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Hohenzollern to Hitler. After Versailles, Germany found herself with a navy of 15,000 men and a few barnacle-bogged vessels barely fit to sail the Baltic. Erich Raeder went to work. He trimmed to the Socialists, who must have made his authoritarian flesh crawl. (When he suspected that the monarchy might be restored, he discreetly cheered.) But politics was a strictly extracurricular nuisance. Every hour he could, he worked with his old comrades at the uphill job of rebuilding his idol. Carefully selected men were enlisted for the long twelve-year hitch, and trained to become officers-some day. Shorn of good ships, the Germans concentrated on fine fire-control equipment, sweated long over their gunnery. They began to train a new batch of naval cadets, starting them in the hard school of sail where German naval officers still start their careers.
When Admiral Raeder became Chief of the Naval Command in 1928, he took over one new and three nearly complete cruisers, twelve torpedo boats, and a number of old hulks perilously close to scrap iron. Submarines were still forbidden Germany. Somehow, in spite of national poverty and naval lethargy, by polishing any apple for any promising politician, the Navy's trap-mouthed, hot-eyed boss managed to get naval building going. By the time Adolf Hitler had come to power, Raeder had completed the pocket battleship Deutschland (now the Lützow), was building the Admiral Graf Spee and Admiral Scheer.
Adolf Hitler could not overlook such a man. He took over Raeder, and Raeder was very willing to be taken over. The best he had hoped for was a raiding navy; Adolf Hitler gave him battleships. And when Britain signed the Anglo-German Naval Pact in 1935 (allowing Germany to build up to 35% of Britain's strength). Raeder danced a private German version of the hornpipe.
Submersibles, Unsinkables. Now he could surround himself with talent. He got plenty of pickings from the old Navy. There was dog-faced Admiral Otto Schnie-wind, now Commander in Chief of the Fleet; Vice Admiral Günther Lütjens, who afterwards went down on the Bismarck. There was Admiral Alfred Saalwächter, with eyes set far apart like the base of a rangefinder. There were Admiral Hermann Boehm, now commander in Norway, and Admiral Rolf Carls, a trim, bearded, rakehell character who looks like a Corsican bandit in uniform. There were thousands of ex-naval officers to be called back, thousands of bright-faced new officers to be trained.
Soon the yards were alight all night with the building of Germany's new fleet. The emphasis was still on submarines. Germany would never have many battleships, nor more than a handful of cruisers. Those they did build, they built with loving care. Their battleships were so carefully compartmented that they were thought to be unsinkable-until a torpedo plane crippled the Bismarck and left her a target for surface craft. Even so, German protection was still the best in the world.