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Probably German fire control was, too. Raeder put the accent on speed and protection in his ships, sacrificed gunpower and made it up by fire control. The Tirpitz, like the Bismarck, has a main battery of eight 15-in. guns, while the North Carolina of the U.S. Navy, with nine 16-in. guns, throws a 25% heavier broadside. In the hit-&-run battles that German seamen still count on fighting, speed and protection are their trump cards, accuracy their no-trump aces. It was thus the Bismarck sent the Hood to her grave. Like the Graf Spee, it was only when her fire-control machinery was smashed that she lost her punching power.
With the fleet now ready for sea again, Grand Admiral Raeder, who carries a field marshal's baton and is heavy with Nazi authority, may well ponder the death of the Bismarck and Graf Spee. In those engagements, the British Navy may well have put a calculating finger on a fatal weakness of the new German Navy. Erich Raeder knows all about the threat of air power to ships. He has the air strength to protect his own. But how to protect the vital cortex of fire coordination is the problem he must ponder well.
But if other famed Germans spoke truly, it will take a greater man than Raeder to remedy another German defect. "The German people have never understood the sea," said old Tirpitz after Jutland. "In their hour of destiny they failed to use their Navy properly." Kaiser Wilhelm II, grandson of Queen Victoria, put it more flatly to his cousin, George V, before 1914. Said he: "Germans are landlubbers. They are afraid of water."
Nevertheless, to the men who love the sea and consider themselves masters of it, the men who fear water have suddenly become an anxiety.