Easily. If they can take off from the 100-150 ft of a predreadnought fo'c'sle they can take off from a carrier.
WW1 German Aircraft carriers break blockade
- Thread starter myr
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Easily. If they can take off from the 100-150 ft of a predreadnought fo'c'sle they can take off from a carrier.
Slight misreading gave me a vision of someone carrying a torpedo on his shoulder and throwing it out the plane.
The British had a marginally capable torpedo bomber in 1913.
Short Admiralty Type 81 - Wikipedia
The issue is not airplanes carrying torpedoes, but aircraft light enough to take off from a carrier but still with enough grunt to do so with a torpedo and fuel capacity to carry it a useful distance. Then you need to have torpedoes that can take the dive into the water and still work, preferably with a useful range. Then you need a targeting system and considerable training in dropping tactics. All that gets you as far as torpedoing near stationary vessels in a harbour. To hit something that is moving takes yet more development and training. That was hard even in WW2.The British had a marginally capable torpedo bomber in 1913.
Short Admiralty Type 81 - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
View attachment 736331
Another thought occurs: the sheer number of capital ships in the Great War: the GF had 28 Battleships and 9 Battlecruisers at Jutland. When I look at some of the more successful air attacks on naval ships in the Second World War, the number of ships sunk are small: Repulse and Prince of Wales (2); Operation Ten-Go (1), Taranto (3), Pearl Harbour (4 sunk, 4 damaged). Obviously the squadrons under attack were much smaller themselves and you cannot sink what is not there, but the attackers were also much more technologically capable than what the Germans would have been in 1916 or 1917. So let's say that somehow the Germans sink four British battleships in one attack (highly unlikely, but they just got really lucky): the GF probably moves to a much more distant blockade and that's about it - the balance of power does not fundamentally alter.
All very true, carrier aircraft WWI technology isn't up to attacking warships at sea. However even a failed attack on the Grand Fleet at Scapa Flow would force the GF to abandon it until defences were improved. That would not break the blockade but it would potentially open up holes in it.
People are getting confused on what the blockade was. 90%+ was done in shipping company offices, not on the high seas. Its not a close blockade like in the Napoleonic wars, its mainly paper with some ship patrolling shipping lanes ( for raiders first, blockade runners a distant second ). Most, if not all, of the ships the RN had scouting in the North Sea were trying to intercept submarines or warn of the HSF sailing.
Yep, the blockade was as Pjmidd said, done by shipping companies and enforced by patrolling ships that were basically sailing the GUK gap. So you've got to get your carrier and its escorts out there and find a target and strike it and then get back and the UK was pretty darn good at spotting when German ships sailed. All this with no radar, no radio (on the aircraft) or anything. And no before anyone suggests it, a massed attack on Scapa's not going to happen either.
OTL, the Germans did have Zeppelins (and a relative handful of other rigid airships built by the rival firm Schuette-Lanz) and the navy got most of them. Naval Zeppelins (the Navy found the SL ships not too useful as they were made with plywood, which warped in moist oversea flights--perhaps SL might have gotten more Duralumin and its founder Dr Schuette might have been less stubborn about giving up his plywood invention) were in fact used for naval scouting.
And while I can't be too sanguine about it, I have seen pictures of attempts to develop an "air torpedo" of sorts--a flying bomb with wings and a pusher propeller. If the Germans could solve the guidance problems involved they might have managed to get some kind of airborne torpedo that dipped into the water (shedding wings and pusher engine of course) and made its way to hit a ship in a final relatively short underwater run. Or alternatively stayed airborne and dived onto a ship at high speed with a lot of high explosive. For guidance I am thinking of radio control, provided it might be possible to design the receiver on the torpedo to only "listen" for signals in a very narrow directional cone pointing back to the mothership Zeppelin, and/or some very primitive form of coded communications--say a chain of metal punch cards containing an index of pulse commands that changes every time one is used, preventing Entente forces from spoofing it. A few commands along the lines of "yaw left (or right) one click", "pitch up (or down)," "crash-dive onto target"--that's 5 there--might suffice; with acceptance of each command the torpedo flashes an acknowledgement and complies, and the index punch card advances a notch, the command airship has an identical chain of command index cards and so they stay synchronized. Then after launching the torpedo a crew member watching both target and drone in a telescope uses the radio to issue these commands as needed to steer the thing to target. Because the torpedo need not take off from the ground, it is dropped from the Zeppelin, its wings can be relatively small and it can proceed at very high airspeed provided the Germans can manufacture a one-shot disposable high energy engine at acceptable cost; range is very short so fuel efficiency is not a major issue nor is fuel supply large. High airspeed near sea level also means cross winds have relatively low effect on trajectory which is why a "veer" command of short duration might be suitable to keep it on track.
