I'm Tian Jun, and welcome to read the Stone Sea ups and downs series 02.
# Super Battleship of Nazi Germany
The full text is 2020 words, and the reading is expected to take 7 minutes.
H-class battleship is an unprecedented "super battleship" plan put forward by Nazi German Navy in World War II. It is also the largest maritime warship put forward in human history, and no one has surpassed it so far. The H-class warship plan belongs to the famous "Z Plan" and is the core warship plan of the plan.
In some military articles and videos, many people called these "super battleships" of Nazi German Navy "Hindenburg", and some even pointed out that this warship should be named "ludendorff". However, if you carefully study the history of World War II in Germany, you will find that the design scheme of German H-class battleship has been changing. The "super battleship" numbered H has not been finalized, and naturally there will be no specific naming scheme. But inside the Nazi German navy, these "drawing ships" were named after H plus the year, namely H39, H40, H4 1, H42 and H44.
It should be noted that the Nazi German Navy only intended to build an H-class battleship. Although there are six code names from H39 to H44, all of which refer to a warship, the warship parameters corresponding to each code name are different.
In addition, under the unfavorable situation that Nazi Germany was losing ground in 1945, the navy and the military didn't even bother to describe the so-called "H45" plan, because there was no chance to build it anyway, and naturally there would be no H45 plan.
But in fact, H-class battleships did start to be built, but this is only the beginning. 1939 July 15 H Ship officially laid the first keel at Bloemforth Shipyard in Hamburg. But soon, on September 1 day, Germany attacked Poland, and the European battlefield of World War II officially started. Germany was forced to invest a lot of resources to build land armored forces and air fighter units, and the H-class battleship known as the "Golden Beast" naturally could not continue.
So in June1939 65438+1October 10, the construction plan of the H-class battleship was urgently stopped, and the newly delivered 3,500 tons of metal was also recovered. Therefore, the H-class battleship is actually only built here, with a total weight of 40 tons, all of which are keel parts, and there is no further progress.
In fact, the H-class battleship with large tonnage of naval vessels is still reliable compared with the onshore P 1000 scheme, but this is only limited to the design level, because the 654.38+ million-ton super battleship, even the United States, a big shipbuilding country today, cannot guarantee that it can be easily built. H39, H40 and H4 1 in the H-class battleship scheme are considered to be realistic, with tonnage of 56,000 tons, 60,000 tons and 69,000 tons respectively. Even the tonnage of H4 1 exceeds that of Yamato, Japan's largest battleship in World War II.
However, with Hitler's "pursuit of large tonnage" after 194 1 year, 70,000 tons can no longer be satisfied, with only 90,000 tons for H42 and11000 tons for H44, where H44 is 132000. When fully loaded, the tonnage reached the horrible 1.4 1.5 million tons. It can be said that even if 1.944 European countries stop fighting and build this warship together, it may not be possible, not to mention Nazi Germany, which has lost more than half of its steel production.
Nominally, the H-class battleship was proposed by the German Navy, but in fact, Hitler was behind it. However, Hitler's plan was not popular in the German navy. No one thinks that H43 and H44 after the H42 plan are realistic, even his successor, Admiral of the fleet Deng Nici.
Obviously, the urgent task of the German navy at that time was not to build these huge and useless super battleships, but to vigorously develop submarines and launch an "unrestricted submarine war" to attack the Soviet Union and the British and American navies like World War I. This reason is very simple. Allied surface ships are far superior to the German navy in tonnage, quantity and quality. Only by developing underwater forces can we barely compete.
This is vividly reflected in the Japanese navy. During World War II, it was no longer the time to pay attention to "caliber is justice". Under the double suppression of the US Navy's carrier aircraft and aircraft carrier, the Japanese Navy's super battleship was badly beaten. Can't lift it.
Another important problem is that the warships after the H42 scheme are too big. H44 has a draft of 12.7m, a length of 345m and a width of 5 1.5m, not to mention Germany. At that time, there was no shipyard in any country in the world, which could accommodate the construction of the H44 battleship, so dock construction was the only way.
We assume that H44 can be built successfully, but no German Ports can berth such a huge warship, and H44 is destined to drift at sea. Therefore, the H44 at this time was actually not used for the needs of war at all, but a "toy" to please Hitler. The designers of the German Navy also don't need to pay any fees at all. A drawing and a pen can accomplish this "miracle" in one night.
Other parameters about H44 are even more outrageous. H44 has eight main guns, 508mm, which is even scarier than Yamato's 460mm naval gun. The turret armor is 650 mm thick, and no artillery can destroy or penetrate it. H44, such a huge body, used unprecedented nuclear power propulsion (the problem was that nuclear power was only a design idea at that time, even the atomic bomb had not been built), and the speed was as high as 35 knots (about 64.8 km/h).
It is precisely because of this meaningless H-class battleship scheme's waste of metal and other resources that Nazi Germany deviated more and more from the development track of military weapons in the late World War II, and Hitler's fantasy of turning the war around with special weapons was doomed to fail.