Type 1936 Destroyer

German destroyer design between the wars went in one direction: up. The Type 1934 and the improved Type 1936 were larger than British or American contemporaries, carried five 12.7 cm guns against the four of a standard Allied boat, and mounted eight torpedo tubes. On a specification sheet they beat anything of their size afloat.

The reason was strategic. A navy that could not match the Royal Navy in capital ships intended to use destroyers offensively — for minelaying off the English coast, for raiding, for escorting the surface raiders into the Atlantic — and those jobs argued for big, fast, heavily armed ships with the endurance to operate away from home.

The ambition ran ahead of the engineering. To get high speed and endurance out of a destroyer hull, German designers adopted high-pressure steam plants that were, in the 1930s, at the edge of what could be built reliably — and in service they were not reliable at all. Boiler tube failures, feed-water problems and turbine trouble were routine.

The practical effect was that a class designed for aggressive independent operations frequently could not be relied on to be available, or to complete a long passage without something breaking. In a small force, that matters enormously: a navy with twenty destroyers cannot afford several of them to be alongside at any given moment, and Germany consistently could.

There was a second, deeper problem behind it. Germany had begun rebuilding a fleet late and was short of the one thing destroyers consume most — fuel oil — and short of trained engine-room personnel for plants this demanding. A complicated machinery installation is a reasonable choice for a navy with depth in both; Germany had depth in neither, having rebuilt from a service the Treaty of Versailles had capped at 15,000 officers and men.

The invasion of Norway put ten German destroyers — half the entire force — into Narvik, deep inside Ofotfjord, carrying mountain troops. They took the port. Then the tanker that was supposed to refuel them failed to arrive, and ten destroyers found themselves 2,000 km from home, low on fuel, in a fjord with one exit.

The fuel failure was not bad luck but a symptom. The Narvik group had been given a single tanker, Jan Wellem, which could refuel two destroyers at a time and took hours to do it; a second tanker was intercepted and never arrived. Ships that burn oil at the rate these did could not simply wait, and by the morning of 10 April the squadron had spent a day and a night taking turns at a hose instead of getting out to sea.

On the morning of 10 April five British destroyers came up the fjord in a snowstorm and attacked. Two German destroyers were sunk and others damaged, for two British destroyers lost; the German commodore was killed. It was a violent, close-range action in confined water, and it left the survivors trapped, damaged and still short of fuel.

Three days later the Royal Navy came back and did not leave the job half done. The battleship HMS Warspite entered the fjord with nine destroyers — a capital ship in water where she could barely turn — and her aircraft and guns methodically destroyed what was left.

By the end of 13 April 1940 all ten German destroyers at Narvik had been sunk or scuttled by their own crews. Germany had lost half its destroyer force in three days, in a campaign it won on land. The Kriegsmarine never recovered the numbers, and for the rest of the war its destroyers operated as a scarce asset to be conserved rather than a force to be used.

The survivors spent the rest of the war in a shrinking set of roles: escorting the heavy ships in Norwegian waters, minelaying, screening the Channel Dash in 1942, and the Baltic evacuations at the end. They fought in the Barents Sea on the last day of 1942, an action that went badly enough to convince Hitler to order the surface fleet scrapped.

Two of them died covering the German response to D-Day. On 9 June 1944 the 8th Zerstörer-Flottille was sent against the Normandy supply route and ran into a British, Canadian and Polish destroyer flotilla off Ushant: Z-32, a Type 1936A, was driven ashore and destroyed after a running fight, and the ex-Dutch ZH-1 was torpedoed at point-blank range. The last German surface attempt to reach the invasion beaches was stopped by destroyers in a night gun action, which is exactly the fight the type had been designed for and exactly the fight it kept losing.

The type also produced one late variant worth noting: the Type 1936A, nicknamed the “Narvik” class, which up-gunned to 15 cm weapons — guns of light-cruiser calibre on a destroyer, and too heavy for the hull to use comfortably in a seaway. It is the same instinct that produced the original design, pushed one step past the point where it worked.

The numbers never recovered because they could not. German destroyer construction after 1940 was slow, and the yards that might have replaced the losses were building U-boats instead — a rational choice given how the naval war was actually going, and one that left the surface fleet permanently without the escorts it needed to operate.

The final operation was also the largest. From January 1945 the Kriegsmarine ran Operation Hannibal, evacuating well over a million people — civilians and soldiers, with estimates running as high as two million — westwards across the Baltic from East Prussia, Danzig and Courland ahead of the Red Army. It was the biggest seaborne evacuation of the war, several times the scale of Dunkirk, and it was escorted by whatever was still afloat: a handful of destroyers, torpedo boats and minesweepers. The surviving German destroyers spent the last months of the war doing the one thing nobody had designed them for, and doing it usefully.

The German destroyers were the best-armed of their generation and among the least useful, and the two facts are connected. Weight and complexity went into guns and speed rather than into reliability and numbers, in a navy that could afford neither losses nor breakdowns.

Narvik settles the argument. Ten of them were sent to hold a port at the end of a 2,000 km supply line with no fuel arrangements that worked, and all ten were destroyed by an enemy that could replace its losses many times over. The ships were not the problem; the strategy that put them there, and a fleet too small to absorb the result, were.

• Roger Chesneau (ed.), Conway’s All the World’s Fighting Ships 1922–1946 (Conway Maritime Press).
• M. J. Whitley, German Destroyers of World War Two (Arms & Armour Press).
• Geirr H. Haarr, The German Invasion of Norway, April 1940 (Seaforth Publishing).