Countering Plan Z - What would the Royal Navy have done?

While I respect Drachinifel's historicity and his scholarship with real naval events and outcomes, I do not tend to agree with his take on naval theory. Part of this is a direct 21st century hindsight, but another part is an imaginative exercise of taking what the people responsible of the era knew and could reasonably expect.

There were two ways to look at the German problem that such RN CNS naval authorities as Admirals Ernle Chatfield and Roger Backhouse could anticipate. Both individuals were aware of the Wegener Thesis and of the thinking of Erich Raeder, though not so familiar with the ideas of Karl Donitz. This was because the Germans published their own naval thinking as lessons learned from the Great War.

I suppose that the arguments among the interwar German admirals can be simplified as to how to conduct a guerre de course, since almost all the German admirals agreed that the Tirpitz risk fleet idea was discredited by Jutland and the idea of distant blockade.

In other words, the Germans had reread their Mahan and finally cognated that it was not decisive battle that was the object of Mahan's work; but use and denial of the sea and that the twin elements of blockade and trade defense were the mechanisms that provoked "decisive battle" as a derivative result of a naval campaign. That the naval campaign, itself, was geographically driven by shoreline constraints adjacent to thr sea and that it was the form and function of the naval campaign which was simplified down to the use and denial of the sea as means of transport from port to port that was the true heart of Alfred Thayer Mahan.

The British were thinking differently. The navy was an instrument of state policy and war strategy and it purely existed to project that national policy and strategy. This was Corbett and it was wrong. One can see this error in the continuous admiralty preoccupation with ideas like "power projections" and targeted interruption of trade schemes such as Operation Paul against Germany, or the Allied Norway Campaign, the misuse of the new naval tools of the aircraft carrier and shore based long ranged maritime patrol aircraft and attempts to thrust surface fleets into the South China Sea and the Baltic.

Add to this error the constant bean counting simplification that plagued British admiralty thinking. This type of thinking led to the error of the KGVs, a badly compromised battleship design which was supposed to be an example for other nations to follow as to what the upper limit of battleships under an arms control regime should look like. Well, how did that work out? Not too good. Neither ally (France) or enemy (Japan, Germany, Italy) paid any attention to British thinking or desires and Britain's competitor, the United States was not even thinking Corbett at all. *(They had their own problems with Stark and Turner and Leahy, but at least they had Mahan to keep them straight. Plan Dog was the worst piece of strategic nonsense ever produced by an American military professional. Thank goodness there was Marshall to counteract Stark and Leahy.^1)

^1 Most of this analysis comes from Samuel Eliot Morison and Andrew Boyd. Morison wrote extensively about the Germans and US thinking in his epic history of the USN in WWII. Andrew Boyd covers a lot of RN thinking here:

link 1.

and

link 2.

Summarizing further; the British sought to maintain "coverage" with battle fleets by region and theater without paying attention to the actual mechanisms of use and denial of the trade lanes. They thought "presence" was enough and they counted that "presence" as in numbers of battleships and patrolling trade protection cruisers. Like Raeder, the Pound crew were thinking of surface raiders as being projected by Germany and Italy and Japan either into the North Atlantic, the Mediterranean or Indian Ocean. The British bean counted what they thought they needed to counter two oceans and confidently thought they would be able to command an ally to cover the ocean the RN would not be able to establish presence in.

Hence the 31 battleship number Drachinifel asserts was never a real planning number. The British lacked the capacity to build such a fleet. It was more like replace the R's with the Lions, build the KGVs to play treaty politics with the Yanks, modernize the QEs and the battlecruisers and build up a force of trade protection cruisers and sprinkle with a few aircraft carriers to splice the gaps and to keep pace with the Americans and Japanese. That was Dudley Pound and company reading their Julian Corbett and being mindful of what build limits were in British capacity and hoping for a more realistic 20 battleships, 60 cruisers and maybe a dozen fleet carriers.

In that schema, with presence they would handle the North Atlantic expecting a couple of Raeder surface raider groups built around a flattop, 3 or 4 battleships, a couple of escort heavy 0cruisers and a trio of "panzer ships" (armored cruisers in the 19th century sense of the word) which would "by presence" disrupt the normal flow of South American and North American trade and interrupt empire trade into the Indian Ocean area. France would cover the Italians and the British would allocate a presence fleet to Singapore to overawe the Japanese. When France fell, the British substituted the Americans into the Atlantic, assumed they would handle the Mediterranean themselves and also the Indian Ocean. That was what they planned. How did that work out?

Not well at all.

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Raeder never built his Z fleet and Hitler and crew never paid attention to his guerre de course scheme. The NAZI regime adopted Wegener (Seize Norway and the French Atlantic coasts.) and the U-boat weapon and tried and failed to fight a sea denial war. This was not what the British expected. Pearl Harbor and the thrust east by the Japanese was not what the British expected, either.

