Plan Z - Practical, Effective, or High Seas Fleet Mk2?

[Music] [Music] okay so people keep asking me to cover ships like the o class p class h-class etc etc some also ask me to cover the overall program that planned them all plan zed so to put them all in context sit back break out the schnapps or your local equivalent and let's talk about plan zed aka hitler's dreams of naval domination hitler had already managed to negotiate his way out of the versailles restrictions on the german navy concluding a new treaty with a british empire that allowed the germans to build a fleet 35 percent the size of the royal navy otherwise in compliance with the washington and london naval treaties on ship displacement and main gun caliber hitler had promptly torn all of that up in private at least and initiated the construction of numerous glasses of ships that flagrantly broke the treaty restrictions whilst at the same time telling anyone that would listen that the rather obviously oversized bismarck was really a 35 000 ton design honest i mean i suppose if you strapped a load of zeppelins to it you could reduce its displacement to that much but really but by 1938 he decided he wanted more a fleet to challenge the royal navy on the high seas a high-seas fleet if you will because clearly this had worked so well the last time german naval high command rather wonderfully called in german the oba commando de marina had spent time thinking about this and come up with a plan it was an initial plan and it wasn't planned zed a plan x looked to expand the cruiser u-boat and panzer shift arms the last being the heavily armed raiders akin to the deutschlands a lesser version plan y was also drafted but hitler didn't want lesser plans he wanted battleships and so plan zed which incorporated these was the one that was adopted this called for amongst other things 10 battleships and 4 aircraft carriers to tie down the main british fleet and many long-range cruisers to attack british shipping curiously given the experiences of world war 1 only a small force of u-boats was requested the plan assumed a decade was needed to complete it and therefore there would be no war until 1948 since wars have an annoying habit of sinking ships hitler approved the plan and assured the head of the german navy that there would be no war before then and then promptly started a world war the next year which put paid to the vast majority of plans ed as germany's war industry needed to be turned elsewhere and supplies of key materials became harder to find as expected the royal navy also started this annoying habit of sinking german ships which didn't help them either ironically plan zed's main effect in reality was to make the war easier for the allies since it meant that admiral donuts did not get nearly as many u-boats as he wanted built before the war as the money and material was being diverted to other naval projects at this point germany had the deutschland and scharnhorst classes operational and the two bismarck class under construction plan zed allowed hitler to order the construction of a further six h-class battleships which would bring the fleet up to eight true battleships in total plus the two scharnhorsts to meet the goal of 10. the rest of the fleet expansion planned would have looked as follows going from the smallest ships upwards torpedo boats with a goal of 90 torpedo boats the germans were building the type 1939 which was called a torpedo boat but was in reality a small destroyer the next in line were unsurprisingly the type 1940s but as these were designed around materials that became available after the invasion of the netherlands which wasn't part of bland's ed they can be ignored for the purposes of looking at what theoretically would have been completed under the zed plan save to note that these were ships that were similar to a fletcher class destroyer and definitely not a torpedo boat that's the 1940s instead the most likely next design would have been the type 1941 torpedo boat which was itself the size of a mid-sized destroyer and armed to suit with four single 105 millimeter guns with one forward one between the funnels and the last two super firing aft this was supplemented by six 37 millimeter flat cannon in twin mounts and eight twenty millimeter flat cannon in one quad and two twin mounts a pair of triple torpedo tubes on the center line with some depth charge launchers completed the loadout equipped with sonar radar and a top speed of 34 knots they were honestly relatively standard mid-war destroyers held to the name of torpedo boat only because the actual german destroyers were even larger although their design was influenced by world war ii it's worth noting that the follow-on 1944 type were basically even larger versions of the 1941 with heavier flak batteries and they were fully and openly ocean going about 60 more of these ships would have been needed to reach the target of 90. destroyers whilst the germans had experimented with some destroyers that were really verging on small cruisers with the 1936a class these being three and a half thousand ton ships armed with a main battery of 5.9 inch guns heavy aaa lots of torpedoes and plenty of mines all cruising at a speed of 37 to 38 knots they had found these ships were far too heavily on for their size and follow-on ships had first dropped the main gun caliber to 5 inches in the 1936 bees but then increased the number of guns to six in the 1936 seas these very large destroyers would have been supplemented by the type 1938bs which were more along the lines of a more conventional large fleet destroyer the two classes of destroyer built for the zed plan therefore would have been derivatives of these designs with some being very heavy ships with six dual purpose 128 millimeter guns eight torpedo tubes and a heavy battery of 20 millimeter 30 millimeter and 55 millimeter a guns along with lighter ships with only four 128 millimeter guns six torpedo tubes and a lesser battery of eight above around 18 to 20 37 and 20 millimeter a guns all of the