Indeed, the Hunt for the Graf Zeppelin could have easily caused a lot more trouble for the Royal Navy than the Hunt for the Bismarck.
Indeed just finding her would have given them hell worse if they DID find her with swordfish, it would have ended badly for those pilots and pursuing ships. Might chase might have been the other way around
Eh, I'm pretty sure that if the Germans seriously pursued the development of aircraft carriers, the British would've developed better planes.
It's not that fast or easy to come up with answers to things. Just look at American tank development in response to the German stuff. The M3 Grant/Lee were just slapped together in a hurry while trying to figure out how to build the M4 Sherman, by which time the Germans were building Tigers, and the only response that America could come up with at all before the war was basically over was the Sherman Firefly, which was again just putting a bigger gun on the tank they already had to buy time to actually design the tank around that gun.
The major advantage that the Swordfish did have even against the Japanese, though, was that it was capable of using radar and night-flying way before any interceptors were capable of doing the same.
Eh, I'm pretty sure that if the Germans seriously pursued the development of aircraft carriers, the British would've developed better planes.
That goes for most advancements in wars, you build to counter. If the Germans had gone for the carriers they would have had to build better planes or at least different planes to work on them. Graf would be their first attempt so I wonder how well the initial planes would have or use of the air wings would have done against the Brits who had technically started the whole thing. The war would look a lot different, mainly because I think that England would have been in dire straits or outright lost if they had done the commerce raiding with carriers.
I do hear that it is surprising how little carrier action there was in the Atlantic considering the impact aircraft had made during the Spanish Civil War or more specifically the carrier-borne attack the British launched on Taranto that inspired the Japanese to go for the Pearl Harbor strike.
The main reason I think is the Germans really were trying to build the most advanced ship in the world from scratch h with no prior experience. Mainly since the interest in it was lost once the land-based part of the war really took off. With all those miracle land-based weapons in development she just kinda slipped through the cracks.
Still, the Battle of Britain could have been the Battle of the Atlantic. I just wonder what type of planes would we have seen if it had really happened. What new designs would have emerged, it always peaks my interest.
That goes for most advancements in wars, you build to counter. If the Germans had gone for the carriers they would have had to build better planes or at least different planes to work on them. Graf would be their first attempt so I wonder how well the initial planes would have or use of the air wings would have done against the Brits who had technically started the whole thing. The war would look a lot different, mainly because I think that England would have been in dire straits or outright lost if they had done the commerce raiding with carriers.
I do hear that it is surprising how little carrier action there was in the Atlantic considering the impact aircraft had made during the Spanish Civil War or more specifically the carrier-borne attack the British launched on Taranto that inspired the Japanese to go for the Pearl Harbor strike.
The main reason I think is the Germans really were trying to build the most advanced ship in the world from scratch h with no prior experience. Mainly since the interest in it was lost once the land-based part of the war really took off. With all those miracle land-based weapons in development she just kinda slipped through the cracks.
Still, the Battle of Britain could have been the Battle of the Atlantic. I just wonder what type of planes would we have seen if it had really happened. What new designs would have emerged, it always peaks my interest.
There's a reason Germany didn't develop carriers, though. Carriers are basically just mobile runways that can only launch relatively less capable aircraft. Unless you are going with a situation where Germany takes out France, the UK, and the USSR in fairly rapid succession, and then spends another decade at least marshalling all the resources of all of Europe, Africa, and half of Asia all to try invading the United States across the Atlantic in a long war of attrition, Germany's main adversaries were always going to be within reach of their land bases. (It's much the same reason why the USSR didn't bother much with its navy when it was facing an existential threat by land on its doorstep.)
A major part of the whole story about the Bismarck was that it was nearly impossible to get any capital ship past England without getting gunned down on the way through either the English Channel or the GIUK gap. That's kind of why Hitler gave up on everything that wasn't a submarine, and hence had a decent chance of making it to the Atlantic to start with. Actually building a navy that could take on the Royal Navy at sea would've been a pipe dream without spending much more time in military and domestic industrial buildup (but if you're a Hearts of Iron player, you know that delaying and working on diplomacy to keep the Allies from coming together is the Axis's greatest asset) as well as probably needing to take out a few RN ships with land-based aircraft, and preferably pushing them out of the Medeterranean so that you could take the Egyptian oilfields and not slowly starve from lack of fuel while you're at it...
