WI Hitler had captial ships broken up?

He threatened to do this, and emplace their guns for coastal defence. These ships carried huge amounts of high quality steel alloys, could the nickel, chromium etc extracted from such a recyling give a boost to the rare-metal starved jet programme?
 

Anaxagoras

Banned
This frees up a lot of Allied warships from escort duty on the Arctic route, therefore making their amphibious operations easier.
 

burmafrd

Banned
MOre effort in the late 30's building more and better U Boats would have been the best force multiplier Germany could have done. Imagine if they had 100 full ocean going U Boats in Sept 1939 and building more?
When you look at what those few boats accomplished imagine 10 times that number?
 

CalBear

Moderator
Donor
Monthly Donor
Not a bad move, but the rare elements were gone, already alloyed with the steel and mostly unrecoverable. Putting all the guns into shore enplacements, if it could be done (it's WAY more difficult than just transplanting the turrets) would provide a significant upgrade to the defeses, depending where they were planted.
 
The coastline is just too long for a couple of guns to have much influence, probably the area around Calais would have been the place they would have made stronger. What would happen if the German would use the hulls of the capital ships to build aircraft carriers? That could have had some impact. Although a totally other strategy from the start of the navy would have a better result.
 

MrP

Banned
The coastline is just too long for a couple of guns to have much influence, probably the area around Calais would have been the place they would have made stronger. What would happen if the German would use the hulls of the capital ships to build aircraft carriers? That could have had some impact. Although a totally other strategy from the start of the navy would have a better result.

Well, I think the Warships1 chaps must have considered that at some point - but in general they'll have problems similar to those suffered by other conversions: Shinano, Béarn, Furious &c, &c. Add in the fact that the only planned German carrier of WWII wasn't really a stellar design and had problems with old Goering. Then again, the problems suffered by the above carriers, while rendering them less useful than purpose-built vessels, didn't stop them being used, one must admit.
 
I have doubts whether breaking up the capital ships would be such a good idea. In contrast to what many believe the real bottlenecks in Germany's war-making potential were not the raw materials (excepting oil) but manufacturing capacity. If you scrap a functioning battleship for the raw material, you need a lot of manpower for the scrapping, and, more important you use energy to turn something valuable - a working (albeit obsolescent) weapon - into something far less valuable, raw materials. I cannot remember any of the World War II powers scrapping a battleship during the war, and if they did, it was certainly not one that was as new as the Tirpitz.It is quite significant that the move was opposed by Doenitz, who was far from a battleship fan.

On the other hand it would probably have been an advantage for Germany's war-making capability if the Bismarck and Tirpitz had not been built in the first place. But that is something completely different from scrapping them after they have been built. If I buy myself a Rolls Royce I spent a lot of money that could have been spent better elsewhere. That does not mean that I get such an awful lot of money if I scrap the Rolls Royce and sell the raw materials.
 
I'm not metalurgy expert, but can't you re-smelt the metal to extract it's component elements? What about just re-melting it and using that for turbines and burners, since it already had lots more chromium and nickel that what the jets were using?

The problem for jets was raw materials, and the capital ships had tons of the good stuff sitting in port, not doing anything other than pissing Hitler off.
 
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