Let's face it, by the end of 1941 the British had sunk a much larger proportion of the rather small German fleet. What was left in 1942 and later spent the rest of the war hiding in port.
It fails to account though for the loss of the HMS Edinburgh, sunk by German destroyers, the loss of the Scharnhorst on it's operative sortie against North Sea convoys, the actions of the Prinz Eugen after 1941, battle of the Barents Sea involving Admiral Hipper and Lutzow in the end of 1942, Admiral Scheer also engaged in the North Sea and the Baltic etc.
You simply live in an alternate reality appearantly.
Whilst the Germans might have sunk 3 British capital ships by the end of 1941 (out of the 15 Britain started the war with), the RN had sunk 4 German and Italian capital ships, out of the 9 they started the war with.
Well let's see those 3 capital ships sunk :
Royal Oak, sunk 1939.
Courageous, sunk 1939.
Glorious, sunk 1940.
Hood, sunk 1941.
Barham, sunk 1941.
Ark Royal, sunk 1941.
Queen Elizabeth, sunk 1941.
Valiant, sunk 1941.
Prince of Wales, sunk 1941.
Repulse, sunk 1941.
More like 8, 10 if we count the IJ efforts, as you were kindly including Italian losses, why not apply the same here..
And what '4 German and Italian capitol ships' were sunk by the end of 1941? Bismarck, for one, at the cost of the Hood and the fiasco at Crete and the loss of 20 000+ troops as half of the Royal Navy was sent against Bismarck (a single ship...
). A single German capital ship lost so far.
The Italians? The British managed to sink the old WW1 Battleship Conte di Cavour at Taranto, but even that one was raised before the end of the year and sent to repairs and refit. A mere week later the Italians came out slightly on top at Cape Teulada in naval combat. A month later the Italians sank
two older British Battleships on their anchor in Alexandria in return.
So that's 8 (or 10) Royal Navy capitol ships lost in exhange for 1 German, 1 Italian (temporary loss). Hardly something to boast about.
Yes, they had a tradition of hiding their major ships in port in WW1 as well
Well, on the other hand the British had the tradition of loosing their major ships in their ports and at the sea - amazing the Germans could achieve that while hiding in their ports ! 8)
Skagerrak still hurts, I guess.
Thinking of it, just about every naval engagement between the Germans and the British, if between roughly equal forces, was won by the Imperial navy or the Kriegsmarine, and Britain lost some 30 million GRT of it's merchant shipping in the two wars. I wonder where and why the Nelsonian spirit disappeared by WW1.
You can get a measure of just how much time they spent hiding in port by looking at the fates of the German capital ships. Of the 4, two were lost at sea (both sunk by the RN), two in harbour (both by the RAF).
Well, which two German capital ships were sunk in port, can you name them?
The RN started the war with 15 battleships and battlecruisers. They ended it with 15. They started with 7 carriers, and ended with 55, 66 cruisers and ended with 67, 184 destroyers and ended with 308, 60 submarines and ended with 162.
I wonder why they built so many submarines, if they did nothing through the war.
Actually none of these is a defeat for the RN. At Dunkirk they evacuated far more men than anyone thought possible.
They lost well over 250 ships in the proccess, though, and some 10 000 men drowned at the sea. To what? A meager number of LW attacks, while both the LW and the Heer was concentrating on the French, while the British fled as fast as they could.
It's difficult to sea
a rout than anything else it was, anyway.
In Norway they did enough damage to the Kreigsmarine to cripple it for the rest of the war, and to ensure that Sea Lion was an impossibility.
While still loosing. Pity that the RN's job was not to make harder for the Germans
to invade Britiain. It was to prevent the Germans from successfully landing in Norway, and to ensure the British invasion of Norway. We all know the results - they miserably failed on both objectives, despite having a far larger force at sea, whereas the small KM detachments successfully completed their landings almost everywhere, and sunk an aircraft carrier and a couple of smaller RN vessels on the top of that.
As for crippling KM for the rest of the war, laughable, they lost a couple of destroyers to the British and a light cruiser as I recall, about as many the British lost to the KM, plus a carrier of course - hardly a crippling loss.
In Crete they stopped any German seaborne forces reaching the island, and evacuated the allied troops at the end.
Garrison of Crete :
United Kingdom:
15,000
Greece:
11,000
Australia:
7,100
New Zealand:
6,700
Total:
40,000
Casualties
Official British figures:
3,500 dead
1,900 wounded
12,000 captured
5,255 Greek Captured
Hmmm... According to Hop, Crete was a successfull evacuation by the Royal Navy : Out of a defending force of 40 000, 22 655 troops were lost,
17 255 men captured was stranded on the island. Beaten by half the force of paratroopers btw.
76% of the losses occured because the RN failed to evacuate them - the LW prevented them doing so, and with meager forces : only 280 bombers, 150 dive bombers, 180 fighters were employed, ie. about 1/4 of the bomers, and half of the dive bombers employed in BoB, under a much shorter time. In less than week, the LW destroyed three cruisers (Gloucester, Fiji and Calcutta) and six destroyers (Kelly, Greyhound, Kashmir, Hereward, Imperial and Juno). Seven other ships were damaged, including the battleships Warspite and Valiant, and the cruiser Orion. The RN fled to Alexandria as quickly it could, leaving most of the troops behind.