Adolf Hitler understood the significance of navies and air forces; but he had great difficulty grasping the two concepts when they were combined as naval aviation. In particular, his erratic flashes of perceptive genius were constantly short-circuited by incredible overconfidence and naiveté when his mind tried to comprehend the aircraft carrier.
As early as 1928, when carriers were still few and experimental in the world's navies, the Nazi Party leader deplored Germany's navy as "a floating gunnery school." He described how a major naval power could destroy German trade "in a moment," possibly land on the coast, and attack by air "all our coastal cities. . . [by] bringing floating landing-places very close to the coast by means of aircraft carriers."
Like most continental European monarchs since Louis XIV, Hitler considered his country's primary strength to be the land forces; naval forces took second place. Military aviation had changed the face of war, but Hitler saw the airplane primarily as a valuable adjunct of his mechanized armies. His solution to meet attacks from the sea was typically continental and defensive: coastal artillery, anti-aircraft guns, and land-based interceptor-fighters.
When Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, the German Navy had begun to take an interest in the aircraft carrier. Great Britain's program in developing this ship type, which the Royal Navy had invented during World War I, had reached what would prove to be its nadir with six carriers, all of them aging rapidly, in commission. The U. S. and Imperial Japanese navies were engaged in a construction race to improve on and gradually to add to their total of three carriers. The United States had been training naval aviators for over two decades, and, in 1927, Japan had required all her naval sub-lieutenants to undergo a short course in aviation training.
Under the rules of the Treaty of Versailles—which the Germans had violated in 1930 by purchasing some aircraft and training a handful of naval aviators—all Germany could do legally was to observe these outside developments and fall further behind the other navies of the world.
At the time the Construction Office of the Navy's Supreme Command (OKM) began to consider the problems of building a carrier—in late 1933—naval experts in other nations preferred the small carrier to the large because of the reduced risk of losing too many planes at once. Japan was just completing its 10,000-ton Ryujo and the United States its 14,500-ton Ranger.
The Germans shunned the huge, converted 33,000-ton battle cruiser hulls of the USS Lexington class and looked to Britain's recently modernized 22,500-ton carriers Courageous and Glorious. Studying what limited literature they could find, such as Weyer's Taschenbuch der Kriegsflotten, and Jane's Fighting Ships, the German marine engineers proposed for planning purposes a 20,000- to 30,000-ton carrier, as well armored as a cruiser. The ship would carry 50 to 60 planes, have a speed of 33 knots, and be protected by eight 8-inch guns as well as smaller anti-aircraft guns. The large main battery would be needed theoretically to ward off surface ship attacks in the North Sea. Actually, it illustrated that the Germans failed to understand that airplanes and not guns were the ship's principal defense.
German engineers in 1933 and 1934 relied almost entirely on speculation in trying to evaluate the technical aspects of building a carrier. Not only were there no carrier pilots in Germany, but also nobody had ever seen the blueprints of a carrier. In April 1934, Wilhelm Hadeler, who for nine years had been Assistant to the Professor of Naval Construction at the Technical University of Berlin, was appointed by the Construction Office of the Supreme Command to draft a preliminary design for an aircraft carrier. Hadeler had never been in an airplane, commercial or military, and he knew nothing about aviation.
A few officers in the Luftwaffe showed an interest in carriers, but Hermann Goering's insistence on controlling all military aviation, along with the tight security of his technical offices, negated early co-operation between Navy and Air Force.
Thus, intelligent guesswork, based on exhaustive research, were Hadeler's only tools in designing a German flattop.
The problem of flush-deck versus island superstructure was resolved in favor of the latter, using the examples of HMS Courageous and, particularly, the USS Ranger. Speed was vital if German warships were to slip through the North Sea into the Atlantic, and maximum designed speed was raised to 35 knots, to be achieved by four high pressure turbine plants. The horsepower requirement was estimated in 1934 at 180,000, the equivalent of the 33,000-ton Lexington and Saratoga, the largest carriers in the world.
