Many years back I had a board game called "War at Sea" - it was a WWII naval battle game. One curiosity in it was an extra ship piece for the Graf Zeppelin that let you play a "what if" scenario if the carrier had been used in the war.
@@Yes_im.a-lordpeacock we need more naval warfare board games tbh, would be neat to see one in the style of that one star wars table top game with the large ship moc's
There was also a civil war board game called Battle Cry and the WWI aerial combat games called Dogfight product by I believe Parker Brothers in the late 1960s.
@@loveofmangos001 I don't think so the 4 boiler/turbine groups would have developed around 150000 hp all together, enough to push her to 30 knots, also the power each of the 4 groups could provide was restricted from 50000 to 37500 hp
There about six Carriers listed for the Germans, btw. The first two were Graf Zeppelin-class, but the next pair would be a different class. There was also two Light Carriers. These two were conversions. Named Weser for one being converted from a Merchantman and Seydlitz, a Heavy Cruiser converted to a Carrier, but like Graf Zeppelin, abandoned and sunk later on. Part of the problem the Germans had, was that Fat Goeing didn't want a rival Air Force. He wanted absolute control over all Military Aircraft. Even as he was creating a ground force out of Luftwaffe personnel who promptly got kicked around every time, they actually had to fight someone. Many nations lack independent Naval Air Forces for the reason that the Air Force doesn't want one. In some cases, in some other nations it is the Army doesn't want the Navy to have a Naval Air Force. Whatever the reasoning, most of the time, they are basis and more a power grab by higher ups or some people not wanting to spend the extra money.
Then you have the royal navy which had an independent fleet air arm then merged it with the royal Air force and just before ww2 recreated an independent fleet air army.
@poil8351 Very true, and it was realized that RAF leadership was prioritizing their own needs over the RN's needs. Which is why the FAA was so behind and needed to acquire American Aircraft to rebuild their capabilities up to par. Something that didn't always work out either due to the differences caused by the decision to place all FAA assets under RAF authority. Ironically, the RAF Rank Structure is actually based on the RNAS the forerunner of the FAA.
@GrahamCStrouse Not really. The USAF has its own credibility. More to the point, there's little room for argument between the three over tasks and details. Though, transferring Ground Attack and localized Scouting back to the US Army would be more practical.
Another interesting carrier that could have been was the Weser. She was originally built as to be the 5th of 6 Admiral Hipper class heavy cruisers under the name Seydlitz, but later planned to switch the eight 8-inch guns to twelve 6-inch light cruiser guns. However, after seeing the success of Royal Navy carriers (especially of HMS Ark Royal during the Hunt for the Bismarck) they decided to begin conversion to a carrier. She was about 70% complete when the Soviets began closing in, and so she too was scuttled.
Given its small size, the _Weser_ likely would have been useful as a light aircraft carrier supporting the larger _Graf Zeppelin_ in the Atlantic Theater. This would have been similar in practice to what the U.S. Navy and Royal Navy did with their fleet carriers and light aircraft carriers in the Pacific Theater.
@@christopherwang4392 the German Navy at that time really needed fighter cover. But their ideas on how to use aircraft carriers would be nice in the early days 30s with that gun battery.
Actually, Seydlitz, and Lützow were originally designed with 12 150mm guns on the same hull. But they were later re-ordered as normal Admiral Hipper class CAs. Seydlitz was nearly complete when the order to convert her into a CV was given...
One of the biggest reasons Germany's surface fleet wasn't ready for WWII is that Hitler promised Erich Raeder, head of the Kriegsmarine that he wouldn't start WWII until 1947, so the fleet that they were hoping for was still being built. When Hitler declared war in 1939, Raeder made the comment "All we can do is die gallantly". Those early defeats were why Raeder was replaced in 1943 with Karl Donitz, with the emphasis on U-boats, which is what Hitler wanted all along. Hitler had already considered following the loss of the Bismarck scrapping the entire surface fleet completely. It was why the Tirpitz was never used to its potential and why Scharnhorst & Gneisenau never received their upgrade in main armament. They were designed in mind with the ability that once the war began and the Washington Treaty no longer mattered, the nine 11-inch guns in three triple turrets would be replaced with six 15-inch guns in three dual gun turrets, very similar to the look of the HMS Repulse & Renown.
Scharnhorst and Gniesau almost got tripple 13 inch or 12 inch guns. The 12 inch guns were actually built and used as shore guns. Hitler preferred these ships with 11 inch guns because he wanted to ease the Anglo-German Naval Treaty through. The 11 inch caliber was easier to make technically but the main reason was political.
From a few sources Graf Zeppelin had some Components that were based on the Japanese Carrier Akagi, which was originally supposed to be an Amagi-Class Battle Cruisers, Akagi would only be the one to undergo the conversion with Amagi being scrapped from the Kanto Earthquake of 1923 and the Washington Naval Treaty and her two other sister ships Takao and Atago would never see the light of day, as their names would be reused for the first two ships of Heavy Cruisers of the same name
The problem of a German aircraft carrier would have been resupply. The Kriegsmarine simply didn't have enough colliers to support the extended missions this vessel was planned for, not to mention the lack of other support vessels needed.
@@JohnSmith-mh1mp Indeed the majority of the German Navy by WW2 ran on oil fired steam turbines with diesel used for the u-boats, s-boats, the pocket battle ships such as Graf Spey and the planned H-class battle ships. Diesel is much more efficient (over 30% more) but the engines bulkier and these ships a little slower. The choice of diesel was because of the lack of refueling opportunities. Some of the German ships did run of superheated steam which made them less reliable initially.
@@JohnKickboxing Either the pilots are gunning their engines, or perhaps the German Navy planned to use black powder charges to power catapults to launch aircraft. From the video it appears some type of catapult system might have been set up, but I cannot confirm this theory.
The Graf Zeppelin actually helped the Allies win the war by taking money, raw resources like steel that could and would have built more tanks, or submarines. The Allies actually figured out fairly early on in the war that it would be a mistake to bomb the ship because it was still a German dream that they could maybe complete it and use it. That would have also been a money and time/resource suck as they had no experience with operating aircraft carriers. back then it took countries about 15 to 20 years to develop just the basic understanding and operational procedures to use aircraft carrier doctrine. Italy was in a similar state with an almost completed aircraft carrier and a second one being worked on.
Rather than engaging in naval battles against enemy fleet carriers, the _Graf Zeppelin_ class aircraft carriers would have been more useful as commerce raiders against Allied merchant shipping.
Right? If nothing else, the diversion in resources to skink or contain it would have helped Germany, especially if it could have gotten out to Brest or some other French Atlantic harbor.
Horrible waste of resources Germany didn't have to spare for literally no gain. This ship would have been cannon fodder like the rest of the German surface force, especially the big capitol ships. Germany gained nothing from deploying a single one, nothing.
Andrea Doria sank in 1956 and by 2004 there wasn’t much left but the outer hull and a splayed debris field where the superstructure once was. The Zeppelin is in roughly the same depth (80m or 240 feet) So I’m guessing the Polish research vessel picked up a hull and that’s about it. Sadly marine archeology is at the relentless mercy of the hydrography 24/7/365.
It's generally accepted that to keep one WW2 carrier at sea, you needed at least three to allow for one being overhauled, repaired or up-dated with another working-up in preparation for ops., so completing one carrier without a task force of escorts would have have been futile (at least Hitler got that right). Apart from anything else, they had no decent naval aircraft: in trials the Stuka's undercarriage proved too fragile to cope with deck-landings, and the Bf 109T, which had a larger wing to cope with low approach speeds, had an even more fragile undercarriage and airframe, and limited range. A week's operation in North Atlantic conditions and they wouldn't have had a plane fit to fly.
that was not true in ww2. Don't base modern Navy ops on ww2 era tempo. US carriers fighting in the Pacific spent much greater periods under operation and generally only returned for port for longer than a few days if they were damaged. And in some cases even when they were damaged they spent only a few days in port. But we were able to keep all our Flat tops in combat unless they took Torpedo hits. But we really can't compare US Navy doctrine to any potential Doctrine from Germany's navy since it was never a true sea control navy and was only valuable in terms of producing trouble for British shipping. The real issue was Germany spent way to much of its resources on building Battleships which had not utility for Germany's limited resources. and poor cooperation between the German Navy and Airforce. Germany had plenty of R&D potential to navalize their normal Land Based Aircraft But they put way to much focus on building up their Battlefleet- 2 Battleships and 2 Battle Cruisers would have been much better spent on Aircraft Carriers- and i don't even mean as true "capitol ships" but carriers are superior in the Raiding missions which from the Start was going to be the only possible value of the German Navy going into WW2. Probably Germany would have been best served by building Carriers on the Scharnhorst Class hull with potentially others on the smaller Cruiser Hulls of the Hipper Class similar to how the US had the Independence class CVLs Given German Capitol Ship output in ww2 they could probably produced up to 5 fleet Carriers and possibly 4 or more light carriers. This of course could only remotely be possible if the German Navy had began its re-armament programs with a intent to build Carriers from the beginning. While the German Army was forward looking the Germany Navy was not- under Admiral Raeder at least. I do think that Germany could have built up a robust Aircraft Carrier force had they committed Earlier to its development starting in the Early 30s when the Nazi's started their re-armament programs.
They had ideas to use the FW190. That actually can carry a torpedo! Sturdy plane and mixing A-variant strike aircraft and D-variant interceptors could have worked
@@MrChickennugget360 Consider that the US and UK had several carriers serving as training vessels, including paddle wheel flat tops on the Great Lakes, the fleet carriers enjoyed a steady supply of replacement pilots without disrupting their operational tempo. These same carriers had the luxury to experiment with new equipment and doctrine which then got passed along the pipeline to the fleet carriers. The sole carrier in an entire navy is not equal to the capability of a single carrier of a navy with multiple carriers.
She would have been swarmed and attacked the second she put to sea. She never would have lasted a week for the planes to be broke in let alone worn out. The Royal Navy would have pounced on her so fast she wouldn't be able to do anything but try to run.
Unfortunately Hermann Goering ran the German airforce and jealously refused to let the navy run or operate any of it's own aircraft. So if the Graff Zeppelin had been finished and commissioned into service would the pilots have their own chain of command ? If the captain of the carrier sailed them close to a target would the pilots refuse to fly because somewhere back in Berlin some airforce general couldn't find the famously drug addicted Goering to OK the mission?
An air force being responsible for everything to do with air ops from naval ships traced back to a bad proposal made by General Smuts at the request of the British government. That, in turn, was a part of a good proposal creating the stand alone RAF. The result was that the Fleet Air Arm was an unwanted, undernourished, semi orphan of the RAF during the Great Depression whose main function, Swordfish TBs excepted, seemed to be awarding contracts keeping the makers of poorly designed heavier than air machines from closing shop. Once the FAA escaped back to the RN in WW2, courtesy of Winston Churchill, it did tend to favour the "better products" available from American firms closely tied to the USN for obvious reasons. When the FAA managed to get the plentiful, scary, "widow maker Corsair" into fighting trim for carrier operations along with minimal casualties, everyone sat up and took notice.
I'd hope for the sake of their own lives the German Brass on the ship would get along no matter what was happening in Berlin, once the ship was at sea they (the Ships Captain and the Wing Commander) were the Highest ranking, end of. But Germany's entire Gov was much like we see today with people in places because of who they know not what they know, and rivalries between adolescents with too much power and not enough pride leak all over the place through their vassals. it can't work if you can't cooperate, the Japanese Navy and Army found that out at the cost of many Japanese "peasants" lives.
Also to add would the pilots or ships even have the Gasoline for worthwhile attacks considering Germany was already having massive fuel problems and focusing heavily on land forces.
The Germans did not have the industrial capacity or the resources to build a Navy, equal powerful as their Army and their Airforce. So they opted to focus in building a submarine fleet. A logical decision, actual one of the few ones that they took during WW II.
I agree, Had a man like Bismarck been Chancellor the Germans would have never fought a three front war. He would allied with the Poles because of his distrust of Communism or should I say socialism and split the French from the English, something like that. He defiantly would have never taking Germany to war before the military was ready to fight a war. There would have not been a genocide committed eighter. Bismarck's favorite banker was Jewish and helped the Empire with the three wars to untied Germany in 1871.
As a nation with primarily land borders, Germany needed a very strong army, which needed support from an air force. The navy was an afterthought. For Britain, the navy was the premiere service, followed by the RAF and then the Army was an afterthought (literally, as Chamberlain's government periodically froze the expansion of the army in favor of growth in the RN and RAF to prepare Britain for war. Previous governments did much the same. Add to that Britain had greater shipbuilding capacity. How to catch up with that? When Bismarck was laid down (followed by Tirpitz and Graf Zeppelin months later), Germany had no battleships, and just two battlecruisers under construction. Britain had 12 (admittedly old) battleships, 3 battecruisers, 5 aircraft carriers and a sixth under construction. In response to Germany commencing Bismarck, Tirpitz and Graf Zeppelin, the Royal Navy began construction of 5 fast battleships and 4 more aircraft carriers. They couldn't hope to match Britain. Adding France and it gets worse. (and if the Stresa Front had been held together, that might have been Britain, France and Italy against Germany.
@@ulrichschnell2331 I can't remember who coined the phrase that Germany lost because they were run by Nazis. Decisions made from their ideology instead of reality. The waste, corruption and dysfunction inherent in their system. So many things would have changed if the Nazis never came to power.
But they got started on the submarine construction too late. They had a fairly free reign in 1939 and early 1940 with their radio coordinated wolf pack tactics that defeated the convoy system that was so effective in WW I, leaving the Royal Navy scrambling to learn all over again how to defeat the u-boats. Taking advantage of that time with a large u-boat force, they might have cut Britain off from supplies. I cringe at the thought of Hastings replacing Chamberlain instead of Churchill. The British and Americans put a fortune into developing technologies to fight the u-boats. The Germans had the technological edge in designing/building u-boats, but it was no match for the UK/USA advantage in technology to hunt submarines (culminating with radars so sensitive they could detect the snorkel of a submerged submarine. By 1943, the Battle of the Atlantic had been won by the Western Allies.
