BlondieBC
Banned
there possibly is something between Dithmarschen and aircraft carrier and seaplane tender that would have been effective?
The real problem the Germans had is the lack of fortified ports outside of easy RAF range that have direct access to the major shipping lanes. It is really the major German failure in both naval wars, and reflects the UK spending centuries acquiring a great string of naval bases.
The problem with all these carriers and a lot of ideas are not that they can't work, it is that these ideas tend to be the last thing one builds in the fleet design. There is a natural way to build up your fleet that comes about due to budget limits, training lead time and the like. It also happens to trigger reactions from competitors in a much slower way. If you don't follow this way, you end up spamming out U-boats and hoping they can do the job alone.
One starts with thinking in terms of coastal defense. i.e. Keeping the enemy fleet at least several hundred miles off your shores. It involves the boring, cheap and effective stuff line mines, small surface craft, radar lines, naval aviation, and of course, my love, submarines. After one can deny enemy access to your shores, there are two other objectives that are useful. Control the surface near you shores is desirable. i.e. ability to move merchant traffic with minimum disruption. And then the more distant denial of sea operations to enemies. The final stage is the ability to operate near your enemy shores. This requires decades of spending and only a few nations such as the UK and the USA have achieved this very expense feat.
So how does one go from the theory to practice without blowing up German UK relationships. First one works with the ToV. Whether a line of light houses manned with naval personnel with radio to radar network, you do what the ToV and your budget allows. On training you crews, you have ships near shore reporting to your navy. Be it small torpedo boats or fishing boats with log books that the navy compiles. You stockpile mines. Coastal navy artillery is cheap and can use older guns.
When you start rebuilding the air force, you build some land based naval aviation. Scout planes are first, then fighters, then attack planes. None of this will greatly upset anyone. And most of this can be one with existing air frames or lightly modified airplanes. A lot of the difference between a good naval dive bomber and a Stuka is training. Among other things, naval navigation is quite hard for pilots used to operating over land. And only after a decade or so of these operations will you have the skill to man a carrier air wing. It is quite frankly unwise for German to build a carrier faster than OTL plans.
When you build up surface ships, you build up small to large. Make your mistakes with the cheaper ships, don't do it with capital ship design. And finally, in the process of building a professional navy, you have trained up good staff officers. And these officers will have plans for an 'unexpected major naval' war and the buildup. So you will have thought through things like how to expand U-boat production, how to triple the number of naval aviation squadrons, and AMC conversions.
If you follow this type of progression, you have this cheaper option of much longer range planes that can operate from France that will do much of what is needed. And maybe you can build a few converted 'baby carriers' or 'baby seaplane carriers' that will be quite effective. If one skips this process, then spamming out the type of ships you talk about is a massive resource wasted. OTL Germans learned reasonably well from WW1 lessons, and without building a better navy, the best option is to convert more AMC combined with better communication procedures. A less chatting and more secure coded German Navy does much, much better than OTL.
They type of ideas that you are talking about, the Japanese could not get to work well. And Japan had a great navy with great admirals and highly trained crews with doctrine built up over decades.