Blücher: A story for the books?

[Simon Orchard]

The entire Norwegian campaign was nothing short of a disaster for the German surface fleet.

Blücher sunk
Karlsruhe sunk
Königsberg sunk (the first capital ship to be sunk by aircraft in WWII)
10 destroyers sunk or scuttled
Gneisenau damaged
Scharnhorst damaged

Bearing in mind the size of the KM surface fleet these were terrible losses.
It's difficult to see how the KM could have adequately protected Seelöwe under these circumstances.

[phylo_roadking]

Without opening up the discussion TOO far, those ten destroyers were SO undergunned and unmanouverable compared to their RN counterparts, they'd have been as little use in Seelowe anyway!

[Tiornu]

undergunned and unmanouverable

The German destroyers carried five 5in guns for a "broadside" of 309 lbs while the typical British destroyers (like the "H's" that fought First Narvik) carried four 4.7in guns for a broadside of 200 lbs.
In what way were the German ships unmaneuverable?

[phylo_roadking]

Tiornu, I've read accounts of the Narvik engeagements that said that the rate of fire from the German vessels was a lot slower than the RN. As for unmanouverable I should have written less manouverable; the why I don't know, but its somewhere buried on that website Sid Guttridge quoted about the GZ.

[Tiornu]

The Germans made their destroyers very big and powerful--on paper. They were indeed big. The first designs were 2200 tons, and the follow-ups were even bigger, some more than 2600 tons. But if you look at the construction dates, you'll see that these ships represent an explosion of construction activity. There really was no time for worthwhile assessment, and we see the knee-jerk escalation of the guns to a 15cm caliber, as if the 5in guns were inadequate. If the 5in guns were less than handy, the 15cm guns were even worse, especially in open waters where the German ships showed their inferiority as gunnery platforms. Ton for ton, German destroyers rate very low.

[Troy Tempest]

Hi Tiornu, I admit I'm no Kriegsmarine experten like yourself , but I was interested in what you said about the German Zerstörers being big and powerful - on paper. As that is the limit of my knowledge of them, on paper, I always thought 'pound for pound' so to speak, the KM Z class would kick the RN destroyers arse. They seem to have everything in their favour re guns, weight etc, so why are they inferior? When you mentioned they are inferior gun platforms, why is that? Wouldn't their extra weight make them more stable, or is there more to it than just weight? Were the 6" guns no good? Were they too slow or short ranged? Or what?! Also re all the damage to the capital ships in Norway, wasn't a lot of that due to the narrow waters they were operating in? Wouldn't a Seelöwe operation have avoided that? Also, wouldn't the KM have been able to rely on a hugely more effective Luftwaffe presence for protection than compared to Norway? Thanks in advance!

Troy

[Tiornu]

If this is a subject that piques your interest, the best reference by far is Whitley's German Destroyers of World War II. (An early edition of this book was called Destroyer! or some such histrionic stuff.)
There was no KM fleet design that could kick contemporary British butt on a ton-for-ton basis, except maybe the pocket battleships. The KM had excellent submarines, and their S-boats were the best MTBs of the war, but their surface fleet suffered from the Versailles harrowing of the design bureau. Often the Germans built ships that were the equals of foreign counterparts, but only because they had a size advantage.
A larger ship is not inherently more stable, and a more stable ship tends to be a worse gunnery platform. In general, stability and steadiness are exclusive properties. Why were German destroyers inferior to British types as platforms? Because the British designs were better.
Destroyers are not great gunnery platforms under any circumstances. Force the gunnery personnel to sling 80-lb projectiles around, and things get worse. Actually the destroyers were supposed to use the same 100-lb shell as other German 15cm ships, but that quickly became an obvious impracticality.
Two disadvantages leap to mind when considering the German situation at Narvik. One, despite their great size, the German destroyers lacked endurance--short on fuel and short on magazine space. Two, German destroyer power plants were famously unreliable. I believe there was one ship at Second Narvik that could not get underway at any time during the fight. It may also be that German torpedoes were under-performing at this time.
Bigger is not always better. A 1400-ton "H" class DD had a design complement of 145 men. A 2400-ton Type 36 DD had a design complement of 323. German ships demanded large crews of trained personnel, and Narvik took place at a time when the Germans were losing cruisers due to poor crew performance.
The only capital ship to fight in the narrow confines of Norwegian fjords was Warspite, and she came through it fine. I have often referred to that as the craziest thing ever done with a battleship.
There would probably have been no capital ships involved in Sealion on either side.
I don't know what Luftwaffe support was involved in Norway. It's not a particularly relevant point. Norway is farther away from Britain than Britain is, so obviously British air would be a greater factor in Sealion, while Sealion had almost no air action until after the first troops were already ashore and established.

[phylo_roadking]

Regarding air cover - the RAF managed to put a couple of underequiped squadrons on the ground, at Andlesnes for example, flying Gladiators and Blenheim I's and the like - remember the British operation was originally intended as a way of taking Norway out of the German war effort, NOT fighting the Germans! Apart from that the Fleet Air Arm provided air cover, and did it particularly well, given the heavy and underpowered fighters thay had at the start of the war. Im not aware of the RAF operating at long range from the UK, I don't think any British fighter designs in those days were equiped for droptanks.

The Germans had a LOT of aircover, operating ASAP out of airfields in the south of the country. Seaplanes acting as bombers, the ubiquitous Stuka, and Ju88s.

