I’m reading Bercuson and Herwig’s book, The Destruction of the Bismarck and I had a couple of questions about that naval period I thought I’d ask of the Dope.
First, the Hood. There seems to be general agreement that as a batle cruiser, H.M.S. Hood wasn’t supposed to go toe-to-toe with a full-bore battleship. So why was it nicknamed “The Mighty Hood”? It seems to have had a considerable reputation - it’s referred to as the pride of the Royal Navy, a major symbol of the British Empire, etc. The Kreiegsmarine in their training exercises tended to make the Hood their mock opponent. When the crew of Bismarck and Prinz Eugene realised they were facing Hood in the Battle of Iceland, they were reported to be both thrilled and intimidated. And when Hood went down, it seemed to have a major impact on British morale, not just because the R.N. lost a capital ship, but because the ship they lost was Hood.
So, why did Hood have such a reputation, both among the British and the Germans?
(And, why “Hood” as a name, anyway?)
Second question: The Graf Zeppelin. The book mentions that the Germans were working on an aircraft carrier, to be named Graf Zeppelin. What happened to it? I’ve never heard of it before. Did they ever finish it? did it ever sail? or did the disaster of the Rhine Exercise lead the Germans to concentrate solely on the u-boat fleets?
WhenHMS Hoodwas launched in 1920 she was the largest battlehip in the world and the nickname “Mighty Hood” dates from that time. In later years she bacame a battle cruiser which distinguished her from battleships which had much heavier armor.
I really question that the officers and crew of the Bismark were all that apprehensive about engaging Hood. The Bismark actually was just as big as Hood. Despite the advertized displacement of 35000 tons she actually displaced closer to 50000. She had far heavier armor and the same sized main battery. She was also much newer with a better propulsion system. It would be middle to late 1930’s ship technolody versus circa 1910 ship technology. Why would the Bismark’s crew have anything more than the normal pre-battle nerves?
As for why the Hood was so esteemed, she had 5,000 tons of extra armor added on after the battle of Jutland destroyed so many other cruisers. This was supposed to make the Hood into a battleship. By many measures (armament, size) she *was * a battleship. Also, the refit introduced new technologies that made her more advanced in some ways than true battleships. The work wasn’t perfect, unfortunately and she suffered catastrophic damage from a lucky german hit.
On the edit, there wasn’t even one answer when I read the question. You guys are good.
The HMS Hood got the nickname because she was the largest ship in the Royal Navy at a time whne the British populace felt quite kindly towards that service. She also took part in a world-wide “show the flag” cruise between the wars, which enabled hundreds of thousands to see her. Thus, both sides tended to use her as an example. Based strictly on show, not on go. As a fighter she was badly flawed, as the Battle of the Denmark Strait proved.
Well, according to Wikipedia, it was never completed, and was scuttled by the Germans before the Red Army arrived in Stettin. The Russians later raised it, and eventually tows it away (last photographed leaving Swinemünde (now Świnoujście in Poland) in April 1947. The Russians used it for target practice in August 1947, eventually sinking it. The wreckage was discovered in July of 2006, off of Leba (Poland, again).
We also had at least one thread on the Graf Zeppelin: Hitler’s Aircraft Carrier…FOUND! Newslink. that might have a tiny bit of additional info to the links already provided.
The Hood, despite being officially a battle cruiser, was one of the U.K.'s strongest fighting ships. Only a few of the newer battleships were superior to her in offensive weaponry, and the “R” class battleships were in fact inferior to her in that category. Despite the additional armor, though, she was considered to be relatively lightly armored – part of the reason that, despite size, she remained classified officially as a battle cruiser.
At some point, and I’ve been unable to identify exactly when in my reading, Grossadmiral Raeder and the surface fleet fell into disrepute in Hitler’s eyes, and he put all construction of new capital ships on the back burner – the Graf Zeppelin included. My impression is that it followed the series of events that sunk the Bismarck and disabled both the Scharnhorst and the Gneisenau, which would make it fairly late in 1941 – but though some of the histories I have access to have discussed the shifts in who influenced Hitler at some length, nobody nailed down any definite date on this. As Raeder’s star delined, Admiral Doenitz and the submarine fleet came to the fore.
IIRC — no cite, sorry — another thing that doomed the Graf Zeppelin was that Raeder wanted his own air arm (similar to the US, Britain and Japan), while Göring insisted that all military aviation must be part of the Luftwaffe. Since Göring had Hitler’s ear, the GZ declined in priority; and since, as Polycarp pointed out, capital ships were low in the pecking order, that made it a very low priority indeed.
i remember newspaper and magazine accounts at the onset of WWII that compared the British and German fleets. The great majority of them pointed out that Hood was just an oversized criuser with big guns. She was built in a time when there wasn’t a lot of money for navy shipbuilding and the navy wanted a big, impressive looking ship so they built Hood.
My impression is that Hood’s capability has been inflated as time passes.
What good would a Aircraft carrier have done the Germans anyway? Pretty much all their naval actions were in range of land-based A/C and the few that were not (Bismark) they could not have protected the Hindenburg.
If they had gotten their act together and had it operational before the allies got control of the air, it would have been able to devastate convoys supplying England.
That might have led to some interesting carrier vs carier action similar to the the Pacific theater. But the GZ would have been hosed by the superior Carrier forces of the RN.
The British had complete naval superiority as Hypno-Toad pointed out. All the GZ would have been is a BIG target- which is more or less what all the German Battleships ended up being.
If Hitler had accepted Raeders plan for an “early war fleet” of lots of subs and commerce raiders, and no big fucking steel targets, then the war would have been very different. The Nazis would have won the Battle of the Atlantic, and absent an early US entry, the Bristish would have had to sue for peace.
Sorry to pile on, but as noted in the other thread, the Graf Zeppelin was only slated to carry about two-thirds of the flight complement of a U.S. fleet carrier, and while that would have given it closer parity to British carriers, it would have still carried fewer planes than a Brit carrier.
Now, it is true that the Royal Navy entered the war with mostly substandard aircraft (for the time), but the planes the Germans considered for their carrier were only marginally better defensively and not as good offensively. It is unlikely that a squadron of Ju-87s would have presented a serious threat to another fleet and the Bf-109Ts would not have had the range to escort the bombers in a serious long-distance battle, making the Stukas pretty much dead meat. (In addition, Brit carriers used armored flight decks, which would have reduced the effectiveness of the Stukas, and the Germans had not even decided on a torpedo bomber.)
So, while your quoted statement is technically accurate regarding convoys, the more likely scenario would have been a repeat of the Bismarck fiasco, substituting carriers for battleships. The Graf Zeppelin would have been subjected to land-based planes until it got out near Iceland and after that the Royal Navy would have pulled a couple carriers together and hunted it down. (I suppose it could have hung around Norway under the protection of land-based support, threatening only the Murmansk run, but even there, once the Brits put their mind to bringing in more than one carrier, the GZ would have been doomed.)