KMS Tirpitz - Guide 117

[Music] [Music] Tirpitz was the second Bismarck glass battleship to be built although she went through so many minor changes and upgrades etcetera that by the time she was in service in the mid part of her career she was almost more like a half-sister than simply a repeat of the class as with Bismarck she started out designed to counter the French rush higher class battleships as the Bismarck's were the last German capital ships designed before plans ed was introduced both ships were supposedly 35,000 ton standard displacement in order to fit with the anglo-german naval agreement but somewhat was with the Japanese the Germans didn't even bother to try to stick to this limit instead rolling out a ship that was near 43 thousand tons standard displacement and would eventually topped the scales at almost 53 thousand tonnes fully loaded the Tirpitz his armament started out the same as Bismarck's although the location of the heavy of some of the heavy anti-aircraft guns would eventually be changed to give a better field of fire and of course the ship commissioning later was fitted with more modern radar sets which would be gradually upgraded over time during its service career the 20 millimeter flak guns would be vastly increased in number from 12 as launched to a final total of 58 and would also pick up a pair of quadruple torpedo launchers mounted on the deck at like a giant destroyer during a minor refit in 1942 ostensibly for use against merchant shipping although laid down in 1936 and launched in 1939 she would not commission for another two years finally entering service in early to mid 1941 with the delay interval caused by British bombing efforts which failed to damage the ship but did manage to blow up a lot of the docks around it which slowed down work on the near completed warship her first role was at the head of a temporary Baltic Fleet designed to block the possible if somewhat improbable deployment of the Soviet Baltic Fleet during Germany's invasion of the USSR but then the Luftwaffe sank most of the Soviet ships and so Tirpitz found itself being sent to Norway to attack convoys since Hitler had forbidden the ship from going into the Atlantic partially because of the Bismarck's fate and partially because HMS Campbeltown had denied the Germans access to any Tirpitz sized docks in France and so Norway seemed to be the best place to make use of the ship upon arrival of the crew used a combination of a sheltering cliff a cut-down forest heavy smoke screens and shore-based fighters and anti-aircraft support to hide and protect themselves from the air raids that they knew from experience must be coming however fuel shortages in Germany were exacerbated by the need to move any fuel up to Norway for the ship's use and so most of this time was spent swinging a tanker although it did take part in a few deceptive operations to distract British heavy surface forces away from the upcoming channel - after this various reinforcements began to arrive first the admiral scheer and Prince Aegon and later the lützow admiral hipper and Scharnhorst amongst others Tirpitz made its first attempt to attack a convoy in march 1942 but was probably lucky to miss it since the total escort consisted of the battleships HMS Duke of York and King George the fifth the battle cruiser renowned the aircraft carrier victorious and a number of cruisers and destroyers in the event after the Tirpitz was detected victorious did try to launch an air strike using alba cores at the retreating German battleship but this didn't go particularly well in part because the Alba caused rather pedestrian 90 knots top speed was being countered by a 40 knot headwind and Tirpitz sailing away from them at 30 knots resulting in an actual closing speed that was so slow they were at one point overtaking overtaken by a fast running destroyer beneath them this operation cost a lot of valuable fuel and so it took three months to restock the fuel supplies at which point they tried again this time with convoy PQ 17 again Duke of York and victorious were in escort this time with battleship USS Washington operating in support but German intelligence worked out that British intelligence knew of the operation and ordered the ship to return to port indirectly however Tirpitz helped to sink a lot of ships since the convoy was ordered to scatter before the turnaround order was known at by British intelligence services this resulted in many lone ships of BQ 17 being picked off by u-boats and the Luftwaffe over the next few days the ship needed a refit by now but it was thought to be too dangerous to make the trip back to Germany and so an ad hoc overall was arranged in Norway with the defences of the ship's Anchorage constantly strengthened to protect it during this somewhat immobile phase once this was completed Tirpitz would fight its main guns in anger for the first and only time when it sailed - with the newly arrived Scharnhorst