sid guttridge wrote:Hi Paul,
You are still overlooking the point that it doesn't take regular warships to counter auxilary cruisers - just other auxiliary cruisers. The British had an almost limitless supply of Armed Merchant Cruisers.
Given that they had no real prospect of gaining maritime supremacy with their own fleet, the best bet the Germans had was to complicate the British task by presenting a variety of different challenges that required a variety of responses from the Royal Navy. This, I would suggest, is what the Germans did.
It only took a handful of submarine minelayers to cause the British to build hundreds of minesweepers, boom defence vessels, etc. Unarmed blockade runners caused the fitting out of a whole class of British ocean boarding vessels. Some 15 German auxiliary cruisers, only a minority of whom were ever at sea, caused the British to fit out and keep several times as many Armed Merchant Cruisers at sea permanently. A pocket battleship or battlecruiser on the loose similarly caused a disproportional response from the Royal Navy. Even doing nothing the Tirpitz required a shadow force to be kept opposite her with steam up.
In only one area - submarine attacks on ocean going merchant traffic - could Germany possibly have turned the course of the war. If Germany had invested as heavily in any other naval threat, it was doomed to defeat. Pocket battleships and converted merchant cruisers could only ever be auxiliary to this. Their value was less in what they might directly sink than in broadening the threat and diverting and stretching British resources.
One further point. Had the German Army not been successful in taking the whole continental European coastline from Norway to the Spanish border, then Germany would have found it virtually impossible to pose any ocean-going surface naval threat at all after the first few months of the war had seen those ships already at sea hunted down. It would have been a rerun of WWI with the Royal Navy in an even stronger position to blockade the North Sea in the absence of any real equivalent to the German High Seas Fleet of 1914-18.
Cheers,
Sid.
Given that the allies could count on a fleet of 10,000 merchant ships to start and a building capacity of hundreds per year to start with , swelling to thousands per year by the time the yanks arrived , the German uboat fleet had to build to a capability of sinking something like 500 allied vessels per month to have any chance of success. By themselves the Uboats could never hope to defeat the Allies.
The key to the failure of any weapon is usually the lack of a realistic strategy and this is clearly an example. The most important lesson for Germany from WW-I was to avoid getting into a war of attrition, so that could not be the basis of a naval strategy. The land solution to this was direct assault and this was clearly the way to go agains the UK. So the strategy Germany adopted was doomed from the start, since it had no end game.
Germany could match the RN in personnel numbers and guns [captured] but they could not match the RN in warships....so they had to resort to radical solutions.They could build an entire fleet based on captured vessels converted into auxiliary warships at a fraction of the price and time of building a conventional fleet. While this could not replace conventional warships, they could fill roles and pervent valuable shipbuilding assets from being diverted away from building such a fleet. This gobbled up a hugh share of the ship building efforts during the war.The totals were 560K tons [Tboot/Rboot/Mboot/Sboot/KFK/MFP] plus another ~500k tons converted Vboot , the Uboat fleets totaled ~905K tons.
German navy was tasked with three essential missions, which they did quite well historically considering how far they had to go. Coastal defense [> 3000 vessels] , local convoy escorting and training plus offensive commerce warfare against the enemy. Auxiliary warships could have been utilised to cover most if not all of these missions to free up ship building to concentrate on building a battlefleet.
European commercial fleets counted some 40,000 vessels of which 1/3 was directly accessable to Allies and 2/3 to the Axis. The Axis could count on expanding a fleet from ~4000 to ~10,000 vessels during the war as Europe is occupied.Any where from 2000-3000 would be needed for continued sea transport , but the rest could be utilised if suitably adapted.
Then theres the issue of using captured enemy naval fleets. In some cases [France], they only got 10% and most was of little use, but in other cases they captured 2/3 [Italy] of which a good portion was put to usage right away. The Belgian, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian & French fleets between them counted about 800 vessels, so not an insignificant amount. A comprehensive policy for seizeing these fleets could have been in place from before the war began.
BTW ,The reason why the Brits had to build a hugh fleet of minesweepers had much more to do with the fact that the germans laid 225,000 sea mines during the war. Every german warshipAuxiliary ships could lay mines...even the minesweepers themselves. By comparison the germans had to devote 40% of their entire fleet in minesweeping operations , ~ 1500 vessels as I recall.