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Post by oldpop2000 on Dec 3, 2018 13:46:08 GMT -6
But the only real advantage to raiding in the Indian Ocean would be to disrupt British shipping and they have the bases to send in a task force of intercepting armoured cruisers or battlecruisers. Disrupting the shipping of other countries would be difficult as everything else would come around South Africa or across the Pacific. Reaching those routes would be just as difficult from Eritrea as it would from mainland Italy in terms of enemy bases passed.
Presumably, in a war with Italy, the Suez Canal would be off-limits anyway, so what's the point?
In my opinion, Italy would be better off with heavier self-sufficient raiders in Southeast Asia or the West Coast of Africa. Actually, the Indian Ocean was not patrolled by the British very much from the Beginning of the war through 1941 due to losses and the movement of warships to other areas. It was a prime area for surface raiders like Atlantis, Widder and Pinquin. When the British started going around the southern tip of Africa to avoid the Med, the area was ripe with merchants.
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Post by rob06waves2018 on Dec 3, 2018 13:58:03 GMT -6
For Germany, yes because they had German East Africa and German Southwest Africa which are much closer to the shipping lanes near South Africa and the Strait of Madagascar. They could also use Vichy ports.
Italy on its own, however, could not support this and the likelihood would be that the British provide old-yet-more-powerful escorts to protect the convoys. With the Suez Canal closed, the only shipping withing reach of Italy would be Egypt and East Africa, which, in the war, were self-sufficient. Most of the shipping to my understanding was of war supplies, convoys of which were heavily escorted. Without Germany pre-occupying a large proportion of the fleet, Italy would have been almost powerless to intercept these.
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Post by oldpop2000 on Dec 3, 2018 14:00:40 GMT -6
For Germany, yes because they had German East Africa and German Southwest Africa which are much closer to the shipping lanes near South Africa and the Strait of Madagascar. They could also use Vichy ports. Italy on its own, however, could not support this and the likelihood would be that the British provide old-yet-more-powerful escorts to protect the convoys. With the Suez Canal closed, the only shipping withing reach of Italy would be Egypt and East Africa, which, in the war, were self-sufficient. Most of the shipping to my understanding was of war supplies, convoys of which were heavily escorted. Without Germany pre-occupying a large proportion of the fleet, Italy would have been almost powerless to intercept these. In the game environment, I would agree that without Germany's help in Europe, most of this would not work. I like to play Italy and I might try this. However, in history, It would be successful. All this historical conjecture is based on a virtual history .
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Post by rob06waves2018 on Dec 3, 2018 14:08:55 GMT -6
Let's face it, vitual history is easy to analyse compared to actual history!
With individual counties, it is plain to see that Britain (or later the USA) would win. In the real world, alliances were messy and complex.
Historically, the Axis Powers had the upper hand when it came to raiding as they hade some bases to operate from but they didn't have to ship as much material in vunerable convoys as the Allies did. Incidently, this is why the U-boat was so effective.
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Post by oldpop2000 on Dec 3, 2018 14:12:43 GMT -6
Let's face it, vitual history is easy to analyse compared to actual history! With individual counties, it is plain to see that Britain (or later the USA) would win. In the real world, alliances were messy and complex. Historically, the Axis Powers had the upper hand when it came to raiding as they hade some bases to operate from but they didn't have to ship as much material in vunerable convoys as the Allies did. Incidently, this is why the U-boat was so effective. Yes it is.
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Post by archelaos on Dec 3, 2018 15:27:31 GMT -6
That's extremely debatable. A typical Kriegsmarine AMC raider was armed with six 15cm SK L/45 guns pulled from the antiquated predreadnought battleships left to Germany by the Treaty of Versailles, which had a rate of fire of around 5 to 7 shells per minute and fired a ~45kg HE shell, with the 15cm guns distributed in a manner such that at best three to four of them might be capable of bearing on any given target. The USN 5"/38 Mark 12 was a modern weapon in 1935, capable of firing either 12 to 15 or 15 to 22 ~25kg shells per minute depending on mounting, and all six of the 5"/38s on my cruiser are capable of bearing on the broadside. That gives the Kriegsmarine AMC raider a weight of broadside of around 135kg or 180kg and my cruiser a weight of broadside of around 150kg, and my cruiser can - at least in theory - fire its main battery guns two to four times faster.
