Werner wrote:You don't believe Hitler's government would have been forced to make good on those promises of consumer appliances and automobiles for the people? After all, the German people had endured a generation or more of privation and hardship at the hands of the war machine in Ww.I and the ruthless Versailles victor's terms after the war.
Time to fix the roof and buy mama a washing machine.
Yes. But the solution Hitler would adapt is another bout of inflationary fiscal policy. This is how both gun and butter demands can be catered to in the short term.
It is relatively easy to adapt a inflationary fiscal policy when your national plan is to definitely go to war in 10 years.
Inflationary fiscal policy only becomes troublesome if you really do not plan to definitively end the arms race at a specific date, and you have to use the inflationary fiscal policy forever to run the rat race of an arms race in, for all planning purposes, perpetuity.
It seems the US entered a period of inflationary fiscal policy around 1958 and hasn't left it yet. The various leaders tuned it up or down, but it has ruined the idea of a stable currency over time, and turned lenders into usurers who would make Biblical moneylenders blush.
You could argue the period really began in 1932 with the "New Deal", but I believe Truman was actually committed to fiscal restraint.
If an unfriendly power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.
Anonymous wrote:It is relatively easy to adapt a inflationary fiscal policy when your national plan is to definitely go to war in 10 years.
Inflationary fiscal policy only becomes troublesome if you really do not plan to definitively end the arms race at a specific date, and you have to use the inflationary fiscal policy forever to run the rat race of an arms race in, for all planning purposes, perpetuity.
Chuck,
what you apparently don't understand is that the German arms effort was financed by what effectively was an inflationary fiscal policy since 1936. Most of the German arms effort was financed through a complicated system of loans, a system that in 1939 was on the brink of collapse.
Look at how the Reichsmark had developed between 1934 and 1939. Look at Hjalmar Schacht's testimony. Germany was nearly bankrupt in 1939.
It is true that Hitler was probably not aware about the intricacies of all this. Which only means that with a bankrupt Germany spiralling into hyperinflation his position would have been endangered.
During this build up phase won't the Z plan also implement Graf Zeppelin & Peter Strasser and some follow ons?
Would the KM be able to develop a fully intergrated naval air arm by 1944-46?
Would the early experience they gain from the 1st&2nd carriers getting fully operational stimulate further carrier construction which may have an impact on superbattleship construction?
In terms of what you mention about the Royal Navy's building programs the main bottleneck is a lack of naval armament production capacity not being tied up with maintenance for the fleet.
Alot of the maintenance for the fleet was carried out in the Royal Dockyards, thus leaving the commercial warship building firms to get on with their own business.
To highlight the bottleneck the Admiralty had by the time they wished to build the KGV's, Illustrious class, Lions, Dido's etc all at the same time in 1918 there was around 15 commercial firms who could undertake such work easily for the Admiralty. By the 1930s there was only 2 naval armament firms Vickers & Armstrong Whitworth.
Laurence Batchelor wrote:During this build up phase won't the Z plan also implement Graf Zeppelin & Peter Strasser and some follow ons?
Essentially only Graf Zeppelin and perhaps B (was the name ever made official?).
Would the KM be able to develop a fully intergrated naval air arm by 1944-46?
I seriously doubt that. Graf Zeppelin was an ill-conceived design from the beginning; in 1939, her designers were slowly realizing that any future carrier would have to be radically different from GZ, so around 1945 a third carrier would either have been on the drawing board or under construction.
Peter Strasser is the name I've read most likely to have been given her.
Hey most peoples first effort at a carrier was poor!
Doesn't mean you don't learn a heck of a lot in terms of design and operationally.
Why so slow to design and implement? Surely you could make from Bismark's hull a pretty decent carrioer conversion.
Won't Germany be influenced by what she sees in other Navy's from 1939-1946? Illustrious class, Aquila, bigger USN & IJN designs?
There has also been no mention of destroyers in this naval arms race.
Surely Germany knows she is extreamly weak in this department?
Laurence Batchelor wrote:
Hey most peoples first effort at a carrier was poor!
Doesn't mean you don't learn a heck of a lot in terms of design and operationally.
Why so slow to design and implement? Surely you could make from Bismark's hull a pretty decent carrioer conversion.
Won't Germany be influenced by what she sees in other Navy's from 1939-1946? Illustrious class, Aquila, bigger USN & IJN designs?
The problem is that despite what they knew about foreign carrier construction they toyed around with the idea of packing a cruiser punch into a carrier hull. Only around 1939 did finally the idea emerge of actually building pure carriers.
As for Bismarck hulls, you have to build them. Which costs money, raw materials, resources, manpower. This is extremely unlikely.
JWintjes wrote:
The problem is that despite what they knew about foreign carrier construction they toyed around with the idea of packing a cruiser punch into a carrier hull. Only around 1939 did finally the idea emerge of actually building pure carriers.
Jorit
Akagi and Kaga and Lexington carried cruiser armament to their graves, and Saratoga carried them well into 1942. The notion that cruiser armament was useful to a carrier, so long as she was large enough to carry them, was very much current in contemporary carrier thinking in 1939.
