Why did Hitler send one of his only three heavy cruisers alone to the fucking southern Atlantic sea?

The German navy’s surface fleet was a huge waste of resources and probably cost them the war.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Kriegsmarine_ships

They would never reach parity with the British and even if the Germans rolled a natural 20 and somehow achieved a stupendous victory, the Brits would _still_ have far more ships.

Germany should have only built submarines for long range interdiction of British shipping and limited the surface fleet to costal defense, putting the resources available from dropping the useless blue-water navy into other projects, especially long range heavy bombers and their long range fighter escorts.

Because the only way for the Germans to knock the Brits out of the war is thru airpower, which not coincidently, the same thing the Germans needed against the Soviets.

If Germany didn't built its surface fleet, Britain wouldn't have built 50 cruisers and 4 battleships to counter them, instead being able to funnel them into more aircraft and destroyer escorts.

the Brits had so many ships because the U.S. was giving them ships, 50 destroyers in one deal

The honest answer is that in order to win the war, Germany would have needed to have more ships of all types. Germany would have needed to have a much larger surface fleet AND more u-boats than they had in real life. In short, they simply couldn't have won with the resources that they had available at the time.

50 destroyers were all outdated junks that were more trouble than they were worth. The Destroyers for Bases deal was a political move if anything, and possibly a way to trick Germans into firing at a USN ship.

Even that probably wouldn't have been enough. Given that the British control pretty much all the places to base aircraft in the Atlantic, they can stick as many naval patrollers and bombers as they want, wheras the Germans can't, whatever the overall air situation.

There's a reason that most of the submarine kills of convoy ships happened in the center of the northern atlantic routes, at the furthest point from the airbases.

Germany had a very good chance of winning an air war against the UK, they had no chance of defeating them on the high seas.

The Kriegsmarine was worse than useless, as it brought nothing to fight while consuming a huge amount of resources needed elsewhere.

>Germany had a very good chance of winning an air war against the UK,

That's right except for the part where it isn't and the Germans had no chance at all of winning an air war.

kek

>Germany had a very good chance of winning an air war against the UK
>can't even win the Battle of Britain

[laughing hurricane pilots]

>Germany had a very good chance of winning an air war against the UK,
They had no chance of winning an air war against the UK. They also had no hope of building and maintaining a meaningful strategic bombing force.

more

>Germany had a very good chance of winning an air war against the UK

Is there any ship more aesthetic than the Deutschlands? Only the littorio class comes close

>The Kriegsmarine was worse than useless, as it brought nothing to fight while consuming a huge amount of resources needed elsewhere.

The war would have been over a lot quicker if the Kriegsmarine hadn't been constantly raiding Allied merchant fleets. It was all just delaying to inevitable, but to say they brought nothing to the fight is simply wrong.

And this while pissing away untold amounts of resources on a pointless surface fleet that did fuck all throughout the war.

It's a false choice based on a false premise. The Germans didn't lose the war because they built the wrong stuff. They lost the war because their capacity to produce stuff was just not enough compared to their competition. In order to win the war, Germany would have needed:

1. A larger, more capable surface fleet
2. A larger, more capable u-boat force
3. A larger, more capable air force

In order to win the war Germany simply needed more.....of everything. You can certainly point to strategic mistakes here and there, but arguably the biggest mistake was starting an unwinnable war in the first place.

>the Kriegsmarine hadn't been constantly raiding Allied merchant fleets

And this while pissing away untold amounts of resources on a pointless surface fleet that did fuck all throughout the war.

aircraft production numbers propped up by huge numbers of single-engine fighters, and by production of engine-less frames towards the end of the war.

I'm not sure why this is supposed to be impressive. Almost every year on that chart has Britain listed as producing more aircraft.

Tirpitz tied up an insane amount of British resources simply by existing. It might not have had a very impressive career, but it definitely did more than nothing.

