Chapter 83: The Future of Naval Warfare
The first of the shipyards that Bruno had begun investing in was located in Danzig. It had been completed in roughly 1903. And for the past two years it had been mostly manufacturing Light Cruisers for the Kaiserliche Marine, simply as a means of gaining the status as a reputable ship manufacturer.
Quite frankly, it was a rather foolish act to provoke the British Empire by challenging its naval might. And it was one of the things which Bruno could only shake his head at. The Kaiser was not necessarily a poor leader. But his desire for the German Reich's prestige and glory sometimes went a bit too far.
Nevertheless, the British Navy was ahead of the Kaiserliche Marine by several years. After all, they had been building ships for centuries for their navy, while the German Reich was only really beginning to make such efforts. Because of this, the British Shipyards were able to outproduce their rival on the High Seas by a significant amount.
Bruno had no intention of helping the Kaiser build his grand navy in terms of battleships. Nobody realized it yet, but the HMS Dreadnought would be launched in 1906 and would make all other warships obsolete overnight.
By 1916, Battleships would be proven obsolete in the Battle of Jutland. A naval battle which would demonstrate the effectiveness of seaplanes and would eventually lead to the construction of carriers dedicated to this purpose.
But even so, the world would not give up on battleships until they were proven woefully obsolete decades later in the second world war. Quite frankly, Bruno had no plans to introduce aircraft carriers at this time, as they were expensive and outlandish investments into naval
buildup.
One which the Kaiser and the German Admiralty would not approve of, as they had yet to be proven in battle. Rather, Bruno instead planned to invest significantly in the development of submarines. As the early designs acted more as torpedo boats that could sink beneath the ocean's surface for a limited time to escape from pursuers.
But this was a horrific misunderstanding of submarine warfare. Something that would only really come to light at the end of the Second World war in 1945 with the introduction of the German Type XXI U-boat, a submarine who was the first to be designed for the purpose of operating primarily underwater.
While initially designed in 1943, these advanced submarines were not fielded until the very end of the war, and even then, they played no role in combat. Perhaps if they were introduced earlier, they would have allowed the Kriegsmarine to dominate the seas, as they were virtually undetectable by the means of the era.