The six months after the Fall of Poland in October 1939 were known as the phony war or sitzkrieg, as both sides sized each other up. The first crack in this came in early April, when the Germans invaded neutral Denmark¹ and Norway, driven by a combination of Hitler's paranoia about the Norwegians cooperating with the British and a real Allied plan to intervene in Norway to stop the flow of iron ore to Germany. Despite several warnings, both the Allies and the Norwegians themselves were unaware of the coming invasion, and the Norwegian military was still badly hamstrung by low budgets and a lack of manpower.

The German invasion plan

The German plan involved seizing the key cities of Norway: Narvik, Trondheim, Bergen, Kristiansand and Oslo, using troops carried aboard warships. The Germans generally didn't think the Norwegians would fight much, and if they did, their low readiness would let the prepared German troops win despite lack of numbers or specialized amphibious shipping. Follow-on units would be available almost immediately thanks to merchant ships that had been sent out before the faster warships departed Germany. Surprisingly, despite some of the transports passing through Norwegian coastal waters, security held. Read more...

When WWII broke out, Hitler had no plans for Scandinavia. The Nordic nations had proclaimed neutrality, and he had his hands full with operations closer to home. But this began to change thanks to a visit from a Norwegian Nazi named Vidkun Quisling in December 1939, who claimed that the Norwegian government was conspiring with the British to join the Allies. Hitler ordered plans be made for intervention if this was true, and these were accelerated in the wake of the Altmark incident in January 1940, which convinced him that Quisling's accusations were true. Orders were given to implement what was known as Operation Weserübung.

Vidkun Quisling

The basic plan was fairly simple. The assault force would be carried by various warships of the Kriegsmarine, as the Germans were lacking in landing craft. Two regiments would be landed around Oslo, in connection with an airborne assault, while one regiment apiece was detailed to Bergen, Trondheim, Narvik and Kristiansand. Reinforcements would come by transport, some of which would have to be dispatched well before the warships. The biggest threat foreseen was intervention by the Royal Navy, and there was considerable friction between the Kriegsmarine, who wanted to withdraw the ships as quickly as possible, and the Heer, who wanted them left to protect the forces ashore, at least until they could make the Norwegian coastal defenses operational. Ultimately, the Kriegsmarine largely won. The Lufwaffe proved its useful cooperative self, and Goering refused to place his forces under unified command, while the other services were skeptical of his claims that the bombers would protect them from the RN. Read more...

In 1945, the US Navy faced a serious problem. Even before it faced the hell of the kamikazes off Okinawa, the introduction of jets and the threat of the air-to-surface guided missile, first shown by the Germans, was enough to start them searching for new ways of protecting the fleet.

The Lark missile

The obvious answer was a surface-to-air missile, one hopefully capable of shooting down the attacking aircraft before it got within range. Both the Bureau of Aeronautics (responsible for aircraft) and the Bureau of Ordnance (responsible for guns and torpedoes) were interested in the problem, and began separate programs. BuAer managed to get into the air first with Lark, intended as an emergency counter to the kamikazes, but the subsonic missile used liquid propellants, which tended to make naval officers nervous due to the risk of a spill, and ran into formidable guidance problems, which it helped solve before becoming obsolete. Read more...

In August 1939, the German replenishment ship Altmark sailed for Texas, to take on a load of fuel. On the way back across the Atlantic, she was told that war was imminent, and ordered to the South Atlantic to support Admiral Graf Spee's attack on Allied commerce there. The two ships met on September 1st, and Altmark received a pair of 20mm AA guns and a naval detachment to handle the guns and radios. Prize rules required Graf Spee to take aboard the crews of any ships she sank, and while the officers were retained aboard the cruiser, the common seamen were transferred to Altmark when the two ships met up to replenish. This hadn't been planned for, and conditions aboard the oiler were spartan.

Altmark

Graf Spee’s patrol came to an abrupt end in mid-December, when she was intercepted by a trio of British cruisers and damaged to the point that her captain decided to scuttle her. The released officers revealed the existence of Altmark, now carrying 299 captured sailors, and the hunt was on. Heinrich Dau, Altmark’s captain, remained in the South Atlantic for another few weeks, but eventually supplies began to run low, and he turned for home. Disguised as first a Norwegian and then an American tanker, Altmark eluded the British, passing south of Iceland and entering the coastal waters of neutral Norway on February 14th, 1940. The plan was to take advantage of "innocent passage" and stay in Norwegian waters for the next few days, with a night dash across the Skaggerak to reach Danish waters and safety. Read more...

It is time for our usual Open Tread. Talk about whatever you want, even if it's not naval related, so long as you avoid culture war topics.

We are going to have our next meetup next weekend, at 1 PM Central (GMT-5) on Saturday the 19th. Hope to see some of you there.

2018 overhauls are Jutland parts three, four, five, six and seven, So You Want to Build a Modern Navy - Coast Guard Part 1, Ship History - New Jersey, Museum Review - USS Alabama and Falklands Part 3. 2019 overhauls are Shells at Jutland, my one-post summary of Jutland, Battleship Aviation Part 3, A Brief History of the Submarine, Inky's review of the Haifa Clandestine Immigration and Naval Museum and Falklands Part 15. 2020 reviews are Jutland - The Blockade, Tomahawk Part 4, Coastal Defenses Part 3 and Soviet Battleships Part 3.

