The Germania shipyards in Kiel had dressed up on December 8, 1938. The occasion deserved it: the Graf Zeppelin was launched, which was to be the first aircraft carrier of the Third Reich navy. The specter of a new conflict was taking shape, and the Nazi bosses wanted to have all the cards for a successful confrontation with the Royal Navy, the British navy.
The aircraft carrier’s name was a tribute to Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, the inventor of the famous airships. His daughter, Helene, was the godmother of the launching. The event was chaired by Adolf Hitler himself and was attended by other prominent members of the regime such as Hermann Göring, commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe and Minister of Aviation, or Erich Raeder, admiral in command of the Kriegsmarine, the German navy.
The good manners exhibited among the top brass during the ceremony hid the struggles for power that were taking place within the Third Reich and that were to determine the future of the newly christened aircraft carrier.
Submarines (U-Boats) are the iconic image of German strategy in the seas of World War II, with occasional episodes starring their famous battleships Bismarck and Graf Spee. But soon after German rearmament began in 1933, what Hitler and Raeder dreamed of was an armada of large surface ships that could take on the Royal Navy.
One of the first steps for that fleet would be the design of a class of aircraft carriers in 1933. The person in charge was one of the most outstanding engineers of the Kriegsmarine naval design office, Wilhelm Hadeler, who projected a ship of about 22,000 tons inspired by on the British Courageous-class aircraft carriers.
In addition to the work on the drawing board, the wishes of a large fleet for the Third Reich were also advancing diplomatically in order to circumvent the restrictions imposed on Germany after World War I. On June 18, 1935, Berlin and London agreed to a naval treaty that recognized the Nazi regime’s right to have a navy limited to 35% the size of the Royal Navy.
Under the pact, the Kriegsmarine could only allocate about 38,500 tons for aircraft carriers. In order to have two ships of this type, Raeder ordered to modify the design of the Graf Zeppelin and reduce its weight to adapt to the conditions.
Also, in the fall of 1935, a German delegation visited Japan to see some of its aircraft carriers. The Japanese navy only agreed to share the plans for the Akagi, a ship that had become outdated, although it would later be refitted and would play a prominent role in World War II until its sinking in the Battle of Midway.
But it was one thing to have an aircraft carrier and another to know how to use it. During the interwar years, these ships were one of the innovations that generated the most debate among experts. For the most innovative military –like the Japanese admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, mastermind of the attack on Pearl Harbor–, they were destined to be the nucleus of the navies; to the old guard who still relied on battleships, they were just a new breed of auxiliary ship.
Raeder and his officers fell into the second group. They conceived the Graf Zeppelin as an escort ship to protect more heavily armed ships, such as the battleships Bismarck or Tirpitz.
Construction of the Graf Zeppelin began on December 28, 1936. In total, the German aircraft carrier would be 262 meters long (length of the main deck of a ship) and 31 meters wide (width). Two years later, his sister ship was commissioned, which was baptized simply B, although, according to some naval historians, it was to be named after Peter Strasser, the head of airships in Kaiser Wilhelm II’s navy.
The ship would carry some forty-three aircraft: ten Messerschmitt Bf 109 fighters, thirteen Stuka bombers and twenty Fieseler Fi 167 torpedo bombers. The first two models were naval versions of the famous Luftwaffe aircraft and the third was to be a design designed specifically for used on the Graf Zeppelin. By comparison, the US aircraft carrier Enterprise was 246 meters long and just over 33 meters wide, and could operate up to 96 aircraft.
German maritime rearmament was embodied in a concrete strategy: Plan Z. Hitler yearned for a large Kriegsmarine with ten battleships like the Bismarck and four aircraft carriers like the Graf Zeppelin.
This construction plan was completed by Admiral Raeder’s project: to send his pocket battleships (with the Graf Spee in the lead) to attack the British trade routes and have the Royal Navy pursue them. From here, the great naval units of the Reich would face the British in a decisive battle for Germany to achieve dominance of the North Sea.
The evolution of the work on the Graf Zeppelin was uneven, not so much because of the work in the Kiel shipyards as because of the power games between the Nazi hierarchs and the course of the war itself.
As the time for the Graf Zeppelin to become operational approached, the heads of the Kriegsmarine and the Luftwaffe began to compete over who should manage the embarked aircraft. Raeder wanted the navy to have its own air branch, as other naval powers, such as Japan, Great Britain or the United States, already did.
