The Saber and Scroll Journal Volume 5, Issue 4, Fall 2016 | Page 11

commerce raiding. She possessed long range with an operational radius of nearly
9,000 nautical miles at 17 knots, and with her 30-knot top speed was very fast for
her size. She was seaworthy (an issue plaguing Germany’s earlier battleship
designs), extremely well constructed with good watertight subdivision, and very
difficult to sink, as illustrated by her sister ship’s ability to withstand dreadful
punishment in May 1941 (although she was in the end sunk, either through
scuttling or from British torpedoes). 12
Tirpitz, like other German warships, also possessed excellent optical
equipment and fire directors; the accuracy and rate of fire of the battleship’s guns
in good visibility was excellent. Her main armament, comprising eight 38-cm (15-
in.) guns in four dual turrets, though far from the heaviest broadside then afloat,
was in keeping with the standards of the period. She was certainly capable of
matching any single Allied battleship before 1943, let alone the cruisers that were
often assigned to escort Arctic convoys. Overall, the Bismarck class compared
favorably with the battleship designs of other nations during the same period. Like
Tirpitz, none of these vessels were without their strengths and weaknesses. The
Japanese Yamato from the same period was, by virtue of her gargantuan size
(65,000 metric tons standard displacement) in a class all her own, while the later
American Iowa class fast battleships predictably outclassed Tirpitz. But this should
come as no surprise; the first of the Iowas was not launched until 1942. Thus no
genuine conclusions can be drawn by comparing these next-generation ships to
their predecessors, all laid down before World War II. 13
Despite her many strengths, Tirpitz did suffer from certain design flaws.
Above all was the fact that Germany had been forbidden to build and thus
experiment with and develop their warship technology sufficiently during the
interwar period. As such, the Bismarck class, though modern looking, betrayed a
conservative design with its share of drawbacks. The armor scheme was old-
fashioned; far too much of the ships’ sensitive electrical and hydraulic lines lay
exposed above the horizontal armored deck, which was situated lower in the hull
than was the case in other navies’ battleships. By situating their main armored
decks higher and thus keeping these vital parts within the ship’s protective scheme,
other nations avoided this problem. 14
Lastly, the fact that Tirpitz’s sister ship Bismarck could be successfully
attacked by a handful of obsolete carrier biplanes (whose torpedoes jammed her
rudder and enabled the British to intercept and sink her) is also telling. However, in
this respect the German battleships were no worse than the rest of their Axis (and
many Allied) contemporaries, none of which matched the potent antiaircraft
armament of many late-war American battleships. Tirpitz, during her sojourn in
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