Tirpitz spend more time in a dry lock being repaired than raiding convoys or sitting in norway being attacked by planes (and then being repair)

That....doesn't actually contradict anything that I wrote.

more resources were spend on that ship by Germany than they were spend by the UK to sink it.

Nope. The British had to keep a large force to keep the Tirpitz in port. They had to continually send bombers to attack it - bombers that would have been better put to use elsewhere.

By just having the ship in Norway, it forced the British to keep enough forces on hand at all times in case the Tirpitz tried to pull another Bismarck.

>Almost every year on that chart has Britain listed as producing more aircraft.

Almost every year, the Brits were getting assloads of material and support from the U.S.

>Tirpitz tied up an insane amount of British resources simply by existing.

“While stationed in Norway, Tirpitz was also intended to be used to intercept Allied convoys to the Soviet Union, and two such missions were attempted in 1942.

In September 1943, Tirpitz, along with the battleship Scharnhorst, bombarded Allied positions on Spitzbergen, the only time the ship used her main battery in an offensive role.

Shortly thereafter, the ship was damaged in an attack by British mini-submarines and subsequently subjected to a series of large-scale air raids.

On 12 November 1944, British Lancaster bombers equipped with 12,000-pound (5,400kg) "Tallboy" bombs scored two direct hits and a near miss which caused the ship to capsize rapidly.”

Wow, what a good investment that was!…

>shit out masses of single-engine fighters without engines half the time in 44
>can't even match 42 USA

[laughing yanks]

>They had to continually send bombers to attack it - bombers that would have been better put to use elsewhere.
what are force of 50-100 bombers compare to the huge numbers they got by late war?
>By just having the ship in Norway, it forced the British to keep enough forces on hand at all times in case the Tirpitz tried to pull another Bismarck.
the Tirpitz would never leave Norway, the RN had a total dominance on sea and by late war the uboots were already stop being a problem like in 1940 thanks to radar

There is only so much you can do when you're vastly outnumbered.

>Scharnhorst
best boy tho

poor fella

>missing the fact it forced the RN to hold several BBs in the North Atlantic for most of the war when it could be using them in the Med/Far East
What part of fleet in being do you not understand?

U-boat effectiveness peaked in early 43, but they were still a problem through the war because there were SO FUCKING MANY.

Building more U-boats instead of battleships early in the war probably would have been the right way to go. Churchill always said that throughout the whole war, the only thing that truly scared him were U-boats. The two Scharnhorst-class battleships cost close to 150 million Reichsmarks apiece, and the two Bismarck-class ships cost nearly 250 million Reichsmarks each for this amount of money, the Germans could have built more than a hundred additional Type VII U-boats. That being said, saying that the surface fleet accomplished nothing is simply wrong.

It's just a matter of having limited time and resources. The US was able to have a very powerful surface fleet and a large submarine navy at the same time. Germany was forced to make very unpleasant compromises due to not having that same production capacity. Factories were the real super-weapons of WW2.

Germany would have been better off building a time machine than wasting valuable resources building this useless fleet. Britian would surely fall if the Germans won the time war.

>Germans build a time machine
[DOCTOR INTERRUPT]

>What part of fleet in being do you not understand?

The war with Japan was a distant 2nd fiddle and even more so, once the U.S. stepped in.

That 50,000+ tons of steel (not to mention all the man-hours, fuel, etc.) that was the Tirpitz, could have been FAR better spent on subs and tanks.

>There is only so much you can do when you're vastly outnumbered.

Indeed, like not wasting resources on weapons systems that don't help you win the war...

Not talking about Japan, talking about the Med. With the RN free to dedicate the full surface fleet there with the US handling the Far East, they'd clobber the Regia Marina, take the Med, and ruin Rommel's day even faster.

Type XXIs were still having technical problems in 45 and only 2 of them ever got patrols. Maybe if they didn't build a shitton of U-boats that didn't work they might have done better.

I certainly hope you're not implying that long-range bombers would have been a better investment. At least Tirpitz was able to function as a Fleet-In-Being. Bombers would have been absolutely useless for Germany.

