German Auxiliary Cruisers as more effective raiders

I've read that German Auxiliary Cruiser or 'ghost cruiser' were more effective than their bigger brethren in raiding.

What if the German Navy had invested in proper ghost cruisers how much more effective would they be? If they worked in conjunction with U-boat armed with more effective weapons along with S-boats how would the allies respond? How much of the war changes?
 
What's a proper ghost cruiser?
Rest is too vague to respond to.

Here's a good primer on what these raiders did in WW-I , and gives an insight into WW-II ideas.

https://archive.org/stream/ReviewOfGermanCruiserWarfare19141918#page/n0/mode/2up

Hopefully it can give some idea of prewar concepts.

Thanks...But I was referring to Germanys auxiliary cruisers in world war 2 they captured or sank more tonnage than the bigger more illustrious battleships and cruisers in the navy. The navy seemed more drawn to the pocket battleships than they these. https://www.bismarck-class.dk/hilfskreuzer/atlantis.html
 

NoMommsen

Donor
Secure codes are what were needed. So buy these ships the commercial Engima machines with more rotors.
What?...
  • Better encryption of radiotransmissions
  • Raisers harder to detect/be known about
  • risk of raiderrs to be sunk lowered
  • more "raider time"
The german military was rather 'stingy' about their enigmas, not introducing the better versions of .. civilian, commercial production and use.
 
Thanks for clearing it up, Germany might have been justified in that. But generally how effective would auxiliary cruisers had been if they had been if the ships had built from the ground up with the latest weapons at that time?
 
how effective would auxiliary cruisers had been if they had been if the ships had built from the ground up
This Hits two issues,
- How much better can you make a AMC and still have it be able to hide like a OTL AMC, I dont think you can make it much better the reason that CLs look like warship rather than tankers are real....
- How much does the KM lose by not having a fleet in being to tie up large parts of the RN?
 
Hilfskreuzer were particularly successful for one they were raiders and good at disguising themselves. They're flaws was they weren't armored and they were armed with old world war 1 naval guns which weren't very good at sustained fire.

If the KM had created these raiders properly as light cruisers or destroyers disguised as merchant ships and had more than just ten. (While still building the big ships) Combine this with U-boats than they'll sink more ships.
 
If the KM had created these raiders properly as light cruisers or destroyers disguised as merchant ships and had more than just ten. (While still building the big ships) Combine this with U-boats than they'll sink more ships.
This is A hard to do as you get a weak CL that still doesn't really look like a Tanker (and cost far more than OTL raiders) and B pre war the RN/GB goes totally out of its mind once they find out as they are the obvious target.....
 
1. More raiders. This means more, suitable, ships, e.g. the banana boats.
2. Better communications, both with home base, submarines and each other. Encryption has been mentioned but the mere existence of radio traffic is a clue.
3. An intelligence network operating in ports (neutral and hostile) to provide assistance and information.
4. A support network to provide fuel, prisoner offloading, crew and other supplies.
5. A strategy to use them.
 

BlondieBC

Banned
Thanks for clearing it up, Germany might have been justified in that. But generally how effective would auxiliary cruisers had been if they had been if the ships had built from the ground up with the latest weapons at that time?

Much more effective, but building them from the ground up would greatly raise tensions with the UK and cause an naval race. And this naval race will eliminate the advantage of custom designs. IOTL, a German AMC was able to sink a British cruiser, so the design of OTL is quite effective. Just as the submarines of the 1939-1941 era were effective. The biggest bang for the buck is better codes which is effectively free, and might even save money. Often using off the shelf equipment is cheaper than custom modifying for military usage. There are also the related issue of poor communication procedures and training. The Germans knew/suspected their codes were broken in the middle of WW1, so this is really an open secret. Second, you want more of them, even if the design is less effective. So these things need to be spammed out just like the U-boats. And just like the U-boats, you have to be willing to take casualties. If 90% of AMC crews die/capture in the war, that is just war.

So lets jump to writing an ATL where I want to buff AMC and want to minimize the chance that negative butterflies (i.e. UK reacts strongly) actually nerfs the AMC. What do we do? And let's try to avoid absurd foreknowledge like France will quickly fall but Hitler will throw away the win by attacking Russia and/or the USA entering the war.