An airship just a couple kilometers above sea level would have (weather permitting!) very long lines of sight on enemy warcraft, and so it could stand out of range of developed seaborne artillery to launch the torpedo. Once they have guided one to target they can break off and proceed with airspeed superior to the seaborne speed of any surface unit however "fast" out of range no matter how aggressively the enemy pursues it. The enemy would therefore be forced to develop aircraft to chase the Zeppelin--but here is where objections about the low state of the art of OTL Great War aircraft come into play. Will the RN develop carrier decks of their own to launch pursuit (and indeed preemptive scout) airplanes, or must they rely on seaplanes? Even during the Great War airplanes started out faster than the fastest airships and under such pressures improvement might proceed faster--IIRC some late-war warplanes could fly closer to 200 mph. Whereas airships are not so much restricted in speed by engine power/propeller thrust as such but rather the structural limits of the buoyant hull--whether rigid or fabric-pressure ships, bending moments on it increase rapidly with airspeed, requiring heavier structure to resist which rapidly eats into useful lift. The practical demonstrated speed limits on airships is in the 60-80 knot (30-40 meters/sec) range. Above 60 knots, it is possible but unwise to soup up an airship to go faster--noting also that aside from danger in breaking up, a faster airship must guzzle fuel faster and thus remaining useful lift minus fuel weight, and thus range, would suffer.
Still, "a stern chase is a long chase" and even if the sea-launched pursuit planes are a lot faster than the airship, it starts with a lead and can buy considerable time by running--if it runs toward the German battle line, shipborne guns threaten the Entente pursuers, and the Germans might launch some airplanes of their own to intercept the Allied ones. Meanwhile the range of the airplanes is limited by their fuel supply, which eats into lifted mass for ammunition, and airships, even hydrogen-inflated, are not quite as vulnerable to unfriendly fire as one might assume. And with enough useful lift they can carry not just a few air torpedoes but also some airplanes of their own that could in theory learn to hook on to the airship much as the Curtiss "Sparrowhawk" biplanes deployed from USS Akron and Macon in the late '20s/early '30s OTL did. As with the air torpedo (though offset by the need to hook on to the airship to "land") such airship borne fighter craft could use smaller wings and fly faster than planes that must take off and land on the ground, so this might offset their smallness with formidable fighting options, along the lines of "zoom and boom."
Realistically, there are many objections--to begin with, early German Zeppelins they had on hand in 1914 OTL were astonishingly primitive versus their late-war designs, which much more closely resemble a classic airship. Their net lift was low, their speed and maneuverability and ceiling also sadly limited, and it took time to improve streamlining, propellers, engines and lighten the structure--indeed the major late war line of development was to aim for very high altitude "height climber" performance for purposes of high altitude bombing of land targets, which was somewhat misguided. (The Zeppelin bombing raids over England were pathetic in terms of actually finding and hitting high value targets for many reasons--the strongest argument such advocates as German Naval commander Peter Strasser could muster in favor was the combined effect of terror and forcing the British to divert resources to air defenses of their homeland. Eventually Strasser himself was the victim of those defenses and not on hand to continue to press such arguments!) ATL development would sacrifice altitude for more robust structure better able to manage higher speeds and sharper turning at lower altitudes--but versus ship-borne artillery, even a mere 2 or 3 km altitude would go far to frustrate successful targeting, if the airship were also some tens of km away from the target, whereas I am thinking practical air torpedoes diving down on targets from such altitudes, or perhaps looping up to higher ones first, could reach many hundreds of knots in terminal dive speeds and so cover the offset distance pretty fast while presenting a very difficult target to bring down.