designs would have been capable of over 35 knots and 38 more ships would have been needed to achieve these 68 vessels compared to the numbers that were actually built scout cruisers germany was going for quite the unique fleet whereas most navies had destroyers between one and two thousand tons and then skipped straight to light cruisers in the eight to ten thousand ton range not only were the germans building destroyers almost twice the size of the average they were also going for what they called the spa cruiser available in 1938 1939 or 1940 patents there were arguments over whether these were massively oversized destroyers or in fact small cruisers as they were of a size and armament comparable to the arathusa class like cruisers of the royal navy but sacrificed basically all armor apart from splinter protection in exchange for a 36 knot top speed their six 150 millimeter or 5.9 inch main guns were arranged in three twin turrets much like with the koenigsberg like cruisers two were on the back in super firing positions to allow for more firepower when the ship was retreating since these ships were designed as the fleet's scouting forces the 1939 variant sacrificed torpedo tubes for a seaplane and catapult but the other two variants would carry 10 torpedo tubes and midships with a fairly heavy anti-aircraft battery for so small a ship with two 88 millimeter 837 millimeter and eight 20 millimeter guns 22 of these ships were planned light cruisers with the emden the three konigsbergs and the two leipzigs completed the zed plan only called for half a dozen more light cruisers these would be called the m-class and were of a similar size to their predecessors but they dropped the three triple turrets in favor of four twins sacrificing a gun for a total of eight hundred and fifty millimeter or four five point nine inch guns in what was rapidly becoming a standard to super firing forward to super firing aft layout across all almost all german large ships these ships were also intended as scouts and shared a 36 knot top speed with the spa cruisers but these were aimed to scout for commerce raiding groups as opposed to battle groups which the smaller ships were supposed to service compared to their smaller relatives they dropped four 20 millimeter a guns and two torpedo tubes in exchange for a couple of extra 88 millimeter a guns and 60 mines along with a couple of seaplanes they were relatively thinly armored with just a two inch belt and the finalized design had a major weakness with all the turbines in the same engine room therefore able to be disabled with a single hit it was planned for the last two ships to alter this layout and like with the hippers also be physically larger heavy cruisers the zed plan didn't call for any further heavy cruisers after the admiral hippa class although it did assume that all five would be completed as heavy cruisers and not tried to be converted into aircraft carriers all sold to the russians panzer schiff the original zed plan called for 15 of these ships including the three deutschland class already built the remaining dozen were to be the p class which were improved versions of the d-class which were themselves improved versions of the deutschlands the d-class had been cancelled in favor of the scharnhorst's earlier in the decade the p-class were much larger at just under 24 000 tons but they still only carried six 11-inch guns into triple turrets like the deutschlands albeit they were the improved and heavier versions used in the scharnhorst class they also only had half the secondary battery with 450 millimeter guns armor was to be about the same with maybe a little extra on the magazines but only two triple torpedo launchers were carried as opposed to two quads on the deutschlands so what were they more than doubling the displacement for i hear you ask the answer was mostly fuel and range with a 50 increase in range and a 33 knot top speed the seven extra knots came with the need for just over three times the engine power the anti-aircraft armament was also somewhat increased to four 105 millimeter and four 37 millimeter guns these ships were completely dedicated to the commerce raiding mission however they would not even survive on paper until the outbreak of world war ii with admiral raider first reducing the order to eight and then cancelling them entirely in 1939 in favor of the next ships battle cruisers despite the plan only being active for just under a year priorities were shifting fast and the o class reflected a change in strategy instead of sending out dedicated commerce hunting groups made up of the p and m classes whilst battle groups forced the heavy royal navy units to stay close to home the new strategy called for the former battle units to engage convoy escorts and fleet elements whilst attached units such as the o class went after merchant ships part of this thinking was that by having the standard raider be a battle cruiser as opposed to a panzer ship this would force the royal navy to cover all convoys with full battleships rather than large numbers of heavy cruisers or potential super cruisers thus weakening any roving fleet units that the h-class might run into as a result the 3-0 class were planned exclusively as merchant and cruiser killers carrying a very thin seven and a half inch belt with a top speed of 35 knots almost completely upending the world war one german battle cruiser concept that mandated protection above speed or armament along with two aircraft the ship's equipment consisted of a main battery of six 15-inch guns in three twin turrets with a secondary battery of 650 millimeter guns in twin turrets one on each wing and one super firing over the rear turret eight 105 millimeter and eight 37 millimeter anti-aircraft guns in twin mounts along with 20 single mounted 20 millimeter cannon made up the anti-aircraft armament four seaplanes for scouting were also included aircraft carriers the plan called for a total of four aircraft carriers two of the graf zeppelin class that were already under construction