Could the Kriegsmarine have assembled a battlefleet for the Atlantic ?

[Crowbar Six]

The entire Royal Navy fall on them like a ton of bricks, sink every single one of them (at the cost of a non-negligeable, but manageable, number of RN ships), and remove all threat from surface units in the Atlantic once for all.

Then the RN divide its forces in 2 :

- ASW Escort units in the Atlantic against U-boots

- everything else in the Pacific.

The problem caused by the German heavy surface units was the threat of a sortie, that forced the RN to keep a lot of heavies nearby to counter the threat.

If there is no Kriegsmarine heavy surface threat, all heavy surface units of the RN can go to the Pacific in a single fleet.

At the same times, all heavy USN surface units can also go to the Pacific (as they are not needed in the Atlantic), and as a result, the Imperial Japanese Navy would find itself facing the entirety of the USN and the entirety of the RN at the same time.

Well Pacific and Med. They would need to eliminate the remaining Italian heavies, once that was done they could leave a couple of battleships in the Med and a stack of cruisers and destroyers then push onto the Pacific.

 

[Korlan]

The RN can take care of the Regia Marina en route for the Pacific, just a short stop on the way to the Suez canal.

 

[Zheng He]

Operation Cerebrus gets brought up quite a bit. Keep in mind that while it was a PR disaster for the RN it was a strategic victory (something the Germans knew at the time). The Twins were both damaged during the operation with S out for several months while G was further damaged in an air attack and never put to sea again and shortly afterwards PE was damaged by a submarine and spent the rest of the war in the Baltic.

Point being none of the those ships did anything substantive after that operation and the one time S tried, it was December 1943 and we all know what happened then.

 

[McPherson]

WOW! A lot to unpack.

Let us apply Mahan, not Julian Corbett.

See Map (^^^) (Sources: McPherson's work; USNI, RN, HYPERWAR with a dose of Mahan and Togo, Heideiki to salt it.)

With a POD between 1933 and 1935 it's difficult, but not ASB.

Bismarck, Tirpitz, Hipper, Blücher and Prinz Eugen were completed about a year late according to the schedule drawn up in 1935. Seydlitz was due to be completed in December 1939 and the heavy cruiser Lützow was due in July 1940.

The AGNA allowed Germany to have three 35,000 ton capital ships. In October 1935 Battleship "H" was to be laid down in December 1937 and completed in February 1941.
Battleship "J" was added after the British announced the ships that would become Duke of York, Anson and Howe. She was to be laid down in May 1938 for completion in November 1941. However, a shortage of suitable slipways together with an excessively long design process meant that they weren't laid down until the summer of 1939.

The programme was behind schedule because the number of ships being built overloaded the the shipbuilding industry. So reduce the number of ships being built. My candidates are Graff Zeppelin, Aircraft Carrier "B", the first 21 T-boats and the 10 F-boats. The resources released would be concentrated on completing Bismarck and Tirpitz on time.

Bismarck will still be working up in April 1940 and won't take part in the Invasion of Norway, but she will be ready in time to take part in Operation Juno. The destroyer Acasta will be sunk before she can torpedo Scharnhorst and that will butterfly away the torpedoing of Gneisenau by the submarine Clyde.

That makes a sortie by Bismarck, Tirpitz, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau in the autumn of 1940 feasible.

And before anyone says the British will speed up construction of the King George V class. No they won't. It can't be done because of the London Treaties and late delivery of the turrets. KGV and PoW should have been completed in July 1940 and the other 3 were scheduled for completion between November 1940 and January 1941. They can't be laid down any earlier because of the London Treaties. They can't do anything to speed up the delivery of the turrets. That's not true. I think they would have been completed on time if the Admiralty had stuck to nine 15" in triple turrets, but I doubt that they would because they were expecting the Germans to complete three 35,000 ton capital ships 1939-41 at the time the decision to give the KGV class 14" guns was made.

View attachment 565096​

Some observations about the shipbuilding schedules RTL.

