germans were quite alarmed that Exeter’s 8 inch shells were able to penetrate the Graf Spee’s armour. More importantly the PB’s diesels, intended to give a long cruising range were very unreliable as with the high pressure steam plants in other ships. They were also very large vessels for simply commerce raiding and converted merchant ships were far cheaper and more effective.
Bismarck was a beautiful looking ship but her great size masked a lot of fundamental faults apart from the weak stern. At a time when other navies were saving weight by using dual purpose secondary armaments she had a tertiary AA outfit which absorbed a lot of space and weight. She suffered from the same faults as the WW1 ships in that her cabling and communications were routed above the armoured deck and thus vulnerable to shellfire. Her armour belt was in fact thinner than British battleships although it seems to have stood up well in her final battle.In many respects she was indeed a ‘jumped up’ Baden which the RN had considered inferior to contemporary British ships when examined post WW1.
Submarines of course were another matter, maybe because the Germans had continued to develop deigns secretly after WW1.
Of course all the above can be discussed at great length which is rather more interesting than the dogmatic responses Nick got as to what constitutes a Dreadnought.
Colin
 

raflaunches:
Hi Colin


It's certainly an interesting read and mis-conceptions about the WW2 German ships are very true. I think people think that because the ships were newer compared to many of the allied ships they were up against so automatically think that they must be better. The German resourcefulness used to make them however was phenomenal using techniques that were brand new which we still use today.
I think (other than U-Boats) the vessels that they certainly had a massive superiority over anything we had were the S-Boats or E-Boats as we called them. They were fast, powerful and could carry some serious firepower compared to the MTBs we operated. We didn't really match their standards of fast motor boats until 1943/4, and even then, they weren't as fast. The U-Boats were excellent vessels especially the later variants but I do think the earlier versions were no better than our P, S or T subs, just more fortunate with more targets available compared to what the allied submarines had to sink.

Colin Bishop:
If you want to get into the subject of Bismarck in REAL depth.....  :o

http://www.combinedfleet.com/okun_biz.htm

Colin

ballastanksian:

Then there is the issue of who were ships designed to fight?

tassie48:
Colin the German S38 and the S100 class of Schnellboot were first class fighting machines 2 to 4 Torpedos up to 7 X 2cm guns some had the 3.7 cm gun aft or a Bofors 40mm Mine is fitted with the Flakvierling 4 Barrel 2cm gun they were quick handled well and after the war they were inspected by both the RN and the USN whom did like their performance and ride handling some MTB captains commented that they could have done with them in some firefights that took they toll .to each their own I like them tassie48

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page