To be effective, flight crews would need a lot of trial and error practice to get doctrine down and develop proficiency, and this tells against a scenario in which the Germans manage to keep their strike airships secret long enough to build up a large force of them and spring it on the British fleet as a total surprise--whereas incrementally building up the capability, say with raids on non-convoyed shipping followed by air raids unsupported by the High Seas Fleet on convoys for instance, would tip the British and other Entente powers off to the need to develop some kind of anti-aircraft capability, which might well include carriers and/or seaplanes as well as superior high altitude light artillery and armoring ships against air strikes.
So, I am giving the idea of deck-borne airplane raids a pass, but I do think airship-borne drone strikes of this kind are a possibility and certainly I think airships can count as "carriers." If the drone idea is rejected out of hand as practically infeasible (the Allies, including Americans, did however work on some such notions of their own in the Great War, not airship borne but ground launched) the argument in favor of airship-borne crewed airplanes being potentially faster than typical ground planes of the era still holds; takeoff is by dropping them, and recovery can I believe happen even if the stall speed of the airplane exceeds the maximum feasible airspeed of the airship, though this has had no OTL demonstration whatsoever I have to admit. Still, I do think a pilot could intercept a trapeze hung some distance below the airship and thus brake off many tens of knots of excess speed by pendulum swinging in a kind of "reverse catapult."
If such a thing can realistically happen at all, it probably would be late in the war, at any rate 2-3 years in, and there would have to be some build-up which as noted means the Allies have some preparation to try to combat it. I do think it does play to Central Powers strengths better than trying to gift the HSF with surface deck carriers! If not primitive remote guided drones then, crewed dive-bombers and/or torpedo bombers.
And while I can't be too sanguine about it, I have seen pictures of attempts to develop an "air torpedo" of sorts--a flying bomb with wings and a pusher propeller. If the Germans could solve the guidance problems involved they might have managed to get some kind of airborne torpedo that dipped into the water (shedding wings and pusher engine of course) and made its way to hit a ship in a final relatively short underwater run. Or alternatively stayed airborne and dived onto a ship at high speed with a lot of high explosive. For guidance I am thinking of radio control, provided it might be possible to design the receiver on the torpedo to only "listen" for signals in a very narrow directional cone pointing back to the mothership Zeppelin, and/or some very primitive form of coded communications--say a chain of metal punch cards containing an index of pulse commands that changes every time one is used, preventing Entente forces from spoofing it. A few commands along the lines of "yaw left (or right) one click", "pitch up (or down)," "crash-dive onto target"--that's 5 there--might suffice; with acceptance of each command the torpedo flashes an acknowledgement and complies, and the index punch card advances a notch, the command airship has an identical chain of command index cards and so they stay synchronized. Then after launching the torpedo a crew member watching both target and drone in a telescope uses the radio to issue these commands as needed to steer the thing to target. Because the torpedo need not take off from the ground, it is dropped from the Zeppelin, its wings can be relatively small and it can proceed at very high airspeed provided the Germans can manufacture a one-shot disposable high energy engine at acceptable cost; range is very short so fuel efficiency is not a major issue nor is fuel supply large. High airspeed near sea level also means cross winds have relatively low effect on trajectory which is why a "veer" command of short duration might be suitable to keep it on track.
An airship just a couple kilometers above sea level would have (weather permitting!) very long lines of sight on enemy warcraft, and so it could stand out of range of developed seaborne artillery to launch the torpedo. Once they have guided one to target they can break off and proceed with airspeed superior to the seaborne speed of any surface unit however "fast" out of range no matter how aggressively the enemy pursues it. The enemy would therefore be forced to develop aircraft to chase the Zeppelin--but here is where objections about the low state of the art of OTL Great War aircraft come into play. Will the RN develop carrier decks of their own to launch pursuit (and indeed preemptive scout) airplanes, or must they rely on seaplanes? Even during the Great War airplanes started out faster than the fastest airships and under such pressures improvement might proceed faster--IIRC some late-war warplanes could fly closer to 200 mph. Whereas airships are not so much restricted in speed by engine power/propeller thrust as such but rather the structural limits of the buoyant hull--whether rigid or fabric-pressure ships, bending moments on it increase rapidly with airspeed, requiring heavier structure to resist which rapidly eats into useful lift. The practical demonstrated speed limits on airships is in the 60-80 knot (30-40 meters/sec) range. Above 60 knots, it is possible but unwise to soup up an airship to go faster--noting also that aside from danger in breaking up, a faster airship must guzzle fuel faster and thus remaining useful lift minus fuel weight, and thus range, would suffer.
