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Zorch -> RE: OT: 78 years ago to this day - Bismarck scuttled (5/27/2019 7:04:39 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Denniss
RoI for the PoW (who fought Bismarck with Hood) was no better and she had a similar fate with a lucky torp hit inflicting fatal damage, dooming her.
Bismarck, the pride of the german navy, sank the Hood, the pride of the Royal Navy, just to sink some days after.
Scharnhorst/Gneisenau sank multiple ships including a Fleet carrier. They could have (and should have) repaired Gneisenau instead of stopping all work so Scharnhorst was alone in her last fight.
Don't underestimate the Fleet-in-Being effect of the large german ships, causing the royal navy to keep large forces in the area of their operations.
The German capital ships did have some successes, but not in proportion to the resources expended. It takes a vast amount of skilled labor and high tensile steel to build a capital ship. They could have had a lot of tanks/artillery/whatever instead. Hitler's decision to build a large surface fleet assumed war wouldn't happen until 1946.
The British would probably have built about the same number of capital ships even if the Germans hadn't built any (lower priority, slower construction). True, they could have sent more of them to the Far East, but how much would they really have influenced the war? Would it have mattered if Force Z had 4 BBs/BCs instead of 2? The Germans got a better return on their surface raiders and pocket battleships. Their CAs were not as good for commerce raiding because of short range/unreliable engines.
Likewise, the US got very little out of the 6 'large cruisers' they laid down (only 2 were completed). They took a long time to build because completely new 12" turrets had to be designed from scratch, built, and tested, and then the rest of the ship built around them.
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