I never understand why Krigersmarine don't request they terms from France
 

Here is some data about size of France navy:

Major ships of the French Navy at the beginning of German attack in May 1940:

* modern battleships: 2 (plus 1 in last stadium of fiting out)
* old battleships - dreadnoughts: 5 (including 2 training ones)
* aircraft carriers: 1
* seaplane carriers: 1
* heavy cruisers: 6
* light cruisers: 11
* big destroyers: 32
* destroyers: 26
* submarines: 77

Apart from these, there was one modern battleship advanced in construction; the second battleship, one aircraft carrier, numerous submarines and several destroyers were in different stages of construction.
I think that they can been good reinforcement for Krigersmarine...:arrgh!:

Because Hitler believed that the United Kingdom and the British Empire were the natural allies of Fascist Germany and would eventually join the Fascists in their crusade against the "Mongol-Tatar" (read as: Untermenschen, i.e. subhumans) Bolshevik hordes, which hordes were controlled by Jews, as was international finance capital, all of which was part of a Jewish plot to subjugate non-Jewish people, including the "Aryan" race, and to hold the world in thrall to Jewry.

That was Herr Hitler's theory, anyway. (Not mine, I may add!)

Hitler believed that Germany could carve out an empire in the east to create "living space" (Lebensraum) for the German Folk, just as "England" had carved out for itself an overseas world empire.

Small problem: the Lebensraum was occupied by Slavic peoples. No matter: they were all subhumans, anyway; if Darwin's theory was correct, only the fittest would survive in the struggle for survival. The Aryans under German leadership, according to Hitler (and many others, including a large number of Englishmen and Frenchmen), were the supreme race and should win any struggle hands down.

Hitler couldn't understand why the UK declared war on Germany on September 3rd 1939.

To defend Poland?

How?

What for?

Hitler believed that he could come to an accomodation with the United Kingdom over his plans in Eastern Europe, which deal would run something like: if you let us play ball in the East and thereby do mankind a service eradicating the Jewish-Bolshevik virus there and, at the same time, setting up a huge German land empire stretching to the Urals, we'll let you keep your maritime Empire.

To keep an overseeas empire, however, Britain needed a huge fleet: that's how the Royal Navy came about. Ever since the end of Buonaparte's plan to make a French European hegemony, Britain had had a policy of maintaining a fleet that was at least twice the size of the next two biggest fleets combined. Any nation state that attempted to challenge British naval supremacy was deemed by British governments to be enemies, real or potential.

That's why the UK went to war with the German Empire in August 1914: the declaration of war made by the British goverment against the German Reich on August 3rd 1914 was not the result of the violation of Belgian neutrality by the German army in marching on Paris (that was just a propaganda trick to attain a position of moral supremacy) it was because German hegemony in Europe and the German Imperial fleet would be real threat to the "balance of power" that Britain enjoyed.

Hitler believed that Kaiser Wilhelm II had made a serious error in provoking the UK with his warship building policy and his demands that the arriviste German Empire have a "place in the sun". If the UK had not been provoked by Kaiser Bill's naval policy, it could well have been that the German army would have wiped the floor with the French (as they had done during the course of 6 weeks in 1870-1871) and the Russians would have then been dealt with accordingly and would have sued for peace.

If only this had happened! A quick German victory in the west followed by a negotiated peace with the Russian Empire would have meant no Bolshevik "revolution", no shameful Versailles Treaty terms for a defeated Germany, no fascists, no World War II.

If, after the fall of France in 1940 the French navy had been absorbed by the Kriegsmarine, that would have signalled that the THird Reich intended to destroy the British and their Empire. Hitler never wanted this, hence the hands-off policy towards the French navy. Hitler waited for peace overtures from the UK and a negotiated peace in the west, followed by his crusade to the east.

If Churchill had not been Prime Minister and Halifax had (he almost was), Hitler would have probably got what he wanted.

