It’s virtually the same plan Japan had to keep the US out of the war except they missed the carrier groups.
To say the British would have wiped out the Bismarck and Tirpitz together ignores the power these ships projected. They were terrified of them. The flag ship of the British navy went down in 3 minutes after confronting the Bismarck. It took a ridiculous amount of fire power to take the Bismarck down and then only because of a lucky shot to it’s rudder made it impossible to maneuver and use it’s guns properly. The Tirpitz was sunk in 1944 in a specialized all-out attack that was successful by shear luck. It was done using Tallboys developed in 1944. The US didn’t have such a weapon in 1940 or a bomber capable of delivering it.
Japan’s navy was massively larger than Germany’s and her strategic situation was totally different. And they failed.
If you wait for Tirpitz, the war starts about when it did anyway for the USA.
Secondly, the Royal Navy would still have destroyed them. It’s ridiculous to think otherwise; they were massively larger, the largest navy in the world, and could not have permitted those ships to enter the Atlantic unopposed. They destroyed Bismarck. They would also have destroyed Tirpitz.
So lucky shots brought down both Hood and Bismarck? Also, Hood wasn’t the “flagship of the British navy.”
I’m sorry, but this idea is just insane. What you are suggesting is impossible. A force of two battleships, no matter how scary, was not going to defeat a massively larger force that would have been absolutely bound and determined to sink it AND overwhelm the United States Navy and air force and shore batteries. Maybe you think Bismarck was an Imperial Star Destroyer or something.
Bismarck and Tirpitz were obsolete for the same reason Yamato and Musashi were obsolete. They just didn’t know it, yet. It is inconceivable that either ship could have survived US and British air power.
Bismarck was obsolete in that respect, but too advanced in another.
The Swordfish that dropped the torpedo that took out the Bismarck’s rudder (and thereby enabled its sinking) is said to have escaped the Bismarck’s anti-aircraft guns because they slew too quickly, i.e. even at their slowest rate of slew (tracking), they were always head of the lumbering Swordfish. They had been designed with the expectation of a faster minimum airspeed of any attacking plane.
I disagree. From Wiki: Despite the appearance of new and more modern ship designs over time, Hood remained the largest and most powerful warship in the world for twenty years after her commissioning and her prestige was reflected in her nickname “The Mighty Hood”.
A lucky shot didn’t bring down the Bismarck. It disabled it and the crew ended up scuttling it. As for the Turpitz, it was taken down much later in the war with weapons the US never possessed or had the bombers to deliver. It was a well planned attack that only succeeded because a radar operator didn’t report incoming bombers.
It’s not a force of two battleships. It’s a fleet of ships that would include 2 of the most powerful battleships at the beginning of the war. There were better ships toward the end of the war so their only practical use was to delay the US and it’s supplies so they could defeat England. Germany wasn’t waging a sea war. they were waging an air war and did an immense amount of damage in the Battle of Britain after defeating a great deal of Europe.
It may have been one of several factors, including poor visibility, older AA weapon systems, durability (and lack therof) of the Swordfish, and the inability to deal with a low-level attack.
MHV covers much of this in a video:
Fact is, AA on ships early in the war was poor for all sides. The Allies got better to the point that attacking US ships was near suicide late in war.
Thanks, I just watched the video. Very interesting. “The perceived weaknesses of the Swordfish were actually strengths . . .”, and in more ways than I might have thought.
I’m sorry, but this idea that the Bismark, Tirpitz et al are going to pound the US East Coast is in pure wehraboo realm. For several reasons:
Its a suicide mission. Ignoring the fact the the US has an Atlantic Fleet the range from the German coast to the US Coast would consume almost 1/2 of those Battleship’s fuel, and that is if they were allowed a straight-line run at nominal speed. Sure they could have dragged a few oil tankers with them, but those ships would slow down the fleet considerably making them all much more vulnerable. This kind of makes such an attack pure suicide, and we know what happened the German Navy was ordered to commit suicide. Now one could place oil tankers in position along the way (assuming the UK fleet did not intercept them) but to coordinate that you would need a lot more radio traffic, which we will cover in a moment.
The UK and US Fleets. I’m sorry, was England just going to wave as this fleet sailed on by? I rather doubt it. Its not an easy run to get past them. Then you have to deal with the US Fleet, which has already had its order of battle listed in this thread.
The targets - OK, again assuming no Allied fleet intervention, what are you going to hit? Norfolk has the closest-to-the-ocean of the big naval yards but there quite a bit of obstacles to deal with. Philadelphia? Try winding of the Delaware river while the shore batteries pound you if you could pilot the river properly. Brooklyn? Even worse. Sorry, you are not going to pull a Battle of Medway (no, I did not misspell that) on the US very easily. If the fleet did manage to get close enough it would probably end up shelling Atlantic City and turning tail.
Operational Security - OK, fact is, the Germany pretty much sucked at it. Their codes were at the very least partially broken, and in some cases fully broken. Their intelligence and counter-intelligence failures are epic and they usually only managed surprise when the enemy was completely complacent or willfully ignorant. This means a huge operation like this is going to have holes. The US might, just might have been complacent enough when the German fleet sails, but the UK fleet would not be, and I doubt they’d just let the ships sail Westward without any warning to the US.
Now, some might point to Pearl Harbor, but Japan had many major differences there - such as the actual attack being with planes, not battleships, and they lacked a large, 3rd party hostile Navy between them.
code breaking in real time wasn’t effective until 1943 with the introduction of the the Naval decoding machine made by NCR. They were incredibly complex machines.
