Innovative she may have been, but Deutschland was not a lucky ship. On 24th August 1939, just prior to the outbreak of war, and three days after Graf Spee sailed on her fateful voyage, Deutschland departed Wilhelmshaven for her ‘waiting area’ off the southern tip of Greenland. On the outbreak of hostilities with Britain she proceeded to her ‘hunting ground’ in the North Atlantic between the Azores and the North American coast. In early October she sought prey in the busy Caribbean shipping lanes, and on the 5th, some distance east of Bermuda and taking care to remain outside the Panamerican Neutrality Zone, she sank the British SS Stonegate, 5044 gross tons. Off Cape Race on 9 October she captured the steam tanker City of Flint, which, it transpired, was United States owned. This was something of an embarrassment as the United States was at that time neutral, and the German regime was not yet ready to antagonise another potential enemy. This embarrassment was compounded when the officer sent from Deutschland with a prize crew sailed the vessel to two neutral ports, Tromsoe and Murmansk, where she should have been impounded for the duration of the war; however, she was subsequently allowed to return to the United States. On 14 October Deutschland sank the Norwegian SS Lorenz W. Hansen, 1918 gross tons, east of the northern tip of Newfoundland.
Following the Battle of the River Plate and the sinking of Graf Spee, Hitler began to develop that mental twitch which always seemed to affect him when German heavy ships were operational, and therefore at risk. He became extremely concerned at the possible effect on public morale should a warship with the name Deutschland be sunk, and she was therefore ordered home, arriving at Gotenhafen on 15 November subsequently to be renamed Lützow.
Concerned for the continuation of essential iron ore supplies from northern Sweden via Norway, and aware how useful Norwegian ports would be to the Kriegsmarine, Hitler ordered the invasion of Norway and Denmark. On 9 April 1940 the troops went in, and for her first sortie under her new name Lützow was ordered north in support. Off the Skaw on 11 April she was hit in the stern by a 21 in torpedo from the British submarine HMS Spearfish,[162] the damage proving to be serious, and almost fatal, for she nearly foundered while under tow to Kiel. In dry dock her stern was stripped down and completely rebuilt, the repairs and subsequent trials taking over a year to complete.
Operationally effective again at the beginning of June 1941, Lützow was once more ordered north to Norwegian waters (something of a nemesis for this ship). Off Egersund, en route to Trondheim, she was hit amidships by an 18 in torpedo from a solitary RAF Beaufort torpedo bomber. Developing a list, she altered course and headed through the Skagerrak, proceeding at 16 knots back to Kiel. Entering dry dock immediately she remained under repair until mid-November 1941, when she left for trials in the eastern Baltic.
May 1942 saw Lützow once more in Norwegian waters, this time for anti-convoy operations. Ordered to join her sister ship Admiral Scheer, the battleship Tirpitz and heavy cruiser Admiral Hipper, for an attack on convoy PQ17, she grounded in fog while leaving Ofotfjord bound for Altenfjord.[163]
Having repaired in Trondheim she spent some time in the Baltic, but by December 1942 she was back in Norwegian waters for operations against Russia-bound convoys in the Barents Sea.
Dr Erich Raeder became Commander-in-Chief of the German navy on 1 October 1928, and managed to retain his post under the Nazi regime. Raeder was a sound naval strategist who appreciated the complexities of sea power, but he was not prepared to indulge in the manoeuvrings and political machinations necessary to achieve prominence at the Nazi court, concerning himself only with the affairs of the Kriegsmarine. As a result he never obtained admittance to Hitler’s inner circle of confidants and advisers, a factor which may have had a negative effect on the ability of the Kriegsmarine to wage the kind of war which would be necessary, since Hitler’s attitude to his navy was at best ambivalent. He was fascinated by the big warships as military hardware, appreciating the prestige they brought to the Reich from abroad, but his conviction that capital ships and aircraft carriers were the ‘playthings of the decadent democracies’[164] ensured pre-war emphasis on the production of U-boats for the navy and aircraft for the Luftwaffe. Both achieved much, but Raeder believed that the addition of aircraft carriers and more surface raiders could have stretched the Royal Navy to breaking point.
Underlying Hitler’s dealings with Raeder were his suspicions concerning the officers and men of the Kriegsmarine – after all, had not the sailors of the High Seas Fleet mutinied in 1918? In his eyes this constituted a fatal and unforgivable stab in the back for the German nation. By 1938 Hitler appeared to have come around to Raeder’s way of thinking, inviting proposals for an expansion of the fleet and assuring Raeder, as he had done previously, that there would be no war with Britain until 1944 at the earliest. The result was the Z Plan, in which Raeder envisaged a balanced fleet of capital ships, aircraft carriers, U-boats and support vessels, achievable by 1944. By 1939 however, Hitler became convinced that there was nothing to be gained by waiting. Any improvement in German arms would be offset by increased military preparations now being put in hand by her enemies.
When war came in 1939 the Kriegsmarine consequently found itself caught between two stools. On the one hand there were not enough U-boats in service to cut Britain’s supply routes, and on the other the surface fleet was nowhere near ready for fleet actions with the Royal Navy. U-boat production was increased during the war years, and although for Admiral Karl Doenitz, Commander-in-Chief of the U-boat arm there were never enough, for the Allied merchant and naval seamen who had to take them on, there were more than sufficient.
In commerce-raiding terms much was expected of Lützow and her sister vessels, but other designs were not so suitable. Excessive fuel consumption, limited cruising range and unreliable engines, for instance, seriously hampered the heavy cruiser Admiral Hipper.
The outbreak of war saw Admiral Hipper at Kiel, where she remained, with the exception of brief visits to Pillau in October 1939 and Hamburg in December 1939, until 31 January 1940. Having dry-docked at Wilhelmshaven on 10 February she sailed in company with the battlecruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau on her first operational sortie, to intercept Allied shipping leaving the north Scottish islands and the Clyde. The operation was compromised two days out by an encounter with a British submarine, and the force returned to Wilhelmshaven.
Supporting the invasion of Norway in April 1940, Admiral Hipper sailed north to land troops and equipment at Trondheim. Also in the area, the ageing British battlecruiser Renown and four destroyers were similarly bound for Norway. The destroyer Glowworm became detached from the squadron in fog while searching for a man overboard, and on the morning of 8 April sighted Admiral Hipper and supporting vessels. While trying to make her escape, Glowworm came under accurate fire from the German heavy cruiser and suffered several hits. With his ship on fire, Glowworm’s captain, Lieutenant-Commander Roope, determined that he could do better than abandon her without responding to the German force. He therefore turned the burning destroyer toward the German battle group and rammed her into Hipper’s bows, tearing a 120 ft (36.6 m) gash in the cruiser’s side and letting in 528 tons (536 tonnes) of water. However, in the process Glowworm was dragged under Hipper’s bows and sank. Roope was awarded a posthumous VC for his action. Although the German cruiser developed a 4° list to starboard she was able to proceed with her mission, and successfully landed men and matériel at Trondheim.