Plan Z

by David Wragg

  By the same token, the owners of privately-owned shipyards were told that the Kriegsmarine had the absolute power of veto over any other work.

  Even if the massive effort had been directed to fulfilling the needs of just one of the three armed services, it would have been impossible. The estimate for the fivefold increase in the size of the Luftwaffe amounted to 60 billion Reichsmarks, which meant that Luftwaffe expenditure alone between 1938 and 1942 would be 50 per cent more than that for the entire Wehrmacht between 1933 and 1938.2 The Luftwaffe never got its 21,750 aircraft, and if it had, it wouldn’t have been able to find trained personnel for them. The Luftwaffe seldom had more than 5,000 aircraft at any stage in the Second World War. The United States Army Air Force, the most powerful air force engaged in the Second World War, peaked at 21,000 combat aircraft, and the Soviet Union only managed 17,000 in April 1945.

  As for the Kriegsmarine’s Plan Z, one of the problems was creating enough fuel storage capacity. To ensure that operations were not interrupted, it was estimated that the Kriegsmarine needed 9.6 million cubic metres of fuel capacity which would have to be protected from the effects of enemy action. In 1936, it was estimated that, given the expansion plans of the time, the Kriegsmarine would need 1.4 million tons of oil annually, and a further 400,000 tons of diesel oil. Under Plan Z, by 1948, it would need 6 million tons of fuel oil, and no less than 2 million tons of diesel fuel. Domestic production was estimated to produce no more than 2 million tons of oil and 1.34 million tons of diesel fuel by 1948. Not only would this not be sufficient for the Kriegsmarine, it did not take into account the needs of the Luftwaffe, the Army, the railways and electric power generation, or civilian transport! The Fuhrer envisaged exploiting the resources of the east, but Germany had to get there first.

  THE MONEY RUNS OUT

  Even as early as 1938, with the Sudeten crisis unfolding, the financial situation was grim. The government could not even raise money by a bond issue. Foreign investors kept away from a country that could be involved in a major war. The mood changed after the Munich Crisis and the resulting agreement. For the rest of October, the Reichsbank was able to borrow the money it needed from the German public, and almost 2 billion of Reichsmarks bonds were offered and snapped up. At the end of November, the mood changed. A further offering of 1.5 billion Reichsmarks in bonds failed, with only around two-thirds taken up. The problem was that the Reich had returned to the market requesting more loans too soon. It could also be that news of the impending armaments build up must have leaked out and the implications readily understood.

  There was another problem. The markets had provided the money that the government needed in October, and struggled to do so the following month. Meanwhile, German industry, anxious to expand to meet the demands being placed upon it, found that the market had dried up, and could not raise the additional capital it needed.

  If a government cannot borrow money when it needs it, it has to cut spending, or raise taxes, or a combination of both. The alternative is to print money, thus fuelling inflation.

  Meanwhile, other problems emerged. As early as 24 November 1938, the virtual collapse of the export programme and the means of earning much needed foreign exchange, put pressure on the allocation of raw materials for the armaments plan. This was the day that the armed forces were told that their steel allocation for 1939 would have to be cut back from 530,000 tons to 300,000 tons. The Army was to be worst hit, with a steel allocation little better than that of 1937, and what was worse, the types of steel it needed most would be the most severely curtailed. To make matters worse, in January 1939, the Army and the Luftwaffe learnt that the Kriegsmarine was to have priority. By spring, orders for ammunition for the Army were being cancelled, less than six months before the planned invasion of Poland! Production of medium battle tanks was cut in half. The situation continued to worsen, with mortar shells no longer produced and ammunition production for infantry weapons almost drying up. During 1939–1940, 61,000 Model 34 light machine guns were due to be produced, but in the end, the Army received just 13,000. The Army had sufficient ammunition stockpiled for just fourteen days of heavy fighting.

