| ??? 09/02/09 21:17 Read: times |
#168711 - Please do get your facts straight, Per Responding to: ???'s previous message |
Per Westermark said:
Before they got sunk, both Bismarck and Tirpitz managed quite well to scare the allied convoys almost to death. They took very, very long routes around locations where Bismarck or Tirpitz was rumoured to be, sometimes delaying a convoy by one or more weeks. And the allied forces had to invest tremendous resources to try to track down the two ships (and keep their convoys alive). Yerwhat? Bismarck was sunk on her first mission and Tirpitz only sailed three missions. Hardly 'scaring to death'. The smaller battlecruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau were much more effective. U-boats, anyone? No, I don't think you should count Bismarck or Tirpitz as big and blunt monuments instead of very efficient war machines. Tirpitz spent almost her entire career lying about in Norwegian fjords, because the sinking of Bismarck had proven that large battleships were singularly unsuited for modern warfare at sea. The advent of the torpedo and the naval mine, not to mention aircraft carriers had rendered the battleship irrelevant. This was already predicted at the start of World War I and was widely debated during the 1920's. That, plus the fact that battleships have never had a decisive role in any 20th century conflict, leads me to believe that the battleships of WW II were indeed not much more than "mine's bigger than yours" type of blunt monuments. Rob. |
