What if: 1939: how to better equip German raiders (HSK)?

[T. A. Gardner]

That's why I'd recommend a tender with larger flying boats. Early in the war these could have been at sea with their planes aboard, operating with one or more conventional raiders. There were plenty of remote places in 1939 that could have acted as harbor for such a tender on a short-term basis. With planes that could cover a 600 to 1000 mile radius, they'd be able to find merchant shipping over a very wide swath of ocean and direct raiders to it. They could also attack such shipping on occasion.
Maybe have the ship carry a number of smaller float planes that are partially disassembled in storage so when you get to some remote anchorage you can put them to use. Maybe leave a small tender / trawler conversion that can support a few after the larger ship heads on to a new location.
These same planes and their tenders could also send information to the OKM as well as to U-boats at sea.


This is why a commerce raider needs to have a support flotilla. This gives it sort of a mobile base to assist it in its operations.

A Guerre de Course is best carried out in mass starting early in a war. That leaves the opposing side little time to adjust to wartime and their merchant shipping is highly vulnerable to it. As the war continues, it will get harder to raid shipping as it adjusts routes for wartime, becomes armed and escorted, and the opposition's navy starts to systematically hunt down the raiders.
A well planned commerce war for Germany would have had raiders at sea in numbers with support ships prior to the outbreak of hostilities.

Imagine a tender anchoring at ascension island in the South Atlantic. Anything within say 750 miles of the island is going to get reported. Or, one supporting the Graf Spee who doesn't get surprised by a British cruiser squadron because it was spotted by a seaplane flying from a tender.

Just the added need for escorts, aircraft, and other resources to end all of this would have put a big strain on the RN at a time when they could ill-afford it. For Germany it's naval warfare on the cheap.

Sell the aircraft part of it to Göring and the Luftwaffe as their getting to be the real Scourge of the Atlantic using a relative handful of aircraft they really have little use for in Germany.

[Paul Lakowski]

HSK had endurance of 40,000nm to 60,000nm @ 10 knot....that's 1/2 to 2/3 of a year. They did not need replenishment at sea, in fact when raiders run their course- late war- they themselves could be utilized to replenish the U-Boats. The raiders had two critical roles. Raid a hemisphere away thus forcing the enemy to dilute his home forces ...but if that consumes your entire fleet it defeats the purpose.

https://archive.org/stream/ReviewOfGerm ... 1/mode/2up

Read the above doc, these raiders required 10 enemy vessels to hunt each raider down.

The other raider role is north Atlantic convoy attacks coordinated with LUFTWAFFE bombers & Wolf Packs. In a deliberate attempt to interdict the American life line to Europe.

If the KM needs Luftwaffe support; they are going to have to build Luftwaffe bombers not sea planes , the Condor would have worked as an interim until a better bomber could be built. However such a replacement needs to be a long range fast and high altitude bomber....which points to zero.

The only thing that might work would be a high altitude version of the ME-261 built instead of the He-177 production run. It already had the speed [385 mph @ 6-7km] and the endurance [13,000km with 700kg bombs or 8000km with 2,000kg]. What it lacked was armor and or guns, which it can ignore if it had bigger wings to fly higher -11km? Methane water could boost top speed to 400 mph @ 8km or 370mph @ 11-12km.

Come to think of it 700kg @ 13,000km is just enough to drop 1/2 dozen incendiary bombs on NYC for each sortie , while 2000kg @ 8000km means a Fritz X delivered out to Greenland.....

[thaddeus_c]

they had HE-119 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinkel_He_119

phantom HE-519 was late war attempt at revival, no information available on that one.

believe the problem with Condors was that they needed more EARLIER rather than MORE?

[kfbr392]

they had HE-119

great what if, but please stay on topic.

[Paul Lakowski]

The ME-261/HE-177 & HE-119 all used the same engine , the production of which could barely keep up with the HE-177 demand, to say nothing of on going engine problems. In other words, they could build one in substantial numbers but not any more. So you have to choose one. According to GRIEHL- LUFTWAFFE OVER AMERICA, they determined that to sustain any patrols on a daily basis, they needed annual production of 30 planes for each daily sortie. Donitz demanded a minimum of 150 planes per year production.

HE-119 has not enough range to reach past the UK, but only needs one engine per plane and is fast [367mph]. The HE-177 has payload/range to reach past UK and almost to Iceland and was built in the numbers needed- but is not as fast [351-356mph].

The Me-261 is fastest [385 mph] and has the range to scout across the Atlantic [ with several 110kg bombs], but can only deliver 2000kg load max [ FRITZ X] out to mid Atlantic Gap .IT would have to be built instead of the HE-177. The CONDOR is already in production but about 1/2 the numbers needed and is too slow to survive in the mid war era , however it has the same range as HE-177 , albeit with little payload.

[Polar bear]

hi,

1. Select better ships. The 2 -mark ships, Neumark (Widder) and Kurmark (Orion) had so much engine trouble that they barely made it home. Steiermark (Kormoran) had much trouble with its bearings, too.

