German navy had focused on naval bombers.

I'm indebted to Mr. Falkenberg! I'll endeavor to find you some hard numbers Mr. Redcoat!

Yours,

Bill

 

I was fully aware of that. I was attempting to point out that AA fire could be effective when the ships are well armed and operated in a tactically sound manner. There are plenty of earlier examples throughout the war as well.

 

I hope you are not being serious...

 

Indeed! The IJN did exactly what the original poster proposed; developed a naval air arm dedicated to the destruction of the enemy's navy. It developed a long range maritime attack plane, the G4M, designed to attack an enemy fleet with bombs or torpedoes.

Of course, the Japanese Navy always realized that the US Navy would be it's principal opponent and that air attack against ships at sea would be an important tactical capability. It's my understanding that Nazi Germany did not regard the Royal Navy as it's principal enemy until quite late in the game, and therefore did not expend much in the way of resources to counter the RN.

Unfortunately for the Japanese, it turned out that the G4M was not all that effective against against moving ships and that heavy losses were almost always experienced, even when no Allied fighter opposition was encountered. The plane, in order to gain the long range required, dispensed with most defensive armament and crew and fuel protection and was easily destroyed by either fighters or AA fire. As a maritime attack aircraft, it was most effective when armed with torpedoes and, as such, was also most vulnerable to ship borne AA fire. It was not a dive bomber and therefore did not have the capability of precision bombing that was required to seriously threaten ships maneuvering at sea.

This begs the question, would Germany have been any more successful in developing an effective, long range, maritime attack aircraft which could defend itself against fighters and survive heavy AA fire?

I seriously doubt the Ju-87 sank the most ships of any plane in WW II. I have seen several web sites, and read at least one book, which claims that achievement for the SBD "Dauntless". I know the SBD sank in excess of 120,000 tons of warships in one 12-hour period in June, 1942.

It seems to me that Germany would have been seriously hampered by lack of air bases from which to launch anti-shipping strikes against the RN which could simply retreat under heavy fighter air cover when in range of such strikes. Without aircraft carriers, Germany would be more or less unable to launch effective anti-shipping strikes, of any kind, against the RN. If Germany had decided to build aircraft carriers they wouldn't have been effective without the supporting ships (cruisers, destroyers, fleet oilers and replenishment ships) that made the Allied carriers so destructive in the Pacific.

As pointed out by T. A. Gardner, the German Graf Zeppelin, as a carrier, was crap. It carried too small an air group (especially for it's size) to be useful, had too small an avgas capacity, very little self-defense capability, and it's aircraft-operating capability was, at best, questionable. Against a contemporary Yorktown-class carrier, the GZ would have been toast; against even one of the less capable British carriers of the time, it would have been in serious trouble.

In my opinion, even if Germany had planned to fight the RN from the early 1930's, it wouldn't have been possible for them to have developed an effective naval air arm which would have seriously threatened the RN's mastery of the sea. That would have required carriers and Germany just didn't have the design experience necessary to build a good carrier, or the shipbuilding capacity to build the required screening and support ships. If they had tried, Britain would have noticed and would have taken steps to build up it's it's own naval air arm.

 

Actually the G4M proved a reasonably good medium long range bomber. Certainly it was a better aircraft than the He 111 of the Luftwaffe except in protection or the Ju 88 except in speed. All models were heavily armed (a result of experiance in China and Mongolia) with several 20mm cannon and 7.7mm machineguns. By 1943 the G4M2 also had self-sealing fuel tanks and armor installed making it easily better than the He 111 or Ju 88 in almost all respects.

Unescorted against mid and late war Allied fighters yes, the G4M was a relatively easy target. But, so too were the He 111 and Ju 88 in daylight. Against ships in daylight the G4M wasn't going to do any better or worse than German bombers of the same period; all were vulnerable, very vulnerable.

 

Great post DevilsAdvocate!

Anyway, about he Graf Zepplin, as T.A. as mentioned it had a lot of problems, and most of those sound like it would have made the carrier more of a liability than an asset. It would stand to reason that since that would have been Germany's first Carrier it most likely would have had issues.

I think one of the primary factors working against this 'What if' is the basing issue. Just as TA and both DevilsAdvocate have mentioned, there really is no good place to base said aircraft.

