Key Point:Berlin's battleships didn't have a good chance against the Royal Navy. Nazi Germany might have good submarines, but their capital ships were too few in number.

April 1, 1939, was a red-letter day in the history of the reborn German Kriegsmarine for two key reasons. First, Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler presented the fleets chief, Erich Raeder, with an ornate, icon-studded Navy blue baton of office as the first grand admiral since the days of the Kaiser Wilhelm II. This was done with great ceremony and a gala luncheon afterward aboard the new battle cruiser Scharnhorst, anchored on Jade Bay in the former Imperial port of Wilhelmshaven. Second, the Kriegsmarine christened and launched the Third Reichs newest and most modern battleship, the Tirpitz, on the same day. The Tirpitz, the last battleship the Third Reich would build, was the sister ship to the Bismarck. But the Tirpitz was heavier than the Bismarck. Moreover, it had the distinction of being the largest warship built in Europe up to that point in time.

The name of the new battleship paid tribute to Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, who worked with the Kaiser to create Germanys powerful and impressive High Seas Fleet, which served and protected the empire from 1898 to 1918. Tirpitz was a gruff old salt who sported a Neptune-like pointed beard. When the Kaiser refused to allow him to command the fleet during the Great War, he resigned in a huff in 1916. Turning his attention to politics, he founded the pro-war Fatherland Party and was subsequently elected to the German Reichstag as a deputy. Sadly, he was not alive to see the ship that bore his name slide into the water in 1939 for he had died nine years earlier. But his daughter, Ilse von Hassell, was present. She was on hand for the April 1 ceremony in which Hitler named the mighty vessel honoring her late father and she christened it.

Just two months before Hitler had authorized Raeder to enact his ambitious Plan Z. The plan entailed the expansion of the Kriegsmarine so that it could successfully challenge the naval power of the United Kingdom. The ambitious plan called for a naval force composed of 10 battleships, 15 pocket battleships, four aircraft carriers, 250 submarines, and more than 100 cruisers and destroyers.

The Kriegsmarine had sketched out the ambitious plan the previous year. The grandiose German super fleet envisioned by Hitler and the Kriegsmarine would not be ready until 1948. But the British declared war on September 3, 1939, on Nazi Germany before the Kriegsmarine had made any tangible progress toward the plans goals.

At that point, Raeder had only two 15-inch-gun battleships, three 11-inch-gun pocket battleships, two 11-inch-gun battle cruisers, two 8-inch-gun heavy cruisers, six 6-inch-gun light cruisers, 34 destroyers, and 57 U-boats. The Bismarck had launched on February 14, and the Tirpitz on April 1.

The Germans never built any aircraft carriers with which to counter the French and British fleets. The odds against the Germans at sea increased dramatically when the Soviet Union and United States entered the war in 1941. Raeder faced an early sea war that he neither expected nor wanted, but Hitler showed little concern for grand admirals wishes.

The Tirpitz displaced 41,700 tons, was 828 feet long, and had a beam of 119 feet and a draft of 36 feet. Three geared steam turbine engines powered the Bismarck-class battleship. She had a dozen superheated boilers that when working in tandem produced a maximum speed of 30 knots. Her wartime crew numbered 108 officers and 2,500 enlisted sailors.

The Tirpitzs main armament was her eight deadly 15-inch guns, which were housed in four turrets. One pair of the 15-inch guns was located forward and another pair was located aft. The guns had a maximum range of 22.4 miles. The fore turrets were named Anton and Bruno, and the aft turrets were named Caesar and Dora.

The Tirpitzs secondary armament consisted of a dozen 5.9-inch guns housed in six double turrets, three of which were located on each side amidships. For protection against incoming enemy rounds, the Tirpitz had belted armor plating that was 13 inches thick. The battleships turrets, gunnery control, and command posts were individually protected with additional armor; however, the antiaircraft positions lacked overhead cover. In addition, she also boasted two quadruple 21-inch torpedo mountings on deck.

Installed foreward, foretop, and aft, the Tirpitz featured Model 26 search radar rangefinders, as well as a Model 30 on her topmast and a Model 213 fire-control radar unit aft, which complemented her 4.1-inch antiaircraft gun rangefinders.

