For those few historical ignoramuses who still lionize the grand strategery of the German Chancellor during the leadup to WWII, this article by Big Serge will suffice to conclusively prove that he was every bit as irrational and incoherent as his eventual successor, Angela Merkel. And then some.
In many ways, the German surface fleet became something like the perfect black hole for resources. In the prewar years, it began a nominally ambitious building program which was still in its infancy when the war began. Naval planners were explicitly preparing for a mid-century war, with construction programs targeting fulfillment in 1948. Consequentially, the navy was entirely unprepared for war in 1939, and the surface fleet never threatened to fulfill any meaningful strategic function. Yet the scale of the building program was sufficient for the navy to siphon meaningful financial and industrial resources from the ground forces and the Luftwaffe. This was an impressively titrated level of wastage: naval expenditures were large enough to weaken the other arms of the Wehrmacht, but too late and too little to make the navy into a useful arm in its own right…
The picture that emerges is one of absolute strategic schizophrenia, and nearly total disconnect between the naval authorities and Hitler’s foreign policy and war aims.
The real kicker, however, was that in 1939 Hitler – reacting to Raeder’s complaints about shipyard delays – promoted the Z-plan to the highest industrial priority. This made an immediate and material impact on the readiness of the German ground forces for the war that was about to start. Steel rations to army production were cut dramatically, precisely as the ground force was expanding and preparing for action. In 1939, after Hitler pushed the navy to top priority, the German Army was forced to scale down production of the MG34 machine gun (cut by 80%), the 10.5cm field howitzer (by 45%), and the Panzer III and IV tanks (by 50%).
The abrupt priority shift towards naval construction occurred at the worst possible moment on the German strategic timeline. Shipbuilding, with its long timeframes and technological bottlenecks, could yield nothing in the short term – the lone exception being submarines, which could be built faster, but of course Raeder was not focused on U-boats at this time. Thus, despite accelerating the naval program, all the active ships at the start of the war had been laid down in 1935 or earlier. However, the naval program did succeed in cannibalizing the ground forces, siphoning off critical industrial resources. 1939 was the worst time for such a reordering of industrial priority, and it ensured that Germany began the war with hundreds fewer tanks and howitzers, and not a single extra ship to show for it.
In fact, the more that one looks at the Nazi program, the more totally insane its actions appear, and the more one begins to wonder if Hitler, like Zelensky, was merely an actor-puppet who was installed by whatever precursor to modern Clown World was active at the time in order to do what no sane and intelligent military leader would ever even think to do.
Then again, modern Germany’s actions appear no less insane, as it eschews inexpensive Russian oil even as its economy collapses despite the influx of third-world refugees who all the economists and scientists repeatedly vowed were good for it. It’s becoming increasingly obvious why France, Britain, and Germany are so desperate to keep Ukraine in the war it cannot win, as Ukraine is the only customer for the armaments industries that are presently keeping their sinking economies from going straight to the bottom.
No matter what the ideology is, the price of ignoring the rules of objective reality is always incoherency, followed by inevitable failure.
