The pride of Hitler’s fleet was launched in grandeur and sunk in ignominy. Now a local historian can reveal her extraordinary secrets. David Charters reports

A BITTER wind ruffled the swastika flags held over the people bunched on the quayside opposite the stooped cranes. Even the formidable, granite-faced offices were dwarfed by the towering ship sliding into the basin behind.

And those close could actually see the breath of the Fuhrer, as he stood on the VIP podium with his right arm raised in salute, his pale blue eyes admiring the unyielding curves of a ship built for war. The band played patriotic favourites. Oompah-oompah. Everyone cheered.

Then came the opening strains of Franz Joseph Haydn’s familiar tune. “Deutschland, Deutschland uber alles, uber alles in der Welt (Germany, Germany over all, over everything in the World).”

These were proud days for the young Third Reich, which had already absorbed Czechoslovakia.

This aircraft carrier before them would be the biggest ship ever built in Nazi Germany. It would also be the Fatherland’s only aircraft carrier – a serious weakness in the preparations of a nation about to enter a war on land, air and sea.

Nine years later, she was sunk while being used as target practice for the torpedoes of another dictator, the USSR’s Joseph Stalin. She had seen no action at all.

But that ignominious end was inconceivable on December 8, 1938, when the Graf Zeppelin’s 250-metre (820ft) hull touched the water at the shipyard in Kiel, home of the German Baltic fleet – watched by Hitler and many of his top brass, including the porky Reichmarshall Herman Goering, head of the Luftwaffe. She looked fine, but there was still much finishing work to do.

Well, the war produced so much horror, bravery, cowardice, treachery, nobility and madness, it is not entirely surprising that the Graf Zeppelin has been almost lost to history, but not quite.

Stephen Burke, a 34-year-old engineer from Warrington, is fascinated by her – as had been the British Government all those years ago. Early in the war, when it seemed probable that she would go into active service, experts in the Admiralty and War Cabinet believed that she posed an even greater threat to us than the Bismarck.

And extensive research has resulted in Stephen’s authoritative book, Without Wings: The Story of Hitler’s Aircraft Carrier. This research took him to Poland, where he met Commander Adam Olejnik, from the Department of Diving Technology and Underwater Work at the Military Naval Academy, in Gdynia, Poland.

They are now co-operating on further research into the once grand ship, now lying in the Baltic Sea, some 30 miles off the coast of Gdansk, Poland.

But why should a chap from Vauxhall’s car plant, in Ellesmere Port, be so interested in the Graf Zeppelin, which had been launched by Hella von Brandstein-Zeppelin, daughter of Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin (1838-1917), designer of the airship?

“In about 2000, I was flicking through an old encyclopaedia of warships and there was a reference to her,” says Stephen.

“It said that nobody knew what her fate had been and what had happened to her after the war, though it was known that she had fallen into Russian hands relatively intact. She was really big. If you stood on the flight deck of the Graf Zeppelin, you would be looking down 72ft to her keel.”

She could carry 42 aircraft; BF109s, the purpose-built Fiesler torpedo-bomber and a converted Stuka dive bomber – a truly imposing aerial force, probably with a greater potential than our own Sea Gladiators, Fairey Swordfish and Blackburn Skua fighter/dive bombers.

“But she never saw any active service,” says Stephen. “In April, 1940, Admiral Erich Raeder decided that the war would be over before she could be finished, probably in 1941. So she was moved to Poland. They were worried that the RAF would bomb her.”

There were two differences in German and Allied thinking here. First, we didn’t think the war was nearly over. Secondly, we feared the threat the Graf Zeppelin could offer our shipping.

Part of a government document read by Winston Churchill, in January, 1940, when he was First Lord of the Admiralty (becoming Prime Minister that May) read: “It is the aircraft carrier Graf Zeppelin, which is likely to provide our most disagreeable problem. If this ship, accompanied by Bismarck or one of the Scharnhorsts (the Scharnhorst and her sister ship, the Gneisenau), were to break out, we should have to be prepared for very serious depredations on our trade. In good weather, the aircraft carrier could reconnoitre some 20,000 square miles in one day and could hardly fail to locate some of our large convoys. Her reconnaissance would serve equally to defend the attackers from our hunting groups. This power of evasion might enable raids to be pressed to the Western Approaches, our most vulnerable area. The conclusion is that the Bismarck herself is not likely to prove the menace that would at first seem likely. It is the aircraft carrier which is going to turn the scales in favour of any raider.”

Underground offices in Liverpool provided the headquarters of the Western Approaches from which the battle of the Atlantic was conducted. On May 27, 1941, the Bismarck was sunk in the Atlantic after being chased and attacked by British ships, including the Rodney, Prince of Wales and our aircraft carrier Ark Royal, all built at Cammell Laird’s yard, Birkenhead. But, by the time the Graf Zeppelin was almost ready for battle in 1943, the tide of war had changed.

It is a vast subject for Stephen, who has a Higher National Certificate in engineering from the Warrington Collegiate Institute. He is married to Sharon, also 34, and they have a mongrel dog called Jake.

Stephen is a member of the Warrington and the British sub- aqua clubs, which added to his interest of sunken vessels. The Graf Zeppelin was scuttled by the Germans before the end of the war, but then re-floated by the Russians, only to be sunk in 1947, after being towed from Szczecin. Before that, lying helpless, she had withstood an aerial bombardment with almost contemptuous ease – a fact which deeply embarrassed the Soviets and could almost be claimed as the last German victory.

More personally, Stephen’s Dad, Joe, 74, a railway engineer/ linesman, answered the door in the summer of 1944 when the telegram came to say that his elder brother Jim, a Royal Marine commando, had been killed, aged 24, in the Normandy advance following the beach landings.

Memories of the brave uncle he had never seen fired Stephen’s interest in the war and then his reading took him to the Graf Zeppelin.

The Cold War prevented any exploration of the wreckage, but the easing ofEast/West tension led to her being located in international waters, though it was not until 2006 that divers were able to formally identify her.

Stephen has not seen her himself but from photographs and speaking with Adam Olejnik, he knows that she is in “incredibly good” condition. “The biggest problem I have got in diving for her is that she is a Russian-owned ship,” he says. “It even took the Poles six months to get permission to dive with their foreign offices speaking to each other.”

So nobody hears the slow groans from the hulk of a ship launched in grandeur, but now only seen by the witless eyes of fish.

davidcharters