AHC: German Navy Carrier Fleet 1941

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sharlin

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The Graf Zepplin was an atrocious design, she was a poor seaboat and had stability issues, she carried a modest airgroup for her size too. Yes she was built but to suddenly pull a full on carrier group out of their asses is verging on ASB.
 

amphibulous

Banned
Germany could not build four carriers, but having two is plausible by the start of the war. If the Germans used them intelligently it would cause some real problems for the British. Imagine the Bismark sailing with a carrier.....................

Yes, this would be an entirely logical and sufficient argument if Alien Space Bats came along and gave the Germans the carrier and specialized aircraft and weapons for free. As opposed to reality, where the Germans would have to develop the carrier, aircraft (the Me109 was barely capable of landing on land successfully..) at the cost of other weapons.

Oh - and the ASBs should make sure that the carrier is nuclear and that the aircraft use electric engines and gauss bottles, so the carrier doesn't drain critical supplies of fuel. And provide robot crew.

Otherwise, however, you have to consider these things...
 
Plus, to get to sea they'd have to make it past both the Royal Navy - so they'd a need a huge escort fleet to survive night engagements with hundreds of destroyers - and the RAF.
Indeed. There is no way the Kriegsmarine can cross the Channel...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cerberus

Oh - and they need a new set of aircraft, including carrier based interceptors capable of taking on Spitfires.
Only if they intend to use them to sortie their fighters into the British Islands. In open seas, they need interceptors capable of taking on Fulmars. And that interceptor would be the Me-109. Which was short ranged and had a narrow landing gear... like the Spitfire!

A carrier force is more likely to take resources from battleships not being built instead of tanks. After all, both battleships and carrier are made at shipyards. Still, more submarines would be a better bet for Germany.
 

amphibulous

Banned
Indeed. There is no way the Kriegsmarine can cross the Channel...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cerberus

Only if they intend to use them to sortie their fighters into the British Islands. In open seas, they need interceptors capable of taking on Fulmars.

I was thinking about how they'd get PAST the UK. Even if they burn huge quantities of fuel (very problematic for destroyer escorts) to avoid Spitfire range, the British still access to Mustangs. And they have Mosquitoes, which don't need fighter support and throw huge dive bombs with demonic accuracy.

And that interceptor would be the Me-109. Which was short ranged and had a narrow landing gear... like the Spitfire!
The Me109 made the Spitfire's landing characteristics look good. It had an appalling loss rate on landing.

A carrier force is more likely to take resources from battleships not being built instead of tanks. After all, both battleships and carrier are made at shipyards. Still, more submarines would be a better bet for Germany.
I was assuming a semi-rational expanded German surface naval strategy, rather than a completely insane one. Fast big gun raiders are more use to them than carriers, so if you're going to build the carriers you still have the gun fighters.

The puzzle is why you have the carriers at all - its certainly not worth having a carrier to make the Bismark harder to sink. The British will sink it anyway, just at increased cost. and the carrier will cost you vastly than the ship its protecting - you have the development cost for the carrier (and the carrier fan boys have no idea how incredibly high that is - they should read "Broken Sword" about the IJN and its carrier design mistakes) and the aircraft.

And German aircraft design and manufacturing are already at critical - new models cost a fortune in lost production of old ones, so they never effectively deploy an aircraft as important as their potentially excellent WW2 A10 equivalent. (Edited to correct laziness: the Hs129 - a big inspiration to Pierre Sprey the systems analyst who masterminded the A10 program.)
 
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Yes, this would be an entirely logical and sufficient argument if Alien Space Bats came along and gave the Germans the carrier and specialized aircraft and weapons for free. As opposed to reality, where the Germans would have to develop the carrier, aircraft (the Me109 was barely capable of landing on land successfully..) at the cost of other weapons.

Oh - and the ASBs should make sure that the carrier is nuclear and that the aircraft use electric engines and gauss bottles, so the carrier doesn't drain critical supplies of fuel. And provide robot crew.

Otherwise, however, you have to consider these things...

