The Saber and Scroll Journal Volume 5, Issue 4, Fall 2016 | Page 10

Raeder, being a proponent of the latter, envisioned his heavy units as solitary
raiders prowling the sea lanes, using the vast expanse of the open ocean to evade
Allied pursuers. For this kind of mission, his new cruisers and battleships were
well suited; they were blessed with good range and high speed, able to outrun
anything they could not outgun, and possessed ample facilities for reconnaissance
float planes. Raeder was keenly aware of the tremendous disruptive potential these
vessels could have on enemy shipping and naval movements, as Germany’s
enemies fumbled around the ocean trying to catch the elusive ships. 9
While ultimately a failure, Raeder’s commerce raiding doctrine with
heavy units paid dividends early in the war. The 1940–1941 sorties of battleships
Scharnhorst and Gneisenau were particularly disruptive to Allied shipping.
However, deeply distressed by the loss of Bismarck during her maiden sortie in
May 1941, Hitler prohibited his capital ships from commerce raiding in the
Atlantic. Instead, he ordered the Kriegsmarine surface ships rebased to occupied
Norway. This was primarily to secure the Reich’s northern flank against a
potential Allied invasion, which the Führer feared and with which he was
obsessed for most of the war. By keeping the surface ships in Norway they would
not only serve as an effective fleet-in-being and deter invasion, but also be able to
strike out against the Allied Lend-Lease convoys to Murmansk and Arkhangelsk
in the Soviet Union, which had begun running the Arctic gauntlet soon after the
Germans launched Operation Barbarossa in June 1941. 10
In any case, the Kriegsmarine’s use of capital ships as commerce raiders
in the Atlantic was a dubious proposition by the end of 1942, as by then Allied
detection measures and air surveillance had effectively closed the high seas to
German surface warships. However, the Allies’ Arctic supply route to the USSR
was dreadfully vulnerable and could be interdicted far more easily, close as it lay
to the Nazi-occupied Norwegian coast. Here, the Kriegsmarine’s surface ships
were always near safe harbors and could count on air support for their sorties.
This, then, was the strategic situation that greeted Tirpitz on 10 January 1942, as
she concluded her sea trials in the Baltic and was declared fully operational with
Captain Karl Topp in command. Five days later, Tirpitz departed Wilhelmshaven
for Norway. 11
The Bismarck class battleships, of which Tirpitz with her standard
displacement of 42,344 metric tons was the second and last, have gone down in
popular lore as super ships of immense power. This, however, is not entirely
accurate. Though Tirpitz was in many respects an excellent design and without
doubt a formidable warship, she possessed few clear-cut advantages over
contemporary battleship designs. On the one hand, she was well suited for
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