Defensive armament became a problem when the designers could not fit in the proposed 8-inch guns. Borrowing again from the design of HMS Courageous, Hadeler proposed to fit eight 5.9-inch guns in central pivots along the side of the ship. His proposal was accepted and enlarged to eight twin 5.9-inch guns, or 16 barrels.
Carrier aircraft were the biggest problem of all. The size and weight of the planes would determine the dimensions of the hangar deck, strength of the flight deck, and size of the elevators. Germany had no carrier planes, and the Luftwaffe refused to commit its already strained building programs to the construction of special plane types. The problem would not be urgent until a carrier was actually floated but, for purposes of designing the ship, most of the foreign aircraft journals were consulted.
British carrier aircraft had not changed in several years, but American and French planes were in a continual state of evolution. Hadeler, still working alone, studied the sizes of these planes to determine dimensions for Germany's carrier and added "15 to 20 per cent as a safety factor." The final ship dimensions compared favorably with those of foreign aircraft carriers.
A workable design was ready by the spring of 1935 and on 18 June British diplomacy enabled Germany to construct such a ship. That date the Anglo-German Naval Treaty was signed, allowing Germany to build a navy with a tonnage 35 per cent of that of the British navy. In regard to carriers, the tonnage came out at 38,500 tons which, when divided in half, allowed the Germans to construct two smaller carriers of 19,250 tons each.
The German Navy seized the opportunity and appropriated funds in the 1936 budget for a 19,250-ton carrier. Construction of the vessel was assigned to the Deutsche Werke Kid Aktien-gesellschaft (DwK) at Kid. Before the year ended, the DWK shipyard received the building order for "Aircraft Carrier A," which the yard designated "K252." Naval engineer Hadeler was made supervisor of the project. An "Aircraft Carrier B" was authorized in the 1938 budget, but its completion was delayed in order that the lessons learned from the prototype, "Carrier A," might be incorporated.
After the order had been placed, work began in earnest. The Luftwaffe co-operated with the Navy by assigning a liaison officer who had been a veteran wartime naval aviator and was an experienced marine engineer. Britain allowed Commander Ohlerich of the German naval construction corps to inspect the carrier Furious when the public went aboard during Navy Week in 1935—but the old flattop revealed nothing. In the fall of 1935 Japan offered to show the German engineers a carrier, and a "Japan Commission" of one Luftwaffe officer, one naval officer, and one constructor was sent to Japan. The Japanese allowed the Commission to inspect their 26,900-ton Akagi and even gave the Germans about 100 detailed blueprints of the ship's flight deck apparatus. The Akagi's dimensions served to reassure the Germans that their earlier estimates of ship dimensions had been correct.
The designers worked throughout 1936 on improving the technical details of "Carrier A." The ship's original 19,250-ton displacement rose as new flight-deck equipment was designed, much to the chagrin of the engineers who warned that the ship was getting to be too large.
The length of the flight deck would be 790 feet, beam 881 feet, initial draught 18 feet. Three elevators were placed along the centerline of the ship. The 16 5.9-inch guns along the side could fire only at surface targets, but anti-aircraft protection would be afforded by ten 4.1-inch, 22 37-mm., and seven 20-mm. guns. The 200,000 standard horsepower would drive the ship an estimated 6,000 nautical miles at speeds up to 35.5 knots.
The 20,000 increase to 200,000 horsepower led layman Hitler to complain several years later that 35 knots was far too slow for such a big power plant: "You find that a battleship of over 45,000 tons with 136,000 horse-power engines steams at 30 knots, while an aircraft carrier of half the size with 200,000 horsepower engines raises only 35 knots! Something, obviously, is wrong with the mathematics of it."