@@iansneddon2956 You are right of course. The statement was describing a scenario in which the Bismarck might had survived another day. If Graff Zeppelin had been built in time for this battle, Great Britian would had suffered greater losses.
The 2nd Graf Zeppelin-Class carrier was to be called Peter Strasser. Germany also had planned to convert 2 ocean liner ships (forgot their names) to be carriers but the plans was cancelled too. They was to be the Jade-Class light carriers Jade and Elbe .
Considering what happened to pretty much ever large German capital ship, they'd be lucky get out of dry dock before the RAF reduced them to smoldering wrecks
@@timphillips9954 No, not really. Truth is that the German Navy was just too damn small to fight off the US and Royal Navy, who had the largest fleets. Once word about any potential German carrier got out, they would be essential targets. Chances are the Kreigsmarine would probably chance steaming them to a secure port and stay there moored up for the duration of the war, like Tirpitz.
@@KnowYoutheDukeofArgyll1841 The German navy was defeated before the Americans even entered the war. The RN / RAF sunk all the German, Italian and most of the French capital ships before the Americans even decided which side they were on! The Americans played on a junior role in the final stages of the battle of the Atlantic and even less in the med and Indian ocean, middle East around the cape and West African coast!
I love learning about all these interesting one off creations. Keep them coming. Would be very interested to hear about all the different kinds of airships that have been around. Also the American b58 hustler
I think the "best case scenario" for Nazi Germany was a stalemate, and that's stretching things. In the event of a stalemate, the US would have used nuclear weapons in original German territory.
Probably, but the Atlantic was very different from the Pacific. Against Imperial Japan, they island hopped until they were in reach for an amphibian invasion. The Atlantic only had one island close enough to the enemy coasts to allow preparations for an assault: Great Britain. Had Nazi Germany successfully invaded it, the US would have no place to concentrate the troops needed. Maybe Russia, but that's if they defeated Japan first, and even then it was a long trip over enemy waters. As for the nuclear card, they would have no aerial base close enough to send heavy bombers to any significant target. I don't know what the end result would be, but what is sure is that the war would've continued many years more.
@@TheAKgunner You're right, I missed Iceland. It's still too far to be used as a platform for an invasion, but a B-29 could easily reach Berlin or any other German city from there. The question still remains if they could make it through an occupied Europe, but it's technically possible.
It had a tiny air group for 1942 and had no ships that would have been effective as escorts. Had it sailed it would have been the tomb of 2000 men. See Drachinifel's video 'KMS Graf Zeppelin - Guide 194 (NB)' for good info on the ship.
Had it been used as additional defense in the Fjords with Tirpitz, and air support for Scharnhorst's convoy raid they may have been able to pose a greater threat.
@@jamesknight3070 I don't think so. Aircraft Carriers of the time (and now, except for VTOL) need to be moving at speed to launch their aircraft, the confined waters of a Fjord would not allow that even if it could get enough steam to be able to move. As for the Scharnhorst's convoy raid... have you seen what the weather was like on that day? If the Germans had a carrier available for the raid, the allies would have had a carrier with Duke of York and escort carrier (or possibly a MAC) to assist in the convoy's defence, but on the day neither side would have been able to launch any planes.
I believe that the limited resources that Germany had would have been better focused on turning out even more and more advanced submarines. You can build a lot of subs for the materials in carriers and battleships. Not as glamorous but very likely more efficient.
You are correct Bigfoot. I once read that for the price of 1 battleship, you can built 38 submarines. Submarines would needed far less crew: 42-46 officers and men per U boat (46 crew x 38 U boats = 1748 total), versus 2065 officers and men on a Bismarck battleship. Submarines were much harder to locate and destroy then a single battleship or aircraft carrier. Because submarines are smaller and can crash dive.
A Bv155 video would be awesome. The twists and turns that project took are something else, to the point where even though one still exists (in Smithsonian storage), for a long time nobody was sure exactly what airframe it WAS (V2 vs V3). That, and it's just a beautiful airplane. In an awkward, gangley sort of way.
The fact is that Germany didn't really need a carrier. Most of their surface operations were in the Baltic and North Seas, within range of land based airpower. While airplanes could be of some help for raiders, that would have required a lot more resources (that Germany couldn't afford) than submarines and regular surface raiders needed.
One need only look at a map of Germany and see that the pathway to the sea is easily blocked Britain and France (or Holland, Belgium, Denmark if they are so inclined) to realize that Capital Ships were almost useless except in the situation that Germany controlled France etc. The fall of France was almost unexpected and prior to the battle of France priority had to be given to the Germany Army, Tactical Aircraft for the Luftwaffe. No point having long range strategic bombers, Battleships and aircraft carriers if France and Poland are over running Germany (and Both could have done so easily prior to 1937)
need after 💩-church ⛪hilltop declared war and made Europe a show 😉 and im 🇬🇧 but leaving a navy without landing on uk shore's was a big mistake and letting the usa 🇺🇸 back uk 🇬🇧 ended with the 3-rike losing the war from 1942 ish onwards as diplomats failed to keep church ⛪in check
I would have to say ..a couple aircraft carriers along with the Wolf pack in the Atlantic could have been bad bad news for Britain. Seriously would have stopped a bunch of freedom ships bringing Britain needed munitions .
The reality is that Germany did send some very valuable ships wayyyy out of friendly aircraft range. They tried to do Commerce Raiding with surface ships. Graf Spee was caught out in the Atlantic, fought the Battle of the River Plate in 1939 against the British. She ran for neutral Uruguay but couldn't stay there long. The British being real sly, fooled the Germans into thinking that a superior force of Royal Navy ships were on the way to pounce on Graf Spee after she leaves the neutral port and waters, when there really wasn't. The captain seeing no good way out for his men with no viable military action, elected to scuttle his ship and turn the crew over to Uruguay, who transferred them over to Argentinia for internment. The captain committed suicide. The Kriegsmarine did Operation Berlin in January - March 1941 with both Scharnhorst-class Battleships. They got into the Atlantic and did quite a bit of damage out there. VAdm Lutjens was in command. The operation was successful and they made the Royal Navy look bad. However, the Germans wanted to repeat Operation Berlin with Lutjens again in command of the mission, Operation Rheinubung. Lutjens wanted to do this with both the Scharnhorst-class and both Bismarck-class Battleships. However, the Scharnhorsts had suffered damage and would take a while to return to service. Tirpitz was brand spanking new and the crew had not been trained. Lutjens wanted to delay Rheinubung but GAdm Raeder would have none of it. So Bismarck was sortied only with Cruiser Prinz Eugen in May 1941 and we all know how that turned out. After Bismarck was lost was when the Kriegsmarine stopped their surface ship sorties past friendly aircraft range.
@@killhacker5776 The Germans were not just going to easily have a bunch of Carriers. There were a lot of obstacles for it. Their resources and shipbuilding weren't up to it. The fact is the Kriegsmarine was quite weak, the Italian Navy was far stronger than they were, and even then the Royal Navy handled both navies very well even before the European Axis powers declared war on the USA. I know there was a plan for Germany to magically build a new Battle Fleet to rival the Royal Navy, which I laughed at because it was nothing more than wishful thinking. The Kriegsmarine, like the French Navy, had a major problem. Germany like France, was a continental European power, meaning they shared borders with rivals. Both countries have a long historical tradition of maintaining very powerful armies. For Germany this was demanded, as almost all compass directions had the country share borders with nations that they had been recently at war with. The French Navy, just like the Kriegsmarine, wanted to do and build more, but the army was more important and both nations had way more finite resources. And now for the Kriegsmarine, outside the Army / Heer having higher priorities, during the 1930s they faced a major hurdle for naval aviation: The Luftwaffe. Hermann Goring had a massive hatred of the Kriegsmarine. Germany is also one of those countries where the Air Force controlled all military aviation, and these air forces tend to hate the naval services that they competed with. The Luftwaffe often c-blocked the Kriegsmarine in trying to get new aircraft designs for carrier use. The Luftwaffe even went further in trying as much as possible to deny the Kriegsmarine pilots for their efforts towards a carrier and carrier air group. You can kind of understand why the Luftwaffe acted the way it did, because they had tons of responsibilities already, and the war would eventually show the Luftwaffe was not large enough to do what was asked of it. There simply was no way Germany was going to get a bunch of fancy new capital ships, especially Carriers. They had far more pressing priorities on land, and the Kriegsmarine as a service was treated like red headed step children. Prussia / Germany have long had a big affair with the army, the Luftwaffe had the powerful Goring to champion its cause. And this left the Kriegsmarine being a starved afterthought.
The reason Germany couldn't get their aircraft carriers up and running was because they didn't use Squarespace? That's a hell of a choice for an ad transition. I really enjoy your writing.
Funnily enough, I only started to know the Graf Zeppelin Aircraft Carrier B from a certain game. But due to the ship never being given a name, it was name as *KMS Peter Strasser* the second aircraft carrier of the Graf Zeppelin class
That self-defending carrier concept is very similar to what the Soviet Union did years later. When you know you don't have enogh warships to protect the carrier this tends to be the obvious option.
The best defence for an aircraft carrier is an additional aircraft carrier. Soviets like(d) Nazi Kanonenkitsch and support(ed) George Lukas because of this preference (Russia Hoax)
In practice, it was a very bad idea. Adding large guns to a carrier reduced the space and resources available for the air group. More, odds were that if a carrier did get intercepted on the surface, a few 8 inch guns wouldn't particularly help. The Americans figured this out with the Lexington-class carriers (which originally had large guns), while the British and Japanese never even tried it.
The navy wasn’t even ready in 1939 mostly due to production and oil supply. There plan was to match the Royal Navy by 1944, the submarine HQ was in a shed in 1939.
World of Warships recently had a update that includes most of the planned German Aircraft Carriers not just the Graf Zepplin! And not only rare German designs, but ship designs from many other nations that were never made it to the shipyard. You should check it out!
Been a couple months since they were added to PC and Legends (console), but were also added to Blitz (mobile) today. You can actually get into and win fun gunfight duels against other carriers lol, at least on Legends
Ah, the glory days before the captain skills rework when you could run a secondary build Graf Zeppelin and cackle maniacally as any DD that got within torp range would get nuked.
This comment is brought to you by World of Warships. Sign up today to get this limited deal! In retrospect, that would have been a better sponsor for this video instead of Squarespace
I think the German carrier would’ve been a failure. The design of the deck was pretty bad. Having the catapults on top of the deck instead of recessed into it like on modern carriers meant you couldn’t use the entire deck as a landing surface, and you couldn’t launch your planes in large waves like they used to back then. An angled deck would’ve made more sense, but we wouldn’t see those until the jet era. Another problem I found with the German’s plan was their refusal to use planes built specifically for carrier use. Other countries did that for a reason. If you take a regular fighter plane, put a tail hook on it, and try to land it on a carrier, you’ll probably crash when your landing gear fails. Landing on a carrier is a controlled crash. You’re literally slamming down on the deck. That’s why planes designed for carrier use have beefier landing gear designed to withstand the stress of landings. Carrier planes also have other changes, such as folding wings so they take up less room and can be stored more easily. Of course, you also have to consider that the German surface fleet wasn’t the greatest. They chose to build it around two gigantic battleships that only managed to make themselves into large targets. One carrier wouldn’t have made a difference. Even if they’d been able to organize a carrier strike force, they were outnumbered by the British and American Navies. The only thing that would’ve changed would’ve been the presence of British and American carriers in the European theater to hunt down the German carrier. It’s wartime career would’ve been very short.
The other problem of adding a tail hook to a land plane besides landing gear strength is the stopping force is applied to the tail and several land plane conversions had the tail pulled off
To be honest, a carrier would have been far better than any battleship in WWII in terms of actual strategic value (the fact every major power save the USSR decided to put new battleships in service in WWII turned out to be a mistake for everyone involved, since they either did nothing or, for the Americans and British, were mostly limited to supporting roles that were already covered much more cost-effectively in other ways, making the new battleships pointless anyways). However, Graf Zeppelin was so badly designed that she’d still basically be useless, especially compared to the better-designed British carriers she’d be facing.
The core of the Kreigsmarine's carrier problem was that they had absolutely no experience in carrier design, training or doctrine. As far as carrier fleets go, they would have been dead last among the major powers. They would have been feeling their way half-blind in the early years of the war as they would be basically training on the job, which is no way to fight a war. Contrast that with the top-notch carrier fleets of the US, Britain and Japan, all of which had been training intensely for years. It would have been over very quickly, I think, for the Graf Zeppelin and her would-be sister ships.
But the concept of "Navy aircraft" was a long trial and error project, and history have not been fair with those unsung heroes, the Naval Test Pilots. I knew one of them from the Vietnam era.
The outcome would have been a somewhat large naval battle off the Grand Banks, resulting in the Graf Zeppelin sinking. With only one carrier and nearly no surface fleet to protect it, it would have been easy prey for the Royal Navy and the USN.
@@generalripper7528 Exactly, as a nation with mostly land borders in the center of Europe, Germany needed a strong army supported by a strong air force. The navy was an afterthought. As an island nation with an overseas empire, Britain needed a strong navy, a modern air force, and.... the army was the afterthought. It was a stalemate. Germany couldn't even defeat the RAF, much less hope to defeat the Royal Navy. So Germany could not realistically invade Britain while the British lacked a strong enough army to invade Nazi occupied Europe alone.
Graf Zepplin: *scuttled * Russians: *Raise it * Graf Zepplin: YAY IM GONNA BE FINISHED! Russians: *You are gonna make a great target ship* Graf Zepplin: *;-;*
typical Russian attitude. Russians got themselves an aircraft carrier but used it for target practice instead of as a template for future aircraft carriers unlike that of the cursed ridden Kutzenov. thats pretty short sighted.
It actually might serve the Russian Navy quite well, and not just as a target vessel. It probably wouldn't be much worse than the floating wreck the Russian Navy operates now. You know, the mighty Admiral Kuznetsov with it's high tech smokescreen and formidable tugboat escorts.
