In early 1939, Hitler approved Plan Z: a colossal naval construction programme intended to provide Germany, by the mid-1940s, with a high-seas fleet capable of challenging the Royal Navy — giant battleships, battlecruisers, aircraft carriers. It is the dream of a prestige navy, on a world scale.
But in the summer of 1939, war appears imminent — well before this fleet can exist. Grand Admiral must confront a contradiction: Plan Z absorbs steel, shipyards and manpower, but its ships will not be ready in time.
Another path exists, championed by Rear Admiral Dönitz: to give up the great surface ships and invest massively in submarines, a cheap and formidable weapon for strangling British commerce. Raeder must decide. To pursue Plan Z and its prestige battleships? To redirect the effort urgently towards a fleet of submarines in great numbers? Or to attempt a compromise which, for lack of means, risks delivering neither one nor the other in time?
Should Raeder pursue the battleships of Plan Z or redirect the effort towards a submarine fleet?
The Kriegsmarine maintains orientation A until the outbreak of war: priority remains with the great surface ships of Plan Z, to the detriment of the large-scale submarine programme that Dönitz demanded. The result: in September 1939, Germany fields only about fifty submarines, of which only a fraction are fit for the Atlantic — far short of the hundreds judged necessary to strangle the United Kingdom. Plan Z is abandoned at once, the war having come too soon. This poor alignment between ambition and timetable will deprive Germany, at the start of the conflict, of the weapon that could have been the most dangerous for it. Dönitz will have to wage his first campaigns with a handful of vessels, while awaiting an accelerated construction programme.
Learn more about this event
Related polls
10
The U-Boats Put to Sea
Dönitz at Sengwarden — the winter pause
Raeder and the Seelöwe gamble
Weserübung — directive of 1 March
Send out the Bismarck alone, or wait for her sisters
Thirty submarines a month, or next to nothing
Brauchitsch — Reich Chancellery, 5 November
The Obersalzberg Speech
Hitler and Fall Gelb — 29 postponements
Hitler Before His Generals
The U-Boats Put to Sea
Dönitz at Sengwarden — the winter pause
Raeder and the Seelöwe gamble
Weserübung — directive of 1 March
Send out the Bismarck alone, or wait for her sisters
Thirty submarines a month, or next to nothing
Brauchitsch — Reich Chancellery, 5 November
The Obersalzberg Speech
Hitler and Fall Gelb — 29 postponements