and two more to a modified design to follow the ships carried an anti-surface battery of sixteen hundred and fifty millimeter guns in paired casements plus twelve one hundred and five millimeter and 22 37 millimeter anti-aircraft guns in twin mounts and seven quad 20 millimeter mounts although capable of 35 knots the heavy emphasis on the separate anti-air and anti-surface batteries meant that even at 33 and a half thousand tons i.e the displacement roughly of an essex class fleet carrier the ship's air group would only amount to just over 40 aircraft with modified ju-87 stukas serving in both the dive and torpedo bomber rolls and initially navalized mesh schmidt 109s in the fighter roll use of the fighter with perhaps the single most unstable and delicate landing gear of the war in a carrier role carryout role was perhaps one of the worst ideas that anybody had ever come up with and a modified aircraft with a wider landing gear the messerschmitt 155 was due to be developed instead although little is known about the modifications planned for the second pair it is likely that the gun battery would be reduced in number but increased in flexibility with a dual purpose array that would thus enable more aircraft to be carried there were also low priority plans to convert merchant ships into light carriers and even a few ideas bouncing around for hybrid cruiser and battle carriers battleships now come on admit it this is the bit that everyone was really waiting for weren't you six h-class battleships were planned at least two of them would have been of the h-39 type these were basically enlarged versions of the bismarck class at just over 55 000 unstandard displacement and swapping out the 15-inch guns for 16-inch weapons in exactly the same four twin turret layout 165 000 shaft horsepower would drive the ships at 30 knots with a secondary battery of 1250 millimeter guns in twin turrets 1605 millimeter and 16 37 millimeter guns in twin mounts and 24 quad mounted 20 millimeter cannon supplying the anti-aircraft armament along with a rather unusual six bow mounted submerged torpedo tubes it is likely that this anti-aircraft suite would have been either augmented or altered by the time the ships were finished armor protection was similar to the bismarck in belt thickness but the armored deck scheme was revised the turtle back armor was still in place but with thicker 150 millimeter plating over the magazines compared to its predecessors however a secondary upper deck two to three inches thick was also planned slightly thicker than the equivalent on bismarck it is not clear if this larger ship retained bismarck's weakness of exposed fire control cables above the turtleback armor all follow-on designs drawn up by the creeks marine in reality were heavily influenced by wartime experience or just plain fantasy so they can't be used to gauge what the final four ships would have looked like however with the british building the lion class it is reasonable to assume that the second pair would likely have had their guns board out as was planned on the h-41 derivative to 16 and a half inches by the time the last pair was built it's likely the details of the yamato would have become available and larger ships with heavier guns would probably have been requested but the h-42 through h-44 would not have been the ones selected as they could not have been built in the normal manner due to their size the most likely possibilities would either be another pair of revised h-39s with 16 and a half inch guns or a revised design with more armor and three triple 16 and a half inch turrets or possibly a version with six guns in three twin turrets with a caliber being upped to a similar size as yamato remember that the yamato itself needed a lot of pre-planning in terms of naval infrastructure and whilst i'm sure germany and everyone else would probably have tried to respond the ship they settled on would have been outside the scope of the zed plan now with all that said and done how realistic and practical was the zed plan well we can look at two aspects overall and individual practicality in terms of overall practicality this mainly comes down to cost and it's extremely unlikely that germany could have completed the plan in full without serious economic effects germany simply wasn't in a similar position relative to the other world economies compared to where it had been in the 1900s and with the various plans to expand the vermax the ss and the luftwaffe they'd either have had to scale back the scope of the zed plan or else find some additional source of funding and you can guarantee that the vermac the ss and the luftwaffe weren't going to give over as much as a single reichsmark to the creeks marine if they could at all avoid it but assuming that somehow a magical money tree was found or hitler just kept answering various countries without anybody raising an eyebrow let's look at the individual designs the torpedo boats were relatively practical effectively being mid-sized destroyers by any other name so i wouldn't foresee them suffering any major operational difficulties other than being thoroughly mocked for being a wolf in sheep's clothing destroyers these were very oversized the navics already had issues with sea keeping due to being overly armed and whilst the first batch of zed plan destroyers might have dodged this the later ships probably would have run into similar issues additionally despite and to be honest partially because of their size and armament and thus cost they would be at serious risk of being overrun outnumbered and out gunned by swarms of smaller and cheaper destroyers that could still wield useful rapid-fire main batteries ships like the tribals the j through m class is and these summoners and gearings all come to mind scout cruisers now honestly i can't really see much practical use for these sure they're designed for a very specific purpose but effectively they're just very big targets uh for the kind of ship that they are they can't fight cruisers and with a lack of armor and