  By the end of 1939, the first winter of war, 300 infantry battalions lacked proper barracks or garages for their vehicles. Germany’s Army was so large that a part of it could only spend the winter under canvas. Even without these problems, the planning still left the German Army in a poor state of mechanisation. The image of fast-moving Panzer divisions was not without foundation, but the bulk of the Army depended on railways being available, and away from the rail heads, transport was largely horse-drawn. Even artillery pieces depended on authentic horsepower rather than the mechanical variety.

  In short, almost a third of Germany’s 105 divisions were seriously under equipped. Some 90 per cent of training units were without weapons.

  This was happening in a planned economy with everyone capable of work being forced into a job, but the net result was that more than 100,000 highly skilled armaments workers were being laid off.

  The Luftwaffe was suffering similar problems. The total of 21,750 aircraft was kept simply by postponing deliveries and adjusting the plan so that increasingly, deliveries were moved to the later years. In December 1938, the Luftwaffe was due to receive 10,000 aircraft in the year ahead, but in January 1939 this figure was cut to 8,299 aircraft, with the air force’s allocation of aluminium cut by a third. The copper allocation was cut by 50 per cent, and then finally, in July 1939, reduced to just 20 per cent of what had been promised. That month a further 20 per cent cut in aircraft production was imposed, with the sole exception being production of the Junkers Ju88, and to compensate for that, it was planned to phase out the older Ju87, the famous Stuka dive-bomber.

  Freed from all of these cuts was the Kriegsmarine, protected by the Fuhrer’s endorsement of Plan Z. The problem was that warships take longer than any other item of military equipment to produce, so there was little to see immediately for all the steel and copper that was being absorbed by the shipyards.

  WAR BRINGS REALITY

  The dream world of ever rising armaments production came to an end along with all hopes of being able to avoid war with Great Britain and France following the invasion of Poland. Late on 3 September 1939, Hitler, who had been so enthusiastic about Plan Z, abandoned it. Only those capital ships capable of being completed during 1940 were spared, all other work on major surface units was stopped immediately, including Germany’s first aircraft carrier, the Graf Zeppelin. The major dockyards at Bremen, Kiel and Hamburg were ordered to switch production immediately to a standard design of U-boat, the Type VII. The new U-boat programme called for the production of no less than twenty-five vessels each month and for this, the Kriegsmarine was to receive priority in the allocation of materials, but in fact it took more than a year for production to build up. As it was, as Dönitz had predicted, the U-boats were cheaper and quicker to build, and also needed less materials, so that throughout the war, the Kriegsmarine received no more than 15 per cent of total armaments expenditure. The Luftwaffe and the Army received priority for the rest of the war. The Luftwaffe alone was to receive 40 per cent of armaments expenditure.

  All hope of Germany emerging as a maritime power vanished with the onset of war, for it was continental power that now mattered.

  Even the policy of concentrating on the U-boats was not set in concrete. As the war progressed, in March 1942, reality dawned, when finally the Germans began to appreciate that, without naval air power, their remaining major surface units were at serious risk, especially from British aircraft carriers. Operation Barbarossa had not only failed to achieve its initial objectives and had left German army and air force units bogged down in the Soviet Union, but worse, the Allies had started to support the Soviet Union, sending convoys to Murmansk and Archangel, to Vladivostok, and to the Persian Gulf, with supplies moved by railway through present day Iran and into the southern Soviet republics. The convoys to Russia were now recognised as bein
g significant. There was little the Germans could do about the Gulf and Siberia convoys, but they could tackle those to Murmansk and Archangel, and Hitler himself called for this supply line to be cut, believing that renewed Russian counter-attacks were made possible by the supplies being carried by the convoys. In 1942, work, abandoned because of Luftwaffe/Kriegsmarine rivalry, on the aircraft carrier Graf Zeppelin, was ordered to restart, while the Hipper-class cruiser Seydlitz was prepared for conversion to an aircraft carrier and the liners Potsdam, Europa and Gneisenau, which presumably would have had to be renamed to avoid confusion with the battlecruiser, considered for conversion to auxiliary carriers. With Seyditz, work progressed as far as having her superstructure removed and the hull taken to Konigsberg, but the order was rescinded early in 1943 and later the hull was scuttled, which seems an incredible waste of valuable scrap metal. Meanwhile, the U-boats and the Luftwaffe were to take the burden of countering the Arctic convoys.

