Plan Z

• 1. Introduction

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  Plan Z was Adolf Hitler's order to build a fleet capable of destroying the Royal Navy, approved on the 27th of January 1939, with a deadline of 1948. Nine years, 797 ships, 33 billion reichsmarks. Those were the numbers that German naval planners wrote down with a straight face. What they did not write down was whether Germany could actually fuel the thing. Or whether, by the time the last rivets were driven, there would still be a war left to fight. The plan raises a question that cuts to the heart of how Nazi Germany went to war: how does a country commit its entire industrial ambition to a fleet it knows it cannot use in time? And what happens to a war when the submarines that might have won it are left waiting because the admirals wanted battleships instead?

• 2. The Versailles Cage

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  Germany emerged from World War I permitted six pre-dreadnought battleships, six old light cruisers, 12 destroyers, and 12 torpedo boats. That was the cage the Treaty of Versailles built. Article 191 went further and prohibited Germany from possessing or building submarines for any purpose whatsoever. The Germans found a way around the submarine ban almost immediately. A dummy corporation called NV Ingenieurskantoor voor Scheepsbouw, registered in the Netherlands, continued submarine development in secret. It built boats for foreign navies, including one for Turkey that became the template for the Type I U-boat, and one for Finland that served as the prototype for the Type II. On the surface fleet side, the treaty allowed Germany to replace aging pre-dreadnoughts once they reached twenty years of age, but new vessels could displace no more than 10,000 long tons. The Germans turned that constraint into a design challenge, building heavily armed panzerschiffe that outgunned the heavy cruisers Britain and France were allowed under the Washington Naval Treaty. The lead ship, Deutschland, carried six 28-centimeter guns at a time when Allied heavy cruisers were capped at 20.3-centimeter weapons. The hope was that a ship powerful enough to alarm the Allies might buy Germany a seat at the Washington treaty table. The French refused any concession, so Deutschland and two sister ships were built anyway. By 1932, the Reichsmarine had pushed through the Reichstag a secret two-phase shipbuilding program whose second phase, running from 1936 to 1943, was always intended to break Versailles entirely.

• 3. Raeder, Dönitz, and the Split Vision

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  In September 1920, Konteradmiral William Michaelis issued a memorandum defining what the new Reichsmarine was actually for: primarily coastal defense, oriented against France, with Britain expected to stay neutral. That framing shaped construction priorities for a decade and a half. When Vizeadmiral Erich Raeder took command of the Reichsmarine in 1928, he brought a different instinct. Raeder had served in World War I as chief of staff to Vizeadmiral Franz von Hipper, and he had watched the German surface fleet rendered useless by British naval dominance. His conclusion was not to abandon surface ships but to use them differently: as long-range commerce raiders that could strangle British trade without ever risking a pitched battle. This was the philosophy that drove every draft of what became Plan Z. Meanwhile, Kapitän zur See Karl Dönitz had taken command of the U-boat arm, and he pushed in a completely different direction. Dönitz called for unrestricted submarine warfare and wolfpack tactics to overwhelm convoy defenses, a direct return to the approach that had nearly worked in World War I. The two men were not simply arguing tactics; they were arguing over what kind of navy Germany needed to fight a war against Britain. The Munich crisis of September 1938 made that war feel inevitable, and on the 14th of October 1938, Generalfeldmarschall Hermann Göring announced a massive armament program intended to be ready by 1942. Hitler told Raeder not to worry: war would not come until 1948.

• 4. From Plan X to Plan Z

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  Raeder's first draft of the new naval construction program, called Plan X, centered on panzerschiffe, long-range cruisers, and U-boats to attack British trade. A trimmed revision was renamed Plan Y. Hitler rejected both. What Hitler wanted was a balanced battle fleet strong enough to meet the Royal Navy directly, and the plan that satisfied him was Plan Z, which he approved on the 27th of January 1939. The approved version called for ten battleships, three battlecruisers, four aircraft carriers, fifteen panzerschiffe, five heavy cruisers, thirteen light cruisers, twenty-two scout cruisers, sixty-eight destroyers, and ninety torpedo boats. Total: 230 ships. The six H-class battleships at the core of the new construction were to be supplemented by three O-class battlecruisers, twelve P-class panzerschiffe, and four aircraft carriers. To house such a fleet, Germany would need to enlarge dry docks at Wilhelmshaven and Hamburg, and much of the island of Rügen was to be removed to create a harbor in the Baltic. Plan Z was granted the highest industrial priority of any project in Germany. Further revisions to cruiser numbers were approved on the 1st of March 1939. Raeder privately retained his own strategic preference, planning to use the battleships and carriers not in direct fleet confrontations but as escorts for the panzerschiffe and light cruisers attacking British merchant shipping. On the 27th of July 1939, he revised the plan again to cancel all twelve of the P-class panzerschiffe, before the broader program had even begun in earnest.