Moreover, while the 15cm SK L/45 as used on Kriegsmarine AMC raiders does have a theoretical range advantage over the 5"/38 Mark 12, a disguised raider is unlikely to open fire at maximum range, and even if it did my cruiser's belt, deck, and turret armor has a zone of immunity against 6" gunfire between about 10,000 and 20,000 yards, and probably has better fire control for long-range gunnery engagements than the raider does, though as the belt and deck armor only covers about two thirds of the length of the cruiser it isn't quite as close to immune to the AMC's armament as it could be.
For that matter, HMS Scylla and HMS Charybdis, the Dido-class cruisers which ended up with eight 4.5" guns instead of eight or ten 5.25" guns, might also disagree with you, as might the Russian Svetlana and Admiral Nakhimov classes, which despite having 15 120mm guns could only bring 8 of them to bear on the broadside.
As long as those 6 inchers would be hitting, they would deal damage you can't accept on your raider. Just like Kormoran's guns ripped Sydney apart. While they had lower RoF, they also had 20-25% bigger bursting charge than US 5 inches so every hit could result in more damage and while armour may protect vitals, you won't run from chasing cruisers with bow shot up (and it is unarmoured, just like 2/3s of freeboard in belt area).
Ok, so Scylla and Charybdis are evenly matched against your ship. Just like Tribal class DDs (8x4,7in), Grom class DD (7x4,7in), or JKLMN classes (6x4,7in). Svietlana had 15x130mm (5.1in), so even with only 8 on broadside that's 25% more throw weight than your cruiser.
5 inchers lack the power to quickly eliminate enemy ship while it needs just one lucky hit to knock out director, put aircraft on fire or slaughter commanding officers on the bridge. And lucky hits have a strangely big chance to happen in those occasions After all ss Stephen Hopkins managed to sink Stier with a single 4in pop gun...
My point is: big guns command respect and suggest ship carrying them is impervious to your puny defensive guns. And this means most of potential targets would neither fight nor flee. On the other hand, seeing on enemy ship the same guns you have on board, you start asking yourself "Maybe I have a chance?" "Maybe my sacrifice would help others?" and then miracles tend to happen...
But my main point is that if we assume we do not want to engage enemy warships ever, as you do, AMC raider would do just as well as full blown surface raider at what, 1/10th the cost?
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Post by aeson on Dec 3, 2018 15:27:47 GMT -6
But the only real advantage to raiding in the Indian Ocean would be to disrupt British shipping and they have the bases to send in a task force of intercepting armoured cruisers or battlecruisers. Disrupting the shipping of other countries would be difficult as everything else would come around South Africa or across the Pacific. Reaching those routes would be just as difficult from Eritrea as it would from mainland Italy in terms of enemy bases passed. I am not aware of any particular reason to believe that only British shipping used the Suez Canal in the first half of the 20th Century. Anything moving from Southeast Asia, India, and much of East Africa would've had a much shorter journey to Europe by going through Canal rather than around the Cape, and I very much doubt that canal fees would have been sufficiently high as to make the shorter voyage less economical, so at the very least I'd expect to see French and Dutch traffic passing through the Canal in addition to British.
That said, I agree that the route through the Mediterranean would almost certainly be effectively closed to shipping flying the flag of a power at war with Italy. I'm less certain that the Canal itself would be effectively closed; Italy did not have a particularly strong naval presence in the Indian Ocean, Gulf of Aden, and Red Sea despite its control of Eritrea and Italian Somaliland and its eventual invasion of Abyssinia, and depending on who exactly is at war with Italy the Regia Marina might not be able to close off access from Port Said to other parts of the Eastern Mediterranean. They did. They were also almost completely unsuccessful as commerce raiders, partly due to the overwhelmingly-superior Royal Navy presence in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, partly due to the lack of merchant traffic passing through the area since the Allies had diverted most of it around the Cape, and partly due to Italy's inability to supply its forces in Italian East Africa as long as Britain held Egypt.