  It would have taken more than six months for the Graf Zeppelin to be completed, more than a year for Seyditz and the three liners to be converted, depending on the resources that Germany could commit. The aircraft could have been made available, but without any prior experience or expertise, landing high performance Messerschmitt Bf109s on the carriers would have been a painful and costly lesson, although prototypes of the carrier variant, the Bf109T, were completed. The Junkers Ju87 Stuka dive-bombers, of which the carrier version was the Ju87C, would have been easier and could have made an excellent carrier strike aircraft, although by this time it was slower than the latest naval aircraft being supplied by the United States. Learning lessons about carrier operations would have been best done during the closing years of peace.

  There were some interesting features of the planned German naval aircraft. The Ju87C, for example, not only was equipped for catapult operations, but also the fixed landing gear could be jettisoned for an emergency landing in the sea. British experience with aircraft with fixed landing gear, on aircraft such as the Fairey Swordfish, was that ditching the aircraft required careful flying, but it was possible to do it safely providing that the tailplane was kept low, otherwise the aircraft would somersault.

  After plans for conversion of the cruiser and the liners were abandoned early in 1943, the Graf Zeppelin was finally cancelled, remaining afloat but without fitting out she was unserviceable. Her catapults were stripped out and sent to Italy for use in the planned Italian aircraft carrier, Aquila, converted from the passenger liner Roma, but she too was never completed. While policy had swung in favour of aircraft carriers again, it had been but briefly, before being reversed. Given the shortage of materials and the impact on production of Allied bombing, the stop-start nature of these decisions and the change in policy was wasteful.

  The truth was that Germany was no longer in command of events.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Battles with Plan Z

  Speculating on how Plan Z may have changed the outcome of the Second World War, or changed the way in which events unfolded at sea, is difficult. This is not just because everything assumes that war did indeed break out after 1943, or even that one has to take into account the changes in the strength of both the Royal Navy and the French Navy in the intervening years, but there is the question about just how much the German naval planners understood about the integration of a more balanced fleet and the way in which it could be used in operations.

  For a start, Dönitz had rightly assumed that naval air power would have to be not only under naval control, but those wielding it would have had to be members of the Kriegsmarine. In this he was undoubtedly right, as the British Admiralty had not simply discovered, but had agitated for control of its own aviation for some years. What is strange is that despite the interest in naval aviation, seldom did the Germans coordinate maritime-reconnaissance with the deployment and operation of the U-boat hunting packs.

  The problem was that in Germany, Hitler’s close associate Hermann Goering was Air Minister, and used his influence to maintain control of all German service aviation. Even the small naval air arm, restricted to the role of providing reconnaissance and gunnery observation from battleships, battlecruisers, Panzerschiffe and cruisers, was transferred to the Luftwaffe shortly after war broke out. A similar situation existed in Italy, but not in Japan, interestingly enough. Indeed, by contrast, the Japanese did not have an autonomous air force as such, but instead divided all service aviation between the Imperial Japanese Navy and the Imperial Japanese Army. This policy in turn was far from ideal as it led to overlap and duplication.

  Goering’s supremacy over service aviation did not mean that he developed a truly autonomous air service capable of exercising strategic air power. The opposite was the case. The Luftwaffe was tied to the tactical needs of supporting ground forces while also providing maritime-reconnaissance and anti-shipping strikes for the Kriegsmarine. This worked wonderfully when the Germans struck east into Poland, and again when they seized Denmark and even when they launched the amphibious and air-landed invasion of Norway, and again worked well in the invasion of Luxembourg, the Low Countries and France. It was far less successful when the Battle of Britain started, and again failed in the Blitz on British towns and cities. This problem was known to senior officers, and while resources had been concentrated in light and medium bombers before the war, in October 1938, when optimist plans were laid for expansion of the armaments programme, a strategic heavy bomber force was planned. When the Heinkel He177 heavy bomber finally did enter service, there were too few of them and too late, and the aircraft was chronically unreliable.