  • Planning. We need good quality staff work by staff level officers in the 1920's and/or 1930's. We need them to do things like keep detail list of German ships convertible to AMC. We need them to have list of what is required in terms of weapons, men, material, and shipyards. This is doable by probably under 20 men, so we can easily hide it in some civilian naval agency. Or hide it in some retired admirals estate. We are talking about a single floor of a single building in Berlin with paperwork. And maybe some of the more sensitive paperwork hidden in mine/basement somewhere. Keeping a list of German flagged merchant ships should not alarm the British. Neither should having specs on most of these ships. These can be in your maritime safety/regulation agency. The thing you hide is the list of what is needed to convert the ships.
  • Supplies. This probably has to wait on Hitler openly rearming. We need to stockpile things like naval cannons of about 5" or so. Stockpile machine guns. Maybe even stockpile some conversion items. If the planning is done correctly, then we may have identified things such as shortages of some welding materials, etc. Fix where possible. The UK is generally assumes German has been doing these two things since 1905 or earlier.
  • Enigma. Germany in WW1 had coastal boats (torpedo boats, mine laying ships, converted fishing boats) using the same code book as U-boats. The pattern of the UK operating around the harbor protection minefields tipped off the Germans the codes were compromised. They just did not do anything about it in WW1. It is not hard logically to know that you will lose AMC and lose the code books and machines. So it is not hard to figure out that these ships should operate with separate coding systems from the rest of the armed forces including the rest of the Navy. Also not hard to figure out that you don't want these things chatty since radio triangulation worked in WW1 on both land and sea. You either buy the better Engima machines or even better yet, use one-time pads.
  • Production. We are probably not going to have a 100 + sea planes sitting around for adding to these ships. So we need to work on the production lines for supplies that are not stockpileable. This one has risk of UK detection and counter measures prewar.
  • We have no idea what year the war starts, so we will likely get caught off guard.
So Hitler invades Poland. About a week after the war starts, we activate the plan and start spamming out these things. Probably can do about 5 times OTL rate or better, at least for first year or two of war. Limited effectiveness since so hard to get around UK before May 1940. We can send a big size convoy 5-20 via the Arctic Sea to the Pacific in the summer of 1940 instead of just a few. The we have the military definition of luck. Luck is where training/planning hits opportunity. We get lucky, France falls. We can then mass covert the merchant ships in French ports and send them out. And we can keep sneaking ships around the UK that can come back to France for repairs. If I write the ATL where we custom design merchant ships in the 1930's to be mass converted to AMC, I will likely trigger a British response. Some of the things like putting a lot of extra steel in the hull in places needed to support naval guns is a dead give away. As would be putting cranes on merchant ships combine with a deck area to hold a couple of planes.

I have spent a lot of time on ship design between 1905 and 1930. There is a reason ships fall into easily identifiable categories such as AMC, CVL, CL, CA, etc. When people do compromise/hybrid ships, the designs suck. They under perform and over perform on costs. If you want warships to be merchant raiders, you build the panzerschiffes. 20+ of these will cause the British Admiralty fits. The British need the traditional warships to defeat the IJN such as CA and CL. To defeat PS, you need to build faster ships with bigger guns. The closest design in IOTL is battlecruisers, but this is overkill. The British need to build a bunch of 13" gunned super fast ships. Call the BCL, or light battle cruisers. Putting these gun/engines on a ship combined with long range means things like very limited to no torpedo protection and maybe light armor. These ships will cost a lot,but actually be worse in a naval battle versus IJN CA. And will be one hit, one kill ships against IJN subs and mines. And there cost will be much closer to a BB than CA. You can look at the lengthy criticism of the Alaska class to understand why. If you want AMC, you get free hulls and very cheap ships. The cost is the guns, the labor to convert, and the airplane. Almost free compared to a PS, so you don't have to worry about losing them. If I try to compromise the design, I get this odd ship that is part PS and has cargo holds. Probably cost what a PS does but has less performance than an light cruiser.

Hope this helps. My main point is that without foreknowledge, we probably make most of the mistakes the British and German Admiralty does. We would just have a chance to adapt faster and not take 30 failures to learn, only 10. Patton was a good commander cause his troops got better. If you take his units performance in 1942 in North Africa and have his 1944 breakout of Normandy units perform the same way, the breakout is a fiasco. Same idea here. Germans can learn faster, and Germans can start learning earlier.

Hope this helps
 

BlondieBC

Banned
This Hits two issues,
- How much better can you make a AMC and still have it be able to hide like a OTL AMC, I dont think you can make it much better the reason that CLs look like warship rather than tankers are real....
- How much does the KM lose by not having a fleet in being to tie up large parts of the RN?

The British kept at least two ships to counter all German Fleet-in-Being ships. Sometimes three to account for repair time and other down time. So if the Bismarck doesn't try to break out, the British will keep 2-3 more BB and 2-3 cruisers in or around Scotland for the duration of the war. And the British will also be using more BB to escort convoys to Russia. The net winners of this will be the Japanese and/or the Italians based on OTL deployment pattern. The benefits to the KM is mostly secondary with things like extra DD being kept in or around port to sortie with the fleet. And extra bombing runs trying to sink the German BB instead of harassing German production.
 
