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