How formidable was the Kriegsmarine during ww2?

How formidable was the Kriegsmarine during ww2?
How did it compare to other nations navy and how well did it preform

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>How formidable was the Kriegsmarine during ww2?
Not very, but it was the fleet of a major power.

In overall capacity at 1939, it was well behind the real naval powers of the world, America, Britain, and Japan. It was behind Italy and France, but not to the same overwhelming degree that it was to the abovementioned navies. It was ahead of everyone else.

>Performance
I mean, they were kind of in a hopeless position from the get-go. The Royal Navy outtonned the Kriegsmarine by about 5:1, and had an enormous network of bases and things like air support from all over they could call upon which the Germans had no match for. The Germans never even tried to ship anything beyond the Baltic and a bit around the coast of Norway where they could cover them with their air assets, not their water assets; Germany's trade was restricted without a shot ever being fired.

With that conceded, they pretty much solely restricted themselves to attacking (mostly British) shipping. Of which they were somewhat effective, but really, it was a hopeless cause from the get-go. They could sink a lot of merchant ships, something on the order of about 16 million tons (but that's from memory, I could be way off), but they never succeeded in halting the acceleration of the British war economy or forcing them to surrender from the sting of convoy attacks.

It's force projection sucked and they only had 2 real successes with the 1st and 2nd happy times of merchant raiding, the Bismarck and Tirpitz were total wastes of time and contributed literally nothing except sinking an outdated Battlecruiser that got memed

Hood.

>nothing except sinking an outdated Battlecruiser that got memed

great analysis

It was probably the least powerful of the great powers navies but I think it got a better run then say Italy’s which ran out of oil and got stuck in port

How many stugs could Germany have built with materials from the battleships they were building?

What if the Bismarck was sent via railway to the eastern front? Could it have turned the tide?

Investing in fleets was a waste of resources for Germoney, but they couldn't know that ahead of time and it forced the Allies to likewise keep investing in their own fleets so it wasn't a total waste.

The raw materials aren't the problem, the problem is finding crews, supplying them with fuel, and the available skilled labor that know how to build things like assault guns instead of battleships. It's hard to say how much that actually comes out to, but it's certainly not the sum of the steel components or whatnot.

How much more advanced was German naval technology compared to everyone else?

Does anyone have any good book recommendations for the Kriegsmarine?

Hell, just a Veeky Forums infograph with German WWII books would be welcome.

Iron Coffins by Herbert Werner is really good. It's his memoirs as an officer and later captain of various U-Boats. It gives a good impression of just how badly the U-Boat fleet got its shit pushed in later on in the war.

Hitler chose the army rearmament tree

I actually have this one, and second it, certainly. I am curious if there are any books that are holistic and look at the entire war from a strategic view.

subsim.com/radioroom/showthread.php?t=175024

For the Kriegsmarine specifically or the history of Germany during the Second World War as a whole?

>How much more advanced was German naval technology compared to everyone else?

This better be a meme

The problem with this argument is that the Allies could afford to expend resources on a Navy, while Germany couldn’t. After aircraft, submarines were the second biggest resource sink for German Industry. Not saying that investing in something more effective would’ve won them the war, but it likely would’ve at least prolonged it.

What if Bismarck was sent via time masheen to the eastern front? Could it have turned the tide?

It is, there was a wehraboo in a thread last year claiming the Bismarck was the greatest battleship in the world and more advanced than the King George V so the Kreigsmarine was more advanced than the RN

It wasn't. There was something of a practical advantage though, because everything in the Kriegsmarine was relatively new, and most of the other navies of the world were using a spread of older ships, sometimes even pre-WW1 ships.

So while say, the Scharnhorst was far more advnaced than say, the Ramilles, it really wasn't compared to another modern battleship.

Kriegsmarine specifically.

A stug 3 is 24 tons, Bismarck is around 36,000 tons empty, so you could have made around 1,500 stugs for the raw material cost of a battleship.

However, the battleship parts are far more difficult to fabricate due to their large size.

Sorry. I misread this guy's post >In overall capacity at 1939, it was well behind the real naval powers of the world, America, Britain, and Japan. It was behind Italy and France, but not to the same overwhelming degree that it was to the abovementioned navies. It was ahead of everyone else.

> It was ahead of everyone else.

Sorry.