The alt-history clips were from “The man in the high castle” which is set in a 1960s German and Japanese Co-occupied USA. A world where the Riech reached it’s full potential and the world fell to it and its allies. A very good show 10/10 recommended
The Germans would have likely lost to American carriers in short order. Our shipboard fighters like the Wildcat (and later Hellcat which ran rings around Zeros), would have done so to the modified German fighters, while American dive-bombers and torpedo planes would have advantages the Germans didn't have then, including not having a real torpedo plane to begin with. The Ju-88 was already a sitting duck against fighters by 1940; our TBD Devastator was the same, but had the advantage of a level-flight torpedo drop, and having fighter escort from our larger carriers. Plus we had more operational experience with our carriers than the Germans would ever gotten by 1941-1942 (Battle of Midway alone was more US carriers, aircraft and ships than Germany could ever hope to have or deal with).
They were right to scrap it as it was a terrible idea. The Tirpitz was one of the most powerful battleships ever made and they couldn't get it to sea. The Bismarck left Germany on 19th May, and was sunk on the 26th. It lasted just a week. A far more vulnerable aircraft carrier would have been close to useless in the circumstances Germany faced. I think it's also less known than it ought to be that Britain had 7 aircraft carriers at the start of WWII, and built a further 19 during the war, plus 46 fleet carriers. This disparity was similar in other ship classes. Hitler was simply correct to abandon a surface navy approach to the war and focus on submarines (which nearly worked), and realistically the US was never in any danger of a major German attack until Britain was defeated. There was a reason starving Britain was their best chance, because in outright naval conflict there was only going to be one winner.
They did build one, the Graf Zeppelin and it was 85% completed. Sadly, Goering stole the defensive guns twice and refused to focus on building carrier based aircraft. Egoes killed the idea.
This was fascinating! If you think about it, the Kriegsmarine actually had a very powerful surface fleet, with 4 major battleships, 3 pocket battleships and three heavy cruisers, as well as a decent amount of light cruisers and destroyers. Add the Graff Zepplin into the mix and you have a significant battle fleet. The problem was, they spent their ships piecemeal, never bringing their units together into a significant fighting force. Together, I'm sure they could have been a real threat to the British home fleet. Add in the U-Boats and Germany could very well have won the war at sea!
They could never have won the war at sea, every ship the British lost could be replaced, while every loss they encountered would be gone forever. Factor in as well that when 'Murica got involved, something like one of the Missouri class ships would be more than a match for anything the Germans had, and that's not even counting the aircraft the allies would throw at them, nor the royal navy. Threat, sure, in the same way that the Bismark was a threat. Nobody likes getting a black eye. But win the sea? The lyrics of Rule Britannia will fill you in on that one mate lol.
The German's real problem would have been the lack of experienced pilots and crews. The Japanese didn't lose all their carriers at Midway but they did lose their best trained seamen. From that point on, all of their carrier operations were with the JV team and the result was the "Marianas Turkey Shoot". If the Germans tried to deploy an aircraft carrier straight into combat without at least a decade of training and experience it would have been briefly annoyed the British and Americans before they put it on the bottom of the ocean.
Worse, even their doctrine to use carrier is very questionable, at best. Other major navy had spend 25 years to really convince that carrier is actually not suck, at best. And only during the war that convince carrier could do so much more than just "not suck", often the most hardest way. And here we are, the whole "What if: German Carrier Edition" discussion is filled with survivor bias Edit : grammar
According to some of the designs, it looks like the air carrier, would've been more of a cross breed, between a top surface air carrier landing and a side/adjacent battle ship weapon arms. Combo fleet ship.
I _do_ wonder what kind of difference the _Graf Zeppelin_ would have made if it had been included in, say, the _Bismark's_ task force. Having actual air cover way out at sea might have made the German surface fleet much more dangerous during the Battle of the Atlantic. I don't think it would have changed the outcome of the war, but wiping out a few more convoys might have prolonged it by a few more months.
@@JohnSmith-mh1mp You'll notice I never claimed they did. However, with actual air cover in the Atlantic, it might have had a chance to do actual damage to Allied shipping.
@@autofox1744 I never ascribed any claim to you. It is that the UK was so keyed in on watching the BM that it would have never succeeded. Hitler should have built more and faster, better versions of the Graf Spee for raiding. Thought would have become useless later in the war with the Allies having escort carries and radar on planes.
Never knew I could wait for a premiere of a video until today, and it was totally worth it!! A way more complex set of reasons than what we usually take for granted! Really interesting topic and top quality visuals and research! as usual!
hi I agree with your opinion although I am German.At the beginning of World War II, the Royal Navy was the strongest navy in the world, with the largest number of warships built and with naval bases across the globe. It had over 15 battleships and battlecruisers, 7 aircraft carriers, 66 cruisers, 164 destroyers and 66 submarines. German shipyards had difficulty producing the ships ordered by Hitler and on the outbreak of the Second World War the German Navy only had two battleships, two battlecruisers, three armoured cruisers, three heavy cruisers, six light cruisers, 22 destroyers and 59 submarines.
One aircraft carrier with untrained inexperienced crew untested tactics and equipment would have stood no chance of making the slightest difference in the war for Germany. In fact it would have drained much needed resources.
Have to agree there. Whilst the german capital ships (Bismarck etc) were superior to most british capital ships training and experience count. However the *Bismarck had a design flaw in the rudder system and emergency "propeller" steering if needed wasn't going to work. This was found out at the sea trials, but never rectified and led to her eventual sinking due only to "steering" in circles when rudders damaged basically. I don't know if that flaw was rectified on Tirpitz. *(Hachette model "Build the Bismarck" history).
@@ruskiwaffle1991 Certainly , but you would not have been able to build that one in numbers! That admiral hipper hull is way more complicatet to make as well as more resorce and labor intensiv ! And more expensiv not to mention ! At least in comarision to an convertet freighter/tanker!
Don't know if someone noticed but when it was talking about the displacement limit. It is the washington and london naval treaties not the versaille treaty.
11:56 Sorry to disappoint, but I don't think it would have made any difference. If Germany got the carrier operational early on, it could have been useful in trade interdiction missions against the Royal Navy, and likely could have wrecked a lot of merchant ships. It also could have been useful in escorting the Bismarck to the Atlantic. However, once the United States inevitably enters the war, the Graf Zeppelin will be only one more carrier for the axis powers (Making 9 total once counting the 8 of Imperial Japan) against the whopping 32 of the US Navy. The odds are simply stacked so overwhelmingly against the Axis Powers that 1 more carrier won't make any difference. Even if it allows the Nazis to keep the fight going for another few months, all that will accomplish is getting the US to drop the first atomic bomb on Berlin instead of Hiroshima. So long story short, even if Germany had all 4 Graf Zeppelins, or even 10 for that matter, it's not going to allow Hitler to bring "Man in the High Castle" or "Wolfenstein" to life.
Tbf at the start of the war the US only has the Lexingtons and the first two Yorktowns really in service and worked up as mainline carriers. But they still have the wasp and ranger to use, and the Langley if they got really desperate. Unfortunately the essex swarm would have to wait a few years.
@@guiltyofbias8818 Good Point, but I don't think there is really anything Germany could have done to stop the US before its Navy reached full strength.
@@jonwoodhouse1444 Only issue with that is when the US entered the war it was severly lacking behind in naval and carrier tachnology compared to the Japanese. It took almost two years for the US to build up an effective naval force and by then the majority of it was completely focused on the Pacific. We were mainly relying on the Royal Navy to get around Europe and the Atlantic by the time we entered the war. That said the British had the same problem. While they had their carriers their aircraft were severly outdated and had to be replace with the same planes the US Navy was using. The only reason they were able to sink the Bismarck was because they got lucky. The thing is Germany didn't need to build up its navy just yet. By 1940 they had conquered most of Europe. They had air superiority by the time the Battle of Britain. If they had utilized the Luftwaffe the same way they utilized their U-Boats they could have been a real threat to the Royal Navy. Remember, the Japanese original targets at Pearl Harbor were the carriers, not the battlships, because they _knew_ how much of a threat they were. The Japanese actually did the smart thing by going directly after the US Navy. Didn't work for them in the end by they had the right idea. If they had sunken the carriers as originally planned it would taken a lot longer for America to rebuild its naval force and the Japanese would have sealed their hold in the Pacific. Germany, in my opinion, should have done the same thing. I know Pearl Harbor happened much later but even if Germany had succeeded in invading the British Isles they still would have had the Royal Navy to deal with. Remember, Britain became a superpower because of its navy. It's vital to their survival. Without it they pose no threat. So instead to of attacking the British Isles have the U-Boats and the Luftwaffe work together and go after the Royal Navy itself. Sink every ship you can find. Use the U-Boats to force them to sail closer to the coast so the Luftwaffe can reach them. Then attack them with a pincer manuever. Attack from bellow with the U-Boats while having the Luftwaffe attack from the air at the same time. Completely overwhelm them. If you can destroy the Royal Navy you will have crippled Great Britian. Without their mighty navy to protect them they are now vulnerable, open to invasion. Therefore Germany could invade or at the very least agree to a ceasefire. Now that they don't have to Royal Navy anymore they can build the navy they want while also turning their focus on Russia. Britain won't be able to do anything to stop them by then. Then, once Germany has its naval force, they can deal with the US should they declare war. At least, that's my take on the whole thing.
@@infinitlycool My point was, even if Germany succeeded in dominating the Atlantic and the British, they were still in no position to threaten the US mainland. The United States, being on a separate continent, was well outside the range of the Luftwaffe. I just don't see any way Germany could have stopped the US from constructing the two ocean navy, which, by 1945, was more than capable of out gunning both the IJN and Kriegsmarine at the height of their power, combined. The reason why most of it stayed in the Pacific in the late war was because Germany's naval capabilities had been mostly crushed by that point. Granted, if the Germans somehow successfully invaded the UK, that would effectively rule out D-Day. However, I seriously doubt that the German carriers would have been enough to do this. Starve Britain and force an armistice, maybe. Although, that would probably rule out D-Day as well. You have a point there.
@@jonwoodhouse1444 I have to disagree. You're looking at it as though it's already 1945. I'm looking from 1940-41, before the US was even involved. If Japan had succeeded in destroying America's Pacific fleet entirely and if Germany had been able to build its naval force do you think they would have allowed the US to rebuild its navy? Highly unlikely. An invasion would have been out of the question because it would have been too costly and they wouldn't had been ableto hold on to it. A more effective strategy would have been to use carrier based airstrikes and attack America's coastlines, targeting being the dockyards and the factories. Like Great Britain who relied on its navy, America's greatest weapon is its industry and mass production. If you can do enough damage to America's industry, you essentially remove whatever threat they could pose and force America to sign a peace treaty that acknowledges both Japan and Germany as the new superpowers of the world. From there. Japan has complete control over the Pacific while Germany has complete control of Europe and the Atlantic. The only way I would see this plan getting disrupted is Operation Barbarossa still going badly for the Germans. Then again, Pearl Harbor wouldn't happen for another year and a half so there was plenty of time before having to deal with the US.
Thinks its pretty clear, Hitler had no interest in forward aircraft carrier warfare.All his targets were on Continental Europe and they were in the center, or North Africa, which carriers would be fairly useless in a desert tank campaign hundreds of miles inland beyond the range of ship based planes. Only reason for the U-boats was to stop resupply by the enemy.
Horten flying wing bombers on a carrier like the Graf Zeppelin would have possibly been able to attack the east coast of the USA so long as the carrier could avoid British and American surface ships and submarines. After the Imperial Japanese Navy was so successful with its attack on Pearl Harbor, carriers became prime targets. It's likely that any degree of German success with carriers would have prolonged the war in Europe, as would have a successful invasion of England. The truth is that the Germans were fighting on too many fronts to ever win the war.
Truth is that the Germans never came close to the preconditions for a successful invasion of Britain. They were never close to winning the Battle of Britain (over the course of the Battle the RAF was growing in size while the Luftwaffe fighter squadrons were reduced to about 2/3 strength for shortages of replacement pilots, replacement plains, spare parts,... And they never had a reasonable plan for maintaining reinforcement/resupply lines across the Channel against the might of the Royal Navy. Germany was used to defeating the British (Norway, France, Greece) with superior numbers. Landing up to 100,000 German soldiers in the south of England wouldn't have worked so well against over 400,000 British soldiers defending Britain. Here's a fairly authoritative American analysis from the era on German plans to invade England. www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/GERMAN%20PLANS%20FOR%20INVASION%20OF%20ENGLAND%2C%201940_0001.pdf
One German carrier would have been unlikely to turn the tide of the war, considering the US produced 150 of various types through the course of the war. They produced six fleet carriers in 1943 alone. One solitary German carrier would have been overwhelmed and destroyed very quickly.
11:25 it wouldn’t. The Allies had many more carriers then the Germans and without escorts it would be easy prey for submarines or surface ship or even aircraft. The idea it would Pearl Harbor the US Atlantic fleet is absurd for several reasons. 1) The modern US fleet at that time would not have been taken by surprise especially with the amount of aircraft over the Atlantic. 2) just like Bismarck spies and scout aircraft would see it the second it left port. 3)the planes, the torpedo bombers in specific, where either her very old or not mad for carrier operations and inferior to allied carrier aircraft.
As a German in can tell you that you didnt Butcher the Name Blohm und Voss as much as you thought, you have Spoken it pretty well. The Accent actualy sounded pretty nice. Thx for a Cool Video.
Germany always had a military philosophy of a "fast and free war", quick knockout and a profitable negotiated peace, and the only time they got that in 200 years was in the 1870 Franco Prussian War. No matter, they kept on trying, a triumph of dogma over experience. (A bit like Russia today). Carriers are a tool of World spanning Empires, or those intending to be one. Prussia's (and Nazi) Germany never worked out why they failed at this. (You have to have a certain minimum empathy with your conquered)..
It's a shame that you didn't make this video long enough to include more of the significant facts and reasons for it not being completed. One of the major reasons was because of the problems encountered trying to design and build a suitable / reliable catapult system for the proposed aircraft. There were also not enough experienced pilots available to train to become carrier based naval airmen, along with the many problems encountered whilst trying to modify existing aircraft types into 'navalised' versions. (Thus having to design carrier aircraft from scratch instead, which took even longer). No mention of the period of time it was 'hidden' in a river inland, or the fact that the Russians used it after the war for testing anti ship bombs / missiles which initially failed to sink it. If you are going to make a documentary video PLEASE DO PROPER IN DEPTH RESEARCH about the subjects.