The idea that England could dispose of Bismarck class ships at will is not consistent with the effort and planning put into making that happen. It took a 12,000 lb bomb from a Lancaster to destroy the Turpitz. This bomb didn’t exist until 1944. the US never had a bomber capable of carrying it.
Partial codebreaking was already in effect by the time the Bismarck sailed. It told the British quite a bit about what the Kriegsmarine was up to.
More to the point, operational security is more than just codes. The Germans were terrible at it.
You seem to think these Battleships were somehow invincible. That simply is not the case. While it was destroyed by a very large bomb in the end, at several points in its career it received damage that would have been fatal had it not been already in port or near enough to a friendly port to limp in for repairs. In the middle of the Atlantic Ocean or off the coast of the US the Tirpitz is going to end up like the Bismarck: crippled, pounded into shambles and scuttled.
Outright sinking of a Capital ship by enemy fire is actually fairly uncommon in history. In days of sail most ships struck their colors long before sinking damage was achieved. The Hood being one of those rare examples (due to a torpedo explosion). If you want to be technical, here is a fact for you: The US Navy didn’t sink any carriers at the Battle of Midway! Its true! All four Japanese carriers were scuttled after damage had rendered them ineffective and towing them back to Japan ports was deemed impossible. A fate similar to this is what faced the Tirpitz. There was nothing magical or miraculous about these German Battleships.
So you can go on and on about a ‘bomb the US didn’t even have’ when the fact is you don’t have to sink a Battleship to end it.
My apologies, I was struggling with the alternate history proposed by Magiver.
I should have said that, historically, the Tirpitz was not completed (construction-wise) until '41, and (after “shake-down” work-ups) would not be available for operations until the summer, I think. (The Germans seemed to like having a lengthy work-up period for their surface ships.)
So we have now established that you don’t even know what a flagship is. Holy smokes.
Cool, and what else? How would that compare to the forces arrayed against them?
How many British battleships were there? How many heavy cruisers? How many cruisers? How does that compare to the German fleet?
How many aircraft carriers? How does the German fleet deal with air attack? Please be specific; they have no carriers and no fighter cover.
How many destroyers can the German fleet bring with them to bombard New York? Oh, I know the answer - zero. Did you know German destroyers were not capable of cross-Atlantic operations? Too small, not enough range. Without a destroyer screen can you please explain what the German defense against submarines will be? U-boats weren’t effective antisubmarine weapons.
If you can’t decode something in real time it’s last month’s news. Encoded messages are not mission plans, they’re instructions for plans already in place.
The British thought they were an extreme threat and acted on that belief. They went all out to destroy them.
Germany was waging an asymetric war they could not win in the long term and certainly not against the production capacity of the US and Canada. Instead of fighting tanks and equipment in the field they chose to eliminate those assets at sea.
The Bismarck and Tirpitz were the best ships at the beginning of war and the Hood was an example of that. They were the benchmark to beat for the ships entering the war later and that’s exactly what happened. Either Germany used these assets early on in an asymetric way or they were a doomed asset. There was never going to be a long term win for Germany if England survived with the production capacity of North America behind it.
Several times intelligence and partial decodings indicated that the Bismarck was heading out. From the wikipedia article:
You are vastly underestimating how even partial decrypts can help provide intelligence (Midway was done with only partial codebreaking). Furthermore, as the other intelligence factors showed, operational intelligence was also available.
Yes, they were a threat. That does not mean ‘invincible’
Which they primarily did with U-Boats, which had horrendous casualties, even for the war.
‘Advanced’ is a subjective term when it comes to capital ships, and no, the US wasn’t too concerned a pair of penned up German battleships when they were seeing the Yamato being built. They were more concerned with longer ranges that were expected from the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
Bismarck was built from the experience of Jutland, for example. Which was a lot of North Sea/Baltic Sea visibility conditions and closer combat.
In the end, it was crippled by obsolete biplanes*. Partly because this ‘Advanced Battleship’ was fielding some obsolete AA weapons.
Again, MHV covers this issue and how it is more complicated, especially how differing countries needs dictated their building styles.
England wasn’t surrendering, and your proposed attack on the US Coast is just plain suicide that does nothing but send the majority of the German Navy to the bottom before the US even enters the war. That’s not asymetrical warfare, that’s just good old suicide.
And yes, they did the deed. You cried earlier that it was a ‘lucky hit’ a standard you do not seem to apply to the Hood’s torpedo explosion.
I may have missed it earlier, but what was the basis of their fear? Was it based on the loss of the Hood or were there other, possibly strategic, concerns?
(Maybe they were worried Dana Wynter would fall into German hands?)
A fast Battleship let to run free could wreak havoc with material shipping and could be much more damaging than U boats. It wouldn’t stand a very good chance against most Capital ships built post-Treaty but the very fact that it was around meant you had to have ships in place to keep an eye on it our counter it. England felt it was better to be done with it.
To be crystal clear on this point, Hitler’s reason for invading Russia is because that was always his primary goal of the war. To varying degrees, every thing else was just a side show to that end. He felt that Germany and England were natural allies. He wanted to take France but that was secondary. And he didn’t really care all that much about the United States.
Russia and the east was the beginning and the end for Hitler.
To be crystal clear on this point: The situation I described was drawn from Hitler’s own words. I get that he was probably not the most honest guy in the world, but absent some contradictory information I’ll trust a primary source rather than a post-hoc assessment. Is there some other documentation where Hitler spells out his own thinking on the topic?