To meet her aerial reconnaissance needs, the Tirpitz possessed four Arado Ar-196 seaplanes. The crew launched the single-wing seaplanes using a double-ended, 34-yard-long telescoping catapult. The seaplanes were armed with machine guns and cannons, and also could carry one 110-pound bomb to strike enemy submarines caught on the surface. The crew retrieved the seaplanes from the ocean surface by hauling them back on board by crane.

The Royal Navy viewed the Tirpitz as a menace not only to its warships, but also to merchant vessels that brought food and ammunition to the British Isles. From her Baltic Sea home port, the Tirpitz could intercept Allied convoys bound for Murmansk in the Arctic Circle. Because of these threats, the British Royal Navy and Royal Air Force had to delegate a large complement of naval and air resources to counter the threat the Tirpitz posed. This was known as the fleet-in-being concept by which a powerful warship or naval force poses a threat without ever leaving port.

In the aftermath of the sinking of the Bismarck on May 27, 1941, the Kriegsmarine was reluctant to send the Tirpitz on raiding missions in the North Atlantic Ocean. Such missions became even less practical in the wake of the British commando raid against St. Nazaire on March 28, 1942, in which the ports dry dock was severely damaged.

In light of such setbacks, Hitler insisted that the Tirpitz deploy to Norwegian waters to shore up the German-occupied countrys maritime defenses. Hitlers rationale was that the Tirpitz could help defend the Norwegian coast against an Allied invasion. Despite evidence to the contrary, he firmly believed that the Western Allies would attempt a seaborne invasion of Norway. He even feared a possible invasion of northern Norway by the Soviet Union.

The first attacks by the Royal Navys Fleet Air Arm occurred while the Tirpitz was under construction at Wilhelmshaven, but she was not hit. The Tirpitz was commissioned on February 25, 1941. British Royal Air Force aircraft failed to score any hits on the Tirpitz while she was undergoing extensive trials and crew training in the Baltic Sea.

As captain of the Kaisers yacht Hohenzollern before World War I, Raeder had firsthand knowledge of the location of many of the protective Norwegian fjords to which he ordered Tirpitz to set sail on January 14, 1942. But the Germans did not know that the British were able to decipher their radio traffic through Enigma machines.

Captain at Sea Karl Topp, the Tirpitzs commander, pronounced her ready for combat operations on January 10, 1942. Four days later she departed Wilhelmshaven bound for Trondheim. Although the British knew that she had sailed, inclement weather conditions in England prevented any aerial sorties against her while she was en route to Trondheim.

The Tirpitz dropped anchor at Faetten Fjord on Trondheims eastern end on January 16, 1942, where she was duly discovered eight days later by a startled Forward Air Arm pilot who initially mistook the behemoth battleship for an island.

Besides her own powerful guns, Tirpitz was protected by multiple antiaircraft batteries ashore and from 100 yards away by sunken steel antisubmarine and antitorpedo netting. The Germans also had Junkers Ju-88 fast bombers and Junkers Ju-87 dive bombers stationed on nearby airfields.

The shore-based antiaircraft gunnery defenses were aided by heavy booms installed in the fjord moorings mouth. To keep the crew both busy and in good physical shape, Topp dispatched tree-cutting details ashore to provide camouflage on-deck for the huge vessel.

In February 1942, Tirpitz had her first real combat jaunt at sea when she participated in a deceptive sortie to draw away Royal Navy attention from the coming English Channel dash of Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, and Prinz Eugen returning to German home ports.

Operation Cerberus was a successful joint Luftwaffe-Kriegsmarine episode of good cooperation between the two normally rival services. In concert with both destroyers and torpedo boats, the following month the Tirpitz had orders to begin assaulting both inbound and outgoing Allied convoys in Operation Sports Palace, but the enemy was forewarned by Engima intercepts that helped to foil the mission.

On March 9, 1942, the RAFs Forward Air Arm conducted a series of aerial torpedo attacks against the Tirpitz that resulted in the wounding of three sailors. The RAF lost two aircraft to the Tirpitzs antiaircraft guns.

Back at Trondheim on March 30-31, 33 Halifax bombers failed to score a single hit at the cost of five bombers. Follow-up raids conducted on April 27-28 by Avro Lancaster and Handley Page Halifax bombers resulted in the loss of seven more bombers without any hits on the battleship.

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Doomed: The Story of How Nazi Germany's Best Battleship Was Sunk - The National Interest Online