In war, there is a conception known as the creation of a diversion, which consists of extending the scope of one's own operations to other areas in such a way that the enemy, to defend them, will be forced to withdraw forces from the main theatre of operations and thus to relax his pressure on it. A diversion, however, is of value only when, seen as a whole, it results in an advantage to the side creating it.
- Admiral Karl Dönitz, Memoirs, chapter 10: the Battle of the Atlantic: November 1940–December 1941
I love small scale war games, and I love naval history. So when a
friendly nearby mail-order gaming store offered Warlord's Victory at Sea rulebook for a competitive price, and a sizeable discount on the German navy fleet box, I knew what to do.
- General Gerhard Johann David von Scharnhorst (1755–1813) in KOEI's L'Empereur (1989)
**
The German navy in World War II is perennially interesting because it offers so much fodder for all kinds of alternate histories. Decisively outnumbered by the Royal Navy, unsuccessful in the ferocious bureaucratic infighting of Nazi Germany and hampered by terrible national leadership, the Kriegsmarine still had excellently engineered, powerful fighting ships that could more than hold their own against their enemies. Reading the naval history of the Second World War, even through Anglo-American triumphalism, it's hard to not ask if the Germans couldn't have done more with what they had.
The trouble started at the top. Like most fascists, Hitler was basically a moron who replaced knowledge with bluster and bigotry. Sure, he was a successful politician, but I've always found the whole mythology of Hitler's supposed genius to be highly dubious. After nazism ended in utter defeat, just about everyone involved with it found it very convenient to blame everything on Hitler, and so he came to be portrayed as this sort of demonic spirit that somehow possessed all of Germany. It's complete nonsense. If there's anything the Trump phenomenon has taught us, surely it's that you can be a successful fascist demagogue while also being a complete idiot.
As a war leader and strategist, Hitler was useless. The post-WWI German navy never quite seemed to have a clear concept of what it was for. The ships it was allowed under the Treaty of Versailles made it essentially a coast defence force, but the Germans set out to circumvent this even before the Nazis came to power. Eventually in 1938 Hitler decided that he might have to fight Great Britain after all, and the naval building program known as Plan Z came into effect. The new fleet was to be ready by 1945, and Hitler apparently told the navy that the war would start in 1948.
As we know, the war actually started in 1939, when Plan Z had barely got underway. Because Germany faced an appalling shortage of steel, most work on the warships was immediately stopped. The fate of the German aircraft carrier Graf Zeppelin is a good example. Laid down in 1936 and launched in 1938, the ship was almost finished when the war started. In April 1940, work on her was stopped after the heavy losses in the Norwegian campaign. In 1942, however, Hitler and the navy had second thoughts, because now aircraft carriers were beginning to look like a really good idea, so work on the Graf Zeppelin was restarted in May. It lasted until December, when Hitler had a tantrum over the inconclusive Battle of the Barents Sea, fired Grand Admiral Raeder and stopped all work on big surface ships. The Graf Zeppelin was never finished, and was eventually sunk off the coast of Poland by the Soviets after the war.
So there's strategic leadership for you. Hitler's incompetence was magnified by the navy's inability to stand up to him, and its own lack of strategic direction. All in all, it never really seemed obvious what the Kriegsmarine was actually for, and the few heavy ships it did have were more or less squandered in penny-packet actions, or deployed so cautiously that they never got anything done.
This is what makes it such an interesting subject for wargaming: what if the German navy had actually been deployed as a battlefleet, and had fought fleet actions against some of its enemies?
This, incidentally, was why I was reading
Correlli Barnett earlier. At the end of 1941, the Royal Navy was in a bad way. That November,
HMS Barham was sunk in the Mediterranean by a German submarine; in December, the
Prince of Wales and
Repulse were destroyed by Japanese aircraft off Singapore, and
HMS Queen Elizabeth and
Valiant were sunk in Alexandria harbor in a
raid by Italian special forces. In the space of a little over a month, the Royal Navy lost four battleships and a battlecruiser.
What this meant in practice was that the Royal Navy had no modern capital ships in the Mediterranean Fleet, and only the ancient HMS Malaya at Gibraltar. The Home Fleet was reduced to two battleships. The Americans had transferred all three of their operational battleships to the Pacific.
If the German navy had come out and challenged the Royal Navy, the outcome could have been shocking. Especially if the Italian navy had simultaneously mounted an operation in the Mediterranean, diverting Force H from Gibraltar. The whole war at sea could have been changed.
Of course, they did no such thing. But this, I feel, is very much what wargames are for.