British KGV program:
a. The delay (1938 problem) of armor plate ordered from Czechoslovakia held up the KGV schedule as much as the turret work. 20,000 tonnes shortfall was a bottleneck. The UK had to make this plate and delay or order it from the US. They did not like MIDVALE, so they rolled (literally) their own.
b. The British had filled in 9 of their 18 WWI barbette assembly and weapon proof pits, so that was a bottleneck.
c. Based on a. and b. it would not have mattered if the choice of 35.5cm bore or 15cm gun turrets had been made. The critical bottlenecks were the weapon proofs and the armor plate shortage. It was a miracle the delay was only a year. I am almost convinced that the delay was exclusive to the weapon assembly and test pits. A shortcut to "Vanguard" some of the KGVs would not have mattered either, because there still would be need to weapon proof the barbettes on land before battleship installations. The 9 pits available was not enough for battleships.

You points are correct, but the problem is the Germans have no way to carry out such a plan after 1941. The German Fleet has no safe base on the Atlantic. Once the Germans attacked Russia they couldn't provide aircover for their French Bases. That's why they sent the Scharnhorst, and Gneisenau back to Germany, because the RAF kept bombing. them. The Germans just can't keep a fleet 150 miles from RAF home bases.

See map. You have to understand the capabilities and technology of 1940. One thing the Germans did not understand was weather effects and naval geography. It is quite apparent if you are USN or RN that weather limits air operations to the temperate zones in the North Atlantic and you do not have the aircraft to cover the ocean area and never will unless by some lunacy some idiot navy builds 100 flattops. (Cough USN cough). The corollary is that naval aircraft operations near the arctic circle and inside land based enemy air power circles will be "difficult".

Naval and aerial geography 1940 style (see boxes on Map.) kind of dictate where Axis fleets in being can be concentrated to operate as SAGs and fleets in being. The stuff is there. So it has to be used effectively. It is no stretch to say, that the KM surface fleet in northern Norway is a LOT more dangerous than anywhere else in German controlled territory. The RN is at the limit of its air protection, the RAF cannot RIKKO in that area, and it breaks the UK to CCCP convoy route. It positions the KM best to try to run the GIUK gap with raiders and worst of all as operations against Tirpitz revealed, it is the most difficult geographic position to get at the KM, before Tallboys and Lancasters solved the Tirpitz problem.

I threw the Italians in for grins and giggles to show what a COMPETENT Axis navy did do. They did try to RIKKO, which hurt the RN a lot, and they certainly maintained SLOCs at a great cost to their North African forces right up until Montgomery put them out of business on land in Tunis.

I think the problem with this is it's very much a retroactive POD driven only by the end goal proposed in this thread, I.e. it's based around changing the whole German's marine production and naval warfare plan with the specific intention of getting those four ships together in one place in 1940 by sacrificing a bunch of other ships. This presupposes a couple of big things:

1). the Germans like the idea of a just sending off 4 battleships as a fleet by themselves (and I don't think they will and even if they did they'll what one of those aircraft carriers), I'm still not sure what the benefit of doing this is and I think the KM will also wonder?

2). in the mid 30's the Germans think they're going to be doing this in 1940. which would be ahead of their long term naval plans and production schedule.

Also while OK even if we accept that the KGV's can't be ready sooner, there will be some ripples of this POD outside of German naval yards.

Plus on top of that it's not just floating and finishing the ship, but manning them, sea trialing them training on board them etc, etc (and your going to be doing the last three at the same time as opposed to OTL).

Plus there's the point that operational POD's needed to get all four ships unscathed to where you want hem to be don't automatically only favour the German ships. For instance yes OK maybe the Acasta is sunk prior to torpedoing Schanhorst during Juno, but you know what maybe Renown's 15 inch shell doesn't pass through Gneisenau without exploding during Wesereubung, maybe the Renown has some destroyer escorts or decides to pursue anyway, etc, etc i.e POD's can go in both directions here they don't just immunise German ships.