That said, in large part due to the aformentioned supply issues, I do not feel that I could reasonably advocate any significantly heavier commitment of forces to the area. Italy cannot reasonably expect to maintain significant forces in Italian East Africa in a war against virtually any other naval power as long as Britain holds Egypt except at British sufferance, and as long as Italy itself remains a formidable Mediterranean naval power it is very unlikely that any particularly significant amount of traffic would attempt the passage through the Mediterranean except under heavy escort, so unless Italy intended to challenge Britain there'd be very little point in basing significant naval forces in East Africa - and if it did base significant naval forces in East Africa and attempted to challenge Britain it'd be on the clock to take Egypt before its East African forces were essentially neutralized by lack of supplies, even if not actually defeated by British forces.
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Post by axe99 on Dec 3, 2018 15:37:15 GMT -6
But the only real advantage to raiding in the Indian Ocean would be to disrupt British shipping and they have the bases to send in a task force of intercepting armoured cruisers or battlecruisers. Disrupting the shipping of other countries would be difficult as everything else would come around South Africa or across the Pacific. Reaching those routes would be just as difficult from Eritrea as it would from mainland Italy in terms of enemy bases passed.
Presumably, in a war with Italy, the Suez Canal would be off-limits anyway, so what's the point?
In my opinion, Italy would be better off with heavier self-sufficient raiders in Southeast Asia or the West Coast of Africa. Actually, the Indian Ocean was not patrolled by the British very much from the Beginning of the war through 1941 due to losses and the movement of warships to other areas. It was a prime area for surface raiders like Atlantis, Widder and Pinquin. When the British started going around the southern tip of Africa to avoid the Med, the area was ripe with merchants. There were British cruisers on station during this period, and iirc one of their smaller aircraft carriers at the end of the Red Sea or thereabouts. That said, iirc they never got convoys going in the same way they were in the Atlantic, which enabled Japanese (and some German) subs to have some success off South-East and East Africa.
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Post by oldpop2000 on Dec 3, 2018 16:43:07 GMT -6
During the early stages of the war, especially during the hunt for the Graf Spee, the British had Dorsetshire and the Cornwall in the Ceylon Area, Malaya and Glorious in the Aden area, along with Ramillies. Ark Royal and Renown on their way to Madagascar. Kent and Suffren patrolling off of Sumatra and Hermes with 2 French Cruisers.
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Post by aeson on Dec 3, 2018 18:54:00 GMT -6
Kormoran wrecked Sydney in large part because Sydney rather incautiously closed to within 1500 meters of Kormoran without positively identify the German ship. Had Sydney pursued Kormoran more cautiously, it is very unlikely that Kormoran would have done nearly so much damage to the cruiser. Beyond that, there is very little reason for a raiding cruiser - as opposed to a patrolling cruiser such as Sydney - to risk approaching an unidentified vessel so closely; a raider - especially one belonging to a naval power as much weaker than its opponent as Germany was compared to Britain - can usually expect most of the ships it encounters to be hostile or at best neutral, whereas most of the ships that a patrolling cruiser belonging to a dominant naval power such as Britain might encounter can be expected to be friendly or at worst neutral.
And yet Stier and the other eight similarly-armed and equally-unarmored German auxiliary cruisers managed to sink over 130 Allied merchant ships in about two years of operations, despite many of them having similar - or in some cases superior - armament to Stephen Hopkins.
The success of the unarmored and lightly-armed auxiliary cruisers such as Stier against poorly-armed merchantmen and the occasional auxiliary cruiser undercuts your argument that a cruiser such as my Prince de Neufchatel would be ineffective as a surface raider; its armament is at least approximately as good - almost certainly better, realistically speaking, considering that a cruiser is likely a better gun platform and is more likely to have sufficiently-good fire control systems to make use of the theoretical range of its guns than an auxiliary cruiser - and having any armor at all as well as a better-subdivided and likely more strongly built hull makes it likely to be significantly more resilient against gunfire than any similarly-large auxiliary cruiser. In this I mostly agree with you, but for some reason this thread has focused almost exclusively on purpose-built cruiser-raiders, which in my opinion have been cost-ineffective since warships went from wooden hulls and sails to iron or steel hulls and steam.