There was never any possibility of the Graf Zeppelin being a serious aircraft carrier. Germany did not have the aircraft types to fly off it. Goering had no intention of allowing the despised Kriegsmarine any control over naval aircraft development. What German naval construction there was was purely a political sop to keep the navy content with the Nazi regime. Germany had no particular use for a surface fleet of any kind, and after May 1941 it was almost entirely useless and confined to the Norwegian Sea. And that mattered not at all because the Kriegsmarine by 1942 was utterly crippled by unsolvable problems of lack of fuel supply. As designed, the Graf Zeppelin was spectacularly useless as a carrier. Carriers have no business carrying guns intended for surface actions. All this did was shrink the possible size of the aircraft numbers carried on board. An aircraft carrier's business is to operate an air group, not to fire surface guns at surface targets. So quite rightly, rather than waste effort and resources completing it, Raeder and the Kriegsmarine turned it into a furniture warehouse.
Depends on job of aircraft carrier... if you don't have the aircraft, fuel logistics for those aircraft, escort ships, etc to play battle group, then an aircraft carrier that can go solo and raid commerce with a few aircraft to spot and hit easy targets and help you run from everyone else might be the best you can do. Germany wasn't US or Japan trying to dominate an ocean, they were just trying to hit and run away from commerce to starve UK.
@@multilis2 It was a wasted effort entirely. It was a mere political sop to keep the Kriegsmarine in line with the Nazi socialist political agenda. It had no aircraft, and Goering refused to provide any support for a naval arm. The Kriegsmarine was crippled for lack of fuel after 1941 anyway so surface warship sorties were not going to happen anyway. Rather than building a useless aircraft carrier incapable of filling its intended mission, Germany would have done better to turn the metal into tanks and aircraft which it could use. Essentially Hitler understood this very well. Zeppelin spent the war as a furniture warehouse, and the Kriegsmarine as a whole achieved nothing whatsoever of any significance.
@@colinhunt4057 never said it was feasible in our world just more feasible than a conventional aircraft carrier.... In alternative universe where Germany did a bunch of things better and had a few planes that worked and enough resources maybe it could have worked to help choke UK off and make UK surrender
Eg no failed battle over Britain, no codebreaker by UK+us, allowed to retreat then counter attack in USSR and better prep for winter there, some aircraft that would work with carrier, Germany taking Malta immediately in 1940
Given some better choices by Germany they would have had much more resources and starving UK to surrender may have worked, and a single aircraft carrier doing hit and runs while assisted by Germany aircraft bases in France may have been viable...
Resupply would've been virtually impossible, they lacked planes that could be launched from it, and the Royal Navy could've easily targeted the carrier at dock while under construction. Obviously they would've needed aircraft carriers eventually, but they weren't in a place to build any the entire time. A lot harder to hide building an aircraft carrier than to hide building your tanks.
USA actually building aircraft carrier bcoz it was an isolated county from the beginning and for connecting to the old world and other super power countries they must need strong navy !bcoz there is no land corridor between American and Euroasia!mostly Europe countries does not care about aircraft carrier even they can build alot if they want too!specially soviet union France Germany etc
Hi ! You mention Bismark in you video, but let me add Musashi and Yamato. Musachi was sunk at her first mission, and Yamato was then transformed into coastal battery in Okinawa. Such costly ship for such use... For me, British would have set up dedicated missions to sink all the Graf Zepellin carriers (Bombing, Intelligence, Commando, ...) . So definitively, they would had no impact on the war. Thx for your video !!
Aircraft carriers are at their most effective with space around them. My first thought is that it would have been a nightmare trying to get it out into the Atlantic intact. My second thought is that it would be a bitch to resupply that far from Axis bases. My third thought is, what would you use it for? The US started putting escort carriers in the Atlantic to deal with U-boats (and the British had a couple as well) so attacking allied shipping in the face of other carriers would be a very risky proposition for a lone aircraft carrier with few screening ships.
Imagine an alternate timeline where Nazi Germany did not invade the Soviet Union and instead focused on fighting the British Empire (and possibly the United States due to the Battle of the Atlantic). In a hypothetical scenario, the Kriegsmarine organizes an aircraft carrier task force to conduct commerce raiding against Allied merchant shipping in coordination with U-Boats and Fw 200s / Ju 290s. This task force would consist of: CV _Graf Zeppelin_ CV Flugzeugträger B CV Flugzeugträger C CV Flugzeugträger D BB _Bismarck_ BB _Tirpitz_ BB _Scharnhorst_ BB _Gneisenau_
This aircraft carrier would have been useless by 1945 as jet fighters were beginning to enter service. Many American aircraft carriers was scrapped after the war. Why? - Because those ships were too short. They could launch old propeller aircrafts only and not modern jet fighters that was superior in performance. So the navy therefore saw no need in keeping them so they were scrapped. And I think that Graf Zeppelin would have faced a similiar fate. It was not a large carrier.
The late WW2 USN carriers continued to see service on through the 1950s, able to handle jet aircraft. The Essex class carriers started to become obsolete in the 1960s as they were not able to accommodate the new F4-Phantom. For that matter, the puny 13,000 ton light carrier HMS Venerable laid down in 1942 went on to carry Argentinian jets in 1982 (Falklands War). But the aircraft she could handle were pretty much 1950s era US Navy aircraft models like the A4 Skyhawk.
@@iansneddon2956 USS Enterprise - the WWII warship that partipated in every battle in the pacific war would have been an honor to keep. But she was scrapped after the war because she was too short and tiny to carry jets. And I don't think the Germans would have bothered developing special jet fighters for this ship like the Harrier or Skyhawk - and thus making this thing obsolete.
@@nattygsbord By 1943, the Essex class carriers were in service and they built a lot of them so they were the benchmark for jet aircraft development. No point building something for a smaller deck when you have more than enough larger carriers and were building even larger. But while the Essex carriers won the war for USA, it was the Enterprise, Lexington, Yorktown, Hornet, Saratoga and Wasp who kept USA in the war long enough for the new larger carriers to come into service. That only two of these ships survived the war speaks to intense combat they engaged in. The Doolittle raid, Midway, Santa Cruz Islands, and Guadalcanal, and more. Lots of WW 2 naval history was written from the deck of Enterprise. For me the greatest crime against naval history was the scrapping of HMS Warspite. This battleship had a great enough story from just WW I, but its actions in WW 2 were legendary. Tied for the longest range battleship hit on an enemy warship, it was not a ship to be messed with. And the battle of Narvik where the Royal Navy went into a fjord under the fire of shore batteries to eliminate half the German Navy's destroyers. But Enterprise would be on my list of historic ships from WW 2 that should have been saved.
@@nattygsbord We had 20 Essex carriers and they (most) were upgraded to handle jets (except for the giant F4). Many served into the 70s. One into the 90s. There was one Enterprise. All the other Yorktown class carriers were sunk.
If the Graf Zeppelin had entered service, I think it would have ended up on the bottom of the ocean just as quickly. By 1941, the British had over half a dozen carriers and years of experience in operating them.
The Graf Zepplin is rarely mentioned anywhere, so Bravo. What limited knowledge I have, I wasn't there; all I can go on is what I've read, and hundreds of documentaries, this video is fairly accurate to everything I have read or heard, So Bravo again. Now as for the Germans and capital ships like the Bismarck, Tirpitz and I think the one that was scuttled in south America was the Graf Spree, they were not deploying ships in traditional "Fleets" they really didnt have enough capital ships to form fleets so for the most part they were raiding with single vessels, a pocket battle ship vs a supply convoy is some pretty easy pickings, but had they deployed 10 of they're best capital ships in one single or first fleet the Graf Zepplin would have made sense. but that was not what they were doing they were raiding with U-Boats and had they not wasted the resources on those pocket battleships and the two unfinished aircraft- carriers that would have been that many more U-boats, enough to win the war, probably not, but who knows, the Germans had way bigger problems on the eastern front and the delays caused by Hitler in the me 262 program, and countless other self inflicted and enemy inflicted wounds, America entering the war and Hitler foolishly declaring war on the united states, the writing had been on the wall for awhile, alot of vets of ww2 that I have spoken to in the past often will say we didn't win the war Hitler lost the war, he had gone mad. anyways great video and I will subscribe
One of the earliest proposals for aircraft on board was the Avia B-534 which were acquired in sufficient numbers after the "annexation" of Czechoslovakia. As a biplane fighter with an enclosed cockpit and decent performance it would have required little modification for carrier duty.
If you look at the north of germany, you can see that half of its shore line is in the Baltic sea (east / top right), and the other half (west / top left) is in the North Sea. Even today, the only significant maritime infrastructure in Germany is in Hamburg, 90 km in the land upstream in the Elbe. Hambourg is basically a port. Like Port Harcourt
the kriegsmarine had a carrier. it was compledted because of the conflict between dönitz and göring. also it was actually deployed to attack some coaster thingy with its defensive armaments.
if I remember right the graf zeplin was never completely finished due to steel shortages and putting more in to subs. There was a lot of back and forth due to various officers fighting over who was closer to Hitler and he encouraged it. The aircraft carrier was almost finished but put on hold and then worked on again and put on hold again.
Hitler was his own worse enemy and his military leadership knew it but was powerless to do anything about it. Japan had some similar weaknesses in this regard.
John Bezpiaty writing--Two big question to ask here is how well the Kriegsmarine understood the tactics necessary to operate the fleet protecting this carrier, and how well the German government would've accepted the allocation of other ships to protect it. Admittedly, their planners seemed to have planned for the Graf Zeppelin to be a more self-defending ship, but use of that tactic may hav÷ simply cost it mobility
The results of the battle of the Barretts Sea(December31,1942) is what decided the stopping of production of anything bigger than a destroyor. The SCHORNHORST was sunk at the BATTLE OF THE NORTH CAPE on December 26, 1943.
If I remember correctly the Graf Zeppelin was planned with much more powerful 8 inch naval cannons on the admiral hipper class cruisers. However the design with the 20cm guns was not used due to issues with the weight and space of the weapons that would further decrease the number of aircraft that the Graf Zeppelin design historically was able to carry with the 15cm weapons and the above average armor plating that reduced aircraft carrying capacity.
![PASULOL รามเกียรติ์ ตอนที่ 4 นนทกพบรัก [Ramakien Ep.4: Nonthok in love]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/tMUQgmZzf_A/mqdefault.jpg)
Everybody knows the reason ...
is Not What You Think!
Ye.
And it's not what you think
The pinned comment was not what/who I thought
Cause the American bankers didn't have more money to lend😁😁😁😁
Not What you Think .nice to see you guys here 👍
They were too busy building a base on the moon
More a Basis in the antartic
lol
I love those movies
Don't forget building a base in Planet Venus
hehe iron sky
Many years back I had a board game called "War at Sea" - it was a WWII naval battle game. One curiosity in it was an extra ship piece for the Graf Zeppelin that let you play a "what if" scenario if the carrier had been used in the war.
Never thought I would hear someone else say that name outside of the game. Barely anyone knows about it.
@I don't think so
Only the board game battleship is popular
@@Yes_im.a-lordpeacock we need more naval warfare board games tbh, would be neat to see one in the style of that one star wars table top game with the large ship moc's
There was also a civil war board game called Battle Cry and the WWI aerial combat games called Dogfight product by I believe Parker Brothers in the late 1960s.
Love that Game. I found a a complete copy a few year ago. we would set up War at Sea & Victory in the Pacific and play them both simultaneously...
The Italians were also close to build their own aircraft carrier, almost close to completion.
The ship was called RN Aquila.
What about impero?
Aquila had crusier engines and would have been very underpowered
@@albertsuseintsus7355 hahaha so many people play azure lane here 😉
@@loveofmangos001 I don't think so the 4 boiler/turbine groups would have developed around 150000 hp all together, enough to push her to 30 knots, also the power each of the 4 groups could provide was restricted from 50000 to 37500 hp
@@dantheman3022
The Switch game for Azur Lane is pretty cool too
There about six Carriers listed for the Germans, btw. The first two were Graf Zeppelin-class, but the next pair would be a different class. There was also two Light Carriers. These two were conversions. Named Weser for one being converted from a Merchantman and Seydlitz, a Heavy Cruiser converted to a Carrier, but like Graf Zeppelin, abandoned and sunk later on.
Part of the problem the Germans had, was that Fat Goeing didn't want a rival Air Force. He wanted absolute control over all Military Aircraft. Even as he was creating a ground force out of Luftwaffe personnel who promptly got kicked around every time, they actually had to fight someone.
Many nations lack independent Naval Air Forces for the reason that the Air Force doesn't want one. In some cases, in some other nations it is the Army doesn't want the Navy to have a Naval Air Force. Whatever the reasoning, most of the time, they are basis and more a power grab by higher ups or some people not wanting to spend the extra money.
Then you have the royal navy which had an independent fleet air arm then merged it with the royal Air force and just before ww2 recreated an independent fleet air army.
@poil8351 Very true, and it was realized that RAF leadership was prioritizing their own needs over the RN's needs.
Which is why the FAA was so behind and needed to acquire American Aircraft to rebuild their capabilities up to par. Something that didn't always work out either due to the differences caused by the decision to place all FAA assets under RAF authority.
Ironically, the RAF Rank Structure is actually based on the RNAS the forerunner of the FAA.
@@FLJBeliever1776The US would be better off returning dissolving the USAF & redistributing most of its assets to the army and navy.
@@FLJBeliever1776 Was thinking of this while watching the video. Göring and Donitz would've fought tooth and nail for these at everyone's detriment.
@GrahamCStrouse Not really. The USAF has its own credibility. More to the point, there's little room for argument between the three over tasks and details.
Though, transferring Ground Attack and localized Scouting back to the US Army would be more practical.
Another interesting carrier that could have been was the Weser. She was originally built as to be the 5th of 6 Admiral Hipper class heavy cruisers under the name Seydlitz, but later planned to switch the eight 8-inch guns to twelve 6-inch light cruiser guns. However, after seeing the success of Royal Navy carriers (especially of HMS Ark Royal during the Hunt for the Bismarck) they decided to begin conversion to a carrier. She was about 70% complete when the Soviets began closing in, and so she too was scuttled.