The British response was to ask the French navy to amalgamate with the Royal Navy. The French would not comply, so the British attacked the French capital ships that had sought refuge in Algerian French bases, which attack was a clear signal from Churchill to Hitler that there was going to be no deal between the UK and Germany.

The sad result of all this is that more French sailors died during WWII at the hands of the British than of the Germans.

As I understand it the ships at Toulon were scuttled as the Germans were arriving. Also, the Bristish shelled other elements of the French fleet to prevent them falling into German hands. But I'm not certain as to the sequence of events.

Hello,
well i'm speechless. The more i read in the last years the more i come to what Moscowexile writes - not only about the "Lebensraum" in the east, slavic people and the jews, which is already well-known.

But also about the first world war, why it happened, and that what happened directly led to WW2, is an on-the-point description i never read before.

I would as well describe WW1 as a war of the monachies and their interests, after all Germany declared war to Serbia because of its treaty with Austro-Hungary - with all the known effects. Kaiser Wilhelm must have been surprized about the close-related England with his own royal relatives declaring war at "him" - after all he was a son of Queen Victoria. Indeed after France declared war the french armies tried to get back the region in the Alsace region before the war in northern France began.

Greetings,
Catfish

I read this too. I know the British knew when they were pushed into the sea that anything left was going into German hands. All the French boats they took out were about to become German boats. It was a smart move with Operation Sea Lion on the table.

All those French sailors killed by us, no wonder France was pi**ed at us, but what could have done? No choice in the matter it was war.

In the first place the KM had no say in the surrender terms that created Vichy and took France out of the war. Even in Germany war and peace were made at the political level and not by the military.

Secondly the French navy was widely scattered, with elements in French North Africa, Dakar, North America, Alexandria, Indo-China and the UK. The combat effective parts of the Fleet had been crippled by the RN at the battle of Mers el Kabr, 3 July 1940 which was after the French surrender. Other significant elements disarmed themselves and were laid up with French caretaker crews under British supervision. Still others got themselves interned in the US and were out of German reach.

Third I think that you might under estimate the ease in which foriegn warships can be integrated into a navy. Creating a combat effective warship is not just a matter of lighting off the boilers, doing a couple of turns around the harbour to see how she handles and then joining the war effort. Typically 12-18 months is common, all of the engines, weapons, ammunition, ship systems, fire control etc. would have to be replaced by domestic items (themselves in short supply) or learned from scratch. The KM was pretty small, subtracting leadership, sailors and shipwrights to get the French ships into service would probably effectively ended the U-Boat war. Resources that should have been working on submarines would have been syphoned off to refit surface ships of little value to the war effort. U-Boats were the only realistic strategic naval option open to Germany. Surface ships, no matter how cool, could never have won the war at sea for Hitler.

And lastly, I'll probably get flamed for this as well, but the French Navy does have a long and honourable history behind it even if it lacks the tradition of victory that the RN has. When Germany decided to seize the surviving French warships after occupying Vichy, many were scuttled by their crews. There is no reason to doubt that most ship captain's would have done the same in 1940.

Good Hunting

You are quite right. The French ships were in the process of being scuttled as German tanks were arriving on the dockside.

After the fall of France in 1940, Churchill and his naval chiefs had, of course, no idea of the terms of surrender that were to be dictated to the French by the victorious Third Reich nor of the messages being sent to French naval commanders. Furthermore, although Churchill and RN chiefs paid lip service to the U-boat threat, they still considered the surface raider to be the major threat to British sea supply lanes. The RN chiefs were especially concerned about the modern French battle cruisers, Dunkerque and Strasbourg, and also about two unfinished battleships: Jean Bart, which was at Casablanca in French Morocco, and Richelieu at Dakar, French West Africa.