As to the idea that a large, heavily-armed purpose-built cruiser-raider would necessarily be better than a small, lightly-armed purpose-built cruiser-raider, I do not agree. Even the British Royal and United States Navies combined had a limited number of ships suitable for hunting raiders and escorting convoys, and as such they can only form so many hunter-killer and escort groups out of them, and still need formations for other purposes. Moreover, there is a minimum strength of ships which can be used for an escort or hunter-killer group regardless of the strength of the raider being hunted or guarded against and a minimum number of hunter-killer and escort groups necessary for an effective response, so while there is certainly some potential for a heavier raider to draw a larger response there is also a relatively high floor on the minimum effective response that can be made to a lighter raider.
Looking at the list of ships involved in the hunt for the Graf Spee that oldpop posted, I don't see much else that the three battleships, two battlecruisers, and five aircraft carriers would be doing at the time other than patrolling and escorting convoys to discourage attack by surface raiders or sitting in port to reduce exposure to submarine attack, and I doubt if a number of cruisers much less than the thirteen on the list could have given adequate coverage over the area involved. Ramillies and Malaya were too slow to chase Graf Spee, so even though they're included on the list of ships involved in the hunt for Graf Spee which oldpop provided it's unlikely that they were at sea for any reason other than to discourage attacks on convoys in their vicinity or on Glorious, and even if Britain and France substituted small light cruisers similar to the British Leander class for all nine heavy cruisers named in the list that's still thirteen cruisers drawn out in response to a single ~7500t cruiser-raider. As returns on investment go, I wouldn't be inclined to say Graf Spee did particularly better.
Also, an alternative mini-cruiser raider: Tonnage was provided for a hangar and floatplanes since the real cruiser it's loosely based upon apparently managed to fit two and hangar facilities.
(Yes, it's slower than archeleos' Tatar, but a 30kn cruiser with oil-fired steam turbines isn't going to out-run a ~32kn cruiser with oil-fired steam turbines either.)
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Post by oldpop2000 on Dec 3, 2018 19:02:23 GMT -6
Kormoran wrecked Sydney in large part because Sydney rather incautiously closed to within 1500 meters of Kormoran without positively identify the German ship. Had Sydney pursued Kormoran more cautiously, it is very unlikely that Kormoran would have done nearly so much damage to the cruiser. Beyond that, there is very little reason for a raiding cruiser - as opposed to a patrolling cruiser such as Sydney - to risk approaching an unidentified vessel so closely; a raider - especially one belonging to a naval power as much weaker than its opponent as Germany was compared to Britain - can usually expect most of the ships it encounters to be hostile or at best neutral, whereas most of the ships that a patrolling cruiser belonging to a dominant naval power such as Britain might encounter can be expected to be friendly or at worst neutral.
And yet Stier and the other eight similarly-armed and equally-unarmored German auxiliary cruisers managed to sink over 130 Allied merchant ships in about two years of operations, despite many of them having similar - or in some cases superior - armament to Stephen Hopkins.
The success of the unarmored and lightly-armed auxiliary cruisers such as Stier against poorly-armed merchantmen and the occasional auxiliary cruiser undercuts your argument that a cruiser such as my Prince de Neufchatel would be ineffective as a surface raider; its armament is at least approximately as good - almost certainly better, realistically speaking, considering that a cruiser is likely a better gun platform and is more likely to have sufficiently-good fire control systems to make use of the theoretical range of its guns than an auxiliary cruiser - and having any armor at all as well as a better-subdivided and likely more strongly built hull makes it likely to be significantly more resilient against gunfire than any similarly-large auxiliary cruiser. In this I mostly agree with you, but for some reason this thread has focused almost exclusively on purpose-built cruiser-raiders, which in my opinion have been cost-ineffective since warships went from wooden hulls and sails to iron or steel hulls and steam.
