Hitler Ahoy: The Third Reich's Surface Fleet

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The Sinking of the Bismarck, by Charles Edward TurnerWhen the Second World War began in September 1939, levels of preparedness varied widely across Europe, both across and within various leadership groups and institutions. War was met by the French and British with a general mood of grim resignation and by the Germans with a curious mixture of aggression and foreboding, while Poland saw its initial mood of punchy defiance and determination to defend itself melt in the face of an overwhelming German maneuver scheme and the Wehrmacht’s deadly new tactical package. Arguably, however, the military institution that was the most unprepared for this new war was neither the Polish, French, or British armies, but Germany’s own forgotten service arm: the navy. The Kriegsmarine (War Navy) of the Third Reich was a curious institution rife with contradictions, resource wastage, and strategic confusion. Naval leadership nurtured ambitious dreams of a formidable Atlantic surface fleet, with little sense of either how such a grand fleet could fit into the timetables of German foreign policy, or the requisite material base to build it. There are few equivalent examples of such a yawning gap between military ambitions and reality: while the Kriegsmarine touted the famous “Z-plan” to construct a fleet of over 700 ships, capable of defending fortress Europe against the British (or American) navies, the German Navy in fact began the war with only a handful of capital ships, and its most famous operations generally involved only a single vessel, or at most a pair, desperately running for dear li…