to shell the island of Spitsbergen but at this point in its career the British were absolutely determined to get rid of the ship and if the ship wasn't going to come to them they would go to it and they began to escalate the series of air strikes and Seabourn operations that had gone on pretty much since the ship had been constructed and these would start to gradually degrade the ship's ability to fight the following is a brief recounting of all these assaults from the start of the ship's career and their final outcome the first dedicated air attack started on the night of 8 October 1940 with 17 Hampton medium bombers whilst she was still in the drydock fitting out there were no hits scored and three more attacks would follow before she was formally commissioned in January in February 1941 with the attacking waves consisting of 32 Wellington Whitley and Hampton medium bombers 25 Wellington's with nine Hamptons and finally a hundred and sixteen Blenheim Wellington Hampton and Whitley bombers all of these attacks achieved as we said earlier the sum total of nothing with one Blenheim being lost in the final attack once the ship had commissioned and moved to Kiel the attacks continued throughout May and June with 14 Whitley's going in first losing one of only three aircraft and she managed to find the target in bad weather then a colossal assault by 47 Wellington's 24 Hamptons 20 Whitley's and 13 Stirling heavy bombers along with eleven of the new Halifax heavy bombers managing to lose two Wellington's whilst again failing to find Tirpitz and attacking Kiel in general instead this concluded aerial operations against the Tirpitz in 1941 and as the ship was moved to Norway things would pick up again in 1942 with numerous raids starting in the first four months nine Halifax's and seven Stirling's attacked losing one sterling 12 albacore torpedo bombers attacked at sea this was the victorious attacking and they managed to lose two of the Alba cause again to no effect an attack by 33 the Halifax's lost five Halifax's and another attack by 31 Halifax's and 12 Lancaster's lost another five bombers as another attack believe or not of 23 Halifax's and 11 Lancaster's managed to lose another two bombers and as you might have guessed all of this accomplished nothing in terms of damaging the ship late spring and early summer of 1942 passed without incident from the air but then in October 1942 the Royal Navy got in on the act with a pair of chariot manned torpedoes unfortunately mechanical and weather issues led to the loss of both the units and a trawler that was supposed to carry them to the target the rest of the winter and most of 1943 again passed relatively peacefully until the 27th 22nd of September 1943 when the escalation really started a 4x craft Royal Navy [ __ ] submarines carrying massive two-ton bombs were ferried to Tirpitz his current birth at the calf yard and although three of the craft would be lost two of them managed to successfully lay a number of the air two-ton charges against the ship when these went off they resulted in heavy damage the first charge exploding near the Caesar turret the super firing rear turret and the other just off the port bow this latter charge dented the hull buckled bulkheads wrap ruptured a fuel tank and tore up plating as well as resulting in just under 1,500 tons of water coming in through various hull breaches a large number of electricity generators were damaged or disabled and for the fourth turret Dora jumped its bearings which was a rather significant problem as there was no crane in Norway that could re seat it and as we've said the bits wasn't allowed to go back to Germany the shock wave also totaled the ship's float planes repairs would take a total of seven months during this period the Soviet Air Force got involved with a 15 aircraft strike of which four of them found the target but failed to do any damage and this was followed up by the Royal Navy stepping in with a number of major attacks launched from various carriers the first being on the 3rd of April 1944 which was also the most successful with 40 of the new Barracuda dive bombers and 80 fighters managing to score 15 bomb hits and repeatedly strafing the ship to suppress the anti-aircraft battery 3 barracudas in a Hellcat were lost and unfortunately despite the number of hits many of the Bombers released their bombs far lower than planned in order to try and improve accuracy obviously with some decent results but this resulted in the impact speed being insufficient to breach the armored deck two of the near misses actually did more hull damage and caused more flooding than the direct hits themselves however both float planes of which had been replaced were again destroyed and the star walked starboard aircraft catapult and crane were also destroyed with number 2 starboard and number three of the 5.9 inch sir anti surface turrets being knocked out boilers turbines and the mess were also damaged with