As to the idea that a large, heavily-armed purpose-built cruiser-raider would necessarily be better than a small, lightly-armed purpose-built cruiser-raider, I do not agree. Even the British Royal and United States Navies combined had a limited number of ships suitable for hunting raiders and escorting convoys, and as such they can only form so many hunter-killer and escort groups out of them, and still need formations for other purposes. Moreover, there is a minimum strength of ships which can be used for an escort or hunter-killer group regardless of the strength of the raider being hunted or guarded against and a minimum number of hunter-killer and escort groups necessary for an effective response, so while there is certainly some potential for a heavier raider to draw a larger response there is also a relatively high floor on the minimum effective response that can be made to a lighter raider.
Looking at the list of ships involved in the hunt for the Graf Spee that oldpop posted, I don't see much else that the three battleships, two battlecruisers, and five aircraft carriers would be doing at the time other than patrolling and escorting convoys to discourage attack by surface raiders or sitting in port to reduce exposure to submarine attack, and I doubt if a number of cruisers much less than the thirteen on the list could have given adequate coverage over the area involved. Ramillies and Malaya were too slow to chase Graf Spee, so even though they're included on the list of ships involved in the hunt for Graf Spee which oldpop provided it's unlikely that they were at sea for any reason other than to discourage attacks on convoys in their vicinity or on Glorious, and even if Britain and France substituted small light cruisers similar to the British Leander class for all nine heavy cruisers named in the list that's still thirteen cruisers drawn out in response to a single ~7500t cruiser-raider. As returns on investment go, I wouldn't be inclined to say Graf Spee did particularly better.
Also, an alternative mini-cruiser raider: Tonnage was provided for a hangar and floatplanes since the real cruiser it's loosely based upon apparently managed to fit two and hangar facilities.
(Yes, it's slower than archeleos' Tatar, but a 30kn cruiser with oil-fired steam turbines isn't going to out-run a ~32kn cruiser with oil-fired steam turbines either.)
My compliments, this is a nice small design and cost effective which is exactly what is appropriate. As I have said, or should have if I haven't, since the Days of Sail, surface raiders have not been particularly successful except to draw enemy ships away from more important task, as the German Raiders actually did.
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AiryW
Full Member
Posts: 183
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Post by AiryW on Dec 3, 2018 21:45:11 GMT -6
Historically, the Axis Powers had the upper hand when it came to raiding as they hade some bases to operate from but they didn't have to ship as much material in vunerable convoys as the Allies did. Incidently, this is why the U-boat was so effective. I seem to recall that the Axis lost more shipping then the Allies did in WWII. However I was unable to confirm if this was true because it's basically impossible to google axis shipping losses except for Japan. No google, if I type "German merchant marine" I am not asking for information about uboats. The only information I could find was painfully indirect. As best as I can tell Japan lost about 10 million tons, Italy 2 million before their surrender but the figure for the rest of the Axis including Germany is really hard to say, not the least because the Germans looted so many ships from not only the people they conquered but also their former allies. However it seems very plausible to me that Axis tonnage losses were more then the ~21 million tons the allies lost. And while the absolute numbers are hard to pin down it's certainly true that the Axis powers lost a far, far higher proportion of their shipping. And in terms of effectiveness, that definitely goes to the American submarines. They sunk one third the tonnage but they did so with one quarter as many submarines in a shorter period of time and with 1/15th the losses. This suggests to me that the means of effectiveness is actually having a wide variety of options. If you can only attack with submarines, submarines will be sent on some missions with low effect. If you have alternative options you wont send the submarines out on some missions.
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Post by oldpop2000 on Dec 4, 2018 0:14:18 GMT -6
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Post by skyhawk on Dec 4, 2018 0:45:15 GMT -6
I don't suppose there are any maps or charts indicating where a majority of these were lost?
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Post by oldpop2000 on Dec 4, 2018 0:57:01 GMT -6
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