(sorry just in the last I'm not saying it's impossible for Schanhorst and Gneisenau to escape their OTL damage, just that all the POD luck only gong in one direction is unlikely)

All good points, that argues against too much 2020 and handwavium. I tend to favor that line of reason when it comes to PoD. The only reasonable supposition I see is that the German admirals look at a map and say to themselves: "Wo können wir unsere jetzt nutzlosen Schiffe plonken, *(Dank des zweitgrößten militärischen Genies der Welt, denn wir alle wissen, dass Stalin an erster Stelle steht.) Wo sie die gefährlichsten sein werden? ("Where can we plonk our now useless ships, *(Thanks to the World's second greatest military genius, for we all know Stalin is first.) where they will be the most dangerous?")

They sent Scharnhorst and Gneisenau out on their own in January 1941. They sent Bismarck with only Prinz Eugen to support it in May 1941.

Therefore, of course they would send all 4 battleships as a fleet in the second half of 1940 if they had the opportunity!

It will give Raeder, Lutjens and even Donitz multiple orgasms! It's their wildest wet dream! It's exactly what they wanted to do!

The benefit of this is that they can annihilate a convoy even if it is escorted by a slow battleship. Bismarck and Tirpitz divert the escort while Scharnhorst and Gneisenau sink the convoy.

One group of bat blind ships limited to their float planes, and ship mounted radars, trying to search a whole lot of ocean for a convoy. How good were the German LRMPs?
I can see a lot of problems there.
a. RDF section of the RN signals service listens to Lutjens or some other dumb cluck as he yaks on the radio to base.
b. RWRs? How hard is it to make and install radar warning receivers on convoy escorts?
c. Flyguys out of Iceland. Bismarck and Prinz Eugen were PBYed. Way to go USN! (I know these guys were instructors in LL supplied BRITISH aircraft, but they flew the recon.)

My personal opinion is that the Kriegsmarine suffered more from being deployed in penny packets and also suffered from being a Baltic Navy with some ability to go into the North Sea. Now my reason for saying this is the range of the escorts is woeful. The longest range escort had a range of 2600nm at 19 knots. This is enough for the North Sea but not enough for a meaningful Atlantic foray. The British had as an average amongst the different classes 5500nm with one class of war emergency destroyer having a range of 3800nm. This means the Kriegsmarine could potentially be stripped of it's escorts simply by forcing high speed travel. Heck a Carrier would only need to make feints for several days without losing aircraft to make the escorts forced to low speed and or out of fuel. It is worth noting that all of the major units had great range and if provided with decent escorts could have held off significant portions of the British Fleet for an extended time.

In reality the Germans would have been better off building 3 15 inch Scharnhorst designs instead of the 2 Bismarck class ships. And putting the extra resources into finishing the Graf Zeppelin class carriers and embarking ME 109 and Ju-87 for an Atlantic Cruise. This would force even more British Units kept in Home waters and allow a fighting chance in a fleet battle. The presence of ME-109 fighters would of course increase the speed at which the RN adopts decent fighters.

If the British do not have enough armor plate and gun pits, how were the Germans doing? NTG. They have maybe a pair of working pits in the BB class range and shortfalls of armor plate of their own. I do not see them having finished drafts on their own 38 cm bore sized twin mounts either before 1937. How do they install 38 cm bore twin mounts into Scharnhorst and the other RN practice target before 1940 with a Bismarck on the slips? They had to MAKE the pits for the Bismarcks. Think about why the 28 cm bottleneck existed in the first place. The Germans had the Panzerschiffe barbette test pits (4 as of 1937) in existence when the twins were built.

Those operations were commercial shipping raids, that was their whole plan. Small forces allowing them to spread that force as much as possible in oceans populated by much larger enemy navies and avoiding those navies as mush as possible.

Why scatter vs. concentration?

why? It's against their overall surface fleet strategy as above but seriously why what is the benefit to doing this? Yes 4 battle ships sink pretty much any convoy but so can the one or two ship shipping raids as well. Plus if you got your four battle ships in one place then their not anywhere else causing problems or tying up RN assets as a threat.

