And the Deutschland class as well (don’t want to make the title unwieldy).
Both ships were in a weird place, too big to be considered heavy or battlecruisers but not strong enough to be part of a battle line
They freaked the Brits out due to their ability to decimate merchant surface shipping but once the RN and later the USN were organized, these ships were bottled up in port
Seems to be a big expense for return of a few dozen merchant ships.
When planned, war with the world’s largest navy (Britain) was not expected. The French navy was a more likely opponent.
Evaluating them is complicated. Looking only at merchant tonnage sunk isn’t sufficient. They also sank an aircraft carrier, 2-3 destroyers, and caused the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force to expend huge resources attempting to sink them. IMO, the Germans got a better return from them than most countries got from warships.
The efforts the RN has to expend on them amounted to at best an inconvinience.
Off the top of my head:
Old RN BBs were put on convoy duty.
Multiple heavy bombing missions.
Battleships and carriers kept in Home Fleet instead of other theaters.
Air reconnaissance missions.
All the efforts vs the Channel Dash.
Cruiser patrols.
Can you think of other capital ships that drew so much effort? Maybe Yamato, Zuikaku, or Tirpitz. That’s about it, I think.
Don’t forget internal politics and prestige. There was still smarting from the loss of the WW1 Kriegsmarine, and a notion that big-gun battleships were the hallmarks of great power status. Building top-of-the-line behemoths in the 1930s were both great for bolstering national pride and also still seen as militarily practical in a decade where traditional naval combat philosophies were only dying a slow death.
Good points. No group of warships had a better reputation post-WW1 than German battlecruisers.
In theory that was the attempt to build a heavy hitting capital ship, capable of sinking any cruiser, and faster than any battle ship- and stay within the Treaty limits of weight (it failed as far as the weight goes, but close enuf so that no one challenged them.) They were pretty solid commerce raiders.
As for the Scharnhorst,to counter the German Panzerschiffe- the Deuschland class , the French built two small Dunkerque battleships/battlecruisers in the early 1930s. This in turn prompted Raeder to begin plans for a more powerful battlecruiser design.
So the Scharnhorst was basically a super Deutschland.
I roll between the national prestige idea and the Kriegsmarine just wanting big ships cause why not, the English have them. Plus in 1935 thinking big ships are very much a threat that your enemy has to account for or egg please meet face.
What makes less sense to me than the big warships is why the Germans kept throwing resources at the failed aircraft carrier Graf Zeppelin (and I think one other?) when the war was half way in progress. It had multiple expensive redesigns because nobody could decide what it was supposed to be and was ultimately scrapped to no gain. Bros, your chance to play aircraft carrier sailed away when the huge land war thing erupted…stop throwing money at it!
It was, and in retrospect, Germany should have poured those resources into more submarines. Or something else. Her capital ships performed admirably but the opportunity cost was ludicrously high.
But that’s in retrospect. To people at the time, had you said in 1937 “Germany can most effectively fight a world war in the next five years by not building any capital ships at all” they would have thought you were insane. It would be akin to me telling you right now that the United States was going to fight a general conventional war with China in 2023, but in so doing, would be much better off getting rid of every single fighter place in the Air Force, Navy and Marines, or maybe fighting a full scale ground war but first melting down all their tanks, because they wouldn’t be worth the bother. It would seem nuts. The centrality of the battleship in military thinking at that time is difficult to overstate; it was just one of those things every country serious about war was supposed to have.
We know now that had Germany focused on its submarine fleet prior to 1939 and gone into the war with more of them and the capability to build even more, they might well have choked Britain to the peace table. But hey, Monday morning quarterbacking is easy.
The “Pocket Battleships” werent so bad of a investment, they made other nations react to them, the French wasted $$ on building ships to counter them.
But yeah, if they had let Doenitz have his way, GB would have been in trouble. The Blitz actually increased morale, but the lack of things like tea and chocolate was hurting morale.
To paraphrase a Great Man: “That Hitler! He was a little bit goofy!”