size they might even lose a fight to a single well-commanded destroyer anything bigger is just going to erase them from existence the minute they get the range accurate so it would have been much better to spend the money on the light cruisers these are only a bit bigger and they're more analogous to the leander-class cruisers now sure they're never going to win a fight with a town class or a brooklyn class but as commerce raiders and scouts they're far more effective than the scout cruisers and unlikely to cost all that much more unlike their smaller relatives they could actually fight destroyers and in pairs would probably have had a decent advantage over most convoy escorting cruisers heavy cruisers well they're the hippers so go see my video on the hipaa class for my thoughts on that particular ship panzer shift raider was very definitely right to cancel these compared to the deutschlands you're paying for a vastly larger ship that's actually going to do worse in a gunfight with cruiser squadrons owing it to it being a much much larger target that can only focus on a single ship at a time thanks to the reduced secondary battery and it still isn't going to be able to get away from a renown a hood or any other truly fast capital ship if you absolutely must have ships of this type for commerce raiding just build more deutschlands or if you really have to revisit the d-class both of these are cheaper and so you're going to lose less when they get caught by the same enemies anyway and the latter are actually capable of comfortably winning the fights the p-class was supposed to get into battle cruisers to a degree these make sense in context of what was known in 1939 but assuming war holds off long enough for them to be built they'll be in an environment where various super cruisers like the alaska stalingrad b65 and possibly even churchill's 9.2 inch cruisers all exist at which point their fewer shells and thin belt are going to mean they're not going to have much choice but to run away even the hood and renowns are in a position of relative superiority thanks to better armor aircraft carriers the graf zeppelin was a horrible hybrid design an aircraft carrier is not a cruiser and is not supposed to get into surface gun fights the only exception to this was hms formidable at the battle of cape matapan and even then it only got off one salvo before being firmly ordered away from the battle now a revised design with a single dual purpose battery and therefore more hanger space might have been relatively effective but the first two ships are just bad with their limited air groups and intended goal they'd be better off just filling them with fighters and using them to scout for the fleet and defend it against the inevitable incoming air attack than try and use them in any kind of offensive role and finally the battleships they're still designed for close brawling and relatively inefficient for what they bring to the table but in terms of pure punching power the h-39s and their possible derivatives are otherwise pretty solid ships assuming that the bismarck's achilles heel is remedied they'd be fairly effective ships against all comers at least until everyone starts building replies to the yamato from a purely technical perspective the zed plan can be divided into two groups the ships whose purposes are more general either torpedo boats light and heavy cruisers and battleships form one group and these are all perfectly serviceable and workable designs and would have been highly effective in their designated roles the other group the larger destroyers scout cruisers panzer shift battle cruisers and aircraft carriers are mostly far too specialized for very specific intended roles and rely on the enemy cooperating on a tactical and strategic level with this chosen method of warfare their weaknesses really are far too easily exploited by both some existing units and slight changes or upgrades in design to other units that would have paralleled them in construction therefore as intended the zed plan fleet would likely have suffered a similar fate to the high seas fleet a few scattered successes overseas before being swept clean of the oceans followed by a prolonged staring match until either hitler orders the battle fleet out into glorious combat or the raf levels the docks and the surrounding few square miles that they're housed in the lack of u-boats is really a killer to any attempt to conduct effective commerce warfare if it were up to me to make changes and assuming that somebody can keep hitler locked in a room to keep him from mashing the laban's round button for two seconds assuming that i can't ramp up u-boat production which would be the first choice i would probably use one of the larger torpedo boat designs to come up with a standard hull for a larger destroyer which could then be built in either gun or torpedo variants probably using five mounting points and twin turrets swapping turrets for torpedo tube banks depending on which variant you were building if commerce raiding is the thing we have to focus on then i'd say scrap the scout cruisers the panzer shift and the o class instead expand the m-class run and maybe see about a run of a few more revised scharnhorst designs to deal with the supercruisers that will inevitably appear scrap the idea of a cruiser carrier and just make them one that's about aircraft oh yeah shoot whoever thought about using the bf-109 and navalize the exciting new focal 190 instead and if at all possible please get someone to design a triple turret for my battleships so there you have it a relatively brief summary of the zed plan and my take on its likely effectiveness i'm sure people will inevitably want to look at the german tillman's aka the h41 and onwards so i guess we'll have to do that at some point as well i hope you enjoyed this one though and let me know in the comments if you have any disagreements or you think the zed plan could have been done in a different way 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 dry dock questions