>Tirpitz, could have been FAR better spent on subs and tanks.
why triggers me more are the Dora and the other railway guns

but then the real problem are not the tanks. but the crews

But a fleet in being is literally a better option than shitting away your prewar production on a battle of attrition? If you're out-produced you won't be able to win the attrition, so it's better to use your limited naval production to tie up the enemy's.

HITLER: “Build me ze blue-water surface fleet!”
SPEER: “But why, mein Fuhrer?”
HITLER: “Because then we’ll be… a fleet-in-being!”
SPEER: “And… then, mein Fuhrer?”
HITLER: “Well… then the overwhelmingly more powerful British navy will have to keep a couple of it’s literally hundreds of ships around to keep an eye on us!”
SPEER: “Jawohl, mein Fuhrer!”

And yet it still makes more sense than your bomber idea.

>Building more U-boats instead of battleships early in the war probably would have been the right way to go.
Battleships were started before the war. If Germany makes the decision to build Uboats in 1936, that's when the war would begin.

>whining about weapons that would win the war
>posting bombers

The Luftwaffe bomber fleet was effectively useless by the end of 1943 because there weren't enough fighters to protect them.

So you're saying that Germany can't build any U-boats until the war starts?

Any attempt to bomb Britain was a lost cause.

Not even Britain - even the Soviets had enough fighters to make it almost impossible for Luftwaffe bombers to do anything even if they were being babysitted by fighters.

If you look at close air support units that the Luftwaffe had, you'll see that by 1943 they were starting to replace all their Stukas with Fw 190s.

> discussing history
> whining

Why are you even here?

But the fact remains that the Germans could not effectively strike the UK (or the U.S.S.R.) as they had no effective heavy bombers and escort fighters. Meanwhile, the Germans surface fleet that cost them fuck loads of material, man-power and money, effectively did nothing throughout the war.

"The surface forces can do no more than show that they know how to die gallantly."
— Grand Admiral Erich Raeder —

He might have not have been the smart, as it turns out

>But the fact remains that the Germans could not effectively strike the UK (or the U.S.S.R.) as they had no effective heavy bombers and escort fighters.

It wouldn't have made any difference if they had those things. Bombing was a losing game.

or just go back in time and off the first anglos in doggerland

>almost impossible for Luftwaffe bombers to do anything
>Bombing was a losing game.

Except that's exactly what the UK and U.S. did to Germany.

>Except that's exactly what the UK and U.S. did to Germany.

And it was completely ineffective for the most part.

He didnt know war tactics

With hugely more production than the Germans were able to bring to bear, and OH YEAH, IT DIDN'T WIN THE WAR ALONE and required ground invasion to end the war.

Hell, strategic bombing didn't even absolutely reduce German production, it just kept it from increasing faster than it historically did. So yes, bombing is a losing game. You know what's a winning game? Having your tanks and artillery and boots on the ground stomping through your enemy's country.

The difference being the Allies had more than enough resources to throw at the bombing campaign and much less of a ground war. And even then, with the Allies regularly launching thousand-bomber raids on German cities, the impact was far less tangible than anyone had hoped. Production numbers didn't drop all that much, and the impact is better measured in the amount of resources the Luftwaffe had to devote to the West and the number of fighters downed in defense of the Reich than anything else.

The Luftwaffe, meanwhile, had always had a tactical focus with its bombing force, and German industry was struggling to just keep up with attrition of the aging machines it had, let alone build up a massive new force of an entirely new class (or more realistically, multiple classes, as they needed escorts) of aircraft.

What the Luftwaffe needed more than anything was pilots, and nothing could really fix that short of a major cultural shift that Nazi Germany wouldn't be capable of.

>You know what's a winning game? Having your tanks and artillery and boots on the ground stomping through your enemy's country.

And you can't do that if you don't control the skies.

