Shipping Losses

I was discussing WWII with a friend and we hit upon the topic of ships sunk during the war.I know the toal number is in the thousands,but is there a rough number on how many total ships were sunk?Considereing how large most vessels were,it's incredible to imagine thousands of them being lost.

 

German submarines alone accounted for 3000 warships and merchantmen sunk. I haven't heard a total for the entire war, but the number would be pretty high.

 

Best I can find.

 

Awesome post canambridge!

Particularly the number of Battleships lost is astonishing, considering their cost and the trouble the designers took to make them 'unsinkable'...

 

The number of USN battleships lost is somewhat mis-leading. Five battleships (Arizona, Oklahoma, Nevada, West Virginia, and California) were sunk, all on December 7, 1941 at Pearl Harbor. Nevada, West Virginia and California were reaised and repaired to fight another day, which all did. The other three battleships at Pearl Harbor, Tennessee, Maryland and Pennsylvania, were all damaged and underwent months of repair and modernization. Interestingly Pennsylvania was least damaged and as a result was the least up to date. Due to a lack of good radar and updated fire control systems, she preformed quite poorly at Surigao Strait during the Leyte Gulf campaign.

 

Accounting for the six German battleships is also interesting. Bismarck, Scharnhorst, and Tirpitz were all destroyed through enemy (British) action.
My source was a British book so it is likely they counted the "pocket battleships" (Graf Spee, Scheer and Lutzow) as BB which adds one (Graf Spee) to the total.
Gneisenau was decomissioned following heavy damage from RAF bombing attaacks in July 1942 so it is likely the sixth.

 

Bismarck, Scharnhorst, Tirpitz, Graf Spee and Gneisenau. That's five.

 

Some people are soooo picky! Let's see, I am an engineer, so, 3+1+1=5, Oops Roel, you're right. I think number six was the Admiral Scheer, sunk in the Baltic by the Brits in 1945.

Any KM experts out there who can give us the facts? I still think the pocket BBs were heavy cruisers and the Brits used the tag for a propoganda boost.

 

Deutchlands were labeled as heavy cruisers by KM at 1940 or 1941. Before that they were "Panzerschiffes". They were never called battleships by KM.

They had battleship(ish)-caliber weapons but armour was closer to cruiser. So, they were more like pocket battlecruisers than pocket battleships

I think that heavy cruiser is best label for them, they were long range, slow, heavily armed heavy cruisers.

 

There's no reason to call the Deutschlands battleships. Is there anything about them that is even vaguely battleshippy? If carrying 28cm guns makes a ship a BB, then all those British 15in monitors would be super-BB.
The Deutschland armor protection is in keeping with CA standards. Not even the weakest of weakest battlecruisers got by with a belt that was 50-80mm, though the large light cruisers of WWI look close.
The Deutschlands were heavy cruisers that traded speed for range and the number of barrels for the size of barrels.

 

The Deutschlands do seem to have ended up with the widest variety of description of any warship type. The original German name was I think simply armored ship, and later on they were reclassed heavy cruisers. The press called them Pocket battleships and even come across one site describing them as battlecruisers

Personally in think in many respects they look very like the Armored Cruisers of the late Pre Dreadnought and WW1 period.

The Deutschlands were basically born out of the political desire for ships with big guns. Like a lot of politically inspired ship they basically suffered from not being very good at their intended role. They might have been more of a runner if the war had been a France Vs Germany affair but it wasn't that big a leap of logic to say Britain might become involved in a future conflict.

With the benefit of hindsight the Germans would have been better off with a cruiser design packing nothing better than 6" guns with good endurance and excellent 'sprint' performance.

 

"Personally in think in many respects they look very like the Armored Cruisers of the late Pre Dreadnought and WW1 period."
A type which was obsolete back in 1905.
Actually, I think the Deutschlands represent a pretty good design. The Hippers would have been much better off to have followed more Deutschland precedents. However, the entire concept of the warship as a high-seas raider was rapidly obsolescing in the 1930's due to aviation and electronics.