**
Now, though, it's time to get to those models. Surprisingly, the ships in the box come in two different kinds of resin: lighter and darker grey. The light grey ships are great: next to no flash or anything that needed much attention at all. The dark grey ones, well, aren't. It's a much softer resin, there's a lot of clipping and filing to do, and all of the ships are a bit banana-shaped. The destroyers, the Köln and the Blücher are done in the worse resin, and as you can see, the Blücher is auditioning for a refit to a ski-jump carrier.
I tried dunking one of the destroyers in hot water and bending it a bit. It didn't go well.
My next attempt was with water brought to a near boil, and it actually worked. I'm not exactly delighted that I had to do this, but it wasn't that much trouble in the end. I unbent my ships while making dinner, and frankly I'm still surprised I didn't end up serving my flatmate the Köln in tomato sauce.
Sadly the bigger ships rebounded a bit overnight, even though I dunked them in cold water, but the end result is still a damn sight better than how I got them. Then it was on to the metal bits. The destroyers were all right, you just have to glue on a funnel, but the cruisers were very, very fiddly. Some of those bits are right on the edge of what's physically possible.
After fitting masts and davits and what have you to the Köningsberg and Köln, all I'll say is that the Kriegsmarine better make do with two light cruisers, because they are not getting more.
**
The first ship I'm going to paint is one of the
Type 1936A destroyers. In reality, the 1936As were only known by their hull numbers, and as near as I can tell, didn't even display those anywhere. That's all very boring, though, and since I was reading Michael Moorcock's
Land Leviathan when I got these, my very first Kriegsmarine ship is going to be the
Z26 Gräfin von Landsfeld.
I went for Light Grey for the sides and Sky Grey for the superstructure. Apparently the exact colors of Kriegsmarine ships are the subject of a long-standing argument, like the one on
Soviet air force colors, and while I find these things fascinating, I also want to paint my miniatures, so I picked the two closest-seeming Vallejo colors. The decks are in Beige Brown, which someone recommended; it's darker than most people seem to use, but I don't know, I kinda like it.
I painted the water around the ship in Blue, Dark Blue and Blue Green, with some Off-White foam in places. Maybe it's a little Mediterranean, but I like it. I'm also into this alternate-history idea of naming the 1936As after German (or Germanized!) noblewomen, so here's the one I broke earlier, as the Z23 Herzogin Margarete von Bayern, and the Z24 Kaiserin Matilda.
**
Next up, the two light cruisers. I'm going to be honest here and admit that I'm not that keen on trying to figure out the exact historically accurate color schemes for these ships: I'm painting the main deck Beige Brown and the superstructure above it Sky Grey, and calling it done.
The Blücher is getting the same treatment.
**
The box also came with four Stuka squadrons, also in the darker, more annoying resin, and they were a chore to prepare. I also kind of don't get solid flying stands when the same darn company sells transparent ones for its
WWII air combat game. But still, the little planes are cute.
I painted the stands Blue and the planes with the same colors as in said WWII air combat game, that is, Light Grey with Neutral Grey stripes, and Green Grey for the barely visible underside.
**
At this point in the project, the Steam summer sale happened, and the PC version of
Victory at Sea was available at an 85% discount. I bought it, and it's fun. It's based on the original Mongoose ruleset, and it's very arcadey, almost like a mobile game, but surprisingly fun.
I tried it as the Germans, obviously, and they gave me a 1936-class destroyer to sail around in. The manual is four pages and they do the usual video tutorials that explain the controls, but that's about it. After a couple of introductory battles, I was told to go raid shipping around England, so I did. My first attempt ended when I decided to find out if i could take on a
Town-class cruiser, and it turned out I couldn't. At least there's a Steam achievement for being sunk!
In my next game, I started out skippering the Z43, and ended up commanding a battlefleet with multiple battleships and a carrier. Toward the end of the campaign, the game becomes more than a bit repetitive; the overall design of the campaign isn't great, with the enemy sending out their ships in penny packets that are ludicrously easy to destroy. It's a shame, because the combat system is actually fun and exciting, but the game just doesn't know how to make use of it. I've had a good time playing it, but it could have been so much better.
**
Then it's on to the last ships. First, the two other Admiral Hippers: the nameship of the class and the Prinz Eugen. I don't know why Warlord thought we needed three of these, to be honest. But they're in the better resin and there's less fiddling about, so why not. Here's the Hipper.
The Prinz Eugen, though, doesn't really interest me at all. So instead, I've decided to name it after the Hipper-class cruiser I invented for my video game fleet: she is now the Admiral Bellingshausen.
And, finally, the Scharnhorst.
I expected the Scharnhorst to be bigger, but next to the Hippers it drives home that they really were battlecruisers.
There they all are!
**
All in all, I've had a great time painting my little ships and playing Victory at Sea on the computer. I've already got more little ships, and at some point I hope I get to try the tabletop game as well.
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