Churchill ordered that Force H at Gibraltar be sent to threaten French units in North Africa, while French warships in the UK were seized by British boarding parties. RN Admiral Cunningham protested and Churchill’s belligerence against the French fleet was not generally well received by the RN. Churchill’s order prevailed and by July 3rd 1940 the battle cruiser HMS Hood, the carrier HMS Ark Royal and the old battleships HMS Valiant and HMS Resolution were standing off shore at Mers-el-Kébir in Algeria, where most of the French fleet lay at anchor. The French were asked to either scuttle or join the RN under the flag of the “Free French” or sail to the West Indies.

The negotiations lasted for many hours, but the French finally refused and the British opened fire at point blank range: Dunkerque was hit with a salvo of 15 inch shells; the old battleship Bretagne was hit in the magazine and capsized with a loss of 997 of her crew; the old battleship Provence ran aground; Strasbourg escaped to Toulon with 5 destroyers and a sea-plane carrier, Commandant Tèste.

A couple of days later, French units at Dakar and Casablanca were attacked by the RN and Richelieu and Jean Bart were damaged.

At Alexandria, Egypt, a more subtle course was adopted by the RN and patient negotiation won the day, despite angry messages from London instructing Admiral Cunningham to speed things up. The gentlemanly relationship and good will between the British Admiral Cunningham and his French counterpart at Alexandria, Godfroy, even persisted after news of the events at Mers-el-Kébir had broken. The result was an agreed demilitarisation of the French warships: the battleship Lorraine, four cruisers and some destroyers and torpedo boats; fuel stores were sent ashore and breech blocks and torpedo detonators were put into the care of the local French consul.

The French naval units at Alexandria had a very peculiar “war”: Admiral Godfroy was permitted to use Vichy codes (the French puppet government of Nazi Germany had its administration at the spa town of Vichy in central France) and to communicate with his Nazi-collaborator masters. Admiral Godfroy’s men were paid by the British government and, unlike the Free French, were able to send money home to occupied France. French sailors under Godfroy’s command were also allowed to take shore leave in Alexandria as well as Vichy-ruled Syria and Lebanon. Whilst the Royal Navy was fighting a desperate war in the Mediterranean, these French ships at Alexandria – a battleship, four cruisers and three destroyers – remained unscratched. “The French ships looked brazenly sleek and shiny compared to the battered British fleet” wrote Artemis Cooper in “Cairo in the War, 1939-1945” (Hamish Hamilton, 1989).

Could the same peaceful agreement have been achieved at other French North African bases had Churchill shown more patience and allowed his admirals more latitude? Certainly, all three RN flag officers concerned in these actions against the French fleet thought so, but one of them who openly expressed that view in a letter to the British Admiralty was relieved of his command forthwith.

I'd always understood that Britain needed a huge fleet because it other people (Saxons, Danes, Normans, various royal factions) had been landing or trying to invade from the end of the Roman Empire up through the Spanish Armada. As an island nation with a relatively small population, the fleet had been its best defense against invasion against invasion by the large land armies of countries such as Imperial Spain or Napoleonic France since Elizabethan times. A fleet big enough to defend the homeland against invasion was also big enough to do some serious exploring, colonizing, and defense of the colonial sea lanes.

I'm not so sure. The other part of British strategy was indeed that no hegemonic European power could be allowed to control the coasts of what are now Belgium and the Netherlands; however, absent the provocation of Germany's invasion of Belgium and Belgium's decision to resist the Germans, a declaration of war on Germany would have bitterly divided the people and Parliament, which had no interest in sending British soldiers to die for France (with whom they had no treaty or alliance) in the slaughter of a general European war over Serbia, but they were willing to defend their commitment to Belgian neutrality. It wasn't just a progaganda trick.

Without the invasion of Belgium, I think it's pretty likely Britain would not have intervened in August 1914, just as it had not intervened in the Franco-Prussian War, when Bismarck specifically assured Prime Minister Disraeli that Germany would not attack Belgium. The German General Staff knew attacking Belgium would bring Britain into the war, but they just didn't care since they felt its army's contribution would be minimal at best. Oops.

