Naval planning and disaster

 After World War II, American naval officers searched German records hoping to find out what their adversaries had been thinking.

One interesting account was published in 1954 by D.L. Kauffman, then a commander, later a rear admiral in charge of the U.S. Naval Academy. Kauffman was writing when people still talked of the “recent war.”

He was interested in the plans of Grand Adm. Erich Raeder, who headed the German navy as Hitler prepared for war. The most telling was Plan Zebra, which was the result of a surreal meeting at the Reich Chancellery on Nov. 5, 1937. Hitler summoned the top brass. Here’s Kauffman’s account.

 

At this meeting, Hitler detailed to his Commanders-in-Chief his plans for conquest and his theory of Lebensraum. He proclaimed the necessity of Germany’s expansion by force and posed but one problem. “The question for Germany is where the greatest possible conquest can be made at the lowest cost.” Of particular interest here was his naming England as the “hateful enemy to whom a strong German colossus in the center of Europe would be intolerable.” However, he believed that he could swallow Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland first, without British interference, and repeatedly promised Raeder that under no circumstances would he risk a war with England until 1946 at the earliest.

 

Raeder, preparing for war with a naval power in 1946 at the earliest, outlined plans for four aircraft carriers, as well as bunches of battleships, battlecruisers and pocket battleships. 

If you don’t recall any big carrier battles involving the Germans, don’t worry;  your memory isn’t slipping. Raeder fought the production ministry to get resources to start building ships and got approval in early 1939. Hitler, of course, provoked a war that September.

The odds of Germany, with an unprepared navy, winning a war against the United Kingdom and the United States was miniscule. When Hitler invaded Poland, he might as well have scuttled his navy.

The story is interesting to me for two reasons:

• It took years to build weapon systems in those days, and it takes even longer now because the weapons are more sophisticated. Democracies have a hard time assessing threats and making realistic plans to address them. 

• It’s a textbook case of how the “genius” model of leadership is ruinous. To have a chance in modern war, you have to make a plan and stick with it, no matter how many revisions you have to make along the way. Tossing all the plans and allowing a charismatic leader to make decisions on impulse is one way to guarantee that you can’t win.

• Source: Commander D.L. Kauffman, “German Naval Strategy in World War II”; Proceedings, US Naval Institute, January 1954, Vol. 80/1/611. The quoted material within the quotation refers to a footnote that says: “Notes on the conference introduced as evidence at Nuremberg trials.” The article is here:

https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1954/january/german-naval-strategy-world-war-ii