Still, "a stern chase is a long chase" and even if the sea-launched pursuit planes are a lot faster than the airship, it starts with a lead and can buy considerable time by running--if it runs toward the German battle line, shipborne guns threaten the Entente pursuers, and the Germans might launch some airplanes of their own to intercept the Allied ones. Meanwhile the range of the airplanes is limited by their fuel supply, which eats into lifted mass for ammunition, and airships, even hydrogen-inflated, are not quite as vulnerable to unfriendly fire as one might assume. And with enough useful lift they can carry not just a few air torpedoes but also some airplanes of their own that could in theory learn to hook on to the airship much as the Curtiss "Sparrowhawk" biplanes deployed from USS Akron and Macon in the late '20s/early '30s OTL did. As with the air torpedo (though offset by the need to hook on to the airship to "land") such airship borne fighter craft could use smaller wings and fly faster than planes that must take off and land on the ground, so this might offset their smallness with formidable fighting options, along the lines of "zoom and boom."
Realistically, there are many objections--to begin with, early German Zeppelins they had on hand in 1914 OTL were astonishingly primitive versus their late-war designs, which much more closely resemble a classic airship. Their net lift was low, their speed and maneuverability and ceiling also sadly limited, and it took time to improve streamlining, propellers, engines and lighten the structure--indeed the major late war line of development was to aim for very high altitude "height climber" performance for purposes of high altitude bombing of land targets, which was somewhat misguided. (The Zeppelin bombing raids over England were pathetic in terms of actually finding and hitting high value targets for many reasons--the strongest argument such advocates as German Naval commander Peter Strasser could muster in favor was the combined effect of terror and forcing the British to divert resources to air defenses of their homeland. Eventually Strasser himself was the victim of those defenses and not on hand to continue to press such arguments!) ATL development would sacrifice altitude for more robust structure better able to manage higher speeds and sharper turning at lower altitudes--but versus ship-borne artillery, even a mere 2 or 3 km altitude would go far to frustrate successful targeting, if the airship were also some tens of km away from the target, whereas I am thinking practical air torpedoes diving down on targets from such altitudes, or perhaps looping up to higher ones first, could reach many hundreds of knots in terminal dive speeds and so cover the offset distance pretty fast while presenting a very difficult target to bring down.
To be effective, flight crews would need a lot of trial and error practice to get doctrine down and develop proficiency, and this tells against a scenario in which the Germans manage to keep their strike airships secret long enough to build up a large force of them and spring it on the British fleet as a total surprise--whereas incrementally building up the capability, say with raids on non-convoyed shipping followed by air raids unsupported by the High Seas Fleet on convoys for instance, would tip the British and other Entente powers off to the need to develop some kind of anti-aircraft capability, which might well include carriers and/or seaplanes as well as superior high altitude light artillery and armoring ships against air strikes.
So, I am giving the idea of deck-borne airplane raids a pass, but I do think airship-borne drone strikes of this kind are a possibility and certainly I think airships can count as "carriers." If the drone idea is rejected out of hand as practically infeasible (the Allies, including Americans, did however work on some such notions of their own in the Great War, not airship borne but ground launched) the argument in favor of airship-borne crewed airplanes being potentially faster than typical ground planes of the era still holds; takeoff is by dropping them, and recovery can I believe happen even if the stall speed of the airplane exceeds the maximum feasible airspeed of the airship, though this has had no OTL demonstration whatsoever I have to admit. Still, I do think a pilot could intercept a trapeze hung some distance below the airship and thus brake off many tens of knots of excess speed by pendulum swinging in a kind of "reverse catapult."
