World Battlefronts: BATTLE OF THE ATLANTIC: Negative Nuisance

On Sept. 22 British midget submarines in Norway’s Alten Fjord rammed some torpedoes into Germany’s greatest battleship, the 40,000-ton Tirpitz, left her floating in her own oil and out of commission for many months.

The disabling of the Tirpitz marked the end of the German Fleet as an offensive threat. Since the outbreak of the war the German Fleet has been whittled from 18 major warships to a fighting six. They are: the pocket battleship Lutzow, the 26,000-ton battleship Scharnhorst, the never-in-action aircraft carrier Graf Zeppelin, the three light cruisers Nurnberg, Leipzig and Emden.*

Still afloat but of questionable value as fighting ships are the battleship Gneisenau, the pocket battleship Admiral Scheer, the heavy cruisers Prinz Eugen and the Admiral Hipper. Repeatedly damaged by torpedo and air attacks, these four are presumably under repair.

Germans at Sea. The German surface fleet, after its single offensive use in Norway, has done a good but negative job. By its presence in northern waters it long immobilized British and U.S. forces four times its size. By keeping the British Home Fleet always on the alert in home waters, and by putting its offensive emphasis on submarines, it almost won the Battle of the Atlantic, contributed largely to German and Italian dominance of the Mediterranean in 1939-42. But, tactically, German Admirals Raeder and Doenitz have lost some great ships (Graf Spee, Bismarck, Blucher, etc.) in questionable actions.

Decimated and divided between Baltic and Norwegian waters, the remnant of the German Navy now has only a limited nuisance value.

* At war’s outbreak, Germany reportedly had eight other major ships building. Apparently only one, carrier Graf Zeppelin, has been completed.