Given its small size, the _Weser_ likely would have been useful as a light aircraft carrier supporting the larger _Graf Zeppelin_ in the Atlantic Theater. This would have been similar in practice to what the U.S. Navy and Royal Navy did with their fleet carriers and light aircraft carriers in the Pacific Theater.
Yea it was more of a concept at the time for the Nazis
@@christopherwang4392 the German Navy at that time really needed fighter cover. But their ideas on how to use aircraft carriers would be nice in the early days 30s with that gun battery.
Actually, Seydlitz, and Lützow were originally designed with 12 150mm guns on the same hull. But they were later re-ordered as normal Admiral Hipper class CAs. Seydlitz was nearly complete when the order to convert her into a CV was given...
@@cjmpaja as for Lützow, she was sold to the Soviets before the two became hostiles, renamed Tallinn
One of the biggest reasons Germany's surface fleet wasn't ready for WWII is that Hitler promised Erich Raeder, head of the Kriegsmarine that he wouldn't start WWII until 1947, so the fleet that they were hoping for was still being built. When Hitler declared war in 1939, Raeder made the comment "All we can do is die gallantly". Those early defeats were why Raeder was replaced in 1943 with Karl Donitz, with the emphasis on U-boats, which is what Hitler wanted all along. Hitler had already considered following the loss of the Bismarck scrapping the entire surface fleet completely. It was why the Tirpitz was never used to its potential and why Scharnhorst & Gneisenau never received their upgrade in main armament. They were designed in mind with the ability that once the war began and the Washington Treaty no longer mattered, the nine 11-inch guns in three triple turrets would be replaced with six 15-inch guns in three dual gun turrets, very similar to the look of the HMS Repulse & Renown.
wow! i never knew that. thanks
Scharnhorst and Gniesau almost got tripple 13 inch or 12 inch guns. The 12 inch guns were actually built and used as shore guns. Hitler preferred these ships with 11 inch guns because he wanted to ease the Anglo-German Naval Treaty through. The 11 inch caliber was easier to make technically but the main reason was political.
From a few sources Graf Zeppelin had some Components that were based on the Japanese Carrier Akagi, which was originally supposed to be an Amagi-Class Battle Cruisers, Akagi would only be the one to undergo the conversion with Amagi being scrapped from the Kanto Earthquake of 1923 and the Washington Naval Treaty and her two other sister ships Takao and Atago would never see the light of day, as their names would be reused for the first two ships of Heavy Cruisers of the same name
The problem of a German aircraft carrier would have been resupply. The Kriegsmarine simply didn't have enough colliers to support the extended missions this vessel was planned for, not to mention the lack of other support vessels needed.
The Kriegsmarine ran on coal? I thought they were using diesel. But I don't think they had tankers, either. For aviation and diesel fuel.
Hey . . . anyone knows why there's black smoke when its catapult sending an aircraft to the air?
@@JohnSmith-mh1mp Indeed the majority of the German Navy by WW2 ran on oil fired steam turbines with diesel used for the u-boats, s-boats, the pocket battle ships such as Graf Spey and the planned H-class battle ships. Diesel is much more efficient (over 30% more) but the engines bulkier and these ships a little slower. The choice of diesel was because of the lack of refueling opportunities. Some of the German ships did run of superheated steam which made them less reliable initially.
@@JohnKickboxing Either the pilots are gunning their engines, or perhaps the German Navy planned to use black powder charges to power catapults to launch aircraft. From the video it appears some type of catapult system might have been set up, but I cannot confirm this theory.
@@markh.6687 👌
The Graf Zeppelin actually helped the Allies win the war by taking money, raw resources like steel that could and would have built more tanks, or submarines. The Allies actually figured out fairly early on in the war that it would be a mistake to bomb the ship because it was still a German dream that they could maybe complete it and use it.
That would have also been a money and time/resource suck as they had no experience with operating aircraft carriers.
back then it took countries about 15 to 20 years to develop just the basic understanding and operational procedures to use aircraft carrier doctrine.
Italy was in a similar state with an almost completed aircraft carrier and a second one being worked on.
Rather than engaging in naval battles against enemy fleet carriers, the _Graf Zeppelin_ class aircraft carriers would have been more useful as commerce raiders against Allied merchant shipping.
Right? If nothing else, the diversion in resources to skink or contain it would have helped Germany, especially if it could have gotten out to Brest or some other French Atlantic harbor.
Agreed!
Except these things were horribly designed, even by Kriegsmarine standards.
Horrible waste of resources Germany didn't have to spare for literally no gain. This ship would have been cannon fodder like the rest of the German surface force, especially the big capitol ships. Germany gained nothing from deploying a single one, nothing.
invest on long range bombers and u-boat is better for convey raiding than Graf Zeppelin
Andrea Doria sank in 1956 and by 2004 there wasn’t much left but the outer hull and a splayed debris field where the superstructure once was. The Zeppelin is in roughly the same depth (80m or 240 feet) So I’m guessing the Polish research vessel picked up a hull and that’s about it. Sadly marine archeology is at the relentless mercy of the hydrography 24/7/365.
It's generally accepted that to keep one WW2 carrier at sea, you needed at least three to allow for one being overhauled, repaired or up-dated with another working-up in preparation for ops., so completing one carrier without a task force of escorts would have have been futile (at least Hitler got that right). Apart from anything else, they had no decent naval aircraft: in trials the Stuka's undercarriage proved too fragile to cope with deck-landings, and the Bf 109T, which had a larger wing to cope with low approach speeds, had an even more fragile undercarriage and airframe, and limited range. A week's operation in North Atlantic conditions and they wouldn't have had a plane fit to fly.
that was not true in ww2. Don't base modern Navy ops on ww2 era tempo. US carriers fighting in the Pacific spent much greater periods under operation and generally only returned for port for longer than a few days if they were damaged. And in some cases even when they were damaged they spent only a few days in port. But we were able to keep all our Flat tops in combat unless they took Torpedo hits.
But we really can't compare US Navy doctrine to any potential Doctrine from Germany's navy since it was never a true sea control navy and was only valuable in terms of producing trouble for British shipping.
The real issue was Germany spent way to much of its resources on building Battleships which had not utility for Germany's limited resources. and poor cooperation between the German Navy and Airforce. Germany had plenty of R&D potential to navalize their normal Land Based Aircraft But they put way to much focus on building up their Battlefleet- 2 Battleships and 2 Battle Cruisers would have been much better spent on Aircraft Carriers- and i don't even mean as true "capitol ships" but carriers are superior in the Raiding missions which from the Start was going to be the only possible value of the German Navy going into WW2.
Probably Germany would have been best served by building Carriers on the Scharnhorst Class hull with potentially others on the smaller Cruiser Hulls of the Hipper Class similar to how the US had the Independence class CVLs
Given German Capitol Ship output in ww2 they could probably produced up to 5 fleet Carriers and possibly 4 or more light carriers.
This of course could only remotely be possible if the German Navy had began its re-armament programs with a intent to build Carriers from the beginning. While the German Army was forward looking the Germany Navy was not- under Admiral Raeder at least.
I do think that Germany could have built up a robust Aircraft Carrier force had they committed Earlier to its development starting in the Early 30s when the Nazi's started their re-armament programs.
They had ideas to use the FW190. That actually can carry a torpedo! Sturdy plane and mixing A-variant strike aircraft and D-variant interceptors could have worked
@@MrChickennugget360 Consider that the US and UK had several carriers serving as training vessels, including paddle wheel flat tops on the Great Lakes, the fleet carriers enjoyed a steady supply of replacement pilots without disrupting their operational tempo. These same carriers had the luxury to experiment with new equipment and doctrine which then got passed along the pipeline to the fleet carriers. The sole carrier in an entire navy is not equal to the capability of a single carrier of a navy with multiple carriers.
@@MalfosRanger true but those training carriers were not in service until war broke out. prior to that pilots were trained on front line CVs
She would have been swarmed and attacked the second she put to sea. She never would have lasted a week for the planes to be broke in let alone worn out. The Royal Navy would have pounced on her so fast she wouldn't be able to do anything but try to run.
Unfortunately Hermann Goering ran the German airforce and jealously refused to let the navy run or operate any of it's own aircraft. So if the Graff Zeppelin had been finished and commissioned into service would the pilots have their own chain of command ? If the captain of the carrier sailed them close to a target would the pilots refuse to fly because somewhere back in Berlin some airforce general couldn't find the famously drug addicted Goering to OK the mission?
An air force being responsible for everything to do with air ops from naval ships traced back to a bad proposal made by General Smuts at the request of the British government. That, in turn, was a part of a good proposal creating the stand alone RAF. The result was that the Fleet Air Arm was an unwanted, undernourished, semi orphan of the RAF during the Great Depression whose main function, Swordfish TBs excepted, seemed to be awarding contracts keeping the makers of poorly designed heavier than air machines from closing shop. Once the FAA escaped back to the RN in WW2, courtesy of Winston Churchill, it did tend to favour the "better products" available from American firms closely tied to the USN for obvious reasons. When the FAA managed to get the plentiful, scary, "widow maker Corsair" into fighting trim for carrier operations along with minimal casualties, everyone sat up and took notice.
Believe it or not!. The Italians did the same thing!. Only in the 80's did the Italian Navy get control of the air assist?
I'd hope for the sake of their own lives the German Brass on the ship would get along no matter what was happening in Berlin, once the ship was at sea they (the Ships Captain and the Wing Commander) were the Highest ranking, end of.
But Germany's entire Gov was much like we see today with people in places because of who they know not what they know, and rivalries between adolescents with too much power and not enough pride leak all over the place through their vassals. it can't work if you can't cooperate, the Japanese Navy and Army found that out at the cost of many Japanese "peasants" lives.
Also to add would the pilots or ships even have the Gasoline for worthwhile attacks considering Germany was already having massive fuel problems and focusing heavily on land forces.
The Germans did not have the industrial capacity or the resources to build a Navy, equal powerful as their Army and their Airforce. So they opted to focus in building a submarine fleet. A logical decision, actual one of the few ones that they took during WW II.
I agree, Had a man like Bismarck been Chancellor the Germans would have never fought a three front war. He would allied with the Poles because of his distrust of Communism or should I say socialism and split the French from the English, something like that. He defiantly would have never taking Germany to war before the military was ready to fight a war. There would have not been a genocide committed eighter. Bismarck's favorite banker was Jewish and helped the Empire with the three wars to untied Germany in 1871.
As a nation with primarily land borders, Germany needed a very strong army, which needed support from an air force. The navy was an afterthought.
For Britain, the navy was the premiere service, followed by the RAF and then the Army was an afterthought (literally, as Chamberlain's government periodically froze the expansion of the army in favor of growth in the RN and RAF to prepare Britain for war. Previous governments did much the same.
Add to that Britain had greater shipbuilding capacity. How to catch up with that?
When Bismarck was laid down (followed by Tirpitz and Graf Zeppelin months later), Germany had no battleships, and just two battlecruisers under construction.
Britain had 12 (admittedly old) battleships, 3 battecruisers, 5 aircraft carriers and a sixth under construction.
In response to Germany commencing Bismarck, Tirpitz and Graf Zeppelin, the Royal Navy began construction of 5 fast battleships and 4 more aircraft carriers.
They couldn't hope to match Britain. Adding France and it gets worse. (and if the Stresa Front had been held together, that might have been Britain, France and Italy against Germany.
@@ulrichschnell2331 I can't remember who coined the phrase that Germany lost because they were run by Nazis. Decisions made from their ideology instead of reality. The waste, corruption and dysfunction inherent in their system.
So many things would have changed if the Nazis never came to power.
But they got started on the submarine construction too late. They had a fairly free reign in 1939 and early 1940 with their radio coordinated wolf pack tactics that defeated the convoy system that was so effective in WW I, leaving the Royal Navy scrambling to learn all over again how to defeat the u-boats.
Taking advantage of that time with a large u-boat force, they might have cut Britain off from supplies. I cringe at the thought of Hastings replacing Chamberlain instead of Churchill.
The British and Americans put a fortune into developing technologies to fight the u-boats. The Germans had the technological edge in designing/building u-boats, but it was no match for the UK/USA advantage in technology to hunt submarines (culminating with radars so sensitive they could detect the snorkel of a submerged submarine. By 1943, the Battle of the Atlantic had been won by the Western Allies.
@@iansneddon2956 You are right of course. The statement was describing a scenario in which the Bismarck might had survived another day. If Graff Zeppelin had been built in time for this battle, Great Britian would had suffered greater losses.
The 2nd Graf Zeppelin-Class carrier was to be called Peter Strasser.
Germany also had planned to convert 2 ocean liner ships (forgot their names) to be carriers but the plans was cancelled too. They was to be the Jade-Class light carriers Jade and Elbe .
Considering what happened to pretty much ever large German capital ship, they'd be lucky get out of dry dock before the RAF reduced them to smoldering wrecks
yes or it would last 6 months once it went in to service .
Not to mention the royal navy. I don't see this thing going anywhere without the royal navy hot on its heels
@@A.i.r_K Pro American rubbish rewriting history
@@timphillips9954 No, not really. Truth is that the German Navy was just too damn small to fight off the US and Royal Navy, who had the largest fleets. Once word about any potential German carrier got out, they would be essential targets. Chances are the Kreigsmarine would probably chance steaming them to a secure port and stay there moored up for the duration of the war, like Tirpitz.
@@KnowYoutheDukeofArgyll1841 The German navy was defeated before the Americans even entered the war. The RN / RAF sunk all the German, Italian and most of the French
capital ships before the Americans even decided which side they were on! The Americans played on a junior role in the final stages of the battle of the Atlantic and even less in the med and Indian ocean, middle East around the cape and West African coast!
I love learning about all these interesting one off creations. Keep them coming. Would be very interested to hear about all the different kinds of airships that have been around. Also the American b58 hustler
I think the "best case scenario" for Nazi Germany was a stalemate, and that's stretching things. In the event of a stalemate, the US would have used nuclear weapons in original German territory.
Probably, but the Atlantic was very different from the Pacific. Against Imperial Japan, they island hopped until they were in reach for an amphibian invasion.