Well... a single battleship scatters a convoy. One surface ship can only chase one surface ship. The convoy killer is actually the U-boat wolf pack that shoals to the fleeing allied freighters as they scatter and the U-boats shark feed one sub chasing each freighter in a general chase. This was what made the surface raider battleship dangerous. I* would argue, that the escort stands and Alamos and the convoy sticks together as it runs and trusts the A^2/vsA^3 mathematics of convoy defense, which states a sub has as much % chance of finding a single ship as it does a whole flock of them fleeing together. Also that sub only gets 1 shot at one ship.

Anybody think about that one? USN tactics?

I think it will given then nightmares because it puts all their heavy eggs in one basket, and puts that basket in the middle of the N.Atlantic outside of air cover. and frankly once those four are gone then they're gone. Their wet dream is a large multi faceted navy, 4 battleships in one place at one time is not that.

See previous remark. If you want to kill convoys with naval combined arms, it is subs and aircraft in combination. The surface warship raider as the Battle of the River Plate demonstrated, was not cost effective. But that is a 1940 lesson learned. Prior to that event, nobody has really thought it through except Mahan, who described how frigate warfare worked in the age of sail and noted that in the age of steam, it would be impossible to guerre de course unless someone magically invented a way to solve the naval fuel and MAINTENANCE logistics problem without friendly ports nearby.

OK so we're re fighting HX106 that's cool, so you destroy one well protected convey and a WW1 era battleship, so what? Not every convoy has a Ramillies attached to it, so it's massive overkill for many convoys and you still have all the issues stated above. Also what are they going to do just hang out in the N.Atlanic picking of convoys with impunity? The RN is going to to do something about that.

See previous remarks about convoy defense tactics. Play the numbers cubed versus squared game surface search and the chase to kill probabilities. The defender always wins except when the attacker has air superiority.

For a navy 4 battleships are the core of o fleet that's trying to achieve some big military goal (take the various actions in the pacific of fleets with that many capital ships) not a suped up commerce raid

Battle of the Bismarck Sea.

That is not the specific intention. The goal is to complete Bismarck, Tirpitz and the Hipper class heavy cruisers on schedule by sacrificing a group of useless ships. Getting them together in one place in 1940 is the unexpected result.

The Graff Zeppelin class would have been very bad ships so they wouldn't have been of much use had they been completed in 1939, which was the plan in 1935. As Hitler told his admirals to plan for a war in 1945 the correct course of action would have been a quick conversion of suitable merchant ship into a prototype aircraft carrier as soon as possible after the AGNA was signed and then build proper aircraft carriers in the first half of the 1940s which would have had the benefit of the lessons learned from the prototype. I wanted the prototype to be the Hannover but she wasn't launched until 1939.

The resources released should have been put into building a third Bismarck instead of Graff Zeppelin or used to avoid the late completion of Bismarck and Tirpitz.

T-1 to T-21 and the 10 F-boats were a waste or resources. My preferred solution is to build more Type 26 torpedo boats. That is they should have stuck to proven designs while new technology like high pressure machinery was perfected. However, not building any ships at all would have released steel and shipyard workers that could have been put into the battleships and heavy cruisers.

The torpedoing of the Liepzig and Nurenburg in 1939, followed by sinking of the Karlsure and torpedoing of the panzerschiffe Lutzow in April 1940 and possibly the torpedoing of Gneisenau were all for want of adequate destroyer screens. If more small destroyers of the Type 1926 had been built instead of the first 21 T-boats and 10 F-boats some of that would have been prevented.

Take these in order.
a. Useless ships are those that do not contribute to the overall naval effort. That sort of means Plan Zed from Outer Space in its totality. If it is not an LRMP plane and a U-boat or an ocean going torpedo/minlayer/subchaser boat fit for Baltic and North Sea and ARCTIC weather, it is about as useful to the KM as milk glands on a male goat.
b. The Graf Zeppelin was a waste of 2 panzer divisions and an air wing.
c. Ocean going torpedo boats of the M1936 or M1936C class? That would have to be a Problem. The design is 1938 available in the M1936 and were bomb bait. The German torpedoes available were also crap fish.

There's less chance of a mission kill because they're attacking in greater numbers.