By the end of the year the design was completed, and the keel of "Carrier A" was laid in Slip Number One of the DWK at Kid on 28 December 1936. Early in 1937 the battleship Gneisenau was launched at the same yard, and "Carrier A" became the main construction there. The work took two years during which time the British, anticipating possible war with Germany, began to rejuvenate their carrier air arm with new construction.
Although the Luftwaffe and Navy cooperated on building "Carrier A," finding airplanes for it was a different matter. The original figure of 50 to 60 planes had been narrowed down in early design changes to between 40 and 43, and these planes would be concerned primarily with reconnaissance. The Royal Navy regarded the aircraft carrier as a scouting element of the fleet and the Germans conformed to this idea.
Thus, the original air complement of "Carrier A" was to be 20 multi-purpose Fieseler Fi-167 biplanes for scouting and torpedo attack, ten Messerschmitt Me-109T (or BF-109T) fighters, and 13 Junkers Ju-87G dive bombers which were reconstructed to carry torpedoes and to act as reconnaissance planes. These aircraft were standard land types and had to be adapted to carrier requirements. For example, one model of the ju-87 was developed with folding wings to facilitate storage on board.
The U. S. Navy had been developing the carrier as an offensive weapon with great success since 1929, giving up reconnaissance as the primary mission, and in Brassey's Naval Annual for 1936, Rear Admiral E. J. King, Chief of the U. S. Navy's Bureau of Aeronautics, wrote, "Carrier aircraft have a single function, the offensive." In 1937, Japanese carrier planes bombed and strafed Chinese forces in purely offensive missions.
The Germans, influenced by these examples and also by the poor performance of the multipurpose Fi-167, in 1937 and 1938 altered the planned air group for "Carrier A" to be strictly offensive: 30 Messerschmitt fighters and 12 Junkers dive bombers. Germany was not building a fleet to operate as a single tactical unit anyway, but rather to destroy enemy commerce and threaten British sea lanes with single ships or small groups of vessels. Fighters could protect surface raiders, bombers could attack shipping. But Reichsmarshal Goering slowed the conversion of the few carrier-type planes in his continued battle with the Navy to win control of all military aviation.
For operations in the North Sea and North Atlantic, German carrier planes would have to be launched quickly. Converted land planes needed long runways, so powered take-offs from the flight deck would be practically impossible. Catapults were the obvious answer, and in mid-1937, the DWK people began designing two catapults with compressed air motors for installation in the forward end of the flight deck. Highly-trained flight deck personnel would be needed to operate these catapults because the Germans hoped by launching one plane every minute at staggered intervals between catapults, 16 planes could be put into the sky in less than eight minutes. These considerations were put to the test on the ground and were successfully accomplished. But, in actual carrier air operations, Germany was still 15 to 20 years behind Great Britain, Japan, and the United States.
The name of "Carrier A" was not revealed until the launching, a German custom. The most fitting name, and the one selected by der Fuehrer himself, could only be that of Germany's most famous pioneer in aviation, Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, developer of the airships that bore his name. The launching took place on 8 December 1938. Hitler, Goering, and other Nazi officials attended, and hailed the great new ship as she was christened the Graf Zeppelin by the count's daughter, Countess Hella von Brandenstein-Zeppelin. Like all new flattops, the Graf Zeppelin slipped down the ways looking like no more than a hull with a flush deck. The island superstructure had to be added, and work continued on the ship immediately following the launching.
In 1939, Hitler began to expedite his grandiose plans for the thousand-year Reich that he felt had been guaranteed by his diplomatic victory at Munich. In February he formulated a ten-year building program for his navy—the "Z" Plan. By late 1941 his two Graf Zeppelin-class carriers would form the nucleus of his carrier strength, to be bolstered with two more carriers by the end of 1947. Goering opposed him, but Hitler sided with his supreme naval commander, Grand Admiral Erich Raeder. Der Fuehrer realized that Germany could not hope to rival the British navy, but with submarines and fast battleships Germany could destroy British merchant shipping. Carriers would augment this effort.