The Atlantic only had one island close enough to the enemy coasts to allow preparations for an assault: Great Britain. Had Nazi Germany successfully invaded it, the US would have no place to concentrate the troops needed. Maybe Russia, but that's if they defeated Japan first, and even then it was a long trip over enemy waters.
As for the nuclear card, they would have no aerial base close enough to send heavy bombers to any significant target.
I don't know what the end result would be, but what is sure is that the war would've continued many years more.
@@moteroargentino7944 What about Iceland?
@@TheAKgunner You're right, I missed Iceland. It's still too far to be used as a platform for an invasion, but a B-29 could easily reach Berlin or any other German city from there. The question still remains if they could make it through an occupied Europe, but it's technically possible.
Probably not.
Depends. If they had take down Russia, the West would have likely sued for peace
It had a tiny air group for 1942 and had no ships that would have been effective as escorts. Had it sailed it would have been the tomb of 2000 men. See Drachinifel's video 'KMS Graf Zeppelin - Guide 194 (NB)' for good info on the ship.
Had it been used as additional defense in the Fjords with Tirpitz, and air support for Scharnhorst's convoy raid they may have been able to pose a greater threat.
@@jamesknight3070 I don't think so. Aircraft Carriers of the time (and now, except for VTOL) need to be moving at speed to launch their aircraft, the confined waters of a Fjord would not allow that even if it could get enough steam to be able to move. As for the Scharnhorst's convoy raid... have you seen what the weather was like on that day? If the Germans had a carrier available for the raid, the allies would have had a carrier with Duke of York and escort carrier (or possibly a MAC) to assist in the convoy's defence, but on the day neither side would have been able to launch any planes.
I believe that the limited resources that Germany had would have been better focused on turning out even more and more advanced submarines. You can build a lot of subs for the materials in carriers and battleships. Not as glamorous but very likely more efficient.
You are correct Bigfoot. I once read that for the price of 1 battleship, you can built 38 submarines. Submarines would needed far less crew: 42-46 officers and men per U boat (46 crew x 38 U boats = 1748 total), versus 2065 officers and men on a Bismarck battleship.
Submarines were much harder to locate and destroy then a single battleship or aircraft carrier. Because submarines are smaller and can crash dive.
Hitler just didn’t understand naval warfare or listen much to those who did.
Amateurs discuss Tactics, Professionals discuss Logistics.
@@JeffMathias Hitler didn't understand most warfare and his generals never really stood up to him.
They did. The E-boats at the end of the war were literally the first true submarines. All subs that came before are better classified as submersibles
A Bv155 video would be awesome. The twists and turns that project took are something else, to the point where even though one still exists (in Smithsonian storage), for a long time nobody was sure exactly what airframe it WAS (V2 vs V3).
That, and it's just a beautiful airplane. In an awkward, gangley sort of way.
The fact is that Germany didn't really need a carrier. Most of their surface operations were in the Baltic and North Seas, within range of land based airpower. While airplanes could be of some help for raiders, that would have required a lot more resources (that Germany couldn't afford) than submarines and regular surface raiders needed.
One need only look at a map of Germany and see that the pathway to the sea is easily blocked Britain and France (or Holland, Belgium, Denmark if they are so inclined) to realize that Capital Ships were almost useless except in the situation that Germany controlled France etc. The fall of France was almost unexpected and prior to the battle of France priority had to be given to the Germany Army, Tactical Aircraft for the Luftwaffe. No point having long range strategic bombers, Battleships and aircraft carriers if France and Poland are over running Germany (and Both could have done so easily prior to 1937)
need after 💩-church ⛪hilltop declared war and made Europe a show 😉 and im 🇬🇧 but leaving a navy without landing on uk shore's was a big mistake and letting the usa 🇺🇸 back uk 🇬🇧 ended with the 3-rike losing the war from 1942 ish onwards as diplomats failed to keep church ⛪in check
I would have to say ..a couple aircraft carriers along with the Wolf pack in the Atlantic could have been bad bad news for Britain. Seriously would have stopped a bunch of freedom ships bringing Britain needed munitions .
The reality is that Germany did send some very valuable ships wayyyy out of friendly aircraft range. They tried to do Commerce Raiding with surface ships.
Graf Spee was caught out in the Atlantic, fought the Battle of the River Plate in 1939 against the British. She ran for neutral Uruguay but couldn't stay there long. The British being real sly, fooled the Germans into thinking that a superior force of Royal Navy ships were on the way to pounce on Graf Spee after she leaves the neutral port and waters, when there really wasn't. The captain seeing no good way out for his men with no viable military action, elected to scuttle his ship and turn the crew over to Uruguay, who transferred them over to Argentinia for internment. The captain committed suicide.
The Kriegsmarine did Operation Berlin in January - March 1941 with both Scharnhorst-class Battleships. They got into the Atlantic and did quite a bit of damage out there. VAdm Lutjens was in command. The operation was successful and they made the Royal Navy look bad.
However, the Germans wanted to repeat Operation Berlin with Lutjens again in command of the mission, Operation Rheinubung. Lutjens wanted to do this with both the Scharnhorst-class and both Bismarck-class Battleships. However, the Scharnhorsts had suffered damage and would take a while to return to service. Tirpitz was brand spanking new and the crew had not been trained. Lutjens wanted to delay Rheinubung but GAdm Raeder would have none of it. So Bismarck was sortied only with Cruiser Prinz Eugen in May 1941 and we all know how that turned out.
After Bismarck was lost was when the Kriegsmarine stopped their surface ship sorties past friendly aircraft range.
@@killhacker5776 The Germans were not just going to easily have a bunch of Carriers. There were a lot of obstacles for it.
Their resources and shipbuilding weren't up to it. The fact is the Kriegsmarine was quite weak, the Italian Navy was far stronger than they were, and even then the Royal Navy handled both navies very well even before the European Axis powers declared war on the USA. I know there was a plan for Germany to magically build a new Battle Fleet to rival the Royal Navy, which I laughed at because it was nothing more than wishful thinking.
The Kriegsmarine, like the French Navy, had a major problem. Germany like France, was a continental European power, meaning they shared borders with rivals. Both countries have a long historical tradition of maintaining very powerful armies. For Germany this was demanded, as almost all compass directions had the country share borders with nations that they had been recently at war with.
The French Navy, just like the Kriegsmarine, wanted to do and build more, but the army was more important and both nations had way more finite resources.
And now for the Kriegsmarine, outside the Army / Heer having higher priorities, during the 1930s they faced a major hurdle for naval aviation: The Luftwaffe. Hermann Goring had a massive hatred of the Kriegsmarine. Germany is also one of those countries where the Air Force controlled all military aviation, and these air forces tend to hate the naval services that they competed with. The Luftwaffe often c-blocked the Kriegsmarine in trying to get new aircraft designs for carrier use. The Luftwaffe even went further in trying as much as possible to deny the Kriegsmarine pilots for their efforts towards a carrier and carrier air group.
You can kind of understand why the Luftwaffe acted the way it did, because they had tons of responsibilities already, and the war would eventually show the Luftwaffe was not large enough to do what was asked of it.
There simply was no way Germany was going to get a bunch of fancy new capital ships, especially Carriers. They had far more pressing priorities on land, and the Kriegsmarine as a service was treated like red headed step children. Prussia / Germany have long had a big affair with the army, the Luftwaffe had the powerful Goring to champion its cause. And this left the Kriegsmarine being a starved afterthought.
8:51, you nailed it somehow. Good job
The reason Germany couldn't get their aircraft carriers up and running was because they didn't use Squarespace? That's a hell of a choice for an ad transition.
I really enjoy your writing.
Funnily enough, I only started to know the Graf Zeppelin Aircraft Carrier B from a certain game. But due to the ship never being given a name, it was name as *KMS Peter Strasser* the second aircraft carrier of the Graf Zeppelin class
My guess is Azur Lane, it has more aircraft carriers from the KMS then what the real KMS theoretically have
@@ppppzone832 it's amazing how Azur Lane actually tells part of their history in their ships whether it's subtle or not
@@CommanderSlayers agreed. Though some of them are very depressing. Especially the ones with PTSD.
That self-defending carrier concept is very similar to what the Soviet Union did years later. When you know you don't have enogh warships to protect the carrier this tends to be the obvious option.
Considering most Soviet ships can barely move without tugboats, sure 😂
The best defence for an aircraft carrier is an additional aircraft carrier. Soviets like(d) Nazi Kanonenkitsch
and support(ed) George Lukas because of this preference (Russia Hoax)
@@mulletoutdooradventures6286 And don´t forget those pesky,sudden storms in the black sea
In practice, it was a very bad idea. Adding large guns to a carrier reduced the space and resources available for the air group. More, odds were that if a carrier did get intercepted on the surface, a few 8 inch guns wouldn't particularly help. The Americans figured this out with the Lexington-class carriers (which originally had large guns), while the British and Japanese never even tried it.
@@Cailus3542 Yes, but keep in mind that those carriers were intended for short range and limited operations.
The navy wasn’t even ready in 1939 mostly due to production and oil supply. There plan was to match the Royal Navy by 1944, the submarine HQ was in a shed in 1939.
World of Warships recently had a update that includes most of the planned German Aircraft Carriers not just the Graf Zepplin! And not only rare German designs, but ship designs from many other nations that were never made it to the shipyard. You should check it out!
Been a couple months since they were added to PC and Legends (console), but were also added to Blitz (mobile) today. You can actually get into and win fun gunfight duels against other carriers lol, at least on Legends
Ah, the glory days before the captain skills rework when you could run a secondary build Graf Zeppelin and cackle maniacally as any DD that got within torp range would get nuked.
@@ljessecusterl German carriers have more or less retained lethal secondaries
This comment is brought to you by World of Warships. Sign up today to get this limited deal!
In retrospect, that would have been a better sponsor for this video instead of Squarespace
Not sure if they have Parseval but Azur Lane Have
bro that was the smoothest transition to an ad Ive ever seen.. bravo
I think the German carrier would’ve been a failure. The design of the deck was pretty bad. Having the catapults on top of the deck instead of recessed into it like on modern carriers meant you couldn’t use the entire deck as a landing surface, and you couldn’t launch your planes in large waves like they used to back then. An angled deck would’ve made more sense, but we wouldn’t see those until the jet era.
Another problem I found with the German’s plan was their refusal to use planes built specifically for carrier use. Other countries did that for a reason. If you take a regular fighter plane, put a tail hook on it, and try to land it on a carrier, you’ll probably crash when your landing gear fails. Landing on a carrier is a controlled crash. You’re literally slamming down on the deck. That’s why planes designed for carrier use have beefier landing gear designed to withstand the stress of landings. Carrier planes also have other changes, such as folding wings so they take up less room and can be stored more easily.
Of course, you also have to consider that the German surface fleet wasn’t the greatest. They chose to build it around two gigantic battleships that only managed to make themselves into large targets. One carrier wouldn’t have made a difference. Even if they’d been able to organize a carrier strike force, they were outnumbered by the British and American Navies. The only thing that would’ve changed would’ve been the presence of British and American carriers in the European theater to hunt down the German carrier. It’s wartime career would’ve been very short.
The other problem of adding a tail hook to a land plane besides landing gear strength is the stopping force is applied to the tail and several land plane conversions had the tail pulled off
@@jeffbybee5207 Yeah, I thought about that too. Regardless, landing a regular plane on a carrier is a bad idea.
To be honest, a carrier would have been far better than any battleship in WWII in terms of actual strategic value (the fact every major power save the USSR decided to put new battleships in service in WWII turned out to be a mistake for everyone involved, since they either did nothing or, for the Americans and British, were mostly limited to supporting roles that were already covered much more cost-effectively in other ways, making the new battleships pointless anyways).
However, Graf Zeppelin was so badly designed that she’d still basically be useless, especially compared to the better-designed British carriers she’d be facing.
The core of the Kreigsmarine's carrier problem was that they had absolutely no experience in carrier design, training or doctrine. As far as carrier fleets go, they would have been dead last among the major powers. They would have been feeling their way half-blind in the early years of the war as they would be basically training on the job, which is no way to fight a war. Contrast that with the top-notch carrier fleets of the US, Britain and Japan, all of which had been training intensely for years. It would have been over very quickly, I think, for the Graf Zeppelin and her would-be sister ships.
But the concept of "Navy aircraft" was a long trial and error project, and history have not been fair with those unsung heroes, the Naval Test Pilots. I knew one of them from the Vietnam era.
The outcome would have been a somewhat large naval battle off the Grand Banks, resulting in the Graf Zeppelin sinking. With only one carrier and nearly no surface fleet to protect it, it would have been easy prey for the Royal Navy and the USN.
Honestly, the Nazis couldn't compete with the British in surface combat. They were right to give up on that, focus on uboat attrition and air raids
Germans have a strong army. Brits have a strong navy. Pretty much dictated by geography.
@@generalripper7528 Exactly, as a nation with mostly land borders in the center of Europe, Germany needed a strong army supported by a strong air force. The navy was an afterthought.
As an island nation with an overseas empire, Britain needed a strong navy, a modern air force, and.... the army was the afterthought.
It was a stalemate. Germany couldn't even defeat the RAF, much less hope to defeat the Royal Navy. So Germany could not realistically invade Britain while the British lacked a strong enough army to invade Nazi occupied Europe alone.
Germany: "The war is fought with the big guns! Not tiny mosquitoes..."
Japan: *smoldering in the background*
Italy: *drops fragile package*
"God is on the side of artillery".
Your content are getting better.love the water dynamics and your team did in a short amount of time.
Now if he can get his narration up to snuff...
Next episode , German Top Gun. In the main role Hanna Reintsch and Herman Goering.
Graf Zepplin: *scuttled *
Russians: *Raise it *
Graf Zepplin: YAY IM GONNA BE FINISHED!
Russians: *You are gonna make a great target ship*
Graf Zepplin: *;-;*
Lol
Wow russian bias
typical Russian attitude.
Russians got themselves an aircraft carrier but used it for target practice instead of as a template for future aircraft carriers unlike that of the cursed ridden Kutzenov.
thats pretty short sighted.
It actually might serve the Russian Navy quite well, and not just as a target vessel. It probably wouldn't be much worse than the floating wreck the Russian Navy operates now. You know, the mighty Admiral Kuznetsov with it's high tech smokescreen and formidable tugboat escorts.