2. Radar would have been nice, but the radar sets available in 1939 were large, clumsy and easily to be seen. The camouflage was, however, the HSK's strong suit.

3. The same is valid for aircraft. The Ar 196 (in the hold) was, under the given circumstances, the best choice, and quite successful, especially with ATLANTIS and THOR (2nd cruise).

4. You might consider a telescopic mast extendable for another 10 or 12 meters. That will give you a better scouting range (under visual conditions).

5. I agree that a jamming device might have been a good idea.

6. Armour wasn't necessary. There's no enemy with machine guns at sea and little armour doesn't help against 4" or 6" shells.

7. A small MTB (German: LS for Leicht-Schnellboot) would have been a real addition. The first two, LS 2 and LS 3 on KOMET and KORMORAN, were faulty (development had been stopped) and little help, LS 4 "Esau" on MICHEL was a success.

greetings, the pb

[T. A. Gardner]

On item 6 above:

Actually, if the ship were given extensive splinter armor it would be very useful. Maybe in construction, build much of the hull out of 12 to 20 mm armor plate along with adding gun shields, armored main bulkheads, and a lightly armored deck.

Sure, none of that will stop a large naval shell, but it will prevent the ship from being quickly riddled end-to-end with splinter holes that will complicate damage control massively. Every little hole that is near or below the waterline is a potential source of flooding. Dozens or hundreds of small holes are far more dangerous than one big one, 4" to 6" in diameter. The big hole you can find and patch. The little ones are much more difficult to do that with.

[Paul Lakowski]

Terry ; most of the time an HSK was intercepted by cruisers, and the SOP was to scuttle the ship before the enemy got within range.

These ships were commandeered from civilian fleets which is why they were so cheap .They were quite big with max displacement of 14-19kt....just 20mm plate on hull /deck, means....900 tons armor or the amount on a Koln Kreuzer....or two Spähkreuzers . Not that significant but with only 78kt Krupp armor for the entire fleet it seems like throwing resources away.

http://navypedia.org/ships/germany/ger_conc_amc2.htm

[T. A. Gardner]

This is as opposed to the US and Britain where larger merchants and liners were designed to one extent or another for conversion to auxiliary cruisers in wartime. Both countries included things like additional bulkheads, strengthened mounting points for guns, and other features to allow for quick conversion. There's no reason that Germany couldn't have planned better and done the same thing.

[Paul Lakowski]

I would much rather invest the armor in proper warships and leave the HSK defence to deception & surprise. The KM did waste armor on U-Boats to allow them to fight allied ASW planes...another poor idea.

[thaddeus_c]

British plastic armor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic_armour

the Germans used concrete on the MFPs not sure if ever used on other ships?

[Paul Lakowski]

applying concrete armor after the fact to a civilian vessel was done a lot and could be done on HSK as well. Nazi used millions of tons of concrete throughout the war but the resistance was something like 1/7th to 1/10th the resistance of armor....which suggests 7000-10,000 tons concrete to get the same protection as 900t armor. That will eat into the cartage of these vessels and thus the fuel range/provisions & ammo will be affected.

[T. A. Gardner]

Eight inches of reinforced concrete is roughly equal to 1" of steel armor plate. The concrete weighs about 100 lbs per square foot, while the steel will weigh 40 lbs a square foot. The steel also takes up 1/8th the area. This doesn't include the necessary supporting structure to hold the concrete nor having to ensure that the concrete isn't going to undergo flexion or bending stresses that could cause it to crack. While you could use gunite, the problem there is that gunite isn't as strong as regular concrete.
Worse, reinforced concrete is not going to stand up to repeated non penetrating hits nearly as well as steel armor would. It will also absorb water making it heavier, and sea water will cause the cement to weaken to some degree over long exposure.

[Graniterail]

It might necessitate co-operation with the Italians, but Manned Torpedos?

There were plenty of times that raiders masqueraded as innocent merchants. Have one slip into a busy neutral port, deploy some divers on manned torpedos from under the waterline. They sneak around the harbour placing limpet mines underneath Allied ships, then head back to the mothership. After a wk the delay timers run out & there's a bunch of merchantmen at sea that have just disappeared all at once.

[T. A. Gardner]

Watching this video on German seaplanes produced an interesting historical note for this thread. It's at about 4:30 into the video.



The Germans already had several large seaplane tenders for service in the mid-Atlantic in the mid 1930's as refueling stations at sea for flying boats flying between Europe and Brazil. They could have easily armed these and had one or more at sea with flying boats aboard when the war started. Paired with a raider, this tender could have had flying boats ranging far and wide in the Atlantic.
The tenders, as the video notes, stayed at sea for up to a year at a time performing their tender duties. It's clear that Germany had the expertise, ships, aircraft, and crews to make something like this possible, and it was already all in place and available.