Channel: Drachinifel

Views: 331,541

Rating: 4.9364762 out of 5

Keywords: Plan Z, Z Plan, Kriegsmarine, World War 2, Hitler, Raeder, Donitz, H-class, battleship, wows, world of warships, H-39, H-41, P-class, M-class, O-class, Spahkruezer, D-class, Scharnhorst, Bismarck, Graf Zeppelin

Id: HvQj2oM69IY

Length: 27min 41sec (1661 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 05 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/flooki_]

Without even seeing the video I'm pretty sure that it would've been High Seas Fleet Mk2.

Few overloaded carriers with limited plane capacity and basically no dedicated AA ships would've prevented it from being anything more than a glorified coast guard.

[u/Yamato_kai]

The whole Plan Z is basically one giant christmas wishlists, Raeder seems forgetting the whole point of plan in the first places, does he either want to built raiders to harass convoys or wish to rebuilt his former battlecruiser admiral career in one giant fleets that virtually have very little impact?

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Adding five useless and expensive Admiral Hipper(s) wasn't enough, get rid the P-class, adding a whole bunch of submarines until no more shipyards can't take it, few resources and lack man power, the whole Plan Z will never complete even if after war.

[u/Terminus_04]

Ill take "Make more Uboats for $200"... Problem with large Ships is they take years to design and build. Germany lacked Slipways, and more importantly natural resources to create a sufficient Capital fleet to appose the Allied Surface fleet.

Not to mention the designs on these ships were dated before they even left the drawing board. Not to mention by 1940 most other involved nations knew the sun was setting on the days of Battleship supremacy and Carriers were far more valuable assets.

I remember reading that you could have made something like 40-50 submarines for the material cost of one Bismark... Or something like 600 Panzer IVs, and get the added bonus of not needing to spend a 3rd of your countries fuel reserves trying to keep ur non-relevant surface fleet running.

[u/crzyhawk]

The battleships' time was nearly over, the world just didn't know it yet when they came up with Plan Z. If you wanted capital ships, aircraft carriers would have been a much better purchase; however the KM was 15 years behind everyone else on developing experience and doctrine on how to use them. Even surface raiders were mostly obsolete in the face of air cover and scouting.