The Luftwaffe obeyed Hitler's dictum by establishing an experimental station on the Priwall River near Travemuende to train carrier pilots and flight deck personnel. Facilities were skimpy, however, for the simulated flight deck had only one arrester wire. The principal plane used in training at Travemuende was the Ju-87G, while the already strained aircraft industry sought to adapt new planes to carrier operations, notably the Arado-195 multipurpose plane and the Me-155 fighter.
Shortly after the "Z" Plan had been formulated and work begun, Hitler felt the pressure of military buildup around Germany, particularly by Great Britain and the Soviet Union. Time was not on Germany's side, and during the summer Hitler told Raeder that Germany had to go to war as soon as possible. Raeder informed him the Navy was not ready, but to meet the emergency, they both revised the "Z" Plan. Submarines and battleships got top priority, cruisers and destroyers were next. Carriers were last. Hadeler left the Graf Zeppelin project for another post in the Naval Construction Council, but work on the carrier continued. "Carrier B" had been laid down in 1938, but its progress still depended on the lessons learned from the Graf Zeppelin.
On 1 September 1939, when Germany went to war, the Graf Zeppelin was 85 per cent completed, with most of her machinery installed. One month later the Naval Staff declared that the carrier had no apparent place in the new war, but Raeder tried to convince Hitler that it could escort commerce raiding cruisers to sea. "Carrier B" was so far from completion that it was scrapped, but the Graf Zeppelin remained intact, pending developments. British naval and air activity early in the war underscored the uselessness of a carrier operating in the confined and exposed waters of the North Sea.
In port, it was also exposed; in 1940 the Graf Zeppelin's anti-aircraft gunners used temporarily mounted 3.7 cm. guns to engage British planes several times and on one occasion managed to shoot a hole in one of the carrier's own radio masts. The Germans believed that any single carrier at sea within range of enemy air bases on land would be doomed. Also, construction priorities had to go to U-boats, and the Naval Staff estimated that with the shakedown cruise the Graf Zeppelin would not be ready until the end of 1941. As a result, the Naval Staff halted construction on the Graf Zeppelin in May 1940.
In June, the carrier was moved further east to Gotenhafen to escape British air raids, and the 5.9-inch surface guns were sent to occupied Norway to bolster German defenses there. At Gotenhafen the Graf Zeppelin acted as a floating supply farm. During the summer, the Luftwaffe ceased training carrier personnel to Travemuende and German carrier aviation appeared dead.
The naval battles of 1940 and 1941, especially the sound defeat of the Italian battleships administered by British carrier aircraft at Taranto in late-1940, rekindled German interest in carriers. Then, in May 1941, when aircraft from the Ark Royal helped destroy the German battleship Bismarck, Hitler began to understand the tangible advantages of carrier air. He commented sentimentally at dinner one evening in August 1941, "There is something tragic in the fact that the battleship, that monument of human ingenuity, has lost its entire raison d'être because of the development of aviation."
Some of his planners envisioned big-gun hybrid battleships with flight decks and hangars much like the Japanese Ise class of 1944, while others revived the idea of the half-cruiser, half-carrier proposed at the London Naval Conference in 1930.
Then, the devastating attack by Japanese carrier planes at Pearl Harbor showed the obvious importance of the aircraft carrier.
In March 1942, a British carrier air strike drove the battleship Tirpitz away from two convoys on the Murmansk run and brought the issue of German carriers into the open. Admiral Raeder demanded from Hitler that the Graf Zeppelin be completed to escort Germany's commerce raiders and that the Luftwaffe give full co-operation. Raeder's demands were reinforced days later by a combined destroyer, submarine, land-based air attack on a Russia-bound convoy that suffered five out of 19 ships sunk. Hitler agreed to fulfill Raeder's needs, much to Goering's dismay, and went further by approving the conversion of one heavy cruiser and three fast passenger liners to auxiliary carriers. Furthermore, the Luftwaffe resumed its training of carrier squadrons.
