German aircraft carrier Graf Zeppelin

The contract for Flugzeugträger A went to the Deutsche Werke shipyard in Kiel on 16 November 1935. Work could not start at once - the yard was at capacity and the slipway she needed was occupied by the new battleship Gneisenau, launched on 8 December 1936. Her keel was laid down twenty days later, on 28 December. She was launched on 8 December 1938, the 24th anniversary of the Battle of the Falkland Islands, christened by Helene von Zeppelin, daughter of the ship's namesake, with a speech from Hermann Göring. By the end of 1939 she was 85 per cent complete and expected to finish by the middle of 1940.

She was the only aircraft carrier Germany ever launched, and the lead ship of a class of two ordered as part of the Kriegsmarine's attempt to build a balanced ocean-going fleet that could project power beyond the Baltic and the North Sea. By September 1939 the Luftwaffe had already formed a carrier wing for her, Trägergruppe 186, at Kiel Holtenau, with three squadrons of Bf 109s and Ju 87s.

Graf Zeppelin measured 262.5 m overall with a beam of 36.2 m and a maximum draft of 8.5 m, and would have displaced 33,550 long tons at full combat load. Four Brown, Boveri and Cie geared turbines drew steam from sixteen oil-fired ultra-high-pressure LaMont boilers for 200,000 shaft horsepower and a designed top speed of 33.8 knots, with a projected cruising radius of 8,000 nautical miles at 19 knots. Her complement would have been 1,760 officers and men plus flight crews.

The air group was to be 42 aircraft - twelve navalised Junkers Ju 87 Stuka dive bombers, ten Messerschmitt Bf 109 fighters and twenty Fieseler Fi 167 torpedo bombers - later reworked to thirty Ju 87s and twelve Bf 109s with the Fi 167s dropped altogether. For surface defence she was to carry eight 15 cm SK C/28 guns, later raised to sixteen, with an anti-aircraft battery of ten (later twelve) 10.5 cm SK C/33, twenty-two 3.7 cm and twenty-eight 2 cm guns.

Her primary offensive power was to be her aircraft rather than her guns, and the protection was arranged for attack from above as much as from the sea. The flight deck carried up to 45 mm of Wotan Weich steel armour, with a 60 mm armoured deck beneath it shielding the ship's vitals from aerial attack, and a waterline belt 100 mm thick through the central part of the hull. None of it was ever tested in action; every figure in the scheme stayed a design intention.

The conquest of Norway in April 1940 ended her chances. Suddenly responsible for a long coastline and many ports, the Kriegsmarine needed coastal and anti-aircraft guns urgently. At a naval conference with Hitler on 28 April 1940 Admiral Erich Raeder proposed halting all work: even a commissioning by the end of 1940 would leave ten months or more of gun installation, since her original fire-control system had been sold to the Soviet Union under an earlier trade agreement. Hitler agreed, her 15 cm guns went to Norway, and her heavy flak had already been diverted. In July she was towed to Gotenhafen and used as a store for Germany's hardwood supply.

By April 1942 the case for carriers had been made by other navies: British carrier aircraft had crippled the Italian fleet at Taranto in November 1940, damaged Bismarck in May 1941 and kept Tirpitz off two Russia-bound convoys in March 1942, and the Japanese had wrecked the American battle fleet at Pearl Harbor. Raeder told Hitler the ship could be finished in about a year plus six months of trials and flight training, and on 13 May 1942 work resumed. But Göring said the aircraft industry could not design, test and mass-produce dedicated carrier aircraft before 1946, and offered converted Ju 87s and Bf 109s instead.

The converted aircraft were heavier than their land-based parents, which forced a cascade of changes: modernised catapults, stronger arresting-gear winches, reinforced flight deck, elevators and hangar floors, air-search radar, an armoured fighter-director cabin on a heavier mast, a curved funnel cap to keep smoke off it, quadruple Flakvierling 38 mounts in place of single 20 mm guns, and extra hull bulges to carry the added weight. On the night of 27-28 August 1942, moored at Gotenhafen, she was the target of the only Allied air attack aimed at her in the whole war: three Lancasters of 106 Squadron each carrying a 5,600 lb Capital Ship bomb. One crew claimed a direct hit, but no record of damage exists.

On 5 December 1942 she was towed back to Kiel and docked. Weeks later Hitler, disenchanted with the surface fleet, ordered the navy's larger ships taken out of service and scrapped. Raeder was replaced by Karl Dönitz, who talked most of the order back, but work on ships near completion stayed halted. All major work on Graf Zeppelin stopped on 30 January 1943.

In April 1943 she was towed east again - Gotenhafen, then the Swinemünde roadstead, then a backwater wharf on the Parnitz River two miles from Stettin, where she sat for two years with a 40-man custodial crew. As the Red Army closed on the city in April 1945 her Kingston valves were opened to settle her into the mud, and an engineering squad rigged demolition charges and depth charges to hole the hull and wreck her machinery. At 6 pm on 25 April 1945, as Soviet troops entered Stettin, commander Wolfgang Kähler radioed the order to fire them; smoke from the funnel confirmed they had gone off.

Her fate stayed unknown outside the Soviet Union for decades, and Western historians guessed at it. Erich Gröner held that she was towed to Leningrad and broken up in 1948-1949; Robert Gardiner and Roger Chesneau wrote that she left Stettin in September 1947 and never arrived, probably mined under tow. Soviet records tell a different story. The Council of Ministers decreed the destruction of former German ships on 19 March 1947, and on 14 August Graf Zeppelin was towed into Swinemünde and two days later to her final position.

She was then used to learn what bombs do to a carrier. Five series of controlled explosions used 180 mm shells and FAB bombs placed in cutouts in the decks to imitate dive-bombing hits at flight deck, hangar deck and gun battery level. She stayed afloat, so Admiral Yury Rall called for torpedoes: one from an Elco PT boat burst in the anti-torpedo bulge without penetrating the belt, and one from the destroyer Slavny went into the unprotected hull below the bow elevator. She sank 25 minutes later.

The wreck stayed lost until 12 July 2006, when the research vessel RV St. Barbara, working for the Polish oil company Petrobaltic, found a 265 m hull 55 km north of Władysławowo lying more than 80 m down. The Polish Navy surveyed it for two days with remote-controlled underwater robots and declared themselves 99 per cent certain it was Graf Zeppelin.