The Saber and Scroll Journal Volume 5, Issue 4, Fall 2016 | Page 9

into the Allied camp. 5
However, the Allied defeat of Germany in 1918 saw draconian measures
implemented in order to prevent its maritime resurgence. Besides being the catalyst
for the German fleet’s defiant scuttling at Scapa Flow in 1919, these measures
largely succeeded in stymieing the Weimar Republic’s technical and organizational
means to rebuild the navy in the interwar years. By the time Hitler came to power
and renounced the Versailles Treaty (brokering a naval deal with appeasement-
minded Britain in the process), the Germans were hopelessly far behind their future
adversaries in naval construction. 6
Despite the tremendous hurdles faced by Hitler’s Kriegsmarine during the
rearmament period in the 1930s, its commander-in-chief, Grand-Admiral Erich
Raeder, was determined to see the grandeur of the Kaiserliche Marine restored. It is
reasonable to believe that Hitler himself (though largely devoid of naval
competence) also craved, at least initially, the great-power status and political
leverage of the traditional battle fleet. It was a fantastically ambitious program by
any standard. Buoyed by Hitler’s guarantees that there would be no war with
Britain before 1944, Raeder envisioned a powerful fleet of battleships (after the
Bismarcks would have followed the H-class, displacing over 56,300 metric tons),
aircraft carriers, cruisers, destroyers, and submarines able to sweep the British from
the North Sea by 1948. This is an important consideration and helps explode the
myth that Hitler never really wanted to fight the British Empire or the West. Such a
construction program could only have been geared in the long-term toward
confronting the Anglo-American naval power bloc. 7
As it was, Germany’s extravagant “Z-plan” was rendered stillborn by the
onset of hostilities in 1939. In retrospect, the German decision to reconstruct a
battle fleet may have been folly; even if the necessary steel and manpower had
been acquired for its ships, the question of where the fuel for operating such a navy
would have come from is not clear. Indeed, Germany had enough trouble
scrounging fuel for the few capital ships it did possess during World War II. The
German war effort would probably have been better served by a stronger focus
from the outset on U-boat production over surface ship building—in other words,
on sea-denial versus sea-control weapons. Instead, the outbreak of World War II
presented the German Navy with the worst of two worlds: an embryonic battle fleet
and a U-boat arm that had been neglected in favor of the former until it was too
late. 8
Given the situation faced by the Kriegsmarine surface fleet at the outset of
World War II, there were only two strategies for which Raeder’s capital ships could
be realistically employed: fleet-in-being and guerre de course (commerce raiding).
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