Hitler, as usual, was overoptimistic and excited. The Naval Staff advised him in April that converted land planes would be too heavy for the Graf Zeppelin's flight deck apparatus: the Messerschmitt and Junkers needed stronger catapults that would take 18 months to be adapted from the existing ones; new, stronger winches were necessary for the arresting gear; finally, the flight and hangar decks would have to be reinforced. The Navy wanted special carrier planes built, but Goering regretted, unconvincingly, that such planes could not be designed, tested, and mass produced until 1946. The Graf Zeppelin, concluded the staff planners, could not be ready before the winter of 1943-44; "the results of our efforts so far do not justify continuing work on the carrier."
Hitler was not impressed by this realistic appraisal. He said the Navy had set its standards too high and, with his childlike comprehension of mathematics, he noted that with four more carriers the Luftwaffe could surely produce carrier planes faster. On 13 May 1942, the Naval Supreme Command ordered work be resumed on the Graf Zeppelin. In June, after the battle of Midway had demonstrated what skillfully handled carriers (three American; one lost) could do to superior numbers of enemy carriers (four Japanese; all sunk), Admiral Raeder discussed the proposed German five-carrier fleet with Hitler.
The Graf Zeppelin would be strengthened and completed, along with the three converted liners and the converted cruiser Seydlitz. Hitler even envisioned a postwar carrier force of eight flattops. Raeder told him that the Seydlitz was too unstable to be a carrier. Soon afterward, a study revealed that the liners were unstable, so conversion went ahead only on the Seydlitz. Hitler was lost in dreams of glory concerning carriers, while Raeder and the Naval Staff did their best to salvage what they could of their almost nonexistent naval air force.
The Graf Zeppelin remained the nucleus of German efforts to produce a carrier. Naval engineer Hadeler, then a commander in the construction corps, was ordered to Kiel as Chief Superintendent of Naval Construction of the Naval Supreme Command, and one month after his arrival he was promoted to the rank of captain (junior grade). His instructions included the completion of the Graf Zeppelin. Upon his return to the carrier project, he found that the designs had undergone considerable revision by Supreme Command designers. New developments in radar, fire direction, and wireless telegraphy required the establishing of a combat information center in the island superstructure. This CIC had to be armored and properly ventilated, which meant that the smoke stack had to be heightened. The additional weight from these changes would unbalance the ship. As a result, naval engineers called for elliptical blisters on each side of the hull at the waterline, but weighted differently in order to rebalance the ship. These blisters could hold oil to increase the cruising radius; they also could cushion the blow of a torpedo hit. More antiaircraft guns would be needed, now that Allied air attacks had intensified, and the 20-mm. guns were increased from seven to 28. The carrier was to be manned by 1,760 officers and ratings.
With the many technical additions since the initial design, the Graf Zeppelin's standard displacement had risen to 23,140 tons, or 31,367 tons fully loaded. Including the blisters, the displacement would be 34,000 tons, far in excess of original expectations. Moreover, the mission of the carrier had shifted completely away from reconnaissance and escort to attack, thus the air group was changed to 28 bombers and 12 fighters, rather than the reverse.
The ship had been moved to Stettin in 1941 for greater safety and now had to be towed back to Kiel for completion. Fear of air attack delayed the move until 5 December 1942, when the Graf Zeppelin reached Kiel under tow and went into drydock. The constructors hoped to complete just two of the four inner shafts of the engineering plant which would enable sea trials and air squadron training to commence during the summer of 1943. During this last month of 1942, the carrier's movements worried British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, whose lack of information regarding the Graf Zeppelin led him to regard it as a potential threat to Allied shipping.