@@classicgalactica5879 yeah im pretty sure the russians would had screwed up with their drunken sailors even the graf Zeppelin
Why was Sabaton not given credit for this part, this is from their music video for their song “Bismarck” 1:44
My boy pronounced Scharnhorst like he is the lead singer of Rammstein 👍🤣
Really enjoy your cheerful mangling of both English snd German😄 Thanks for the fascinating videos.
I think that the FW-190 with it radial engine would have been better suited as a aircraft carrier plane.
It honestly looks like a slimmed down Hellcat or a Helldiver.
Nice video. I didn't know about German aircraft carrier.
The alt-history clips were from “The man in the high castle” which is set in a 1960s German and Japanese Co-occupied USA. A world where the Riech reached it’s full potential and the world fell to it and its allies. A very good show 10/10 recommended
My man's. Your right, the man in the high castle is a 10/10. Amazing take on hoe the old would look like of Germany won the war
The Graf Zeppelin was so powerful, it's not an aircraft carrier. It's a fleet carrier. It carries the whole fleet acting like a mobile fortress.
Great content man! A very interesting topic for sure. Would have been cool to see some potential carrier battles in the Atlantic.
Hey you could still do a animation of it
The Germans would have likely lost to American carriers in short order. Our shipboard fighters like the Wildcat (and later Hellcat which ran rings around Zeros), would have done so to the modified German fighters, while American dive-bombers and torpedo planes would have advantages the Germans didn't have then, including not having a real torpedo plane to begin with. The Ju-88 was already a sitting duck against fighters by 1940; our TBD Devastator was the same, but had the advantage of a level-flight torpedo drop, and having fighter escort from our larger carriers. Plus we had more operational experience with our carriers than the Germans would ever gotten by 1941-1942 (Battle of Midway alone was more US carriers, aircraft and ships than Germany could ever hope to have or deal with).
They were right to scrap it as it was a terrible idea. The Tirpitz was one of the most powerful battleships ever made and they couldn't get it to sea. The Bismarck left Germany on 19th May, and was sunk on the 26th. It lasted just a week. A far more vulnerable aircraft carrier would have been close to useless in the circumstances Germany faced. I think it's also less known than it ought to be that Britain had 7 aircraft carriers at the start of WWII, and built a further 19 during the war, plus 46 fleet carriers. This disparity was similar in other ship classes. Hitler was simply correct to abandon a surface navy approach to the war and focus on submarines (which nearly worked), and realistically the US was never in any danger of a major German attack until Britain was defeated. There was a reason starving Britain was their best chance, because in outright naval conflict there was only going to be one winner.
They did build one, the Graf Zeppelin and it was 85% completed. Sadly, Goering stole the defensive guns twice and refused to focus on building carrier based aircraft. Egoes killed the idea.
Did he have any regrets after the war?
The inter-service rivalry between the Luftwaffe and the Kreigsmarine ultimately killed the carrier project.
@@BHuang92 and two destroyers. Operation Wikinger, Luftwaffe actually bombed and sunk a destroyer, and led to another hitting a mine
Maybe watch before commenting….
is it sad though?
This was fascinating! If you think about it, the Kriegsmarine actually had a very powerful surface fleet, with 4 major battleships, 3 pocket battleships and three heavy cruisers, as well as a decent amount of light cruisers and destroyers. Add the Graff Zepplin into the mix and you have a significant battle fleet. The problem was, they spent their ships piecemeal, never bringing their units together into a significant fighting force. Together, I'm sure they could have been a real threat to the British home fleet. Add in the U-Boats and Germany could very well have won the war at sea!
By 1942 uboats were being sunk by radar equipped grumans flying off of escort carriers in the Atlantic U-boat losses increased thru 1942.
They could never have won the war at sea, every ship the British lost could be replaced, while every loss they encountered would be gone forever. Factor in as well that when 'Murica got involved, something like one of the Missouri class ships would be more than a match for anything the Germans had, and that's not even counting the aircraft the allies would throw at them, nor the royal navy. Threat, sure, in the same way that the Bismark was a threat. Nobody likes getting a black eye. But win the sea? The lyrics of Rule Britannia will fill you in on that one mate lol.
The German's real problem would have been the lack of experienced pilots and crews. The Japanese didn't lose all their carriers at Midway but they did lose their best trained seamen. From that point on, all of their carrier operations were with the JV team and the result was the "Marianas Turkey Shoot". If the Germans tried to deploy an aircraft carrier straight into combat without at least a decade of training and experience it would have been briefly annoyed the British and Americans before they put it on the bottom of the ocean.
Worse, even their doctrine to use carrier is very questionable, at best.
Other major navy had spend 25 years to really convince that carrier is actually not suck, at best. And only during the war that convince carrier could do so much more than just "not suck", often the most hardest way.
And here we are, the whole "What if: German Carrier Edition" discussion is filled with survivor bias
Edit : grammar
According to some of the designs, it looks like the air carrier, would've been more of a cross breed, between a top surface air carrier landing and a side/adjacent battle ship weapon arms. Combo fleet ship.
I _do_ wonder what kind of difference the _Graf Zeppelin_ would have made if it had been included in, say, the _Bismark's_ task force. Having actual air cover way out at sea might have made the German surface fleet much more dangerous during the Battle of the Atlantic. I don't think it would have changed the outcome of the war, but wiping out a few more convoys might have prolonged it by a few more months.
>>but wiping out a few more convoys might have prolonged it by a few more months.
@@alexmuenster2102 Huh! Yeah I guess that would have been a distinct possibility.
Bismarck did not get to a single convoy.
@@JohnSmith-mh1mp You'll notice I never claimed they did. However, with actual air cover in the Atlantic, it might have had a chance to do actual damage to Allied shipping.
@@autofox1744 I never ascribed any claim to you. It is that the UK was so keyed in on watching the BM that it would have never succeeded. Hitler should have built more and faster, better versions of the Graf Spee for raiding. Thought would have become useless later in the war with the Allies having escort carries and radar on planes.
I wrote a short story sometime ago about the Graf Zeppelin being deployed. A couple of friends loved it.
Never knew I could wait for a premiere of a video until today, and it was totally worth it!! A way more complex set of reasons than what we usually take for granted!
Really interesting topic and top quality visuals and research! as usual!
hi I agree with your opinion although I am German.At the beginning of World War II, the Royal Navy was the strongest navy in the world, with the largest number of warships built and with naval bases across the globe. It had over 15 battleships and battlecruisers, 7 aircraft carriers, 66 cruisers, 164 destroyers and 66 submarines.
German shipyards had difficulty producing the ships ordered by Hitler and on the outbreak of the Second World War the German Navy only had two battleships, two battlecruisers, three armoured cruisers, three heavy cruisers, six light cruisers, 22 destroyers and 59 submarines.
One aircraft carrier with untrained inexperienced crew untested tactics and equipment would have stood no chance of making the slightest difference in the war for Germany. In fact it would have drained much needed resources.
Have to agree there. Whilst the german capital ships (Bismarck etc) were superior to most british capital ships training and experience count. However the *Bismarck had a design flaw in the rudder system and emergency "propeller" steering if needed wasn't going to work. This was found out at the sea trials, but never rectified and led to her eventual sinking due only to "steering" in circles when rudders damaged basically. I don't know if that flaw was rectified on Tirpitz. *(Hachette model "Build the Bismarck" history).
08:13 Junkers JU-87C is a super happy little fellow.
A better carrier design would be a light carrier that carries small planes, but could be made in numbers.
Like the US did with their escort carriers !
As mentioned in some comments, there was a light carrier that is based on the hull of the admiral hipper but it too was captured by the soviets
@@ruskiwaffle1991 Certainly , but you would not have been able to build that one in numbers! That admiral hipper hull is way more complicatet to make as well as more resorce and labor intensiv ! And more expensiv not to mention ! At least in comarision to an convertet freighter/tanker!
Don't know if someone noticed but when it was talking about the displacement limit. It is the washington and london naval treaties not the versaille treaty.
11:56
Sorry to disappoint, but I don't think it would have made any difference.
If Germany got the carrier operational early on, it could have been useful in trade interdiction missions against the Royal Navy, and likely could have wrecked a lot of merchant ships. It also could have been useful in escorting the Bismarck to the Atlantic.
However, once the United States inevitably enters the war, the Graf Zeppelin will be only one more carrier for the axis powers (Making 9 total once counting the 8 of Imperial Japan) against the whopping 32 of the US Navy. The odds are simply stacked so overwhelmingly against the Axis Powers that 1 more carrier won't make any difference. Even if it allows the Nazis to keep the fight going for another few months, all that will accomplish is getting the US to drop the first atomic bomb on Berlin instead of Hiroshima.
So long story short, even if Germany had all 4 Graf Zeppelins, or even 10 for that matter, it's not going to allow Hitler to bring "Man in the High Castle" or "Wolfenstein" to life.
Tbf at the start of the war the US only has the Lexingtons and the first two Yorktowns really in service and worked up as mainline carriers. But they still have the wasp and ranger to use, and the Langley if they got really desperate. Unfortunately the essex swarm would have to wait a few years.
@@guiltyofbias8818 Good Point, but I don't think there is really anything Germany could have done to stop the US before its Navy reached full strength.
@@jonwoodhouse1444 Only issue with that is when the US entered the war it was severly lacking behind in naval and carrier tachnology compared to the Japanese. It took almost two years for the US to build up an effective naval force and by then the majority of it was completely focused on the Pacific. We were mainly relying on the Royal Navy to get around Europe and the Atlantic by the time we entered the war.
That said the British had the same problem. While they had their carriers their aircraft were severly outdated and had to be replace with the same planes the US Navy was using. The only reason they were able to sink the Bismarck was because they got lucky. The thing is Germany didn't need to build up its navy just yet. By 1940 they had conquered most of Europe. They had air superiority by the time the Battle of Britain. If they had utilized the Luftwaffe the same way they utilized their U-Boats they could have been a real threat to the Royal Navy.
Remember, the Japanese original targets at Pearl Harbor were the carriers, not the battlships, because they _knew_ how much of a threat they were. The Japanese actually did the smart thing by going directly after the US Navy. Didn't work for them in the end by they had the right idea. If they had sunken the carriers as originally planned it would taken a lot longer for America to rebuild its naval force and the Japanese would have sealed their hold in the Pacific.
Germany, in my opinion, should have done the same thing. I know Pearl Harbor happened much later but even if Germany had succeeded in invading the British Isles they still would have had the Royal Navy to deal with. Remember, Britain became a superpower because of its navy. It's vital to their survival. Without it they pose no threat. So instead to of attacking the British Isles have the U-Boats and the Luftwaffe work together and go after the Royal Navy itself. Sink every ship you can find. Use the U-Boats to force them to sail closer to the coast so the Luftwaffe can reach them. Then attack them with a pincer manuever. Attack from bellow with the U-Boats while having the Luftwaffe attack from the air at the same time. Completely overwhelm them.
If you can destroy the Royal Navy you will have crippled Great Britian. Without their mighty navy to protect them they are now vulnerable, open to invasion. Therefore Germany could invade or at the very least agree to a ceasefire. Now that they don't have to Royal Navy anymore they can build the navy they want while also turning their focus on Russia. Britain won't be able to do anything to stop them by then. Then, once Germany has its naval force, they can deal with the US should they declare war.
At least, that's my take on the whole thing.
@@infinitlycool My point was, even if Germany succeeded in dominating the Atlantic and the British, they were still in no position to threaten the US mainland. The United States, being on a separate continent, was well outside the range of the Luftwaffe. I just don't see any way Germany could have stopped the US from constructing the two ocean navy, which, by 1945, was more than capable of out gunning both the IJN and Kriegsmarine at the height of their power, combined. The reason why most of it stayed in the Pacific in the late war was because Germany's naval capabilities had been mostly crushed by that point.
Granted, if the Germans somehow successfully invaded the UK, that would effectively rule out D-Day. However, I seriously doubt that the German carriers would have been enough to do this. Starve Britain and force an armistice, maybe. Although, that would probably rule out D-Day as well. You have a point there.
@@jonwoodhouse1444 I have to disagree. You're looking at it as though it's already 1945. I'm looking from 1940-41, before the US was even involved. If Japan had succeeded in destroying America's Pacific fleet entirely and if Germany had been able to build its naval force do you think they would have allowed the US to rebuild its navy? Highly unlikely.
An invasion would have been out of the question because it would have been too costly and they wouldn't had been ableto hold on to it. A more effective strategy would have been to use carrier based airstrikes and attack America's coastlines, targeting being the dockyards and the factories. Like Great Britain who relied on its navy, America's greatest weapon is its industry and mass production. If you can do enough damage to America's industry, you essentially remove whatever threat they could pose and force America to sign a peace treaty that acknowledges both Japan and Germany as the new superpowers of the world. From there. Japan has complete control over the Pacific while Germany has complete control of Europe and the Atlantic.
The only way I would see this plan getting disrupted is Operation Barbarossa still going badly for the Germans. Then again, Pearl Harbor wouldn't happen for another year and a half so there was plenty of time before having to deal with the US.
Thinks its pretty clear, Hitler had no interest in forward aircraft carrier warfare.All his targets were on Continental Europe and they were in the center, or North Africa, which carriers would be fairly useless in a desert tank campaign hundreds of miles inland beyond the range of ship based planes.
Only reason for the U-boats was to stop resupply by the enemy.
Horten flying wing bombers on a carrier like the Graf Zeppelin would have possibly been able to attack the east coast of the USA so long as the carrier could avoid British and American surface ships and submarines. After the Imperial Japanese Navy was so successful with its attack on Pearl Harbor, carriers became prime targets. It's likely that any degree of German success with carriers would have prolonged the war in Europe, as would have a successful invasion of England. The truth is that the Germans were fighting on too many fronts to ever win the war.
Truth is that the Germans never came close to the preconditions for a successful invasion of Britain. They were never close to winning the Battle of Britain (over the course of the Battle the RAF was growing in size while the Luftwaffe fighter squadrons were reduced to about 2/3 strength for shortages of replacement pilots, replacement plains, spare parts,...
