![]() ![]() Other factors were also involved.Ĭaptain Hans Langsdorff scuttled Graf Spee outside Montevideo, Uruguay harbor on December 12, 1939, rather than face a feeble British flotilla he believed was much more powerful than it actually was. However, the construction effort was nowhere near completion with the outbreak of hostilities in 1939. ![]() Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, chief of the Kriegsmarine, initiated his Z-Plan for building the German surface fleet during the 1930s. Still, in many instances these warships failed to live up to expectations, largely because they were so few in number. German capital ships were at large in the Atlantic during wartime, and the Royal Navy was hard pressed to bring them to bay while simultaneously dealing with menacing packs of U-boats that continually raided merchant shipping. Among these was the battlecruiser KMS Scharnhorst, one of Nazi Germany’s new generation of fighting ships that were too fast to be kept bottled up in the North Sea like their Imperial predecessors had been 25 years earlier. As a result, new battleships, battlecruisers, pocket battleships, and heavy and light cruisers were built during the 1930s. Because the victorious Allies had destroyed Imperial Germany’s fleet after World War I, Adolf Hitler had no choice but to construct a new navy after he came to power. ![]()
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