In the early months of the First World War, the British were faced with a dilemma. Traditionally, British strategy called for using sea power to attack the flanks of an enemy, instead of facing them head-on. The question was where they should make this attack, or if they should just double down on the force in France. Jackie Fisher, the uniformed head of the Royal Navy, had proposed an attack on the German Baltic coast, ultimately abandoned due to the risks of taking ships into such narrow waters from mines, torpedoes, and coastal fortifications. His civilian counterpart, a rising star by the name of Winston Churchill, instead favored an attack on the other side of Europe, hoping to knock the Ottoman Empire out of the war with an attack on the Turkish Straits connecting the Mediterranean and Black Seas, which would both make it easier to ship supplies to Russia and capture the Ottoman capital of Constantinople.

British battleships shell Turkish fortifications in the Dardanelles

Tensions with the Ottomans had begun to rise after Goeben and Breslau took refuge in Constantinople during the opening days of the war, but the Turks remained neutral until the ex-German ships, now sold to them, conducted a rogue bombardment of Russian positions in the Black Sea. The British and French retaliated on November 3rd by bombarding fortification in the Dardanelles, the westernmost of the Turkish straits, blowing up a magazine on one of the outermost forts. This performance made them overconfident in their ability to take out fortifications with naval bombardment, and after war was declared two days later, planning began in earnest for an all-naval campaign against the Dardanelles. Read more...

The Soviet Union first began to send strategic ballistic missiles to sea in the early 70s, and while they were reasonably happy with the resulting Yankee class, it did have one major drawback. The R-27 missiles it carried were relatively short-ranged, forcing the boats to patrol in the open ocean within easy reach of American ASW forces. Besides the risk of the USN killing the SSBNs before they could fire, there was also the issue that only a small fraction of the force could be on station at any one time. The USN had gotten around this problem by having two crews for each boat and forward-basing them at the ports of its allies, but the Soviets had enough trouble manning their fleet as it was, and didn't have any equivalent bases.

Delta I on the surface

The obvious solution was to build a longer-ranged missile, which emerged in the form of the R-29 (NATO SS-N-8), twice the size of the R-27 and with a range of about 4,200 nm, enough to let it target the entire US from pierside, if necessary. Now, instead of having to reach the Atlantic, the SSBNs could be kept close to the Soviet Union, where other air and naval forces could easily be deployed to protect them. Read more...

I am pleased to announce the first in-person Naval Gazing meetup for nearly three years. As you'd probably expect, my first stop is going to be Iowa, and I plan to host a meetup there on Saturday, July 10th. We'll start at 1000 when the ship opens, although I can't say how late I expect things to go. We are going to get to do the turret tour after all. It's $50/person, although if that's going to be a deal-breaker let me know and I'll see if I can do something. If we want to keep going after that, maybe we go to Fort MacArthur and inspect COASTAL DEFENSES!

I'll be there when the ship opens, wearing a green hat with the Naval Gazing logo. Will update as I learn more.

While the Soviets were the first to take ballistic missiles to sea, their first generation of submarines were not particularly successful. Each could carry only three or four short-range missiles, making them more suitable for theater strike than attacks on the US mainland. The American Polaris program thoroughly eclipsed these submarines, and it wasn't until 1962 and the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis that the Soviets decided to try again.

A Soviet Yankee class submarine

The initial plan was to build the submarine around 8 of the R-21 missiles that were being refitted to the Golf and Hotel classes. These were capable of underwater launch, but they were large enough that they would have to be carried horizontally, and a complicated mechanism would be required to turn them upright and prepare them for firing. This was quickly dismissed as overcomplicated, and studies were instead made of solid-fueled missiles very much like Polaris. Read more...

In many ways, Jutland was both the first major naval battle shaped by the development of aviation and the last one unaffected by it. Aviation considerations shaped the time and place of the battle, but despite efforts by both sides, aircraft made no impact on a tactical level. As such, it's worth taking a closer look at the aviation operations surrounding the battle.

By 1916, the Germans had at least the first inklings of a doctrine for the use of the Zeppelins in support of the fleet, and they formed an important part of Scheer's plans in May. As part of his attritional campaign against the British, he would use a raid on Sunderland, in northeastern England, to draw the British fleet past his U-boats, hopefully costing them some ships. Even better would be a chance to catch a detachment of the fleet by itself and defeat it in detail. Zeppelins offered a platform capable of making sure that the High Seas Fleet didn't blunder into the entirety of Jellicoe's force. Unfortunately, by the time his ships were ready to sortie, southwest winds² meant that the Zeppelins couldn't participate. Scheer chose to abandon the Sunderland plan and instead send his force to sweep the area around the Skaggerak, the strait separating Denmark and Norway. The British, aware of the German sortie thanks to good intelligence work, sent Beatty and Jellicoe to intercept. Read more...