And they never had a reasonable plan for maintaining reinforcement/resupply lines across the Channel against the might of the Royal Navy.
Germany was used to defeating the British (Norway, France, Greece) with superior numbers. Landing up to 100,000 German soldiers in the south of England wouldn't have worked so well against over 400,000 British soldiers defending Britain.
Here's a fairly authoritative American analysis from the era on German plans to invade England. www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/GERMAN%20PLANS%20FOR%20INVASION%20OF%20ENGLAND%2C%201940_0001.pdf
One German carrier would have been unlikely to turn the tide of the war, considering the US produced 150 of various types through the course of the war. They produced six fleet carriers in 1943 alone.
One solitary German carrier would have been overwhelmed and destroyed very quickly.
11:25 it wouldn’t. The Allies had many more carriers then the Germans and without escorts it would be easy prey for submarines or surface ship or even aircraft. The idea it would Pearl Harbor the US Atlantic fleet is absurd for several reasons. 1) The modern US fleet at that time would not have been taken by surprise especially with the amount of aircraft over the Atlantic. 2) just like Bismarck spies and scout aircraft would see it the second it left port. 3)the planes, the torpedo bombers in specific, where either her very old or not mad for carrier operations and inferior to allied carrier aircraft.
Its called the Graf Zeppelin started in 1936 and launched in 1938
i feel bad For the alternate reality pilots that had to land a Ho229 on an aircraft carrier.
As a German in can tell you that you didnt Butcher the Name Blohm und Voss as much as you thought, you have Spoken it pretty well. The Accent actualy sounded pretty nice. Thx for a Cool Video.
Germany always had a military philosophy of a "fast and free war", quick knockout and a profitable negotiated peace, and the only time they got that in 200 years was in the 1870 Franco Prussian War. No matter, they kept on trying, a triumph of dogma over experience. (A bit like Russia today). Carriers are a tool of World spanning Empires, or those intending to be one. Prussia's (and Nazi) Germany never worked out why they failed at this. (You have to have a certain minimum empathy with your conquered)..
It's a shame that you didn't make this video long enough to include more of the significant facts and reasons for it not being completed. One of the major reasons was because of the problems encountered trying to design and build a suitable / reliable catapult system for the proposed aircraft. There were also not enough experienced pilots available to train to become carrier based naval airmen, along with the many problems encountered whilst trying to modify existing aircraft types into 'navalised' versions. (Thus having to design carrier aircraft from scratch instead, which took even longer). No mention of the period of time it was 'hidden' in a river inland, or the fact that the Russians used it after the war for testing anti ship bombs / missiles which initially failed to sink it. If you are going to make a documentary video PLEASE DO PROPER IN DEPTH RESEARCH about the subjects.
There was never any possibility of the Graf Zeppelin being a serious aircraft carrier. Germany did not have the aircraft types to fly off it. Goering had no intention of allowing the despised Kriegsmarine any control over naval aircraft development. What German naval construction there was was purely a political sop to keep the navy content with the Nazi regime. Germany had no particular use for a surface fleet of any kind, and after May 1941 it was almost entirely useless and confined to the Norwegian Sea. And that mattered not at all because the Kriegsmarine by 1942 was utterly crippled by unsolvable problems of lack of fuel supply.
As designed, the Graf Zeppelin was spectacularly useless as a carrier. Carriers have no business carrying guns intended for surface actions. All this did was shrink the possible size of the aircraft numbers carried on board. An aircraft carrier's business is to operate an air group, not to fire surface guns at surface targets. So quite rightly, rather than waste effort and resources completing it, Raeder and the Kriegsmarine turned it into a furniture warehouse.
Depends on job of aircraft carrier... if you don't have the aircraft, fuel logistics for those aircraft, escort ships, etc to play battle group, then an aircraft carrier that can go solo and raid commerce with a few aircraft to spot and hit easy targets and help you run from everyone else might be the best you can do. Germany wasn't US or Japan trying to dominate an ocean, they were just trying to hit and run away from commerce to starve UK.
@@multilis2 It was a wasted effort entirely. It was a mere political sop to keep the Kriegsmarine in line with the Nazi socialist political agenda. It had no aircraft, and Goering refused to provide any support for a naval arm. The Kriegsmarine was crippled for lack of fuel after 1941 anyway so surface warship sorties were not going to happen anyway.
Rather than building a useless aircraft carrier incapable of filling its intended mission, Germany would have done better to turn the metal into tanks and aircraft which it could use. Essentially Hitler understood this very well. Zeppelin spent the war as a furniture warehouse, and the Kriegsmarine as a whole achieved nothing whatsoever of any significance.
@@colinhunt4057 never said it was feasible in our world just more feasible than a conventional aircraft carrier.... In alternative universe where Germany did a bunch of things better and had a few planes that worked and enough resources maybe it could have worked to help choke UK off and make UK surrender
Eg no failed battle over Britain, no codebreaker by UK+us, allowed to retreat then counter attack in USSR and better prep for winter there, some aircraft that would work with carrier, Germany taking Malta immediately in 1940
Given some better choices by Germany they would have had much more resources and starving UK to surrender may have worked, and a single aircraft carrier doing hit and runs while assisted by Germany aircraft bases in France may have been viable...
Resupply would've been virtually impossible, they lacked planes that could be launched from it, and the Royal Navy could've easily targeted the carrier at dock while under construction.
Obviously they would've needed aircraft carriers eventually, but they weren't in a place to build any the entire time. A lot harder to hide building an aircraft carrier than to hide building your tanks.
USA actually building aircraft carrier bcoz it was an isolated county from the beginning and for connecting to the old world and other super power countries they must need strong navy !bcoz there is no land corridor between American and Euroasia!mostly Europe countries does not care about aircraft carrier even they can build alot if they want too!specially soviet union France Germany etc
Hi !
You mention Bismark in you video, but let me add Musashi and Yamato. Musachi was sunk at her first mission, and Yamato was then transformed into coastal battery in Okinawa. Such costly ship for such use... For me, British would have set up dedicated missions to sink all the Graf Zepellin carriers (Bombing, Intelligence, Commando, ...) . So definitively, they would had no impact on the war.
Thx for your video !!
The British would have just sunk it. Wast of time.
First things that pop into my mind when I hear the word 'zeppelin' (in order):
1. led zeppelin
2. large airships, most notably the famous Hindenberg.
Aircraft carriers are at their most effective with space around them. My first thought is that it would have been a nightmare trying to get it out into the Atlantic intact. My second thought is that it would be a bitch to resupply that far from Axis bases. My third thought is, what would you use it for? The US started putting escort carriers in the Atlantic to deal with U-boats (and the British had a couple as well) so attacking allied shipping in the face of other carriers would be a very risky proposition for a lone aircraft carrier with few screening ships.
If your wondering, B did have a name a bit before it was incomplete. Apparently it would've been SMS Peter Strasser.
Imagine an alternate timeline where Nazi Germany did not invade the Soviet Union and instead focused on fighting the British Empire (and possibly the United States due to the Battle of the Atlantic). In a hypothetical scenario, the Kriegsmarine organizes an aircraft carrier task force to conduct commerce raiding against Allied merchant shipping in coordination with U-Boats and Fw 200s / Ju 290s. This task force would consist of:
CV _Graf Zeppelin_
CV Flugzeugträger B
CV Flugzeugträger C
CV Flugzeugträger D
BB _Bismarck_
BB _Tirpitz_
BB _Scharnhorst_
BB _Gneisenau_
The us would just replace the ussr without invasion, German industry can’t compete and reach the us
Also they will invade the soviet anyway because of ideology
I take it Hitler has magic in this alternate timeline in order to get all those carriers built.
8:11 Happy looking Stuka
“Oh boy! I get to go on a boat!”
This aircraft carrier would have been useless by 1945 as jet fighters were beginning to enter service.
Many American aircraft carriers was scrapped after the war. Why? - Because those ships were too short. They could launch old propeller aircrafts only and not modern jet fighters that was superior in performance. So the navy therefore saw no need in keeping them so they were scrapped.
And I think that Graf Zeppelin would have faced a similiar fate. It was not a large carrier.
The late WW2 USN carriers continued to see service on through the 1950s, able to handle jet aircraft. The Essex class carriers started to become obsolete in the 1960s as they were not able to accommodate the new F4-Phantom.
For that matter, the puny 13,000 ton light carrier HMS Venerable laid down in 1942 went on to carry Argentinian jets in 1982 (Falklands War). But the aircraft she could handle were pretty much 1950s era US Navy aircraft models like the A4 Skyhawk.
@@iansneddon2956 USS Enterprise - the WWII warship that partipated in every battle in the pacific war would have been an honor to keep. But she was scrapped after the war because she was too short and tiny to carry jets.
And I don't think the Germans would have bothered developing special jet fighters for this ship like the Harrier or Skyhawk - and thus making this thing obsolete.
@@nattygsbord By 1943, the Essex class carriers were in service and they built a lot of them so they were the benchmark for jet aircraft development. No point building something for a smaller deck when you have more than enough larger carriers and were building even larger.
But while the Essex carriers won the war for USA, it was the Enterprise, Lexington, Yorktown, Hornet, Saratoga and Wasp who kept USA in the war long enough for the new larger carriers to come into service. That only two of these ships survived the war speaks to intense combat they engaged in.
The Doolittle raid, Midway, Santa Cruz Islands, and Guadalcanal, and more. Lots of WW 2 naval history was written from the deck of Enterprise.
For me the greatest crime against naval history was the scrapping of HMS Warspite. This battleship had a great enough story from just WW I, but its actions in WW 2 were legendary. Tied for the longest range battleship hit on an enemy warship, it was not a ship to be messed with. And the battle of Narvik where the Royal Navy went into a fjord under the fire of shore batteries to eliminate half the German Navy's destroyers. But Enterprise would be on my list of historic ships from WW 2 that should have been saved.
@@nattygsbord We had 20 Essex carriers and they (most) were upgraded to handle jets (except for the giant F4). Many served into the 70s. One into the 90s. There was one Enterprise. All the other Yorktown class carriers were sunk.
@@iansneddon2956 Warspite was a top ten battleship. Even warship. Finished in 1915. Amazing.
If the Graf Zeppelin had entered service, I think it would have ended up on the bottom of the ocean just as quickly. By 1941, the British had over half a dozen carriers and years of experience in operating them.
1:41
sabaton
The Graf Zepplin is rarely mentioned anywhere, so Bravo. What limited knowledge I have, I wasn't there; all I can go on is what I've read, and hundreds of documentaries, this video is fairly accurate to everything I have read or heard, So Bravo again. Now as for the Germans and capital ships like the Bismarck, Tirpitz and I think the one that was scuttled in south America was the Graf Spree, they were not deploying ships in traditional "Fleets" they really didnt have enough capital ships to form fleets so for the most part they were raiding with single vessels, a pocket battle ship vs a supply convoy is some pretty easy pickings, but had they deployed 10 of they're best capital ships in one single or first fleet the Graf Zepplin would have made sense. but that was not what they were doing they were raiding with U-Boats and had they not wasted the resources on those pocket battleships and the two unfinished aircraft- carriers that would have been that many more U-boats, enough to win the war, probably not, but who knows, the Germans had way bigger problems on the eastern front and the delays caused by Hitler in the me 262 program, and countless other self inflicted and enemy inflicted wounds, America entering the war and Hitler foolishly declaring war on the united states, the writing had been on the wall for awhile, alot of vets of ww2 that I have spoken to in the past often will say we didn't win the war Hitler lost the war, he had gone mad. anyways great video and I will subscribe
Scharrrrrrrnhorst
One of the earliest proposals for aircraft on board was the Avia B-534 which were acquired in sufficient numbers after the "annexation" of Czechoslovakia. As a biplane fighter with an enclosed cockpit and decent performance it would have required little modification for carrier duty.
If you look at the north of germany, you can see that half of its shore line is in the Baltic sea (east / top right), and the other half (west / top left) is in the North Sea. Even today, the only significant maritime infrastructure in Germany is in Hamburg, 90 km in the land upstream in the Elbe. Hambourg is basically a port. Like Port Harcourt
Very cool - it's interesting hearing these "side stories" of the war
the kriegsmarine had a carrier. it was compledted because of the conflict between dönitz and göring. also it was actually deployed to attack some coaster thingy with its defensive armaments.
Either it was too hard to fix or it was so expensive that they didn't want to lose it.
if I remember right the graf zeplin was never completely finished due to steel shortages and putting more in to subs. There was a lot of back and forth due to various officers fighting over who was closer to Hitler and he encouraged it. The aircraft carrier was almost finished but put on hold and then worked on again and put on hold again.
Hitler was his own worse enemy and his military leadership knew it but was powerless to do anything about it. Japan had some similar weaknesses in this regard.
Finally, an English speaker who correctly spells "von" with an 'f' sound instead of 'v'.
They were overstretched somewhere around June 1941.
John Bezpiaty writing--Two big question to ask here is how well the Kriegsmarine understood the tactics necessary to operate the fleet protecting this carrier, and how well the German government would've accepted the allocation of other ships to protect it. Admittedly, their planners seemed to have planned for the Graf Zeppelin to be a more self-defending ship, but use of that tactic may hav÷ simply cost it mobility
The results of the battle of the Barretts Sea(December31,1942) is what decided the stopping of production of anything bigger than a destroyor. The SCHORNHORST was sunk at the BATTLE OF THE NORTH CAPE on December 26, 1943.
Your German is pretty good. But meme of the year: The Luftwaffel XD
Your Content is very good keep it up! :)
Very interesting channel this is! Love it! And just imagine that they succeeded operating with the Horten 229 on the Graf Zeppelin.
If I remember correctly the Graf Zeppelin was planned with much more powerful 8 inch naval cannons on the admiral hipper class cruisers. However the design with the 20cm guns was not used due to issues with the weight and space of the weapons that would further decrease the number of aircraft that the Graf Zeppelin design historically was able to carry with the 15cm weapons and the above average armor plating that reduced aircraft carrying capacity.
Your German pronunciation is getting a lot better.
Thanks for putting in the effort.
I like how there were skeletons hitting the griddy at 6:05 🤣🤣
The first thing that pops into my mind is Led Zepplin, not an airship.