Bismarck and Tirpitz can draw off the escort while Scharnhorst and Gneisenau sink the convoy. Attacking in greater numbers mean fewer ships escape.

It's a six and two threes whether one group of four is a better tactic than two groups of two. Two groups of two can cover a greater area, but there will be some targets that only a group of four can attack with an acceptable risk. There's a greater risk that one of the two groups of two being intercepted and a group of four can defend itself better than a group of two.

I'd also argue that a squadron of four German battleships at large in the North Atlantic is more than enough of threat for a Royal Navy that had 15 capital ships and is also fighting the Regia Marina in the Mediterranean.

Plus the Admiralty hasn't forgotten that the Germans also have two panzerschiffen and 2 heavy cruisers even if you appear to have. Scheer will still be making it's October 1940 to April 1941 sortie. Hipper will still be making her September 1940 attempt to break into the Atlantic and if that still fails her second attempt in November which IOTL was a success.

Raeder wanted Scharnhorst and Gneisenau to come out and support Bismarck and Tirpitz in May 1941 but they couldn't be made ready in time. It would be interesting to know if he wanted them to rendezvous and act as a single squadron or operate independently.

AIUI Lutjens wanted to postpone the sortie until Scharnhorst, Gneisenau and Tirptiz were ready, but he was overruled by Raeder. Furthermore, the captain of the Tirpitz wanted to take part in the May 1941 sortie, but that may have been hubris and Raeder was probably right to think that sending out a ship that wasn't fully worked up was too great a risk.

See my previous remarks about mathematics and ship-chases. Gunnery at sea takes time, stern chases are long and Mister RIKKO shows no mercy.

Rubbish! It was going out with one battleship and one heavy cruiser that gave Lutjens nightmares IOTL. AIUI he didn't expect to survive and was right.

The facts contradict your statement. I've already written that the plan was for Scharnhorst and Gneisenau to sortie from Brest to support Bismarck and Tirpitz. Lutjens wanted the sortie delayed until they were ready and AIUI would have preferred to have waited until Tirpitz was ready too. Whether that would have helped is debatable because Prince of Wales would have been fully worked up, Victorious would have had a full strength air group and if they wait too long Duke of York and Indomitable would have been completed. However, it does prove that the senior German commanders would have attacked in greater force had they been able to.

Lutjens did not survive because he was an IDIOT. Yakking on the radio and one lucky Swordfish vectored on him because of it, KILLED him.

There wasn't a lot more air cover in the first half of 1941 than there was in the last quarter of 1940 so its doubtful that it will be a factor in Raeder's calculations ITTL.

Raeder knows that he has a temporary advantage that he must exploit. That is use Bismarck and Tirpitz before the British complete the KGV class.

It's a risk, but this is a war and calculated risks have to be taken. You're calculation is that it isn't worth the risk. However, based on what they did do between September 1940 and May 1941 IOTL and what I know about what they would have liked to have done my assessment is that they would have thought it was an acceptable risk.

AIRPOWER. Recon can vector in surface ships, but once that Swordfish rudder wrecked Bismarck, an RN sub could have put her down. Too much gun club and not enough blub,
blub, blub.

Cool is putting it mildly. It's 30-40 cargoes that aren't delivered. It's 30-40 merchant ships that won't make another voyage. It's a massive blow to the Royal Navy's prestige. It's a massive propaganda victory for Goebels. Finally, British morale receives a hefty kick in the goolies. (Goolies is a British slang word for testicles for those that don't know.)

1 ship =1 chase event. So I do not see it. (^^^)

Winning the Battle of the Atlantic is the Kreigsmarine's reason for being and souped up commerce raids by battleships supporting the U-boats was how they had been planning to do it since at the latest 1935.

Did I mention that the Kriegsmarine admirals were not well versed in how seapower actually works?

To be fair to the un-exploded German 15" Shell that hit below POWs belt - if it was going to explode it would have done so when it hit the water. Just saying.

Duds were an everybody thing in WWII. Just sayin' Luck of the warshot before lessons learned (1942 for the USN.)

What about the shell that went straight through the bridge without exploding? Just saying.