  It can be argued, with much justification, that the Battle of Britain failed because the attack on British airfields ended too soon, allowing RAF Fighter Command to recover. There is a lot of truth in this. Nevertheless, the German fighter pilots once they reached the skies of Southern England that summer of 1940 were at a profound disadvantage compared to their RAF counterparts, they were short of fuel. While the Allies struggled in the early years of the strategic bombing campaign because of the lack of long-range escort fighters, the Germans would not have needed such a long range in 1940 flying from their bases in France across the English Channel, but they still did not have the range. They left their bomber formations with less protection than necessary. True, many German bomber pilots accused their fighter escorts of preferring to dog fight with the RAF than protect them, but the RAF had a two-prong strategy, whenever possible leaving the bombers to the Hurricane squadrons and the fighters to the Spitfires, and had the Messerschmitt Bf109 pilots tried to stick with the bombers, they would have suffered even higher casualties – when combat was offered, they had no choice.

  It can also be argued that the Blitz ended too soon because the Luftwaffe was diverted from the operations against British cities and eastwards towards the Soviet Union. This was true, and not just for Great Britain, but for Malta as well. Nevertheless, at no stage could the Luftwaffe bring the maximum force to bear on the raids, and this was simply because they lacked a strategic heavy bomber. The bomb loads carried by individual Luftwaffe aircraft seldom exceeded 4,000-lbs, while the RAF routinely had loads of 8,000-lbs or more. The 8,000-lb ‘Double Cookie’ was more effective than two 4,000-lb bombs. Ignore the 14,000-lb Tallboy and 22,000-lb Grand Slam for the purposes of this argument, for effective though these were, these were for special operations, it was the ability to send bombers with heavy loads night after night, and over a short period send more than a thousand of these for several nights, that proved so devastating. Aerial photographs of air raid damage to German cities show far worse destruction than visited on British cities. Even the Heinkel He111, Dornier Do17s and Junkers Ju88s did not appear in large enough numbers or sufficient concentration of force compared to the RAF. When the Heinkel He177 finally did arrive, it was in insufficient numbers to affect the outcome. And when the United States Army Air Force joined in, the end was obvious.

  When Operation Barbarossa started, the lack of true strategic air p
ower once again affected the outcome. While Stalin famously ignored warnings about the pending German assault, the Soviet Union had nevertheless moved much of its heavy industry east of the Urals, where almost all of it was beyond the reach of German bombers. It was not just that Hitler was fighting wars on two fronts in defiance of his own policies and of military theory, it was that the Germans were as ill-prepared for this campaign as they were for the campaign at sea. On the ground, German troops lacked adequate equipment for winter operations and the Luftwaffe lacked the right kind of bombs, with many shattering on the frozen ground in winter, but even before this, supply lines were dangerously over-stretched and aircraft did not have the range to cripple Soviet industry and communications.

  The Eastern Front was a front too far. Yet Germany had little choice, for without the food, fuel and raw materials it could provide, the war machine would grind to a halt. Yet, with this additional burden, Germany was increasingly vulnerable and her forces over-stretched.

  What would have happened firstly, if war had not broken out when it did with the United Kingdom and France again offering appeasement, allowing time for at least part of Plan Z to be implemented? What would have happened if the balanced fleet that Plan Z had offered had been available at the major naval engagements between the Kriegsmarine and the Royal Navy?

  APPEASEMENT AGAIN

  If September 1939 had started with frantic diplomatic exchanges between London and Paris, and with Berlin, perhaps with the realisation amongst the European Allies that United States support could not be guaranteed, appeasement may well have been an option. The surveys of public opinion by Mass Observation at the time of Munich showed that appeasement was not unpopular with a public that dreaded a repeat of the First World War. On the eve of the war, it also found that the public then, as now, believed Britain’s armed forces to be stronger and in better shape than was in fact the case. In the early twenty-first century, such attitudes spring from indifference and a failure to recognise a threat, while in 1939, these attitudes were the result of jingoism and a firm belief on the invincibility of the British Empire.