And even if Germany had prevailed in World War II, Plan Z would have left the Reich with a battleship heavy, carrier light force that would have matched up poorly with the modern U.S. Navy. Nevertheless, the prospect of German battleships, carriers, and battlecruisers fighting spectacular convoy battles against the RN and the U.S. Navy continues to spark the imagination.    

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At the end of the Second World War, Soviet dictator Josef Stalin stood undisputed as the most powerful man in Eurasia. His Red Army had crushed Nazi Germany, repelling an invasion and going on to capture Berlin after a grueling, four year campaign. Stalin’s Red Army was arguably more powerful than the American, British, French and western European armies combined.

Still, that was not enough.

Stalin had long craved a strong navy that would extend Soviet influence far from Europe and Asia, and do it in a big way.

The Soviet leader wanted battleships, and a lot of them.

A fleet that simply was never meant to be, it existed largely on paper and even included some highly advanced ships that were flat-out hoaxes.

The Idea:

During World War II the Soviet Navy was a distant third in priorities. It was the Red Army that had fought the grueling ground battles and campaigns that defeated Germany. Supporting it was a Red Air Force optimized, like the Luftwaffe, on tactical battlefield support of ground forces. The Navy, on the other hand had played a very limited role, providing convoy protection for Lend-Lease equipment from the U.S and support for land operations and harassment of the German military in the Baltic and Black Sea regions.

Still, by mid-1945 it was clear to Stalin that with Germany gone, his most powerful rivals—the United States and United Kingdom—lay across the water and out of his armies’ reach. So was Japan, which the USSR had been shut out of occupying, and many of the former European colonies that were ripe for revolution. Powerful army or not, if  Stalin wanted to remain a major military power, he was going to need a powerful navy.

Why Battleships?:

By the end of World War II it was clear that battleships were obsolete. Aircraft carriers had replaced them as the dominant naval platform, a fact made painfully clear to the Empire of Japan during literally dozens of sea battles in the Pacific Theater of Operations. After the war, the Western Allies mostly divested themselves of battleships, preserving their fleets of carriers instead.

Despite their success, Stalin disliked aircraft carriers and preferred battleships instead. At a September 1945 meeting of the Soviet leadership, Stalin overruled a proposal to build aircraft carriers and instead directed the Soviet Navy to complete construction of the battleship Sovetskaya Rossiya. The battleship had been laid down in 1940 and was still less than one percent complete by war’s end. He also directed the Navy to build two “Project 24” 75,000 ton battleships, and seven “Project 82” (Stalingrad-class) battlecruisers displacing 36,500 tons and equipped with nine twelve-inch guns. Stalin approved only two light carriers, a useless number considering the superiority of the American and British fleets.

A Bad Plan:

The plan was doomed to failure. The Soviet Union never had much large-shipbuilding capacity, and developing such capability had been delayed by the Great Patriotic War. Furthermore, the war had done great damage to the country’s industrial capacity, which needed replacing. There were only so many resources to go around, and gradually the Soviet Union scaled back plans for a grand surface fleet. The 75,000 battleships were never constructed, and only two of the seven battlecruisers began construction—none were ever actually completed. The death of Stalin in 1953 ended the dream of a large fleet of battleships.

Meanwhile, reports of a new class of Soviet super-battleships were percolating in the West. Several periodicals, including allegedly Jane’s Fighting Ships, spread the rumor of seven new super-battleships, nicknamed K-1000, under construction in Siberian shipyards.

The seven super ships: Strana Sovetov, Sovetskaya Byelorossia, Krasnaya Bessarabiya, Krasnaya Sibir, Sovietskaya Konstitutsia, Lenin, and Sovetskiy Soyuz were said to be between 36,000 and 55,000 tons—ironically smaller than the ships Stalin had actually approved. They were variously reported as having a top speed of between 25 and 33 knots, and carried a battery of between nine to twelve 16-inch guns and twelve 18-inch guns. They were also supposed to have guided missiles as armament.