• 5. War Before the Keel Is Laid

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  Between the approval of Plan Z in January 1939 and the outbreak of war with Britain on the 3rd of September 1939, exactly two of the plan's major ships were laid down: a pair of H-class battleships. Material for the other four H-class ships had been gathered in preparation, but no construction had started. Components for the three O-class battlecruisers were in production, but their keels had not been touched. Two M-class cruisers were laid down, then cancelled in late September. The war had arrived eight or nine years ahead of Hitler's assurances to Raeder. Almost every ship in the plan existed only on paper. The construction program was shelved to redirect manufacturing capacity to more pressing wartime needs. The ships that did serve Germany in the war were the ones ordered before Plan Z: Bismarck and Tirpitz, the heavy cruisers Blücher and Prinz Eugen, the Scharnhorst-class battleships, the Deutschland-class panzerschiffe. Work on one incomplete ship was cancelled definitively in 1943, after Hitler abandoned the surface fleet following the Battle of the Barents Sea. The grand ambition of 797 ships by 1948 produced, in terms of new construction, nothing at all.

• 6. Commerce Raiders and Their Limits

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  Deutschland and Graf Spee, two of the three Deutschland-class panzerschiffe, were already at sea when war began. Deutschland found little success. Graf Spee was hunted down and trapped; her commander scuttled her after the Battle of the River Plate in December 1939. The most effective surface raider Germany ever deployed was Admiral Scheer, which operated independently from October 1940 to March 1941 and captured or sank seventeen ships, the single best result of any German capital ship during the entire war. Scharnhorst and Gneisenau conducted Operation Berlin, a sortie into the Atlantic in early 1941. Bismarck and Prinz Eugen followed with Operation Rheinübung in May 1941. Bismarck sank the British battlecruiser Hood but was herself sunk three days later. That loss pushed Hitler to forbid further Atlantic sorties, and the remaining heavy ships were moved to Norway to threaten the Murmansk convoys rather than interdict merchant trade. The surface raider strategy Raeder had built his entire planning philosophy around was effectively finished by the middle of 1941.

• 7. The U-Boat Deficit

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  Admiral Karl Dönitz had calculated that 300 U-boats were the minimum needed to win a commerce war against Britain. At the outbreak of war in September 1939, he had only a few dozen. The resources poured into Plan Z's surface program help explain why. The two Scharnhorst-class battleships cost close to 150 million reichsmarks each. Each Bismarck-class ship cost nearly 250 million reichsmarks. For the combined price of those four battleships, Germany could have built more than a hundred additional Type VII U-boats. The submarine force only reached Dönitz's 300-boat threshold in 1943. By that year, the campaign in the North Atlantic had already been decided against Germany. The shift in strategic priority from surface fleet to submarines, which was the correct call by any measure of the war at sea, was not made definitively until 1943, four years into a conflict that had been lost at sea well before then.

• 8. The Fuel No One Counted

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  The planners of Plan Z had satisfied themselves that the ships could be built, given enough time. They had not seriously asked whether the fleet could operate once built. Fuel consumption for the Kriegsmarine was projected to more than quadruple between 1936 and the program's 1948 completion date, rising from 1.4 million tons to approximately 6 million tons annually. To maintain even a year's worth of wartime fuel reserves, Germany would have needed to build roughly 9.6 million tons of storage capacity. Against those requirements, Germany's projected domestic production by 1948 stood at less than 2 million tons of oil and 1.34 million tons of diesel fuel. That production had to be shared with the Heer, the Luftwaffe, and the civilian economy. The arithmetic was impossible, and no serious effort had been made to resolve it before Hitler signed the plan on the 27th of January 1939. Plan Z was approved as a political document, not an engineering one, and the fuel problem alone was almost certainly insurmountable regardless of whether the ships had ever been built.