The Saber and Scroll Journal Volume 5, Issue 4, Fall 2016 | Page 20

fleet engagements and battleship duels that did occur during the war, their
opponents usually bested the Axis battleships (the notable exception being
Bismarck’s spectacular destruction of battlecruiser Hood in May 1941).
Against the backdrop of her Axis counterparts, however, Tirpitz was—by
virtue of her comparatively long career as a fleet-in-being—an exception to this
trend. No other individual Axis warship tied down as many Allied resources and
was the singular focus of so much enemy attention in World War II. The effect the
ship had on the war was out of all proportion to her actual utility. To the British,
her mere existence was the source of immense anxiety. This innate fear of the
German battleship in turn had unfortunate consequences for the Allied war effort.
The virtual destruction of PQ-17 in July 1942 might not have happened had the
British Admiralty kept its head over the question of whether or not Tirpitz had put
to sea.
By the time the Allies were able to first cripple, then sink Tirpitz, the
naval war in Europe and the Atlantic was for all intents and purposes won. There
was little, if any, way the German battleship could practically affect the war from
1943 onward. Nevertheless, she continued to be an object of incessant British
attention right up to her sinking off Håkøy Island in November 1944, when she was
so battered and decrepit that she was useful only as a floating battery. It is no small
irony that Tirpitz, a vessel that never fired her guns in anger against an enemy
counterpart, may arguably have been the most effective Axis battleship of World
War II.
Notes
1. In the unflattering words of author Ludovic Kennedy, the ship “lived an invalid’s life and
died a cripple’s death.” Ludovic Kennedy, quoted in Dan Van der Vat, The Atlantic Campaign: World
War II’s Great Struggle at Sea (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 365.
2. Pietro Badoglio, quoted in Donald Macintyre, The Naval War Against Hitler (New York:
Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1971), 155.
3. Dudley Pound, quoted in Vincent P. O’Hara, Struggle for the Middle Sea: The Great
Navies at War in the Mediterranean Theater, 1940–1945 (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2009),
Kindle eBook Loc. 5984.
4. Robert C. Rubel, "Talking about Sea Control," Naval War College Review 63, no. 4
(2010): 40, accessed 7 November 2015, http://search.proquest.com/docview/750836496?
accountid=8289.
5. Laurence Lafore, The Long Fuse: An Interpretation of the Origins of World War I (Long
Grove, Illinois: Waveland Press, 1971), 131–134.
6. Gerhard L. Weinberg, Germany, Hitler and World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1995), 72–73. Nazi Germany, of course, had no intention of actually abiding by the
terms of the 1935 Anglo-German Naval Agreement.
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