I think the effect of Kaiser Wilhelm's (or rather, Admiral Tirpitz's) naval policy was that it caused Britain to reconsider its centuries-old enmity for France in the face of German weltmacht, for no appreciable gain to Germany, rather than actually provoking Britain into declaring war. I suppose Germany's real problem was that they needed a first-class strategic thinker, like Bismarck, but all they could manage was Kaiser Billy.

There's a reasonably good recounting of all this in Robert K. Massie's book, Dreadnought: Britain, Germany, and the coming of the Great War, which is currently in paperback at Amazon.com.

Pablo

When I said that the British Empire was the raison d'etre of the Royal Navy, I had in mind the twice-as-big-as-the-next-two-combined-fleets navy patrolling the sinews of British seaborne free enterpise trade and not King Harold the Great of Wessex's or Elizabeth I's wooden walls.


'We are entering a general European conflict because of German beastliness in its rape of poor little Belgium" was the cry of the British government in August 1914 and I still maintain that it was largely propagandist in nature: witness the British political cartoons of the time. Furthermore, Britain's noble defence of Belgium neutrality in 1914 was contradicted somewhat by the Salonika expedition of 1915 when French and British forces landed in Greece in order to bolster up Serbia by attacking Bulgaria. In that year, Serbia, whilst having bravely defended herself against the Austro-Hungarian Empire (the Serbs suffered the greatest losses in relation to population size of any participant in World War I), faced imminent defeat after having been attacked by Bulgaria, which had joined the Central Powers in order to expand, at Serbia's expense, in the Balkans. Problem was: Greece was neutral. Lloyd George disingeniously argued at the time that "there was no comparison between going through Greece and the German passage through Belgium."

The all too prescient Jackie Fisher hit the nail right on the head at the beginning of the 20th century when asked for a possible date for the outbreak of a general European conflict: his answer was that a general European war would start when the Kiel canal had been widened to facilitate the passage of dreadnoughts. He was almost spot on in his prediction. The canal widening began in 1907: it was completed in June 1914. A Royal Navy squadron was invited to the re-opening of the widened canal by Kaiser Wilhelm II, a grandson of Queen Victoria. The celebrations were cut short by the announcement of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Hapsburg Empire, in Sarajevo by a Serbian nationalist.

The Royal Navy squadron promptly left Kiel to take up war stations. On leaving Kiel the squadron signalled to the Kaiser and his fleet: Friends today; friends in future; friends forever.

How tragic!

Grandson. Wilhelm II and George V were first cousins.

Which makes the First World War something of a family feud.

Hello,
Sailor Steve you are certainly right with grandson.
Anyway he was early inclined to ships.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...elm2schiff.jpg

Greetings,
Catfish

crazy stuff. every interesting and mind boggeling at the same time :huh:

Pablo:

"Without the invasion of Belgium, I think it's pretty likely Britain would not have intervened in August 1914, just as it had not intervened in the Franco-Prussian War, when Bismarck specifically assured Prime Minister Disraeli that Germany would not attack Belgium. The German General Staff knew attacking Belgium would bring Britain into the war, but they just didn't care since they felt its army's contribution would be minimal at best. Oops."

I agree: a major miscalculation.

The much modified German General Staff's Schlieffen plan, a sweeping "right hook" through Belgium of the German 1st and 2nd armies in their march on Paris whilst the majority of French divisions, chasing after revengeful glory in their lust to regain those territories, Alsace and Lorraine, lost to the German Empire in 1871, hurtled headlong into the wrong direction necessary to counter this sweep, took little or no account of those French divisions that would oppose them on the Franco-Belgium border and treated with disdain any contribution that any paltry British expeditionary force could contribute to resisting the invasion of France through Belgium . Hence Kaiser Bill's alleged comment at the the time about Britain's "contemptible little army".

There is no German record of the Kaiser describing the British Expeditionary Force 1914 as "contemptible", though he did say that it was "a contemptibly small" army. Whatever, the name stuck and veterans of the 1914 BEF to France and Belgium called themselves with pride: The Old Contemptibles.