Tiornu, I can't remember where I read it but yes - the KM design bureau basically produced a number of what were very late WWI-type destroyer designs, or designs extrapolated from them, whereas as a maritime power the RN was up at the cutting edge. Hence although you're right, on smaller ships a lot of activities that are automated on captial ships, like ammo lugging, are necessarily done manually on smaller ships, the Germans seemed particularly slow at incorporating what automation could be integrated into smaller vessels, so a lot more of their combat procedures were slower and man-heavy.

[Richard Hargreaves]

I wrote this about ten years ago for a book I abandoned.

It doesn't contain much of the info I've collected on Norway since, so it's likely to be completely re-written by the time I write my book on Norway and the Fall of France...

Shortly after midnight on April 9th, the recently-commissioned heavy cruiser Blücher led the pocket battleship Lützow and light cruiser Emden into Oslofjord. The three-strong force constituted Gruppe V, charged with the task of capturing the Norwegian capital. But Kapitän August Thiele, commanding the Lützow, feared the events of the eighth meant there was now “little chance of surprise.” [Bekker, Hitler’s Naval War, p.110] In Oslo harbour, the German naval attaché waited for the warships to arrive:

Berths have been arranged so as to be able to carry out the action in Oslo as quickly as possible [he wrote]. Everything that I can do here has been considered and prepared down to the smallest detail. [KTB German Naval Attaché, Oslo, 9/4/40. FCNA, p.92]

Over five hours later, the attaché was still waiting for the task force. It never arrived.

At 5.20am, Gruppe V had been approaching the Drøbak narrows. Blücher, struggling up Oslofjord at half-speed, was easily visible from the shore a few hundred metres away in the early morning light. Coastal batteries with their 11-inch guns suddenly opened up and knocked out the heavy cruiser’s steering. Within a minute, two torpedoes launched from the shore tore into the Blücher’s engine room and her turbines ground to a halt. Fregattenkapitän Erich Heymann, the vessel’s first officer, reported:

Port side of the ship ripped wide open...Ammunition either exploding in the fire or thrown overboard. Fire parties unable to operate due to hoses having been slashed by splinters. The fires are spreading and wreaking more and more destruction with no possibility of combating them from the ship herself. [Bekker, Hitler’s Naval War, p.114]

An hour later, the Blücher was racked as her magazine blew up. Fleet commander Konteradmiral Oskar Kummetz decided to abandon ship, and the remaining crew threw themselves into the icy water. There was no panic, Blücher’s engineering officer wrote in his report on the sinking:

The bearing of the crew and soldiers was excellent. Despite the angle of the ship the soldiers behaved calmly and disciplined, even forward they were composed and calm. In a comradely fashion many members of the crew gave up their life jackets to non-swimmers in the Army with the words: “You must now continue the struggle ashore.” The mood of the soldiers was faultless.

At 7.32am, the cruiser turned on her side before plunging to the bottom of the fjord, “with her flags still fluttering”. [Report by Fregattenkapitän (Engineer) Karl Thannemann. Lochner, pp.460-64] The end, according to one Propaganda Kompanie reporter, was heroic: “There was one last infantryman on deck. He saluted and the survivors stood to attention. A cheer went up for the Führer.” [Irving, Goebbels, p.330. Another contemporary account of the Blücher’s end adds: “This living symbol of a German soldier standing like this in his hour of death [demonstrates] that a German soldier knows how to die.” [Gombrich, p.8]] Admiral Kummetz and the staff of 163rd Infantry Division, including its commander Generalmajor Erwin Engelbrecht, made the shore safely but were captured by the Norwegians; 125 sailors and 195 soldiers were not so lucky. They went down with Blücher or drowned in the icy, oil-drenched waters of Oslofjord.

[Troy Tempest]

Thanks for your reply tiornu, and I'll keep that book in mind mate.

Troy

[Tiornu]

Regarding German destroyer design, you can find a vague parallel in US destroyers. The vast DD construction program that America undertook during WWI left the USN with the largest destroyer fleet in the world. The fact that all the ships were obsolescent didn't mean as much (to Congress) as the sheer numbers. It wasn't until the mid-1930's that destroyer production resumed, and when it did start, it erupted in huge numbers before adequate assessment could correct initial shortcomings. The problems were not so pronounced as in the German case, largely because the Americans happened to develop some excellent weaponry, but is some regards the situation actually got worse before it got better. The two main problems were hull strength and stability.

[phylo_roadking]

Yep, reading accounts of the old four-stackers supplied to the RN on Lend-Lease, they were very unstable at their top speed...which they were constantly at because in the intervening years from when they'd been laid down and the RN were given them the speed of both RN destroyers and U-boats had increased greatly.

[Simon Orchard]

With such a huge disparity in numbers between the destroyer forces of the RN and KM, design is almost a moot point.
Another factor is training and tactics, German destroyers and torpedo boats generally came off worse when they met their opponents in the RN.

Without checking, the 10 lost destroyers at Narvik represented more or less 50% of the KMs entire force!


Phylo

The Skuas that sunk the Königsberg at Bergen flew from land bases in the UK.


Regarding Seelöwe, there's no way the LW alone could have garranteed safety for the shipping channels. RN submarines alone had been very active during Weserübung and had for example crippled the cruiser Karlsruhe.

[phylo_roadking]

The Skuas that sunk the Königsberg at Bergen flew from land bases in the UK.

The Blackburn Skua was a torpedo bomber operated from carrier or land by the Fleet Air Arm

Im not aware of the RAF operating at long range from the UK, I don't think any British fighter designs in those days were equiped for droptanks.

[Tiornu]

The Skua operated as a dive bomber and fighter.