The problem: they were a hoax. The rumor had spread in the Western press, but the Soviet Union, once it learned of them encouraged the rumors. Some of the names were retreads of the earlier, cancelled Sovetsky Soyuz class. The ships were just plausible enough to sound real, although the Soviet Union had not developed guided missiles capable of being fitted on ships. The rumors were advantageous to Moscow—if the NATO countries believed a fleet of super-battleships were on the way they would have to figure out a means to beat them, siphoning resources away from the ground forces that protected Western Europe.

As predominantly land power, the Soviet Union was fated to spend most of its resources on land forces. Sea power by necessity came in at third place. While the USSR did manage to field four  Kirov-class battlecruisers in the 1980s, it never came anywhere near to realizing Stalin’s great red fleet.

Kyle Mizokami is a defense and national-security writer based in San Francisco who has appeared in the Diplomat, Foreign Policy, War is Boring and the Daily Beast. In 2009 he cofounded the defense and security blog Japan Security Watch. You can follow him on Twitter: @KyleMizokami.

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In the mid-1930s, the Nazi government began to plan in detail for the reconstruction of German naval power. The destruction of the German High Seas Fleet at Scapa Flow remained central to the mythology of German betrayal and defeat in World War I; rebuilding the fleet would be a grand achievement worthy of the Nazis, but also in accord with long-term German foreign policy goals.

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In March 1935, Adolf Hitler announced that Germany would no longer abide by the naval restrictions established in the Treaty of Versailles, which had drastically limited German construction. Berlin and London quickly came to a new agreement, the Anglo-German Naval Treaty, which would limit German construction to 1/3rd that of the Royal Navy (RN), and would establish Washington Naval Treaty style restrictions on ship size and gun caliber.

Even before Germany reached the limitations of the new treaty, Hitler and the senior naval command developed plans for abrogating the agreement.  These construction programs went by a variety of names, but became known in their final form as Plan Z. If fully undertaken, Plan Z would have given Germany a world class navy by the late 1940s.

The Ships:

Plan Z envisioned the construction of a balanced fleet, built along similar lines to those of the Washington Treaty powers, with some important exceptions. The final version of Plan Z expected to supply this fleet by 1948, assuming that war did not interrupt construction.

Battleships represented the core of the fleet. Scharnhorst and Gneisenau were the first step of the project. Armed with 9 11” guns, the two light battleships gave German builders valuable experience with large, fast ships, experience that had dissipated since the First World War. Unlike the other major powers, the Germans had no large battleships to reconstruct during the interwar period. Bismarck and Tirpitz represented the next step in the evolution, and were designed in explicit rejection of the limitations of the Washington Naval Treaty. Although they carried only 8 15” guns, the Bismarcks displaced nearly 50,000 tons, well in excess of treaty limits.

Eventually, six “H” class battleships would have formed the core of the German battlefleet.  The H class went through multiple design iterations, but the 1939 project represents the most realistic culmination of Plan Z. Essentially enlarged Bismarcks, the Hs would displace 55,000 tons and carry 8 16” guns in four twin turrets.  This would make them competitive with most of the advanced battleships planned by the United States and the United Kingdom, although German designers still suffered from a lack of practical experience with modern vessels.

This would have given Germany ten modern battleships to contest the RN, supplemented four fast, modern, 35,000 ton aircraft carriers. The Germans also planned to construct three “O class” battlecruisers of classic design, faster than the battleships but unable to match them in armor. These ships would have specialized in attacks on enemy cruisers and merchant vessels.

Plan Z also envisioned a broader array of support vessels. The three Panzerschiff (“pocket battleships) represented an effort to circumvent the Treaty of Versailles, creating powerful, effective, long-range raiding units instead of the coastal defense battleships that the Allies expected. Nevertheless, Plan Z projected the construction of twelve additional vessels, suggesting that the ships would conduct operations along the lines of traditional heavy cruisers, as well as long-distance commerce raiding. The plan also allowed for five heavy cruisers and a range of smaller vessels.