Again, it's just that so many other things would have to go right for German carriers to ever matter that they'd basically have already won the war.
There's a reason Germany didn't develop carriers, though. Carriers are basically just mobile runways that can only launch relatively less capable aircraft. Unless you are going with a situation where Germany takes out France, the UK, and the USSR in fairly rapid succession, and then spends another decade at least marshalling all the resources of all of Europe, Africa, and half of Asia all to try invading the United States across the Atlantic in a long war of attrition, Germany's main adversaries were always going to be within reach of their land bases. (It's much the same reason why the USSR didn't bother much with its navy when it was facing an existential threat by land on its doorstep.)
A major part of the whole story about the Bismarck was that it was nearly impossible to get any capital ship past England without getting gunned down on the way through either the English Channel or the GIUK gap. That's kind of why Hitler gave up on everything that wasn't a submarine, and hence had a decent chance of making it to the Atlantic to start with. Actually building a navy that could take on the Royal Navy at sea would've been a pipe dream without spending much more time in military and domestic industrial buildup (but if you're a Hearts of Iron player, you know that delaying and working on diplomacy to keep the Allies from coming together is the Axis's greatest asset) as well as probably needing to take out a few RN ships with land-based aircraft, and preferably pushing them out of the Medeterranean so that you could take the Egyptian oilfields and not slowly starve from lack of fuel while you're at it...
Again, it's just that so many other things would have to go right for German carriers to ever matter that they'd basically have already won the war.
I thought it fell mainly to Hitler not being very bold when it came to naval action as he said “On land, I am a bold adventurer but at sea, I am a coward.” so he diverted ever or most to land combat. If he had focused on naval at all we would have German carriers or at least even more subs. Can you imagine the mayhem is one small escort carrier type had gotten out there with or instead of Bismark and carriers would have ruined that whole early warning radar thing too for the brits.
After all, a carrier was a wonder weapon at the time he would have jumped at it. Then again the rivalry between the different arms of the military would be an even bigger issue.
Winning the land war was not really needed, starving England was. Still, just my opinion and it's from one view and there is never just one view so who knows. One thing I thought they would still have been behind in carrier development that most other nations I think.
I thought it fell mainly to Hitler not being very bold when it came to naval action as he said “On land, I am a bold adventurer but at sea, I am a coward.” so he diverted ever or most to land combat. If he had focused on naval at all we would have German carriers or at least even more subs. Can you imagine the mayhem is one small escort carrier type had gotten out there with or instead of Bismark and carriers would have ruined that whole early warning radar thing too for the brits.
After all, a carrier was a wonder weapon at the time he would have jumped at it. Then again the rivalry between the different arms of the military would be an even bigger issue.
Winning the land war was not really needed, starving England was. Still, just my opinion and it's from one view and there is never just one view so who knows. One thing I thought they would still have been behind in carrier development that most other nations I think.
"Verbose response"
Hitler didn't say that just because he's hydrophobic or anything, he said it because he realized that he just couldn't afford the price he would have to pay to actually take control of the seas, since it would require vastly more naval buildup than he was capable of doing. Even if he threw everything into naval buildup to the exclusion of building up his army, there just weren't that many shipyards, and it's not like carriers (much less the escorts they would require) are quick and easy to build.
A single, lone carrier is only a temporary threat. The Germans had to resupply their submarines with more submarines because anything that wasn't a submarine wouldn't survive the trip to the Atlantic. Carriers are notorious resource hogs (just ask Akagi), and any carrier group needed multiple dedicated oilers running alongside them to keep them supplied, as well as other supply ships for all the food and munitions and other supplies they ate through at alarming rates. And if the whole point of going out into the Atlantic is that attacking unarmed Allied supply ships make such easy targets and so cripple the enemy war effort...