It really seems like Germany should have put everything into the U-Boats, as plan 'Z' was a waste of time and naval bombers would have been a waste of time as well.


Bill

 

A useful thread with links on the Graf Zeppelin

http://www.ww2f.com/weapons-wwii/12432-graf-zepplins-effectiveness.html


The German navy in the words of Admiral Wägner was "trying to escape a dead angle in a dead sea." By this he mean that Germany had no useful outlet to the seas of the world that could not be easily blocked by other naval powers. Essentially, Germany was forced by geography into being a land power.

 

And here is a thread about the aircraft for the Graf Zeppelin,

http://www.ww2f.com/weapons-wwii/22590-me-109t-carrier-fighter.html

 

The He-177 was a turkey that never made it as an operational success. The 4 engined versions He-277 or He-274 would have made a better choice for any application. But these developments came too late and were not seriously considered. Another good long-ranging candidate would have bee the Me-264. However, the best and most practical aircraft probably would have been the Ju-88 or a development thereof.

tom

 

The problem here is two fold:

First there is the issue of fuel. One He 177 takes about 6 to 8 metric tons of fuel per sorte. Long range it may use as much as 10 metric tons. This is obviously going to be a problem. You will never have many aircraft available for regular sorties due to the fuel issue even if planes and crews are available.

Second, is numbers. Henkel made just over 1000 He 177 during the war. For the most part the German aircraft industry could produce large four engined bombers at a rate of say, one every few days. This will never be sufficent for any kind of large scale application.

What the Germans really need is to simply concentrate their production on that most ubiquitious of airplanes in their inventory; the Ju 88. For maritime patrol the Ju 88H was the answer. Here is a stretch twin that is reasonably frugal on fuel while having great range. Coupled with a really good stand off weapon like the Hs 293 glide bomb and a decent radar set for targetting and detection of enemy aircraft it might have had a real impact on shipping.

 

Actually the Messerschmitt Me-264 was an even bigger lemon than the Heinkel He-177, Messerschmitt boffins spent just over two years trying to eliminate the bugs out of the Me-264, the problem was that when they eliminated one problem it caused another and so and so on all this on one aircraft.

Then we have the Ju-88 Family, the Junkers Ju-88 was without doubt an exceptional aircraft, but how much design can one squeeze out of a design that became obsolete in 1942, no the problem was that the RLM and the Luftwaffe was stuck with the old dogma of medium bombers and never investing in new replacements down the track, the RLM and the Luftwaffe relied on wringing out the maximum of obsolete designs.

Now onto this, the fuel issue has been raised time and time again, quite frankly what a load of rubbish, if the Heinkel He-177 had become available in say late 1939 Germany had no fuel crisis, it at the time still imported oil from Soviet Union if i am correct (if not then correct me). And it has been pointed out that their were substantial amounts of recruits to man these aircraft starting in 1938/1939

What i have done is to raise the issue that the Luftwaffe did not use the Heinkel He-177 Heavy Strategic Bomber at all but the Oberkommando der Kriegsmarine Luftwaffe or Kriegsluft operated the Heinkel He-177 Heavy Strategic Torpedo Bomber, this is in conjunction of the cancellation of the Focke-Wulf Fw-200 Kondor, so in this there were no Focke-Wulf Fw-200's in WW2 they had been scrapped.

Again the issue of production again so what. The Kriegsmarine gets personal support from Adolf Hitler issues Heinkel to build the Heinkel He-177 as a strategic heavy torpedo bomber (remember no interference from Goering in this thread) and so Heinkel with official permission from the Fuhrer begins to build additional factories to build the vast numbers needed. This plan of action still takes place in 1938. And with Heinkel and Focke-Wulf geared into full production by mid 1940 hypothetically as many as four to six aircraft per day and other factories producing sub assembled parts.

On to the Junkers Ju-88H can it carry four 21 inch torpedoes (two internally and two externally), plus crew and fuel to attack convoys as far as Iceland from Norway.

Well that's my peice.

 

I've seen this debated on a number of forums. The consensus seams to be that the JU-87 did indeed sink the most ships (not warships). The fact that the allies upgraded their naval aircraft during the war is part of the reason. Consider also that most allied anti shipping strikes were composed of a number of different types of planes so no one plane can claim all the credit (Midway and a few other examples excepted) and then of course there were a lot more allied ships out there. The Germans also sank a fair number of ships in the East which sometimes gets over looked as well.