Being practical, the British built escorts (too late), relearned 18th century naval convoy warfare and applied Mahan in practice while continuing to deride him in theory. Admiral Pound and his protege' Admiral Phillips lost the empire and Somerville hung on to the western Indian Ocean sea lines of communication only by the paint of his obsolete ships' sea-ruined hulls in 1942 after being defeated off Sri Lanka. What happened in the Atlantic was a severe shortage of escorts for the British who did not build enough of them to counter the 550 U-boats Germany built in 2 years. The Americans were caught destroyer short because they had to send everything they had afloat to the Pacific to stop the Japanese and thus they sacrificed their own Atlantic coastal and Caribbean coverage for a whole year until they could build enough replacement escorts of their own to cover the Allied deficits in the North Atlantic.

This is not what is taught in the popular histories, is it? The Allied navies got it wrong. They should have read Raoul Castex. and reread Mahan. Castex was all about the trade war and the interruption of sea lines of communication. Those, who paid attention, would have known that the airplane and the submarine were the decisive offensive naval weapons and would have planned and built accordingly.

Map.



According to Wegener, the Norwegian Fjords would allow the Germans to outflank coverage from the British east coast ports as far north as Scapa Flow. It was not until well after the Bismarck broke out into the North Atlantic that the incompetent RAF figured out it had to mount a recon presence in the Shetlands and Faeroes. As to that fiasco, it was an RN PBY that found Bismarck as she exited the Denmark Strait. One wonders what would have happened if the Home Fleet had decent air recon and shore based air support to catch Bismarck as she hugged Norway's coasts transiting the North Sea.

Similarly, one wonders about the Tirpitz. Naval power is not just ships. Perhaps it is a severe criticism to suggest that one lousy German battleship tied up a huge chunk of the Royal Navy to no purpose because nobody in the RN seemed to really think about bombing it out of existence until Barnes Wallis suggested it?

Air power theory is currently very much Alfred Thayer Mahan in its underpinnings.

As a technical exercise, for what the British wanted, the KGVs were about 5,000 tonnes short in displacement. Shock mounting was poorly implemented, subdivision of compartments was not well thought out and damage control as in flood control paths seemed to have been unheard of by British shipwrights.

a. Technically the KGVs had worse torpedo defense than the North Carolinas, which battleship design was generally known to be awful in that respect.
b. The KGVs' 35.6 cm artillery was not well designed for stable ballistic profiles in salvoes. In addition; the mechanical systems supporting transport of ammunition and propellant as well as the point and elevation of the artillery repeatedly failed on KGV and PoW. It was not until late 1943 in the North Cape Action that DoY gives evidence that British engineers had fixed those problems.
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Actually if one reads Plan Dog and the minutes of the ABC 1 and ABC 2 conferences that is exactly what Pound and Stark agreed to do. As to a reliable ally... FDR was not the fool the British thought he was. Once he fired Stark and hired King, he had his own ideas about how the naval war would be fought. I will have something to write about the myth surrounding King in a moment.



I noticed some things in the statement about that I missed the thesis about Plan Z.

I did cover what the British "could have done" to handle the Raeder plan.

They could have used air power. They were building a bomber force after all. Geography (Jomini) gave them interior lines in the naval and air power sense. As Operation Rhine illustrated (see map)



As an exercise in how to stop Plan Z operations, notice how air coverage out of the Shetlands, Orkneys and Faeroes should have worked to force multiply the Home Fleet and double its effective combat power? Never happened throughout WWII. Why? Bomber Harris was fixated on the Ruhr. Later I will comment on how King handled HAP Arnold who bollixed a similar problem for the USN.

One might now turn to who was responsible for the Atlantic Seaboard defensive mess in 1941-1942 until King tgook over in APRIL of that year. The man was the author of the Plan Dog Memo.

He was the most incompetent naval officer in the United States Navy. FDR packed him off to London to tour the British cocktail circuit and put in the man who famously said; “When they get in trouble, they send for the sons-of-bitches.”

King inherited Stark's mess with the torpedo crisis (Stark was BuOrd Actual when the Mark 13, 14, and 15 were screwed up 1934-1937.) , Drumbeat, the British collapse in the Indian Ocean, the ABDA crisis, and the Atlantic and Caribbean sea frontiers defensive collapses. King could not really do anything about it until he assumed duties as CNO around March April 1942. He was rather quick once he got the authority so that by August 1942 he had some ad hoc defenses in place. Famously King is the one as LantFlt Actual who pushed for sonobuoys and acoustic ASW torpedoes. Both of those innovations were one year emergency programs that helped the Allied ASW effort by MARCH 1943. Those innovations famously neutered the U-boat snort innovation and made even that German attempt to hide from Allied naval air power totally ineffective.

He had to fight HAP Arnold for the VLR Liberator assets he wanted (See above for why.) out of Iceland and admittedly that was a huge mistake on his part not to go to the mat for it, but he got the Atlantic Gap closed at last by March 1943. The British never did figure that one out.