There wasn't a single instance of effective strategic bombing in WW2 that didn't involve nukes. On the balance of things, bomber campaigns were just a great way to lose lots of pilots and kill a few civilians in the process.

Bombers can't control the skies.

>And you can't do that if you don't control the skies.

You control the skies with fighters, interceptors, and to a lesser extent smaller attack craft as they put a lot more pressure on the opposing air defense assets than heavy bombers.

They can be useful once you already do control the skies, but they don't really help you win it. Not to mention that you DO have successful ground offensives in absence of air superiority. The 1942 North African offensives, or the 1943 Soviet offensives.

Try the Transport Plan.

Depends what you consider to be effective. The bombing of Germany had a lot of "soft" consequences - people fled cities, resources better used elsewhere were diverted to defend the skies over Germany, and experienced men were killed over Germany. The strategic bombing did fail at its original goal - to grind German production to a halt, or at least slow it down.

But it was devastatingly to the Luftwaffe in the long run. Countless pilots were killed in defense of the Reich, draining resources from the Eastern Front. Even the Luftwaffe's second greatest ace, Gunther Rall, was downed over Germany and put out of action for the remainder of the war less than ten sorties into his career there. And meanwhile, the Eastern Front was horrifically undermanned. The Luftwaffe threw all of its available resources into Kursk, leaving the skies open over the rest of the front, and by 1944 the Luftwaffe could only spare a single fighter gruppe and a single schlachtgeschwader gruppe to defend the Crimea against roughly 1,000 Soviet aircraft.

If it weren't for the Allied bombing drawing so many resources away from the Eastern Front, the Luftwaffe may have been able to hold onto air superiority for a bit longer.

>Try the Transport Plan.

I accept this refutation.

But I maintain that most bombing campaigns were a waste of resources, more inspired by a primal desire for revenge then by practical concerns. And that equally applies to campaigns by both sides.

Bombers didn't break the Luftwaffe. Fighters like the P-51 did. And then bombers only became viable after the majority of the Luftwaffe was already in flames.

If you want something, at least on the British side, I would recommend pic related. It goes quite a lot into the interplay of personality and different interests as to why Britain ended up with the doctrine it had.

But quite a bit of it wasn't exactly a desire for revenge, but a stupid kind of terrified optimism. WW1 style trench warfare was enormously traumatic to pretty much all involved, and you see the military development of France, Germany, and the UK alike all coming up with ways to try to not have to stand in rows for four years pouring artillery on each other.

Strategic bombing was conceived of as a way of sidestepping land war entirely; if you can break their morale with some bombing raids directly on the civilians, you sidestep the need for even more enormously destructive land war. So they sunk an enormous amount of resources into Bomber Command, it was one of the few things that kept increasing budgets during the interwar period when everyone else had to tighten their proverbial belts, and once they were committed, it was really hard to get uncomitted and try something else even when it became very clear that it couldn't deliver on its promises.

>There wasn't a single instance of effective strategic bombing in WW2 that didn't involve nukes.

Alright, I'm out of here.

What bombers did was force the Luftwaffe to pool resources there. Fighters may have downed the Luftwaffe's fighters, but the Luftwaffe's fighters wouldn't have been there if not for the bombers. And fighters weren't the only strategic pieces. Thousands of guns were stuck looking into the skies, along with millions of rounds of ammunition and the men to crew these weapons. Radar sets and operators were stuck on the Kammhuber line instead of bbeing sent east where they were needed, as were experienced pilots.

And the sheer terror caused by the bombers made the impact even greater - cities were hoarding air defense resources, regardless of their strategic value, for fears of becoming another Hamburg.

...

because he was a fucking retard who couldnt command his way out of a paper bag

You must be joking...