 

I don't buy it. A "consensus" on a forum is pretty worthless unless the membership numbers more than a few historians who are working from primary documentation. The absence of hard numbers in the posts I have seen on this thread indicates that is not the case here.

While it's true that the USN did upgrade many of it's attack aircraft during the war, the SBD was a frontline aircraft up until the end of the war in 1945. Furthermore, due to the rather poor performance of USN aerial torpedoes and torpedo aircraft early in the war, the SBD was largely the only type of naval attack aircraft capable of consistently hitting ships at sea for much of the war. The claim that Alied airstrikes were composed of different types of aircraft is also true of German airstrikes, so there is little difference there. Perhaps most significantly, the SBD participated solely in oceanic campaigns where anti-shipping strikes were major features of each campaign; the Ju-87, on the other hand, divided it's time between ground and sea campaigns and seldom was committed to sustained anti-shipping operations.

Overall production of the two types appears to be similar; total numbers given for the JU-87 vary from 5,700 to 5,752, while total production of the SBD is listed at 5,938. Of course, every SBD built was a navalized aircraft designed for anti-shipping strikes while only a handful of JU-87's were specifically meant for the anti-shipping role. I would dispute the claim that the JU-87's enjoyed the advantage of more Allied ship targets since by early 1943, Allied air superiority denied most of the Atlantic and North Sea and much of the Med to JU-87 operations, leaving only the Baltic and the northern shores of the Med.

Given the circumstances of the JU-67's service compared to the SBD's service, I would opine that the SBD not only had greater opportunity to sink more enemy shipping than the Ju-87, but actually did so. Just from memory, I can verify that the SBD sank close to 300,000 tons of enemy warships in 1942 alone; this does not include mechant shipping.

 

I wonder if that JU-87 claim is just poorly worded? Perhaps what was meant was that; the "Stuka" (Ju 87) was the Axis aircraft which sank the most tonnage of allied shipping!

And let us remember that some ex-Luftwaffe Ju 87s (I’ve seen numbers into the hundreds when all models are totaled) were handed over to their Italian ally, the Regia Aeronautica and re-named the Picchiatello (I think that means "little diver" but don't hold me to it!).

Here is why I say I don’t know the numbers or for what they were used. Whether land attack or naval attack, by 1941 the Italians received 46 B-1s, 50 B-2s, 59 R-2s. In 1943 they received an additional 46 aircraft, D-2s and D-3s.

And the Italians also used the Ju 87 for the method which later became known as skip bombing in attacks on shipping. I don’t know if they were the first to actually use the idea or if they adapted it from others. And at least one of the bombs that hit the carrier HMS Illustrious in January of 1941 was dropped by a Stuka in Regia Aeronautica service, while in the company of a small flight of Savoia-Marchetti SM 79s.

That is why I wonder if the JU-87 is perhaps best named as the most successful Axis anti-ship bomber?

 

I'm familiar with the campaigns in which the Ju 87 fought and I just don't see the numbers there to justify the claim.
Take for example the Norwegian campaign, the RN only lost 4 warships to air attack during the whole campaign !!!!!
I know that a number of other ships were damaged, and that some merchant ships were sunk as well, but the numbers lost to aircraft were not excessive and the shipping losses were inflicted by a number of other Luftwaffe aircraft as well ( most notably the Ju 88)

If the the Ju 87 was indeed the most successful anti-ship aircraft where are the numbers !!!!

ps, Even the B-24 Liberator is credited with sinking over 72 Axis warships (U-Boats)

 

I have seen hard numbers posted and not refuted. I'll see what I can find.

I thought it was pretty much replaced on the CVs by 45.

It may have got more hits but one torpedo or a hit by another bomber and you have a shared claim.

It's not at all clear to me that this is the case. Not diputing you just haven't seen documentation on it. My impression is also that a lot of the LW antishiping strikes made vs merchants were from a single unit.

The strikes at Croal sea were all mixed strikes and the US did pretty well. The torpedos also improved significantly. Most of the strikes that caught a lot of Japanese merchants were also later in the war where the Dauntless was not the only contributer.

