The long-lost wreck of the Nazi Aircraft Carrier Graf Zeppelin was found by Polish divers looking for oil.
I am so glad they didn’t get this finished!
The sucker was longer than the ocean was deep!
Man, oh, man, am I glad they never got this thing fully operational. What was the hang up? Couldn’t they see the military value of an aircraft carrier?
Catfight betwwe the Navy & the Luftwaff.
Nobody was willing to bend, so it sat out the War in dock.
That thing coulda shown up off New York City with Incendiaries & HE under it’s planes’ wings and… :eek: !
They’s have given us what we gave to Berlin!
Is that really how the Polish look for oil?
Is this the ship that the German Navy insisted on refering to as “he”?
Well, sure, otherwise it’d be the “Grafina Zeppelin.”
Yes. The trawling nets weren’t successful enough.
Hard to imagine it even getting out of the North Sea, even if it was completed in early 1942. Land-based Allied air-cover, and the Germans didn’t really have all that much in the way of ships to provide an escort. Possible with a simultaneous breakout from Norway by the Tirpitz, but unlikely IMO.
This is why Germany rarely builds aircraft carriers in Axis & Allies.
There were several times when it was attempted to establish that usage when referring to “special” ships but it never really caught on. One was the pre-WW1 ocean liner Imperator, another was the Bismarck (the battleship, incidentally the Imperator also had a sister ship named Bismarck) and, as you said, the Graf Zeppelin. Probably there were others.
They all had masculine names but so did most German navy ships. Normally this didn’t keep anyone - not even the sailors serving on those ships - from using the traditional “she.”
In German this distinction is more visible than in English because the gender is also used for articles and attributive adjectives.
I’ve never played it. I get all my military hypotheticals from Risk. 
I get mine from Civilization, and let me tell you, Germans build as many carriers as anyone else, but usually only when they’ve made Eurasia-Africa their bitch.
[crusty old Brit]Oh, get a grip, Yank. How much damage could one carrier-load have done you, even if it got past everything in the Atlantic and you had no home air defences? You’re lucky you never lived through the Blitz.[/coB]
High-ranking Nazi officials began to seriously question Hitler’s sanity when he unveiled plans for the construction of an enormous zeppelin, which would be named *Aircraft Carrier * “to confuse the enemy.”
OK, how about the planned Nazi “dirty bomb”?
Or Hitler’s store of nerve gas?
Did the Germans ever develop a carrier-based fighter plane? I can’t imagine the ME-109 being used for such a role. This ship was built in the late 1930’s-so why was it never used? There were a few carrier designes in the 1930’s (British I think) that had forward gun turrets- did the Graf Zeppelin have them.
I agree, building an aircraft carrier for service in the baltic was pretty stupid. There was no way this ship was worth its investment, when they could have built 20 submarines for the price of this ship.
Incidentally, the Italian navy never developed carriers as well-Mussolini didn’t think the expense was worthwhile-boy was he wrong!
Wrong! Twice!
1)The correct designation was Bf 109.
2)And—
The Ju87C version of the Stuka was also intended for the Graf Zeppelin. I believe they were all converted before they went into service to remove most of the carrier modifications and bring them to almost the standard Ju87B version, but the jettisonable undercarriage was retained and used in at least one emergency landing during later service on the Eastern front.
You’re still hyperventilating.
The Bf-109T was a Bf-109E fitted out with some of the gear necessary for carrier work. In other words, by the time the ship had been launched (in its most optimistic scenario) the fliers would have been stuck with a bird that was already two years out of date, further encumbered by the extra weight of the strengthened undercarriage and catapult and arrestor hooks.
The Ju-87 was just as little a threat. It worked well provided it was flying around fully defended by fighters, but in a situation where it had to defend itself, it was a flying tomb.
In addition, the Graf Zeppelin was only expected to carry about two thirds the air complement of any U.S. fleet carrier. Against any U.S. fleet carrier or pair of U.S. light carriers, it would have been flying a smaller number of outdated aircraft and handled by people who had fifteen fewer years’ experience actually plotting carrier combat.
I wish they had finished it. Think of the submarine resources that they would have had to divert to get it built so we could sink it.
I smell a new Dirk Pitt novel in the making.
Considering the US ended the war with about 30 (thirty) odd fleet carriers (IIRC, there were 26 Essex class fleet carriers alone), I’d say the German CV was probably not the most effective use of their resources. 
This is MPSIMS, so it may be of interest that a good number of characters from the anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion are named after aircraft carriers, and of course naval fleets are figured prominently in the first few episodes.
Asuka Soryu Langley - CV-1 Langley, Soryu
Asuka’s mother, Kyoku Zeppelin Soryu
Misato Katsuragi
Ritsuko and Naoko Akagi