If Britain had built big carriers of 40,000 tons in 1939, she almost certainly would have armed them with big guns as well, for British carrier thinking, even more than Japanese and German, envisioned carriers operating in restricted water against air and surface threat, and Britain in 1939 had lower opinion of carrier aircraft's ability to form the main striking force of a battlefleet than either US or Japan. It was only the fact that Britain didn't have ready made battlecruiser hulls to convert, and Britain didn't have the resources to build adaquate numbers of large carriers new, that prevented her from building heavily armed carriers with cruiser armaments.
Regarding German destroyers, the German Z-plan was for a a"balanced" fleet, but it really was imbalanced. First of all, it wasn't designed for a fleet battle for which there could have been a mature concept of balance for it to follow. It was envisioned as a top heavy fleet of big ships that would operate more or less independently of escorts, rather like Bismark on her May 1941 mission, to deliver unexpected hammer blows to a RN surface fleet that had to be dispersed to cover its vast trading network. So it didn't envision too much role for destroyers because it didn't envision a battle of the focused core of RN operating near enough to British bases to be protected by an extensive screen of destroyers. Also destroyers could never have kept up with a fleet of extremely long range battleship that relies in part on global dispersion to hit the RN. Z plan did involve a most allotment of destroyers and torpedo boats, but that seems to have been added mainly because a fleet build up plan that exclusively contained only big ships would have looked odd.
Also, Not only was Z-plan not forward looking in anticipating the progress of aviation and other technologies in the 10 years it would have taken for the plan to materialize, it wouldn't have worked even with under-estimated potential of the air power already in existence in 1939.
Anonymous wrote:
Akagi and Kaga and Lexington carried cruiser armament to their graves, and Saratoga carried them well into 1942. The notion that cruiser armament was useful to a carrier, so long as she was large enough to carry them, was very much current in contemporary carrier thinking in 1939.
Show me an international post-1936 design with a main armament in casemates.
BTW, the H-class of battleships looks really bad on the basis of weight of both main armament and secondary armament, and weight and thickness of armor, when compared to its very large displacement.
They packed what is effectively a 35,000 - 40,000 ton battleship's armament and armor into a 56,000 ton hull. Admittedly they were intended for non-traditional battleship roles, but Germany was nevertheless building tremendously large and expensive ships of quite modest tactical combat power. If their non-tradition roles do not pan out, they would be white elephants indeed.
Anonymous wrote:
Akagi and Kaga and Lexington carried cruiser armament to their graves, and Saratoga carried them well into 1942. The notion that cruiser armament was useful to a carrier, so long as she was large enough to carry them, was very much current in contemporary carrier thinking in 1939.
Show me an international post-1936 design with a main armament in casemates.
Jorit
Akagi and Kaga. Casemates is actually a much better solution if you really want 8" guns on a carrier. Blasts from firing 8" turrets on deck would have demolished much of your airwing around them through overpressure.
Anonymous wrote:BTW, the H-class of battleships looks really bad on the basis of weight of both main armament and secondary armament, and weight and thickness of armor, when compared to its very large displacement.
They packed what is effectively a 35,000 - 40,000 ton battleship's armament and armor into a 56,000 ton hull. Admittedly they were intended for non-traditional battleship roles, but Germany was nevertheless building tremendously large and expensive ships of quite modest tactical combat power. If their non-tradition roles do not pan out, they would be white elephants indeed.
Akagi and Kaga. Casemates is actually a much better solution if you really want 8" guns on a carrier. Blasts from firing 8" turrets on deck would have demolished much of your airwing around them through overpressure.
Uhem - Kaga and Akagi are post-1936 designs?
And - going back to GZ - casemates on the hangar deck are a really, really poor idea. Particularly if you have twin casemates with only one ammunition hoist, but that's a differnet story...
Actually, these ships had main deck casemates as completed with turrets on the flight deck.
When rebuilt with one deck, the four guns in turrets were relocated to further casemates.
In Shattered Sword a survivor describes the destruction aft as extending down to these casemates.
If an unfriendly power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.
Werner wrote:Actually, these ships had main deck casemates as completed with turrets on the flight deck.
When rebuilt with one deck, the four guns in turrets were relocated to further casemates.
In Shattered Sword a survivor describes the destruction aft as extending down to these casemates.
What I meant was that in the case of Kaga and Akagi these casemates are essentially from an earlier design stage; newer Japanese carrier designs don't show casemate guns.
And I maintain that a casemate gun is fundamentally flawed if on the hangar deck like in GZ (incidentally, I'm actually rather fond of casemate guns... ).
JWintjes wrote:
What I meant was that in the case of Kaga and Akagi these casemates are essentially from an earlier design stage; newer Japanese carrier designs don't show casemate guns.
Jorit
They had a few casemates from before 1934. They added more during the major refit after 1934.
JWintjes wrote:
What I meant was that in the case of Kaga and Akagi these casemates are essentially from an earlier design stage; newer Japanese carrier designs don't show casemate guns.
Jorit
They had a few casemates from before 1934. They added more during the major refit after 1934.
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