The JU-87 also got a couple years more in combat than the SBD.

But as I pointed out above teh JU-87's started earlier.

Again from memory the SBD was the leader in warships sunk and perhaps in total tonnage but not numbers. I'll see what I can find.

 

SBD v Ju-87 yeah, blah, blah, blah it's boring, so what, it sounds like an aviation peeing contest.

This my senarion of the deployment of the Heinkel He-177 HSTB And please fell free to enter the fishing contest. (you know exactly what i mean)

October 1942

In South of France, Sicily and North Africa the Kriegsluft has 150 deployed and that eventually they attack the Operation Torce landings at Oran and Tangiers inflicting heavy damage to the two taskfoces, eventually Operation Torch is a failure, eventually the Western approaches of the Mediterannean becomes to much for the RN and USN and that the British in North Africa must be supplied through the east, eventually Malta is isolated and taken, by 1944 there are over 600 based in the Mediterannean and that Allied shipping come to a halt

Mid 1943

Germany ultra-long torpedo bombers acted in conjunction with the U-Boat fleets, the tatic is simple enough the U-Boats attack convoys that can't be attacked by their Kriegsluft units until they come into range imagine say that in Norway the Kriegsluft had say 200 fully servicable Heinkel He-177's on call this amounts to 800 torpedoes that can be delivered en masse to convoys already weakend, imagine the situations is such that eventually convoys are re-routed elsewhere. Not only do the transports suffer massive losses but also does the R.N and USN.

April-May 1944.

The Kriegsluft deploys the largest concentration of Heinkel He-177 HSTB in all along the French Coast some 1,200 to 1,400 are deployed, and again attack en masse again with conjunction with the u-boast and small torpedo boats the transports of the D-Day landings, 6th to 8th June the Allies suffer catastrophic losses several thousand vessels are lost hundreds of thousands servicemen are lost. Operation Overlord is cancelled for the loss of 300 Heinkel He-177 HSTB and 100 u-boats and 200 other Kriegsmarine units, the English Channel becomes a no go zone for allied shipping.

Now the fishing begin.

v.R

 

How about the historical reality of He 177 anti-shipping operations vR?

Let's start with one of the bigger ones: The attacks on convoy SL 139/MKS 30 (11/21/43). This was an fully escorted 66 ship convoy sailing from North Africa to England. The KM managed to send a total of 30 U-boats against it in varying numbers (all 30 never were able to attack together). These submarines failed to hit or sink a single vessel.

The Luftwaffe's initial strike consisted of 20 He 177 carrying two Hs 293 glide bombs each. A total of 16 were launched at ships in the convoy. A single ship that had straggled was actually hit and sunk. Poor visibility was a major cause of failure.

Land based fighters from North Africa managed to catch and shoot down three He 177.

Next up is a convoy in the Bay of Biscay. 14 He 177 attacked with Hs 293. They scored no hits and were set on by defending fighters that shot down four and damaged another 3 badly enough to be written off. Thus, the Germans suffered 50% casualties for no success.

The results of these early shipping strikes in daylight led to a discontinuation of them as it was realized that these were impractical against convoys with good air defenses. AA alone was dangerous. The presence of even a few fighter planes was disasterous.

The Germans then switched to night ops. Their tactic was to have one aircraft fly parallel to the shipping convoy dropping flares. The other aircraft would then make Hs 293 launches from six to nine miles out on the dark side of the convoy. This avoided enemy AA fire even where radar controlled. But, it also resulted in very few actual successes.

Aside from all that, the German aircraft industry never proved capable of building more than a mere handful of the He 177. Only a few dozen were operational at any given time. Between operational losses and enemy action no more could be accumulated. Production remained at its very best just a few aircraft per week.
By mid 1944 fuel was so critical the remaining He 177 were essentially premanently grounded for lack of fuel.

 

Here's a link to a thread where it's discussed on the axis history board. Some numbers and sources but it's pointed out that some of the credited kills may actually have been U-boat sinkings (and possibly no sinkings at all).
//forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=69&t=135168&start=0&st=0&sk=t&sd=a

 

If the question doesn't interest you, then just don't read the posts pertaining to it. Personally I find your fantasy of a German wonder plane that never existed in the quantities you imagine to be absurd, and you can rest assured that I'm simply skipping over your posts.