But Capn Carl was referring to the plan Asuka mentioned of using Tigers against the D-Day ships. A Tiger’s gun is slightly smaller than a Ratte’s.
Yes and as correct posts in that thread pointed out, for conventional tanks (WWII mediums* or now) the tank is at big advantage vs an unarmored warship which comes within effective range of its main gun. The tanks, and there won’t realistically be only one, are much smaller targets which might be hard to even spot, but have to be hit directly. The ship is a relatively huge target on a flat surface with no cover, in most scenario’s. And WWII destroyers, generally completely unarmored, were vulnerable to even 75mm or smaller HE shells. Some destroyers were ‘mission killed’, though few sunk outright, even by .50 cal and 20mm fire.
However in almost all real cases destroyers engaged tanks from outside the effective range of the tank guns. Thus, while WWII claims by ships to have destroyed tanks were generally exaggerated compared to the accounts of the armored units, the ships were not typically in much if any danger from the tanks. And the fact that the armored formations, including accompanying infantry, were under fire they couldn’t respond to was in fact effective in some cases in getting them to retreat. But actually destroying tanks with a given round or salvo of naval gunfire was highly unlikely. Any brief study on the dispersion of naval guns at the relevant range v the size of tanks shows that. Same with indirect field artillery fire v armor: tank kills were unlikely, but separating tanks from supporting infantry, and subjecting them to fire they could not directly respond to, might well stall an armored attack.
If instead the ‘tank’ is a huge vehicle itself mounting heavy naval guns then the equation would change. The tanks would no longer be nearly as hard to spot or hit, and there would not be nearly as many of them. Although OTOH it would have an effective range more comparable to that of ships, maybe longer than destroyers. It would really be an extension in that case of coast defense guns (larger than tank or destroyer guns) v ships, except the coast defense battery would be a more obvious target, though mobile (to some degree), and way more expensive than most ad hoc coast defense emplacements of WWII, which were generally repurposed obsolescent ship’s guns or medium/heavy field artillery, sometimes pretty elaborate but most times not.
*not necessarily as true of some small WWII tanks, but if considering WWII medium tanks like Pz.IV, M4, T-34, or heavy tanks.
Naw you still would, after pulling the turret off and mounting it in some sort of armoured casement. I mean, we’re talking about a shore battery here. It’s not like there was a burning need for shore batteries to be semi-mobile. The harbour or whatever you’re defending isn’t moving around. If you need it to resist aerial bombardment, you dig it into the side of a hill (or make your own hill on top of it) and have it fire through a slit in the side. You get a more stable firing platform and it’ll be subject to fewer mechanical breakdowns, and you can use all that steel for something else.
There really is just no point to the Ratte except appealing to a 12-year-old’s sense of “Whoa cool!” It’s not that you can’t dream up scenarios where it wouldn’t be useless. It’s that in any of those scenarios you can achieve the same end better using fewer resources with some other method of mounting the ex-battleship guns. The design considerations that lead to giant armoured battleships as the methods of choice for carrying around huge guns on the high seas do not apply to land-based scenarios.
Should be pretty effective against a phalanx, or Napoleonic infantry. In WW2 not so much. Even if the drive-train could be made reliable the tracks would still be vulnerable to artillery, mines and anti-tank weapons.
Actually, that was done in Egypt, when the Germans were bombing British harbors at night. The harbor was moved.
Really, they just built a dummy harbor model a short ways away on bare sand shoreline, mostly just small lights that from overhead looked like the harbor. Quite scaled down, since pilots flying overhead couldn’t tell the scale. Then during air raids, the real harbor was blacked out, and the fake model was left lighted up until the Nazi bomber pilots saw it, then suddenly went to (imperfect) blackout.
It worked quite well. The fake harbor was bombed extensively, and the real one left undamaged. They even faked ‘damage’ to the real harbor, with piles of ‘rubble’, painted bomb ‘craters’ in buildings, etc., so that the next day enemy photo planes would report success from the nightly bombing raids.
Organized by stage magician now soldier Masklyne, using bigger versions of the techniques used in his stage shows.
To defend a limited number of harbors that’s true. But the German response to Allied ‘over the beach’ landing capabilities was to fortify entire coasts of 100’s of miles.
So in theory there would be a benefit to mobile coast defense to defend such areas, besides being able to move the guns around locally in defense of particular harbors or straits to reduce their vulnerability to preemptive strikes. And in fact some post WWII coast defense guns emphasized mobility, like the Swedish 120mm Karin system or the Russian 130mm Bereg system, although Scandinavian countries also had fixed coast defense gun and torpedo emplacements built as late as the 1990’s and operational till fairly recently. But coast defense anti-ship missile systems are all mobile.
The fundamental problem with a mobile 28cm coast defense gun (the caliber of Ratte’s main guns) in WWII was that it wouldn’t realistically be that mobile, not practically transportable by rail long distances so would have to move everywhere on its tracks and only on very large/strong roads, with no crossing bridges etc. But even if a system is practically mobile, you have to factor in the difficulty of predicting approximately where the enemy landing will occur, how predictable depends on the situation. In the German situation in WWII in the West that was very difficult, and there wasn’t an obvious alternative to the huge number of fixed coast defense installations from France to Norway, which automatically meant only a small % of them were ever likely to be used.
Any plan that proposes driving a 1000-tonne hunk of metal across deep wet mud like a river bottom can only be described as harebrained.
However there is a use for the Ratte. Let’s say you want Germany to waste resources on something monumentally stupid: persuade them to build a Ratte.
We could also encourage them to build/rebuild some behemoth battleships, like more Bismarcks & Tirpitzs to waste more resources.
Bismarck did one (partial) war patrol, totaling 135 hours before being damaged & scuttled. Tirpitz was also rather ineffective; her 8 main guns only ever fired 52 shells in battle. But she did manage to destroy a British weather Station & fuel depot on Spitsbergen Island.
Bismark also took out Hood, which isn’t nothing. And the various Kriegsmarine ships did tie up considerable Royal Navy forces which would have otherwise been free to escort convoys, etc. A battleship at Scapa Flow held ready to sortie the moment there was word of German capital ships on the move is a battleship unavailable for action in the Mediterranean or the North Atlantic. That’s far more useful than the Ratte would have been.