most of the 122 fatalities and 316 wounded being from the anti-aircraft gun crews who were strafed constantly by the fighters three follow-up attacks were all canceled due to bad weather but these were followed by five mass air assaults throughout July and August involving a total of 300 aircraft losing 13 of them and inflicting minor damage from two small bomb hits well so far so good and Tirpitz was still relatively intact apart from the damage caused by the [ __ ] subs but the British were now getting rather fed up of throwing aircraft at a battleship for little return and on the 15th of September 1944 the skies were filled by 28 Lancaster's of number nine and six one seven squadrons carrying the last resort when it came to dealing with annoying warships the 12,000 pound tall boy supersonic bomb warning to the Tirpitz is covering smoke generators didn't quite arrive in time to obscure the ship from the first wave for Lancaster's were damaged by defensive fire and although most of the bombs missed one probably from the lead Lancaster in the first wave struck home ironically this bomb was actually too good at its job coming in at over Mach 1 it smashed straight through the armored deck the internal superstructure and straight back out the hull to explode on the starboard side of the bow outside the ship this alone let in 2,000 tons of water and several near misses opened up hull plates and bulkheads the ship would remain afloat with minimal casualties but the big hole in the front meant it was unfit for service and would need at least nine months of repair to be combat worthy as a result the ship was then moved to Tromso fjord and it was still afloat there as another 38 Lancaster's were sent after it this operation would result in no hits and one Lancaster lost although some reports indicate that a near miss did cause some additional damage however with the ship practically non operational as far as being a seagoing warship was concerned the end came on the 12th of November 1944 as 32 Lancaster's once again appeared overhead the ship now used everything it had including special 15-inch anti-aircraft shells had been developed for its main battery and initially this seemed to work with tool boys raining down all around the ship blowing craters out of the seabed but leaving the Tirpitz itself intact then a bomb landed between the two forward turrets Anton and Bruno and went straight through the deck deep into the ship and then failed to explode the reprieve was brief however as another bomb came down smashed through the deck near the funnel and made it most of the way through the ship before detonating this resulted in a huge hole being blown out of the side and bottom of the ship with a large section of the thick armor belt actually blown completely away from the ship unsurprisingly the ship had began to heal very rapidly the Germans had anticipated after the first set of tallboy strikes that this might be the situation and had built up sand banks around the ship designed to stop it from capsizing however the near misses had unintentionally blown away much of these sand banks and so the Tirpitz would capsize relatively quickly it's possible based on some reports that a third bomb hit near the rear super firing turret that being turrets Caesar at this point as a massive explosion destroyed the turret flinging large parts of it in all directions the ship would then complete rolling overcome and came to rest upside down more than half of the crew were either killed or trapped and then drowned or ran out of air as a result the sum total of these offensive operations against the Tirpitz had involved 1101 separate aircraft flights to chariot man torpedoes and four [ __ ] submarines and had eventually resulted in the total destruction of the largest capital ship that Germany would ever build Tirpitz was left in place until after the war where when she would later be salvaged between 1948 and 1957 in a decade-long operation that's it for this video thanks for watching if you have a comment or suggestion for a ship to review let us know in the comments below don't forget to comment on the pinned post for drydock questions

Channel: Drachinifel

Views: 590,407

Rating: 4.9032769 out of 5

Keywords: wows, world of warships, Kriegsmarine, Tirpitz, PQ17, Spitzbergen, Norway, World War 2, WW2, Bismarck, Tallboy, 617 Squadron, Trondheim

Id: mvUolod3aY0

Length: 16min 6sec (966 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 13 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/AbyssalKageryu]

Tirptiz: The ship that caused tonnes of deaths, diverted tonnes of resources and caused plently of fear by doing practically nothing.

If "fleet in being" was a term in the dictionary, Tirpitz's pictures would very likely be next to it.

[u/QueenOfTheNorth1944]

I cant wait to watch this when I get home. Tirpitz is my absolute favorite and I think her story is one of the real hidden gems.

[u/sw04ca]

Boo to 'KMS'.