Same again. Shells make holes and improve ventilation. Torpedoes are the way to anti-ship if you want to sink them. Just sayin'.

The Bridge was relatively unarmoured and therefore did not set off the fuse - as I understand it 'as intended' (the entire Super structure was not armoured and was outside of the ships citadel)

And said shell did kill/maim all but 2 members of the Bridge watch as it passed through

But I concede the point

Was it a mission kill, Murphy?

AIUI the 15" shell that failed to explode when it hit the Gneisenau passed straight through the director. How much damage would it have done had it exploded? That is in itself and compared to shell that did explode and knocked down the aft turret?

It was not a mission kill, Floyd.

Well Pacific and Med. They would need to eliminate the remaining Italian heavies, once that was done they could leave a couple of battleships in the Med and a stack of cruisers and destroyers then push onto the Pacific.

And do nothing. NO LOGISTICS.

The RN can take care of the Regia Marina en route for the Pacific, just a short stop on the way to the Suez canal.

See previous remark.

Operation Cerebrus gets brought up quite a bit. Keep in mind that while it was a PR disaster for the RN it was a strategic victory (something the Germans knew at the time). The Twins were both damaged during the operation with S out for several months while G was further damaged in an air attack and never put to sea again and shortly afterwards PE was damaged by a submarine and spent the rest of the war in the Baltic.

Point being none of the those ships did anything substantive after that operation and the one time S tried, it was December 1943 and we all know what happened then.

Lessons learned applicable from Operation Cerberus:
a. RIKKOS, even INCOMPETENT ones, work.
b. By 1940, unless you were under shelter, or out of reach by aircraft, or covered by a robust IADS you were a dead ship in port.
c. Surface action groups make sense as fleets in being, ONLY when they are based where they geographically exert leverage on a sea user, by their mere existence. (See Map for where that is for the Germans.)
d. WEATHER is an offensive defensive weapon of underestimated importance. Examples are that 1940 aircraft carriers do not do well in Arctic weather conditions and sea states. Battleships prosper in those 1940 conditions.
e. Combined arms (aircraft and ships) beats aircraft alone or ships alone.
f;. Stay off the radio!
g. Air farces do not know how to conduct warfare at sea. Need someone NAVAL (Fleet Air Arm) to fly RIKKO missions. Or American or Japanese. (See Operation Berlin and Operation Rhine for that one.)

 

[Zheng He]

You forgot one big lesson from Cerberus - mines and lots of them. Really cheap and brutally effective.

 

[McPherson]

You forgot one big lesson from Cerberus - mines and lots of them. Really cheap and brutally effective.

I did forget that one. Too bad the British did not sow more of them. That would/could be a RIKKO action.

 

[alspug]

What i suggested was not to build a Bismarck class ship at all but to build a further 5 Scharnhorst Class ships with 15 inch guns instead of the 11 inch. The turret diameter was designed to accept the mount and it was supposed to happen to both 2 completed ships. Bismarck and Tirpitz did more for the war effort tied up at a pier then they ever did by sailing out to fight. Bismarck got one golden BB and if it had not gotten it i am sure POW and Hood would have won. In high calibre gun duels a little luck makes a huge difference.

I should also point out that this is a speculative venture and peoples answers to question asked. The Kriegsmarine was the ugly step child that was last to the table in terms of resources. The Designs suffered from being done by people with no current experience and had numerous points of failure.

 

[Zheng He]

RAF RIKKOs occasionally did well. An RAF Beaufort put a torpedo into LÜTZOW, at long range six months before Force Z met it’s fate. Talk about lessons not learned.

 

[Zheng He]

I did forget that one. Too bad the British did not sow more of them. That would/could be a RIKKO action.

Under appreciated success by USAAF B-29s in the Pacific.

 

[McPherson]

What i suggested was not to build a Bismarck class ship at all but to build a further 5 Scharnhorst Class ships with 15 inch guns instead of the 11 inch. The turret diameter was designed to accept the mount and it was supposed to happen to both 2 completed ships. Bismarck and Tirpitz did more for the war effort tied up at a pier then they ever did by sailing out to fight. Bismarck got one golden BB and if it had not gotten it i am sure POW and Hood would have won. In high calibre gun duels a little luck makes a huge difference.