Oh, and that's not even starting on the whole fact that you need an entire fleet of escorts around any carrier group to be a threat. A lone carrier's planes may have a wave of planes that are fierce in that one attack against a couple of ships, but if half the Royal Navy went after the Bismarck, you can bet that if even half so many ships went after Graf Zeppelin, Graf would be very quickly finding itself running so hard it wouldn't have time to effectively resupply, and could easily be cornered.
Without escorts, carriers fare very badly against surface gunships - just ask the HMS Glorious. There's a good reason why the Japanese kept trying to make their cruisers (and even battleships like Hyuuga) into having more and more spotter planes - it took a load off of the carriers so that they could focus upon having more actual combat planes, because those combat planes are worthless unless someone finds the enemy, and if the enemy finds you first, you're screwed.
Likewise, you need to field enough supremacy aircraft to at least gain local supremacy. Even that's not enough to stop incoming attacks (the Japanese had local supremacy at Midway, which meant they ripped the torpedo bombers to shreds, they just didn't have enough to spot and stop the bombers in time...) but it's the very least you need to achieve to prevent the kinds of all-out slaughter you saw in the Pacific after Japan lost the capacity to contest US Air Supremacy.
Carriers are not a "dabbling" proposition. They're an all-or-nothing proposition. You either send enough carriers to really grab air supremacy and keep the enemy back in fear of your air supremacy, or they're small fish that can be snapped up by a larger one. This is why carriers move in huge fleets that represent a giant proportion of the naval might of a nation. (At Midway, both Japan and the US put basically every fleet carrier they could field at the time into the fray, even rushing Yorktown back into the fight by the equivalent of a repair bucket, while Shoukaku and Zuikaku sitting the battle out for repairs and a new air wing may have been a deciding factor against Japan.)
Yes, if there was a German carrier group running buck wild in the Atlantic, it could have done some damage at first, but presuming that nobody would try to do anything about it is absurd. America adopted a clearly-stated "Germany First" policy, and all those carriers and battleships that went to the Pacific just because there was little need for more than escort carriers (rigged for anti-sub warfare) would have absolutely been going to the Atlantic to pound whatever Germany could muster into flaming wreckage before turning back around and taking on Japan when all the big targets were toast. (This may have indirectly helped Japan if they were better able to secure a position that actually threatened some supply lines or let them gain a larger stockpile of oil, but that's a different argument.)
All of this, meanwhile, is ignoring all of the opportunity cost, which is the primary reason Hitler focused upon his armies. A Germany that didn't spend an overwhelming amount of time and effort on its panzers and blitzkrieg tactics may not have been able to take out France with such alarming speed, and if France isn't taken out of the fight almost immediately, and the weight of France's army could have actually been brought to bear against Germany, sand would have been thrown into the gears of the Nazi war machine far, far earlier. While Italy had colonies in North Africa, Germany was mainly working from and expanding out of French colonies to try to drive towards Egypt, and try to take the oil fields that they absolutely desperately needed. Driving to Egypt or driving to the southwestern areas of the USSR that had all those oil fields was always going to be mandatory for Germany to remain in the war (and that goes double if you're spending huge quantities of fuel on aircraft carriers), since it's vastly more sane than trying to take Egypt by amphibious landing or paratroopers (which proved too costly even against small islands cut off from support, much less whole stretches of colonies with garrisons in hardened fortifications and with better supply networks in place than an amphibious operation could support). Meanwhile, if Germany had control of Egypt and its oil fields (and the Suez), it would be strangling the Royal Navy from the land, because it was cutting the British Empire in half and stealing its greatest supply of oil for itself. If that happened before America entered the war, they could have had the leverage to force the UK to capitulate early without ever needing to really control any part of the sea besides as much of the Mediterranean as they could at least bluff the Royal Navy out of controlling (and that was always more Italy's job, with some help from the Luftwaffe).
Again, either Hitler would have needed a much more economically, industrially, and militarily powerful nation than he had to actually win that way, which would just beg the question "why not spend all those extra resources on his armies, and actually win the war by land?" The only way he could have done anything meaningful by sea is if he already had a foothold on the land so secure he would have already had victory in his grasp, regardless.