Hitler, on the other hand, quickly tired of all his immobile surface vessels. Two days before 1942 ended, he condemned the low morale of the Navy and criticized the surface ships in general as useless. Raeder's patience ran out and he asked to be relieved. Early in January 1943, Hitler again rambled on to Raeder about converting other ships into carriers, but the admiral knew his surface navy was finished. At the end of the month, Raeder was replaced with U-boat chief Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz. In February, the Supreme Command halted all work on surface ships and the Navy became submarine. The Graf Zeppelin was so incomplete that she could be navigated only in an emergency and then with the assistance of auxiliary ships.
At Kiel, the Graf Zeppelin was a liability, standing in the way of submarine construction and standing out as a target for bombers. In April 1943, she was towed to the Moenne tributary near the mouth of the Oder River, camouflaged with nets, and placed in the hands of a 40-man maintenance crew of civilians. In 1944 Captain Hadeler, head of a department at the Navy Supreme Command, inspected the carrier as a possible barracks ship for midshipmen, but the idea never materialized. Also, Vice Admiral Friedrich Ruge, the new chief of warship construction, inspected the ship and found her absolutely useless. Some of her auxiliary engines had been transferred to battleships, but otherwise she was intact. Without planes and guns, however, the Graf Zeppelin was little more than a floating hulk. Had a miracle gotten her to sea by 1944, she would have been an antiquated vessel compared even to the many small Allied escort carriers then roaming the Atlantic.
The end of the Graf Zeppelin came in the spring of 1945 with the advance of the Russian armies from the East. Admiral Doenitz ordered all ships in Baltic ports scuttled if they could not be moved (to where?). According to a Russian/German-language radio broadcast on 29 March, the crew of the Graf Zeppelin mutinied as a result of the scuttling order. Maintenance men removed the main valves of the bilge piping, flooding the engine and boiler rooms. The crew then left the ship and sent the valves to the West to avoid capture and reinstallation by the enemy. The Graf Zeppelin sank two feet into the mud of the Moenne. Finally, on 25 April, the Russian army reached the environs of Stettin and began shelling the defenseless carrier. A German commando unit placed depth charges in the boiler and engine rooms. Their timed detonation destroyed the engine plant completely, riddled the hull, and settled the ship more firmly into the mud. Presumably, the Graf Zeppelin would be unserviceable to her captors.
If aircraft carrier construction and operations had been difficult for the continental Germans, their geographic neighbors from the East suffered from an even worse ignorance. Russian salvage parties made either the armored deck at the waterline or the lower hangar deck air tight and repaired the leaks on the bottom as much as possible. Pumping the water out, they floated the Graf Zeppelin and towed her to Swinemuende in March 1946. There the hangar deck was loaded with such war booty as U-boat sections and other heavy goods for transporting to Leningrad. On 27 September 1947, the Graf Zeppelin was towed into the Baltic by heavy Russian tugs, but she failed to reach port.
According to Swedish sources, the carrier struck a mine northeast of Ruegen, or perhaps north of Danzig, between the 27th and the 29th. With hangars so overloaded, the ship must have been top-heavy and probably capsized quickly with the loss of all equipment and possibly many lives. Only the Russians and some East German salvagers know her exact fate.
The Graf Zeppelin was an experimental vessel built by a second-rate naval power. The experiment had failed even before the most crucial problems had been encountered: damage control, fire fighting procedures, spotting aircraft, night operations, barrier crashes, and the myriad questions arising during a carrier shakedown. Even had the DWK at Kiel completed the carrier on time—December 1940—the probability that she would have survived even one British air attack still would have been remote.
In retrospect, she stands as a monument to the megalomaniac whose absurd attempt to imitate a naval weapon peculiar to great naval nations merely illustrated his extreme desperation to overcome Germany's disadvantages—whatever the cost.
A graduate of the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1961, Doctor Reynolds was awarded a Ph.D. by Duke University in 1964. His articles on naval history have appeared in journals and magazines in this country and abroad. Presently engaged in writing a history of fast carrier operations in the Pacific from 1943 to 1945, he is an assistant professor in the U. S. Naval Academy's Department of English, History and Government.