(^^^) You have 4 assembly pits for 28 cm bore 3 gun barbettes as a bottleneck and your Krupp plants (2) can only roll so much thick battleship rated and sized plate. Your program is 2 + 2 +1 or 1943 before it is ready.

I should also point out that this is a speculative venture and peoples answers to question asked. The Kriegsmarine was the ugly step child that was last to the table in terms of resources. The Designs suffered from being done by people with no current experience and had numerous points of failure.

I find that last one kind of a myth since Plan Zed from Outer Space promised to eat up 65% of all German armaments STEELS if pushed through to 1945. War kind of changed that
resource allocation.

 

[RamscoopRaider]

The main issue is that KM can only realistically send such a force a few times a year so RN could just order all convoys home for the few weeks involved and then do anything it wants the rest of the year?

That is true, but they won't know ahead of time when the Germans are sortieing, they may have some warning, they may not depending on factors, so that is not necessarily an option. And even so that is a win if you can shut down convoys for a period without risking any difficult to replace assets

Actually a large fleet like that which is limited by it's slowest/shortest ranged ship is much easier to find and track* and once found since it can be outnumbered and is more likely to be operating out of air cover than the RN/USN is very vulnerable.

Thing is how does concentrating them all in a single vulnerable fleet somewhere in the N/Atlantic (out of range of LW support) get you anything better than OTL?

This whole idea would seem to give you no benefit's and only down sides.

also just because I don't think I've mentioned it yet likely out of Air Support from the LW, that's a massive deal !

*not just by eyeball, radar, intercepted messages etc, etc (remember OTL the British and the US had developed ASW techniques for the N.Atlantic, large surface fleets are somewhat easier to spot than u-boats)

Hence why you don't send anything slower than Bismarck, or shorter ranged, the PB's and small fry can be left home

Of course it's vulnerable, that's why it should be running for home at the slightest sign of danger. The point is to give credibility to the bluff that they are planning on sending surface raiders at Atlantic convoys, not to actually attack the Atlantic convoys

Because you are not actually sending them into the North Atlantic, you are making the British think you are going to when really you are having them steam towards the Atlantic, then sprint back to Norway upon encountering British patrols, possibly fighting a skirmish if the odds and conditions are very favorable, never leaving the Norwegian sea the whole while. The point of doing this is to give credibility to the bluff you are making at the Atlantic convoys, so they take you serious while you are sitting in Norway and have more ships sitting in Scapa rather than doing something useful elsewhere

Hence why my idea is to have them not leave LW air cover for very long if at all. You may be confusing my idea with someone else's

You points are correct, but the problem is the Germans have no way to carry out such a plan after 1941. The German Fleet has no safe base on the Atlantic. Once the Germans attacked Russia they couldn't provide aircover for their French Bases. That's why they sent the Scharnhorst, and Gneisenau back to Germany, because the RAF kept bombing. them. The Germans just can't keep a fleet 150 miles from RAF home bases.

And them serving as a fleet in being does not require them being on the Atlantic. Tirpitz did fine from Norway OTL, this is just doing what she did with 4 Battleships and a few heavy cruisers rather than just one battleship. Again you may be confusing my idea with someone else's

 

[BlackDragon98]

A large chunk of said ships refloated and scrapped between the wars

And the Germans never got the steel.
Had the Germans scuttled the High Seas Fleet off Kiel or some other German port (it happened in my Red Baron TL), then at least they could recover the steel for later use.
I do recall seeing something where the steel recovered from the sunken ships were eventually sold to German and used to build U-boats, but the Germans had to pay for them in this case.

And the Germans could make an excuse for why they did it.
They could say that scuttling the fleet was to prevent another Kiel Mutiny from happening, which could easily have turned into an Aurora or Potemkin type incident.
In my Red Baron TL, that is what happened. The High Seas Fleet was scuttled off Kiel using the "Kiel Mutiny" excuse.
Commies were the most feared thing at the end of WW1, and the Kiel Mutiny provides a perfect excuse.

