Naval History Forums

Lutjens suspected the mission had been compromised and stopping in Bergen offered several advantages. If spotted there a stop over would keep the British guessing--was it a redeployment, had the squadron been escorting supply ships, was it preparation for a break out in the near future or the first ...

http://www.germandeli.com/4001743034013.html

http://www.worldofsweets.de/oxid.php/si ... nid/300394

in case anyone wants to try it.

Doing a sonar search for a suspected submarine would probably be done at 5 to ten knots, and once a contact was made, and the target was being tracked by the sonar, it was possible to make a depth charge attack at 15 or so knots, or a little more depending on sea state. Enemy bearing was fairly accu...

Asidic was primarily an active sonar. Hydrophones were passive.

Part of the reason that German crews seemed large compared to RN counterparts was a lot of redundancy built into the ship--two complete sets of turbo and Diesel generators, two each of Flak, SA and MA computer centers, 11 low angle directors, and so on. In terms of armament, the heavy Flak was manpo...

it would probably be cheaper to get the plans for the ship and have a shipyard make you a new one, considering the condition of the wreck now, and how much it would take to stabilize the ship from further corrosion even if you did manage to raise it in one piece.

I would not say Chamberlain was necessarily indecisive, but he was in a hard spot. He probably was cognizant of the threat posed by a resurgent Germany under Hitler, but his delimna was how to contain that threat. Massive military expansion to deter aggression is very expensive and very time consumi...

German naval doctrine was always to engage the most powerful enemy with your most powerful weaponry. So if Bismarck's gunnery staff correctly identified the enemy vessels as a KGV and a 15-inch armed battle cruiser like Hood or Renown/Repulse, the battle cruiser would be the one to draw fire first r...

Hi RF, For the most part, the auxiliary cruisers would have used mostly nose fuzed HE, and these generally worked quite well. The main problem was in the base fuzed shells, and it was not just the Germans that had troubles with AP and SAP. When one considers how an AP shell and fuze system operate, ...

On the whole German naval shells appear to have been about average in reliability--i.e., the incidence of duds does not seem any worse than that experienced in other navies. That said, there were some issues with German shells in that the rate of low order detonations was fairly high in their SAP an...

I think there is a misunderstanding about the term guide of fleet . It has nothing to do with PoW taking the lead. Holland's ships were moving in echelon with PoW astern and slightly to starboard. Normally the flagship is guide when steaming in a straight line and the other ship or ships are expecte...

Heydrich did not simply switch from the Navy to the SS. He was a fairly promising junior officer, but the exact reasons for his leaving the navy are murky. There are several possibilities: the most common explanation, and one which Heydrich seems to have endorsed himself, was that he got the daughte...

Dave, It's obvious that the Germans were mainly concerned with intact penetration in their IZ calculations, rather than make turrets ect... proof to any type of penetration. Proof against various types of partial penetration and so forth were probably not deemed as realistic goals. I would say there...

Besides the 4cm Bofors, which adopted in 1944/45, the Kriegsmarine had the 3,7cm Flak 42--a modification of the Army/Luftwaffe 3,7cm Flak 36/38. This was an automatic gun with delayed recoil operation. A separate development, 3,7cm Flak 43, was also used. This was based on the gas operated 3cm MK 10...

Durchschlagsleistungen = strengths of penetration; in the same vein, durchschlagen is to pierce, strike, or punch through something with force. This would usually imply complete penetration unless a qualifier was added to the phrase in which the verb was used to indicate otherwise. As to durchschlag...