In September of 1939, Graf Zeppelin was, by all accounts, 85% complete when war broke out. The ship would be the second of the Graf Zeppelin class of carriers, and it is widely believed that at her christening she would carry the name KMS Peter Strasser, named after the First World War commander of Germany’s airships. Weeks after her launch, another carrier, known simply as Flugzeugträger “B”, was laid down and work commenced.
She was then attended by numerous tugs who shepherded her to a berth on a dock where she would be fitted up and readied for her shakedown cruise. Graf Zeppelin was then cut loose to slide down the slipway and into a launch basin at Deutsche Werke, Kiel.
#Axis history forum admiral hipper full
Work proceeded at full bore until the end of 1938 when, on 8 December, she was christened KMS Graf Zeppelin by Countess Hella von Brandenstein-Zeppelin, the daughter of the ship’s namesake-Count Ferdinand Zeppelin. Both the Germans and the Italians chose to select aircraft from their air forces and modify them for carrier duty – a process that would prove, for the most part, unsatisfactory.īy 1937, plans had been largely completed, enough at least to lay down the keel on Slipway One at Kiel’s Deutsche Werke for an 861-foot-long fleet carrier called Flugzeugträger “A”. Along with the German lack of experience in the carrier business, came an even greater shortfall in appropriate aircraft for carrier operations. There, they visited the recently completed IJN Akagi, one of the Japanese carriers that would launch aircraft in the attack on Pearl Harbor six years later. In secret, a delegation of Kriegsmarine and Luftwaffe officers visited Japan to obtain technology. It didn’t take long before Adolf Hitler announced plans to construct the first of four planned carriers – for the Kriegsmarine had been developing plans since 1934. In the summer of 1935, a new Anglo-German Naval Treaty gave Germany permission to construct new capital ships including aircraft carriers up to 38,500 tons displacement. Re-armament or “Aufrüstung” was conducted both under the noses of and in the face of the Allies. Of course, when the Nazis took control of the government, they largely thumbed their noses at the treaty that Germany had been forced to sign in 1919. This was largely because her militaries (Kriegsmarine and Luftwaffe) were prevented from doing so by the Treaty of Versailles-at least on paper. Carriers would be in the thick of things in the closing weeks of the war in the Pacific, and by then had supplanted the heavy battleship as the most important weapon in any navy’s arsenal.Īs mentioned, Germany came into the aircraft carrier game later than other countries with designs on the world. Carriers would be involved in the opening salvos of both the Pacific and the European wars-with HMS Courageous being torpedoed just a couple of weeks after the declaration of war, and Japanese carriers delivering a crippling but not fatal blow to the Americans at Pearl Harbor.
In fact, it was the defence and extension of these very empires, stretched across massive expanses of open ocean from Scapa Flow to the Falklands, from San Diego to the Philippines and from Sakhalin to Sarawak, which gave impetus to the development of carriers and their supporting task forces. They all had been in the game for a long time and had built relatively deep experience with technologies for deploying and operating carriers throughout their empires. The great carrier powers of the Second World War were three-the United States Navy, the Imperial Japanese Navy and the Royal Navy. Carriers were a military weapon system about to prove their place at the top of the food chain, but for the undecided and the late-to-the-game navies of Italy and Germany, there was still plenty of heated debate and animosity within these services and without. The concept of the aircraft carrier, while not new when the war began in 1939, could certainly be said to be untested. In the end, her only military accomplishment was a benefit to the Allies-keeping 30,000 tons of much needed steel from the U-boat builders of the Third Reich. Of the five attempted carriers, Graf Zeppelin came the closest to being operational. She is Flugzeugträger (Aircraft Carrier) Graf Zeppelin, one of five aircraft carriers commenced by the navies of the two European fascist powers of the Second World War-Germany and Italy. It has been nearly seventy years since she last saw the light of day. While fish sluggishly fin in and out of her silent spaces, silt settles like the dust of history over her rusting shoulders. Somewhere 55 kilometres off the coast of Poland, beneath the dark, cold waters of the Baltic Sea, lies the colossal ghost of a haughty dream of world dominance.