But Göring was intransigent when assuring that “everything that flies belongs to us!”, in one of his many discussions with the admiral. Raeder hoped that the Luftwaffe chief would change his mind when the carrier was ready or that Hitler would disavow it.
The start of World War II disrupted the strategy of Plan Z and the implementation of the Graf Zeppelin. At the end of 1939, the aircraft carrier was 85% complete, and everything indicated that she would have a prominent role within a year. The perspective changed the following spring, when the Germans occupied Norway and found themselves with some 2,500 kilometers of coastline to protect.
The Kriegsmarine, responsible for defending the Norwegian seafront, needed all the artillery it could muster. So Raeder ordered the removal of the Graf Zeppelin’s 150-millimeter guns and anti-aircraft guns to reinforce the coastal positions. These modifications meant, in practice, that the construction of the aircraft carrier stopped sine die.
In July 1940, the ship was towed to the Polish port of Gdynia to keep it away from British bombers. She stayed there for a year and was used as a floating timber store. In June 1942 she was taken to Stettin, at the mouth of the Oder River. The reason for this transfer would be similar to the previous one: to avoid an air attack, although this time the threat came from the Soviets.
Furthermore, in the early stages of the war, Admiral Karl Dönitz’s submarines proved highly effective. These ships achieved notable successes, such as the sinking of the British aircraft carrier HMS Courageous (the one that had inspired the design of the Graf Zeppelin) near Ireland or that of the battleship HMS Royal Oak within Scapa Flow itself, the great Royal Navy base in Scotland.
These successes of the “wolf packs” (the name given to the groups of German submarines) increased with the attacks on convoys, and contrasted with the failures accumulated by the large German surface ships in the first years of the war, with cases such as the sinking of the Graf Spee or the Bismarck. Hitler began to see the U-Boats in a better light, which generated a rivalry between Dönitz and Raeder.
Despite the effectiveness of the submarines, Raeder managed to revitalize the Graf Zeppelin project at the beginning of 1942. The success of the operations with aircraft carriers in the attacks on Taranto and Pearl Harbor allowed the commander-in-chief of the Kriegsmarine to convince Hitler to give a new opportunity to the ship. The construction of it was resumed, with the prospect that it would be operational in a year.
The Graf Zeppelin would provide air cover for battleships and heavy cruisers attacking Allied convoys sailing across the North Atlantic bound for the Soviet Union. Those missions had met with very limited success due to superior Allied aircraft, and Raeder hoped to match the forces once his carrier was able to sail.
As construction resumed, the feud between Raeder and Göring over control of the aircraft also returned. The head of the Luftwaffe assured that, due to the circumstances of the war, he could not develop specific devices for the Graf Zeppelin, so he sought to adapt existing models of Messerschmitt and Stukas. Aircraft launch catapults also needed to be modernized and weaponry refitted for protection.
On the night of August 27-28, 1942, the first and only air attack that the ship would suffer in the entire war took place. Nine British bombers raided the Kiel shipyards, where she had retaken the Graf. She did not hit any projectile. In fact, the killing blow for the Third Reich’s aircraft carrier would not come from enemy fire.
In early 1943, Hitler ordered the construction work on the aircraft carrier to stop and focus efforts on submarine production. The Führer was greatly disappointed by the Battle of the Barents Sea, fought on December 31, 1942. Once again, the Kriegsmarine had been unable to destroy an Allied convoy. From then on, U-Boats would carry the brunt of the war at sea.
Another consequence of Hitler’s turn in naval strategy was the replacement of Raeder by Dönitz as commander-in-chief of the Kriegsmarine. The outgoing head of the German navy referred to the cancellation of the Graf Zeppelin work as “the cheapest maritime victory England has ever won.” For the rest of the war, the carrier languished in various Baltic ports until returning to call at Stettin.
When the Red Army arrived there at the end of April 1945, the Kriegsmarine ordered a ten-man commando, commanded by Captain Wolfgang Kähler, to disable the Graf Zeppelin with explosives. Stalin’s troops were left without an important war trophy, although USSR engineers managed to refloat the aircraft carrier in March 1946.
In any case, the ship had a very short second life, since it sank on August 18, 1947. For decades there was speculation about why it went down. The opening of the Soviet archives and the location of the wreck in 2006 allowed a certain consensus among naval historians to explain the end of the Graf Zeppelin: a target of torpedoes during maneuvers by Stalin’s navy.