A POD early enough, say in the early 20s would give time for research and development to progress and time to work out all of the bugs. They could also seek assistance from other nations and work on carrier development as a joint project. The motivation could simply be a way to get around the restrictions of the Treaty of Versailles. Assuming that Hitler and his gang does not screw up the project, two good fleet carriers along with reliable carrier aircraft are possible by 1941.
 
I was thinking about how they'd get PAST the UK. Even if they burn huge quantities of fuel (very problematic for destroyer escorts) to avoid Spitfire range, the British still access to Mustangs. And they have Mosquitoes, which don't need fighter support and throw huge dive bombs with demonic accuracy.
A Carrier group based on Bourdeaux is already sailing beyond Spitfire range. Sooner or later, of course, the carriers will be sunk, as American, Japanese and British carriers were sunk. The capacity to reinforce and replace looses is what matters. And, since Germany will be involved in a massive land war with the USSR at some point, once the German carriers go to the bottom of the Atlantic, they are unlikely to be replaced.
The Me109 made the Spitfire's landing characteristics look good. It had an appalling loss rate on landing.
My point is that an ideal fighter is not required to operate carriers. Neither the Fulmar nor the Seafire were ideal - far from it - but that didn't stop the RN from using carriers in battle.

I mean, there is no way Germany is building a perfect carrier force which will see service until the end of the war. But the same applies to all branches of all countries. Every country used badly designed equipment, had inadequate doctrines, etc. Perfection is not something to be aimed nor expected in war, much less in WWII.

The puzzle is why you have the carriers at all
That I agree. Finding a way to cheat on the Versailles Treaty is a reason to have them though.
 

amphibulous

Banned
A POD early enough, say in the early 20s would give time for research and development to progress and time to work out all of the bugs. They could also seek assistance from other nations and work on carrier development as a joint project. The motivation could simply be a way to get around the restrictions of the Treaty of Versailles. Assuming that Hitler and his gang does not screw up the project, two good fleet carriers along with reliable carrier aircraft are possible by 1941.

It doesn't get around Versailles. Versaille bans German warplanes. Saying "The planes don't count because they're on a carrier" is like saying "The planes don't count because they're painted blue and flown by dwarfs!" There just isn't a polite way of explaining how.. lacking.. in sanity and intelligence this argument is. It's like telling a judge that you killed his wife on a Wednesday, and the law against murder doesn't explicitly specify Wednesdays, so he has to let you go free - and btw, you'll bludgeon him next week.

Even more ridiculously, there are adequate sane and effective ways around Versaille. You call a fighter prototype a racer, a bomber an airliner, you develop in Holland, you test in Russia.

They could also seek assistance from other nations and work on carrier development as a joint project. The motivation could simply be a way to get around the restrictions of the Treaty of Versailles. Assuming that Hitler and his gang does not screw up the project, two good fleet carriers along with reliable carrier aircraft are possible by 1941.

So your hypothesis is that they try to get around Versailles in the stupidest way possible, it works because the Allies have the mental age of pre-school children, and the sausage eaters build a carrier group they don't need, can't afford, and which won't survive, to celebrate.

I think I preferred the Space Bats.
 
Sorry, ny computer's running slow today and all I was seeing was slow loading image files of the Graf Zeppelin. However the point stills applies, it's up to people responding to the challenge to provide Germany with a reason to build carriers, not come up with all the reasons it was a bad idea in OTL.

The Germany plan was to have the navy ready to fight with carrier and battle ship by 1946.
They were hoping defect Russia by then and did not see any conflict with the royal navy before 1946.

I just cannot see any way the Germans could devote the resource to build a fleet like that without causing massive problems with vital weapons programmes.

if they could have kept the british and american out of the war and won the war in Russia in the first year or 2.
Then they could have built the resources for a fleet like that by the late 1940s.
I cannot see how they could do it before that.

Construction of the Graf Zeppelin was started in 1936 with an unnamed sister ship started two years later in 1938, but neither ship was completed.