They were so "comtemptible" that although greatly outnumbered, in August 1914 they dug themselves in along the Albert canal at Mons, Belgium, where they waited for the leading divisions of Kluck's 1st army:

"Kluck determined to take on the BEF and they first engaged the British in battle on August 23rd, 1914. French [BEF commanding general] had deployed his men across a 40 kilometre front. The BEF was heavily outnumbered. The BEF had 70,000 men and 300 artillery guns whereas the Germans had 160,000 men and 600 artillery guns.

Despite such overwhelming numbers, the Germans did not do well at the start of the battle. The BEF may have been referred to as a bunch of “contemptibles” by Kaiser William II, but they were professional soldiers. The Germans believed that they were facing many British machine guns at Mons. In fact, they were infantry men firing their Lee Enfield rifles, but at such a combined speed that they gave the Germans that impression. German intelligence later estimated that the BEF had 28 machine guns per battalion at Mons - whereas each battalion only had two. After his experiences of the BEF at the Battle of Mons, Kluck, after the war had finished, described the BEF as an 'incomparable army'."

The fact was that the British had learnt the hard way during the Boer War what rapid, accurate rifle fire from entrenched positions could do to advancing columns. Nevertheless, Mons was not a victory and the British had to retreat because of the overwhelming numbers of German infantry.


My great granddad was one of those BEF riflemen.

Hello,
sorry for being OT, WW1 and such, but this is really interesting - while i always thought to know why WW2 began, the First world war and its beginnings is somehow foggy to me. Sarajevo, yes, but I realized that some historical background was never taught in school here in Germany after WW2, maybe due to the reeducation project, or because the good post war germans wanted some distance to their/our predecessors. And then there was the cold war ...

Kaiser Bill may not have been too intelligent, or witty, but he was also let down by his own advisors - and he himself certainly had let go Bismarck, what was described as "the pilot leaving the ship", which was even translated and printed in the british "Punch".
But after all it was obvious Germany would have had no chance in fighting a two-front war against Russia AND France, so the Schlieffen-plan seemed the only solution - fight France and win as soon as possible, and hold the lines in the east until men from the west become available. It did not turn out that way as we all know.

The British Expeditional Forces were tough, and even if a prussian general (Clausewitz?) had said any army needs a ratio of 3 to 1 to attack anyone successfully, the even much bigger german army did not succeed instantly, and got the first impression of what was to come. Moscowexile, please accept my utmost respect for your great grandfather having fought in this war.

As Moscowexile wrote even before the first battles in the north there was already the french armies who tried to get back the Alsace region they had lost in the prussian-french war of 1871, but they failed here, and left a big gap in the north.
Regarding the Royal Empire it had an uprising rival in Germany, which needed a fleet to support and control its own colonies in Africa, and Asia. There was a real conflict trade-wise, with the invented "Made in England" sign that should represent quality and such, but the products "Made in Germany" suddenly surpassed those products, maybe because Germany had a technological advantage with dynamoes and other technical products back then.

Additionally Germany was building the Baghdad - railway, which would have connected Germany directly to its african colonies, and which the British tried to interrupt, not without success if you think of "Lawrence of Arabia". With a functional railway the Suez canal would have been almost useless.

Anyway Germany's cannon-boat politics were not so successful as what the British Empire or the US did - certainly lack of experience in running overseas countries politically. My personal theory is that our Kaiser was angry for he was not wanted becoming a member of the British Royal Yacht Club - hence his own huge fleet ;)

Greetings,
Catfish

Off topic maybe, but this thread has progressed from a question posed about the Kriegsmarine in WWII after the fall of France...

Old Kaiser Bill was really an English gentleman in Prussian uniform!

What always intrigued me about him was that when revolution hit Germany in 1918, like the majority of the German aristocracy, he just packed his bags and left the Fatherland. Wilhelm II spent the rest of his life in Doorn, the Netherlands, where he died on June 4th 1941, just 18 days before Barbarossa, the attack on the USSR, was launched, which attack spelt doom for the Third Reich.

