When 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 life.
In many ways, the German surface fleet became something like the perfect black hole for resources. In the prewar years, it began a nominally ambitious building program which was still in its infancy when the war began. Naval planners were explicitly preparing for a mid-century war, with construction programs targeting fulfillment in 1948. Consequentially, the navy was entirely unprepared for war in 1939, and the surface fleet never threatened to fulfill any meaningful strategic function. Yet the scale of the building program was sufficient for the navy to siphon meaningful financial and industrial resources from the ground forces and the Luftwaffe. This was an impressively titrated level of wastage: naval expenditures were large enough to weaken the other arms of the Wehrmacht, but too late and too little to make the navy into a useful arm in its own right. Furthermore, wasteful investments in surface ships, particularly capital ships, materially weakened the one element of the Kriegsmarine that did have a strategic function: the U-boats. The result was a force expensive enough to cannibalize the rest of the Wehrmacht (and itself) but far too immature and small to do anything useful on a strategic scale. In the one German campaign where the navy did play a pivotal role, the limited fighting destroyed most of the surface fleet.
Full text: https://bigserge.substack.com/p/hitler-ahoy-the-third-reichs-surface