The only way I could see the Germany getting 4 carrier by that date ould be to pay the Japanese to biuilt them for them and use Japanese designed aircraft to fly from them.

They would have to be based the west coast of France.

I assume they would be used to stop the convoy resupplying Britain and force the British to withdraw from the war.
 
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CalBear

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Close to impossible. The German navy would have to allowed a LOT of tonnage beyond that in the Treaty of Versailles. Even if they used the cruiser tonnage, a 6,000 ton carrier isn't going to cut it, especially in the North Atlantic (the Casablanca class CVE were 7,800 tons, the Langley was 19,000 tons, HMS Eagle was 22,000 tons, even the Hosho was 7,800 tons). All you would learn from a 6,000 ton hull is that you can't operate a 6,000 ton carrier.

The IJN, RN, & USN were all able to see the utility of the carrier right from the start.

You would need to somehow find a way to stop aircraft development cold, or manage to get the London Treaty to ban carriers altogether. The former is very hard to see, the latter would require some true visionaries, way beyond any reasonable chance. The London Treaty was aimed to cut off the building race, nothing else, and since there really wasn't a carrier construction race it wouldn't need to put on the brakes.
 
This really started rather semi-seriously but has no one noticed that the OP says the POD can occur anytime after the 11th of November 1918 and that the Nazis or World War 2 aren't mentioned?
 

mowque

Banned
This really started rather semi-seriously but has no one noticed that the OP says the POD can occur anytime after the 11th of November 1918 and that the Nazis or World War 2 aren't mentioned?

I still think captured ones is the best way to go if you want small butterflies.
 
I still think captured ones is the best way to go if you want small butterflies.

How does one capture a carrier, prey tell? It is not a tank or an airplane. You cannot just capture it and man it with random Matrosen Hans to operate it. Doesn't work that way.
 
I still think captured ones is the best way to go if you want small butterflies.

I'm not bother about butterflies one way or the other. This thread has nothing to do with the others I've posted recently in case that's what people are thinking. Rather it's a semi-serious response to the Scarpa Flow thread to see if anyone can actually come up with a plausible way for Germany to own aircraft carriers in 1941.
 

mowque

Banned
I'm not bother about butterflies one way or the other. This thread has nothing to do with the others I've posted recently in case that's what people are thinking. Rather it's a semi-serious response to the Scarpa Flow thread to see if anyone can actually come up with a plausible way for Germany to own aircraft carriers in 1941.

Oh! I assumed it dealt with your other threads. I figured there was a massive TL building.
 
Oh! I assumed it dealt with your other threads. I figured there was a massive TL building.

The other are, this one isn't.

I may ask the Mods to lock this one. I was thinking about it before as it's getting a lot more replies than stuff I need answers for, and if people are trying to tie this in with them....
 

CalBear

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This really started rather semi-seriously but has no one noticed that the OP says the POD can occur anytime after the 11th of November 1918 and that the Nazis or World War 2 aren't mentioned?

I did. I just can't see any way to get around the various treaties, regardless of if it is Weimar Republic, Nazis, Communists or Social Democrats in charge.

The U.S. will have at least a half dozen decks, they are just too damned handy as scouts if nothing else, for a major ocean power, same for the British and Japanese. Of all the major, even 2nd rate powers, the only one that has less need for a carrier force than Germany is Russia/USSR. The POD means Germany lost the war as IOTL, so the colonies are history so you really have no need for a serious ocean going force, all that is really needed is a coastal defense force (although they screwed up the application, the German "Panzer Ship" concept was a good one for the country's actual needs). 1920-1930 Argentinia, Belgium, Brazil, Chile, Holland, Peru had WAY more need for a carrier force than Germany.

Carriers are actually pretty unnecessary if you have no real interests out past the Baltic (even the EEZ in the modern sense is all within easy range of land based air, which until around late 1942 was more than a match for any carrier based aircraft in terms of performance). Truth be told, Germany never needed any warship over about 8,000 tons (maybe 16,000 if they had retained the Pacific colonies).
 
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