 

[BlackDragon98]

That is not the specific intention. The goal is to complete Bismarck, Tirpitz and the Hipper class heavy cruisers on schedule by sacrificing a group of useless ships. Getting them together in one place in 1940 is the unexpected result.

The Graff Zeppelin class would have been very bad ships so they wouldn't have been of much use had they been completed in 1939, which was the plan in 1935. As Hitler told his admirals to plan for a war in 1945 the correct course of action would have been a quick conversion of suitable merchant ship into a prototype aircraft carrier as soon as possible after the AGNA was signed and then build proper aircraft carriers in the first half of the 1940s which would have had the benefit of the lessons learned from the prototype. I wanted the prototype to be the Hannover but she wasn't launched until 1939.

The resources released should have been put into building a third Bismarck instead of Graff Zeppelin or used to avoid the late completion of Bismarck and Tirpitz.

T-1 to T-21 and the 10 F-boats were a waste or resources. My preferred solution is to build more Type 26 torpedo boats. That is they should have stuck to proven designs while new technology like high pressure machinery was perfected. However, not building any ships at all would have released steel and shipyard workers that could have been put into the battleships and heavy cruisers.

The torpedoing of the Liepzig and Nurenburg in 1939, followed by sinking of the Karlsure and torpedoing of the panzerschiffe Lutzow in April 1940 and possibly the torpedoing of Gneisenau were all for want of adequate destroyer screens. If more small destroyers of the Type 1926 had been built instead of the first 21 T-boats and 10 F-boats some of that would have been prevented.

It was the shitty high pressure turbines, along with generally poor designing.
AFAIK several German destroyers were rebuilt during WW2 with a new bow for that reason.

The T-1 to T-21 torpedo boats were overloaded with torpedoes at the expense of flak and naval guns.
This made them pretty much useless for anything else.
F for failure. Need I say more?

What the Kriegsmarine should have done was install diesel engines for all ocean going ships (and all the subs of course) while using coal fueled boilers for all their coastal vessels.
The Kriegsmarine did use many coal fueled patrol boats and VP-boats, which proved especially useful when oil ran short later in the war.

The Bismarck and Tirpitz were not worth the money. It would have been much better if Germany built the 3 O-class battlecruisers instead of the Bismarck class.
Faster, had the same firepower and had a longer range.
If I recall, it was a lack of fuel that forced Bismarck to sail to France and it's eventual demise.

 

[BlackDragon98]

Precisely. Not simply by sinking merchant ships but delays to convoy sailings.

Trouble is you need to do this repeatedly, not as a One Off. And each time they venture out, one or more warship is liable to a mission kill hits. Which when you're in the middle of the North Atlantic is not likely to be survivable.

O-class battlecruiser?
Faster, same main guns as the Bismarck class, longer range due to diesel engines.
Only thing I would propose would be a catapult to launch fighter like the CAM ships.

 

[NOMISYRRUC]

If I recall, it was a lack of fuel that forced Bismarck to sail to France and it's eventual demise.

The lack of fuel was due to a leak created by one of the 14" shells fired by Prince of Wales.

 

[NOMISYRRUC]

The Bismarck and Tirpitz were not worth the money. It would have been much better if Germany built the 3 O-class battlecruisers instead of the Bismarck class.
Faster, had the same firepower and had a longer range.

AIUI that couldn't be done because suitable diesels weren't available when the ships were designed.

 

[CalBear]

To do ... what?

Die gloriously would be my guess.

 

[McPherson]

AIUI that couldn't be done because suitable diesels weren't available when the ships were designed.

Postwar for commercial, and even today not WAR-rated.

 

[BlackDragon98]

AIUI that couldn't be done because suitable diesels weren't available when the ships were designed.

The Deutschland class used all diesel engines.
I don't see how this couldn't be done with the O-class.

 

[BlackDragon98]

The lack of fuel was due to a leak created by one of the 14" shells fired by Prince of Wales.

But this would be less of a problem if the ship in question had more fuel in the first place.