Thanks for the information, so in other words the German navy could not really use auxiliaries to their best nor could they afford to build a better version. Is there any theatre could have been more successful?
 
Thanks...But I was referring to Germanys auxiliary cruisers in world war 2 they captured or sank more tonnage than the bigger more illustrious battleships and cruisers in the navy. The navy seemed more drawn to the pocket battleships than they these. https://www.bismarck-class.dk/hilfskreuzer/atlantis.html

KM based -on those WW-I experiences - concluded merchant ships adapted to fill HSK role , would be valuable to the fleet at large- if they could divert vast numbers of RN CL/DD/AMC as had been achieved in WW-I. In that conflict- purpose built warship's were a failure , while aux passenger ships were not any better. The best ships were higher speed [~ 15 knots] larger merchant steamers with longer endurance. These crews used disguise and elementary Intel to avoid allied sweeps and find the occasional victims. They also changed their ID as much as possible. In addition these pioneer's trialed refueling technique with ship to ship transfer of coal, and included a simple sea plane in the hold helped for scouting.

The raiders that didn't follow those lessons were rounded up quickly by the considerable allied effort or were interned in neutral ports. However the WW-I raiders that did follow the ideas- did very well lasting for years- sinking more vessels than their WW-II brothers. The key to program success was - the ships were off the shelve with basic resourceful crews & clever skippers, that could be assembled any time for Reich marine/Kriegsmarine with little cost to the fleet. I gather the WW-II equipment and WW-I armament in these HSK was about 2 million RM each raider [? ] when a new minesweeper was ~ 5 million RM .

However all these efforts were directed at independent shipping and never on convoys. The independent shipping decreased steadily through out the war and thus the value of these efforts.

Their biggest contributions was the diversion of WALLIE efforts -which was estimated to be 10 warships diverted to hunt each raider down and EACH RAIDER sank or capturing 9-10 WALLIE merchant vessels.

Through out the 1930s all KM discussions focused on a U-Boat war to cut the transatlantic life line to Europe. ALL WARSHIP BUILDING HAD TO WORK TOWARDS THAT GOAL. Which it did until Hitler intervened. Both the 1932 Naval Plan & 1935 Ship Replacement Plan acknowledged this- ordering 6-8 heavier Panzerschiffe and 6-18 cruisers.

All those new Cruisers/Panzerschiffe had diesels and thus great endurance to survive on the open seas. These faster versions of the PBS was desirable through 1920s/30s until Hitler forced Raeder to instead build a small battle fleet to be able to repeat WW-I surface actions in and around Germany.

I seem to remember reading - that HSK enigma network was not cracked until the spring of 1944, so it doesn't look like that needs to be updated.
 
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I didn't realize that. Though while oil fired engines were less dirtier and hotter, when war broke out the German Navy went back to coal fired engines.
 
one decision that affected commerce war was invading USSR, the KM lost the Northern Sea Route into the Pacific https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Sea_Route (the Soviets wanted returning German ships to carry cargo and planned to allow repair base or repair ship on Kamchatka)

the KM could have had a drip-drip of raiders into Pacific (and onwards) but instead were bottled up at GIUK Gap.

to the ships themselves? my only suggestion would be that the seaplanes gave away fact there was a nearby raider, if they instead carried small helicopters the issue might be confused if they were deployed from nearby u-boat? they also could have carried numerous helicopters and needed little in the way of handling equipment.
 
all these efforts were directed at independent shipping and never on convoys.
This is the real issue without the warships braking out as OTL the RN can simply deploy smaller warships that can still "win" (even mutual damage is a win for the British position) against any realistic AMC.
 
This is the real issue without the warships braking out as OTL the RN can simply deploy smaller warships that can still "win" (even mutual damage is a win for the British position) against any realistic AMC.

Which is true, the Royal Navy had plenty of auxiliary cruisers and destroyers of their own (not to mention mini carriers) that could find and sink ghost cruiser not that this would be easy though.

Strange to say I didn't know what banana boat looked like until recently I thought they were fast corvettes cum gun boats!
 
Interestingly the biggest effect amc raiding would have in my opinion would be to force the adoption of convoys world wide by the British.

As we all know that in of itself significantly reduces the effectiveness of merchant shipping.

Also if there are an extra 20 convoys world wide at any given time and they all get an escort (even aa minimal one) the royal navy will be stretched and may have to reduce escorts in the atlantic.
 
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