See:

http://pierreswesternfront.punt.nl/i...&tbl_archief=0

The old Kaiser died when the born-again Reich was at its most successful and powerful. I often wonder what he thought about all of this when he was breathing his last. Needless to say, he despised the Nazis, who, as national socialists,held the old order in contempt, but I reckon the old man could not have been more than a little proud when looking objectively at the success of the Wehrmacht.

I still think that it was a disaster for the United Kingdom, a disaster for Germany, a disaster for Europe and a disaster for the world when the British government, after several days of hesitation, decided to throw in its lot with the Entente powers.

The world situation as we see it now all stems from that fateful decision made on August 3rd 1914.

Hello,

thank you for the link, never saw this page before.

I also wonder why the Kaiser left Germany, but times were different. Anyway a lost war does not mean an instant danger for a government (not even today hrrm). But apart from fear maybe the aristocrates did not want to live in a Germany now ruled by a democratic or socialist force, even if there was no real revolution, as had been in France long before, and Russia. And the years after the war were hard for aristocrates in Germany, but especially for the former soldiers, who were looked down upon, and despised, some even killed by the mob. The situation in Germany after the war, with the Freikorps etc. battling in the streets against the socialists and communists was a mess. And maybe Wilhelm felt indeed responsible - and maybe he did not want to be accused for it, hence his exile (?).

I also never understood why England did not intervene when the plan for the Versailles treaty became apparent, heaping all the guilt of the war alone on Germany. This had been the idea of the french politician Clémenceau, and it was not as widely accepted as it is told to us today. Maybe the British Empire was satisfied to have won the war, and established trade supremacy again (?).

Anyway this treaty and its results were felt as inquitous even by the german socialists, but their comfortable scapegoat for the situation certainly was Kaiser Wilhelm, and they blamed him alone. The politicial right force (nationalist/monarch) instantly invented the legend of the stab in the back, done by german socialists and communists, and blamed them for the outcome of the war.

"I still think that it was a disaster for the United Kingdom, a disaster for Germany, a disaster for Europe and a disaster for the world when the British government, after several days of hesitation, decided to throw in its lot with the Entente powers. The world situation as we see it now all stems from that fateful decision made on August 3rd 1914."

Well said, but maybe the British Government could have still helped defusing the situation right after the war, in refusing or denying Clémenceau's plan of the Versailles treaty, but however they did not. Maybe they had become a victim of their own propaganda.
Since Germany's unconditional surrender it was not in a position to intervene. It was definitely WW1 and its fortthcomings that laid the foundation for Hitler's dictatorship and the second world war. I wonder what will shop up in the british archives after 2018, when the locked-up archive files will be made available.

Thanks and greetings,
Catfish

Hi!

My point was that the Royal Navy's raison d'etre was to protect Britain from invasion, long before there was a British Empire. The Empire came about because of British naval superiority, not the other way 'round.

Hmm... You might want to review Foreign Minister Grey's speech to Parliament on August 3, 1914, where he outlined why a German attack on Belgium would be sufficient reason to enter the war against Germany, and the Parliament agreed.

Actually, Lloyd George was correct: the troops landed in Salonika at the request of the pro-Allied Greek Prime Minister, Elefthérios Venizélos. It is true that Greece was not of one mind on this question, since King Constantine I was pro-German, and that the resulting disagreement and all that followed is known in Greece as the "National Schism" (Εθνικός Διχασμός, Ethnikos Dikhasmos), but the offer was made by the Prime Minister and legitimate head of government.

It was my understanding that the Royal Navy's Second Battle Squadron left Kiel to continue its scheduled cruise through the Baltic, and returned to Britain for the annual royal review by King George V on July 20, followed by fleet exercises. The Royal Navy did not begin moving to its war stations (i.e., Scapa Flow) until July 28-29, after Austria had publicly rejected Serbia's response to its ultimatum and was mobilizing for war.

Pablo