Erich Raeder - Rebuilding The German Navy - The Z Plan

The Z Plan

In the late 1930s, when it become clear that Britain was neither going to ally with Germany nor permit Germany a free hand to dominate Europe, Hitler's foreign policy became markedly anti-British. Raeder's traditional Anglophobia, which always led him to view Britain as the main enemy and together the chance for increased naval building represented by the anti-British turn made Raeder into one of the strongest supporters of the anti-British foreign policy. In late 1938, Hitler ordered Raeder to accelerate warship construction. On 4 January 1939 Raeder advised Hitler that given the Kriegsmarine's status as third in regards to allocation of resources and spending behind the Army and the Air Force, the construction targets could not be met within the deadlines given. Raeder reported that in the future the Kriegsmarine would have to take precedence over the other branches of the Wehrmacht to meet the construction targets within Hitler's deadlines. Raeder stated that unless this was done, there would be a delay in warship construction which would ensure that the time when the Kriegsmarine "would be sufficiently strong and ready to act against the big sea powers" would not happen in the near future. Even if the current naval construction programme was completed on time, Raeder warned that the resulting German fleet would still be too weak to win command of the sea, and what was needed was a vast new battlefleet, even larger than Tirpitz's High Seas Fleet to defeat Britain. Finally, Raeder's endless championship of the Seemachtideologie and of the need for the Navy to have primacy in the defence budget bore fruit, and Hitler was won over to the cause of navalism. On 27 January 1939 Hitler approved the Plan Z presented to him by Raeder, and ordered that henceforth the Kriesgmarine would be first in regards to allocation of money and raw materials, marking the first time during Raeder's tenure that the Navy had enjoyed such a position, indeed the first time since 1912 that the Navy had been given the first call on the defence budget.

The Z Plan called for a fleet of 10 battleships, 4 aircraft carriers, 15 Panzerschiffe, 5 heavy cruisers, 44 light cruisers, 68 destroyers and 249 U-boats by 1944. Reflecting Raeder's obsession with big battleships, the Z Plan called for a new class of gigantic H battleships to be the core of the proposed fleet, which would have been the largest battleships ever built. With this force, Raeder promised Hitler that he could destroy the Royal Navy. After the Z Plan was completed in the mid-1940s, Raeder's plans called for a "double pole strategy", in which U-boats, Panzerschiffe and cruisers operating alone or in tandem would attack British commerce all over the globe, forcing the Royal Navy to divert ships all over the world to deal with these threats while at the same time two task forces of carriers, battleships, cruisers and destroyers would engage in frequent sorties into the North Sea, preferably from bases in Norway to destroy what remained of the British Home Fleet in a series of battles that would give Germany command of the sea. The Canadian naval historian, Commander Kenneth Hansen wrote that Raeder in devising the idea of a task force of different types of ships was a more forward-looking and innovative officer than he was usually credited with being. In a revisionist picture of Raeder, Hansen charged that the conventional view of Raeder as a blind follower of Mahan and Tirpitz was mistaken, and instead claimed that Raeder was really a follower of the theories promoted by Franz von Hipper of Germany and Raoul Castex of France about using guerre-de-course to force the numerically superior Royal Navy to divert its strength all the world in order to allow a numerically inferior force to engage in battle with the remainder of the British fleet on more or less equal terms. To support the planned global war on the high seas against Britain, Raeder planned to get around the problems posed by the lack of bases outside of Germany by instructing naval architects to increase the range and endurance of German warships and build supply ships to re-supply German raiders on the high seas.

In 1936, Raeder ordered a new class of support ships, the Dithmarschen-class ships which served as a combined oil tanker/supply ship/hospital ship/repair shop and could carry 9,000 tons of fuel oil and 4,000 tons of lubricating oil plus ammunition, water, spare parts and food. The captains of the Dithmarschen class ships and Kriegsmarine warships and submarines were trained in Underway replenishment as the practice of transferring goods and fuel from the Dithmarschen ships to the warships/submarines at open sea was known, a most difficult operation that required considerable practice. Through the Dithmarschen ships, Raeder planned to greatly extend the length of time that Kriegsmarine raiders could spent on the high seas before being required to return to Germany. Five Dithmarschen ships were built between 1937 and 1940 and two, the Altmark and the Westerwald were at sea at the start of the war. Hansen wrote that the Dithmarschen ships were Raeder's most enduring legacy as they provided the basis for the modern support ship; after the war, the United States Navy took over the Dithmarschen and renamed it the USS Conecuh. Despite his strong dislike of Wegener, Raeder agreed that it had been a huge mistake on the part of Germany not to have occupied Norway, the "Gate to the Atlantic" in 1914 as control of Norway would allowed Germany to escape the North Sea by breaking the British distant blockade. As early as 1915, Wegener had pointed out that the blockade was based upon patrolling the waters between Scotland and Norway, and argued that if Germany had control of Norway, then not only would the blockade be broken, but the German Navy could then force the British Navy to engage in a decisive battle of annihilation. The second part of the "Wegener thesis" about breaking the British distant blockade, namely seizing the Shetland Islands, Wegener's other "Gate to the Altantic", Raeder rejected as early as the 1920s as utterly impractical.

The German historian Jost Dülffer wrote that Raeder would have been better off in preparing the Z Plan by following the advice of Commander Hellmuth Heye, who had advocated in a 1938 paper a guerre-de-course strategy of Kreuzerkrieg (cruiser war) in which groups of Panzerschiffe and submarines would attack British convoys, or Karl Dönitz, who also advocated a guerre-de-course strategy of using "wolf-packs" of submarines to attack British commerence. Dülffer contended that either option were both less expensive, would take less time and more achievable given German resources than the Z Plan which Raeder chose. The Canadian historian Holger Herwig wrote that the Z Plan was Raeder's fantasy given that the Z Plan fleet would take 8 million tons of oil whereas in 1939 Germany imported a total of only six million tons of oil. Naval planners informed Raeder that the Z Plan fleet would require ten million cubic metres of storage to be built in order to supply enough oil to last a year. Raeder never addressed the question of where the oil that was supposed to power the Z Plan fleet was going to come from, or where the oil would be stored once it had been imported.

Read more about this topic:  Erich Raeder, Rebuilding The German Navy

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