>resources better used elsewhere were diverted to defend the skies over Germany
This. After the big bombing raids of 1943 the german air defence of the reich claimed an enormous amount of resources. More than the russian front got.

the idea was to lay low and strike unexpectedly, draw attention, leg it then strike again

disrupting shipping lines, causing materials to arrive late, sink merchants, avoid confrontation with the royal navy

in theory it works, but the graf spee was a bit too effective and so it left traces to be found by a british task force

in theory it is a brilliant plan actually
you occupy forces without being caught and sink tonnage at a moderate level without losses

however when you are greedy (stopping merchants in quick succession, board them, take the sailors as prisoners, then sink the ship) you are taking risks and the it can easily cost you your ship
as it did with the graf spee

If Germany builds a bunch of U-Boats, Britain will no longer be following a policy of appeasement. Do I need to connect the dots for you?

Because he was an autistic dumbass who thought he could win wars by doing what he wanted.

>in theory it is a brilliant plan actually
Actually, commerce raiding is a terrible plan in theory, and was conclusively refuted by Mahan then in practice by WW1.
Tying up a disproportionate amount of enemy forces doesn't mean shit when the enemy control the seas and 90% of their shipping gets through.

U-boat construction was permitted under the Anglo-German Naval Agreement.

Hahahahahaha

Because he had his mind on his thing ====D

This thing ^

Well yeah, countries like Finland built U-boat for Germany before the war.

The Allies during World War II dropped in excess of 2.5 million tons of bombs on Europe without this being directly decisive for the war. These bombings accomplished very little besides wrecking a great many historic cities and killing loads of civilians. And before you start calling me a Wehraboo, I fully acknowledge that the Luftwaffe started the trend by normalizing the idea that it was okay to bomb cities indiscriminately.

Smaller, more tactical aircraft like the P-51 and P-47 had a much bigger impact in terms of actually defeating the German military. Also, note that the Soviets were also able to fight all the way to Berlin without having any large bomber aircraft at all.

Britain didn't just outproduced Germany in aircraft, but also in tanks.

Tanks were one of the few things Britain didn't outproduce Germany in, user.

Germany almost did win the air war until the blitz started.

They were destroying UK airfields and planes and pilots faster than the UK could put them up and lucky for the british they started to bomb London instead of military targets.

There was a large chunk of british politicans who wanted peace.

Peace for the UK in 1940 would have been extremely generous and wouldn't have meant occupation or loss of land, probably just a return of the pre-WWI german colonies.

Considering it how bad France got beaten there was little reason to keep fighting the war.

So in other words, they were doing great until they bought into the strategic bombing meme.

.t retard

You know, if the airfield damage continued (We will, for the moment, ignore the fact that Germany could not keep up the bombing campaign indefinitely, and even if the air assets are destroyed, that doesn't mean the British will surrender, or even that a channel invasion is feasible), the British can always do something radical, like say, bring FG 10 or 12 down south, or rebase FG 11 somewhere out of Me-109 range.

>There was a large chunk of british politicans who wanted peace.

Backbenchers don't count user. And the one time you had a testing of waters for a vote of no confidence over Churchill (way after the Blitz, by the way), it got crushed. Part of that, by the way, is because Germany's recent treaty breaking left people skeptical of German promises, and there was the fact that Germany couldn't actually do all that much to the UK.

if you count purely tanks yes, STUG III are not tanks.

Well, its debatable who started it.

1. Lone german pilot flies several miles past his target and mistakes London for his air factory, nobody dies
2. Churchill calls bomber command and tells them to bomb berlin that night
3. Bomber command objects saying if they do that the germans will respond by actually bombing London and civilians will die
4. Churchill doesn't care they are losing the air race and it would take pressure off plane production
5. Hitler ignores attack n berlin
6. Churchill does it again every night for a week
7. Hitler gives speech in Reichstag calling for revenge thinking the public will turn on Churchill
8. Hitler pisses off British public and they go from almost wanting peace to never surrender

The blitz turned public opinion in favor of war and the year after the blitz the USSR was in the war and the situation was drastically different.

Germany wasn't asking for a surrender it was asking for a negotiated settlement and was willing to make concessions to the UK.

To raid british traffic, also supposedly to back a pro nazi coup in argentina