 

Versailles treaty didn't allow Germans to build anything larger than 10000 tons ships. Apparently this was thought to be strict enough to reduce German navy to coastal defence force. Its amusing to find out that Germans managed to outwit that restriction with Deutschlands. Althought they cheated "a bit".

 

Can you expand on why you think the Deutschlands were a good design. Always interesting to hear a different point of view.

I would argue with you that the concept of a deep sea raider wasn't obsolete. True air recon and radar were making breaking out increasingly difficult, partially for a country like German which geography has not treated kindly, but once you get out the sea is a big place to hide in.

The next argument against surface raider is they do nothing Uboats can't already do. Not quiet true. Yes the Uboats would form the core weapon but even a lightly armed cruiser will be more than a match for destroyers, corvettes, frigates and AMCs that already protect the convoys. The enemy will be forced to deploy ships which are little use against subs like cruisers and battleships to protect from surface raiders. Thus you place more strain on the enemies assets for a fairly small outlay of your own.

 

Except having escort carriers with your convoys would mean that surface raiders can be sighted from a fair distance.
And hopefully sunk by aerial torpedoes.

However, if the airstrike fails, or even if you decide to try and avoid the raider, the raider has seen aircraft and knows there is a convoy nearby, and is certain to have better speed than the convoy...

 

Escort carriers don't really exist before mid war on the other hand an earlier adoption of the MAC ships might go some way towards sealling the gap.

Of course any German raider into the North Atlantic be it cruiser, capital ships or sub suffers from one big problem. If they get hurt their a long, long way from a friendly port. However you can build several subs for the cost of one cruiser and god-only-know how many for the cost of the battleship.

 

The Deutschlands had a pretty good armor scheme and powerful weaponry. If you look at the cruiser forces available to France and Britain in 1933, you see that there was little to oppose such powerful ships.
I like how you worded it; the ocean is indeed a big place, but the reason I say the high-seas raiding warship was obsolescent is that the ocean was shrinking. Both the British and Americans had plans for converting merchant ships in to escort carriers, though obviously they didn't undertake conversions until wartime. If I were to assign a specific date for the final nail in the raider's coffin, I would pick 27 May 1941. I believe the Bismarck sortie was Germany's final high-seas raid by warships, and it resulted in the destruction of Bismarck herself, the loss of about half a dozen other ships, while Eugen's damage forced her home prematurely. From that point on, high-seas raiding was left to militarized merchant ships, and warships restricted themselves to sailing after specific convoys, rarely with an success.

 

Tiornu

Not sure I'd agree with the first couple of lines of your reply.

Okay 1939 between them the British and French have only about five ships that can go one on one with the Deutschlands. But those five are basically worst nightmare scenario for the captain of a Deutschland.

From what I've heard the armor of the Deutschlands was nothing to get too excited about. It was reasonable enough cruiser scale armor but nothing beyond that.

The big, big problem with the Deutschlands is their speed, 26kts is simply not fast enough. Pretty much all cruisers will have a speed advantage of at least 4kts and the British in particular have a hell of a lot of cruisers This leaves the Deutschlands with a problem that it is very hard for them to avoid contact. True a Deutschland will be more than a match for any single treaty cruiser but the River Plate showed that they could be tackled by two or three cruisers.



Second part of your reply I have less problems with. Bismark I always felt suffered from being far to much of a 'all the eggs in one basket' and it was basically a mistake to build her. A larger number of small, fast and long legged cruisers would have done the same job better. Not sure I'd agree with your May 41 date but certainly by close of 42 the risk / return on surface raiders just doesn't work out.

 

The speed problem with the Deutschlands is not their absolute top speed (which in GS was over 28 knots) but their top speed after an extended voyage. At River Plate, GS couldn't do more than about 24 knots.
The key here is that, when Deutschland commissioned, the British did not have a lot of cruisers unless you include the "C" class and such. And the French...?
In terms of armor, it looks to me that Deutschland is the best "first-draft" produced by any navy. Trento, Pensacola, Kent, Myoko,and Duquesne--these were the first "10,000-ton" cruisers for their respective navies.

 

Perhaps number six was the predreadnought SCHLESWIG-HOLSTEIN, which was sunk, IIRC, in 1943. How about it, Tiornu?