If such a thing can realistically happen at all, it probably would be late in the war, at any rate 2-3 years in, and there would have to be some build-up which as noted means the Allies have some preparation to try to combat it. I do think it does play to Central Powers strengths better than trying to gift the HSF with surface deck carriers! If not primitive remote guided drones then, crewed dive-bombers and/or torpedo bombers.
Unless this is coordinated with an attempt at blockade running the reaction in the Admiralty will be "Oh no, a couple of AMCs have been sunk, better replace them straight way"
Garrison
Donor
Interesting, also suggests any sudden interest in Naval aviation by the Germans would not be ignored by the British.The British had a marginally capable torpedo bomber in 1913.
Short Admiralty Type 81 - Wikipedia
View attachment 736331
Given how quickly the Germans abandoned naval aircraft with torpedoes after one of its major proponents got shot down by a merchantman, I don't think the Germans have the imagination for that (as they lack in WW2). The only one I could see pulling this off is Dornier but you have to convince him to abandon seaplanes (something he and Zeppelin were dead set on doing)
A lot of people seem to not be aware of this, but Germany actually did have a carrier plan during WWI:
en.wikipedia.org
This carrier would have been finished had Germany not had submarine priorities towards the end of the war. This means that for the Ausonia to be converted Germany needs to abandon unrestricted submarine warfare. Also, the decision to convert would probably need to be made earlier than 1918 if the ship is wanted prior to the end of the war.
In terms of carrier attacks, Tondern proved that they were not only possible but could work. However, WWI aircraft successfully sinking battlecruisers and battleships is iffy. Unfortunately, we do not have the planned Cuckoo raid on the High Seas Fleet that would have proved how possible this would be. If Germany were to sink a heavier ship with aircraft, it would (probably) need to be in conjunction with damage already done by other submarines or heavier ships.
German aircraft carrier I (1915) - Wikipedia
This carrier would have been finished had Germany not had submarine priorities towards the end of the war. This means that for the Ausonia to be converted Germany needs to abandon unrestricted submarine warfare. Also, the decision to convert would probably need to be made earlier than 1918 if the ship is wanted prior to the end of the war.
In terms of carrier attacks, Tondern proved that they were not only possible but could work. However, WWI aircraft successfully sinking battlecruisers and battleships is iffy. Unfortunately, we do not have the planned Cuckoo raid on the High Seas Fleet that would have proved how possible this would be. If Germany were to sink a heavier ship with aircraft, it would (probably) need to be in conjunction with damage already done by other submarines or heavier ships.
Plus you would have to convince Kaiser Wilhelm this is a good idea.
Sending out lightly armored carriers into a region of sea where enemy fleets may appear out of nowhere due to fog sounds suicidal (could you imagine a Glorious style incident with British Battlecruisers laying down the pain?)
Sending out lightly armored carriers into a region of sea where enemy fleets may appear out of nowhere due to fog sounds suicidal (could you imagine a Glorious style incident with British Battlecruisers laying down the pain?)
To better clarify, that's why I said that if Germany had not gone into unrestricted submarine warfare and had started the project earlier than 1918 the carrier would be more feasible.
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Garrison
Donor
One almost certainly not very effective carrier in 1918 would have been a complete waste of resources for Imperial Germany as it faced defeat on the Western Front, an earlier Graf Zeppelin basically.
This might provoke the British to develop a long range anti-aircraft weapon capable of hitting a zeppelin-like target at a range of several miles. Imagine the San Shiki shell for Dreadnought main batteries introduced 3 decades earlier.
San Shiki (anti-aircraft shell) - Wikipedia
For curiosity's sake, do you think that in a Central Powers victory scenario completing the carrier may be a better idea?
From a torpedo plane that can scarcely take off in 1913 to sinkings from air-launched torpedoes in the second half of 1915 is amazing and at least a year sooner than I'd thought. I learned something today.The British had a marginally capable torpedo bomber in 1913.
Short Admiralty Type 81 - Wikipedia
View attachment 736331
So the idea of carriers would have been reasonable by the end of 1915, even if the engineering and how to use them needed some work.