King's mistakes were real (Not pushing for escorts when he was asked for advice on The Two Ocean Bill, and resisting TORCH because it would interfere with WATCHTOWER, but as to his record as an admiral leading a navy from where he started?

But a lot of criticisms against him are based on misapprehension of what was actually happening when he took over as Chief of Naval Operations and had to retrieve the global disaster that the Allied naval war was in March April 1942. In point of fact the Allies were losing the naval war everywhere. The sour grapes crowd post-war (Leahy and Stark cliques who did not want to shoulder the blame for the 1942 catastrophes they caused by their incompetent leadership.) created a lot of myths around Ernest King, blaming HIM for the lack of resources and the misallocation of assets that was not his fault. Down to the present a lot of dubious scholarship has bought into these myths. The truth is that FDR knew exactly what he did when he made Leahy a supernumerary to a JCS run by Marshall and packed "Betty" Stark off to London to social gadfly to get him out of the way in a reverse Gatehouse move that kind of amused the British, who would later pack that incompetent off to Washington after he screwed up at El Alamein. Why not imitate success?

King won the global naval war. That is all that mattered, despite his real mistakes.

1. Denmark Strait...

a. Prince of Wales' aft turret was inoperative.
b. Prince of Wales' B mount main armament had a misfire of the port barrel.
c. Only 6 main armament barrels functioned as they ought in that action.
d. The fire control system packed it in. Cause? Shock of guns firing.
e. There was an attempt to court martial the captain because he ran for it after Hood blew up, (Churchill) but it was correctly pointed out (Tovey) that hanging around to add to the butcher's bill and Bismarck's glory would have been "insane".

2. KGV in action against Bismarck.

a. Shell ladders were observed to be widely dispersed,.
b. Reload problems were encountered at the midrange engagement.
c. Optics in the fore control fogged up.
d. Tovey decided to let Rodney mainly pommel Bismarck because that old girl was actually known to work well and he had reports of PoW's troubles and his own captain reported issues with KGV that were disturbingly similar.

3. Gulf of Siam Action.

a. One lousy puny Type 95 torpedo hit the PoW in the prop. That was all that was needed to sink her.
b. Attendant to that prop hit, the generator, actioned to the PTO shaft that served the screw and with no backup, died. No power to the AAA guns.
c. The PTO shaft snapped, the broken end backed out of its chocks and opened a flood path along the shaft alley straight to the engine room that was impossible to isolate or contain.
d. Due to longitudinal compartmentation (Not correctable in any of the KGVs.) as opposed to the transverse bulkhead scheme in American warships, the PoW turned turtle with an uncorrectable list, making her impossible to fight once some power was rigged up.
e. Compare with USS Pennsylvania or KMS Bismarck which suffered similar aerial torpedo hits.



FDR ordered it done and it was done after King complained (Trident Conference). So... The US did remedy the situation. Meanwhile Western Approaches and Coastal Command had to await the replacement of Dudley Pound by The Viscount Cunningham of Hyndhope before they got their own decent LRMP air cover (Same again. Trident Conference, One might note the interaction between Slessor (Coastal Command) and King?). You might have heard of Cunningham. He fought and won Matapan.



LANTFLT had three destroyer flotillas and a cruiser division. They were running convoys to Iceland and out to England. Those "sweeps" were distant cover operations along the trade lanes... sanitation sweeps which were effective for the limited forces available, which seems to have escaped the notice of British historians who gloss over the ineptitude and incompetence of Coastal Command and Western Approaches to manage British coastal traffic at the same time period.


Is that why Stark politicked to have King beached and career dead-ended to the General Board? They hated each other.



I do not disagree that FDR was out to destroy the British Empire. That was US policy for decades. Colonialism and imperialism, whatever its form, was an international evil that had to be removed if any system of international order and justice was to mature. As for Truman, he did not sell jet engines to the Russians, generate a nest of spies, that materially aided the Russians, nor did his administration just sit on its hands and fail to come up with a workable grand strategy that has so far prevented the immolation of humanity.

As for the US bomber barons? Big Week and the Transportation Plan = death of the Luftwaffe.

The double advance in the Pacific or more properly the Spruance / Halsey / MacArthur three step actually doubled the speed of the Pacific advance. It takes time to assemble logistics and plan operations. Having three headquarters working away cut time between operations from 6 months per op (Europe) down to 30 days to 6 weeks.

Can we go back to discussing what the Royal Navy would have have done regarding Plan Z, thanks.

when did plan Z become known to the British? I think we have to accept that there could have been no changes to the RN's building program until after the extent of plan Z was discovered. I am, of course, assuming it was secret at the time.

Once it becomes known, does the RN analyze it? Plan Z was ludicrous overreach on the part of the Kriegsmarine, as I don't think there was enough steel being made each year to provide the material needed for Plan Z as well as all the other various needs for steel in the Nazi war machine. If the RN looks at it and says "No way they can do this. Lets figure out what they CAN do, and build to meet that" that might be a better question to answer.

Belushi TD