Comments by "doveton sturdee" (@dovetonsturdee7033) on "Military History Visualized"
channel.
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
@looinrims I am saying that at the time of Dunkirk, no one, French or British, had signed an armistice. That didn't happen until 22 June. The British, moreover, did not believe that the French military had been totally defeated, only that it had suffered a serious, but not irreparable, reversal. Indeed, after Dynamo the British intended to re-land the 100,000+ French troops back in France, together, with a 'Reconstituted BEF' under the command of Brooke. This began landing on 7 June, but was withdrawn from 14 June onwards, after Brooke was informed by Weygand that the French army was no longer able to offer organised resistance.
Only at that point did the British realise the true extent of the French defeat, and begin operation Aerial.
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
user-wj6dt5bq3w In point of fact, I really don't care whether you take me seriously or not. However, if you think I have not read the book, you are mistaken, as there was a copy in my University library, years ago, translated by one F. A, Voigt. My tutor, Professor Foot, urged great caution on those of us who did read it, as he considered it somewhat unreliable.
Which is off the point. I asked you, and gave you details, of the efforts Germany went to to prepare for an invasion attempt. You haven't explained why so much effort was expended, if hitler never intended to undertake any invasion.
By the way, being close to Walther Hewel is hardly supportive of any claim to impartiality. Oh, & did you read the 'primary source' or simply an old article in the Guardian?
Which ever. I will not discuss this matter with you further.
1
-
Bomber Command began attacking barge concentrations from 5 September. In total, they appear to have destroyed 214, but there were still 1859 available at the end of September. In fact, the German problem was not the number of barges, but the number of towing vessels. The barges were to be towed in pairs across the Channel, and the Germans in late September had only 397 such vessels. Even allowing for the fact that some barges could be towed by some of 159 small coasters being used as transports, the German plan for the first landing involved 844 barges, which required every towing vessel to be used. There were literally no reserves, and losses could not be replaced.
Interestingly, on 10/11 October, the Battleship Revenge, supported by seven destroyers, shelled barge concentrations in Cherbourg. In an 18 minute action, Revenge fired 120 fifteen inch High Explosive shells, and the destroyers 801 4.7 inch shells. On the following day Sealion was officially called off, and the remaining barges began to disperse. This action, Operation Medium, is totally forgotten today.
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
@Edi_J The circumstances of Jutland were unique, in that the commanding admiral, David Beatty, regarded rate of fire as paramount, and unofficially encouraged his captains to stow cordite in unprotected areas. This policy was not followed by the battleships of the Grand Fleet, and was discontinued entirely after Jutland.
Hood had a 12 inch belt, compared to the 6 inch of the Invincibles, or the 9 inch of the Lions and Tiger, by the way. Therefore, your comment that 'Sending Hood against Bismarck, knowing what happened during Jutland battle, was a war crime' is simply silly.
The fact is, that the Royal Navy in May 1941 had only five capital ships with the speed and firepower necessary to challenge Bismarck. These were King George V, Prince of Wales, Hood, Repulse, and Renown.
Renown was with Force H, which left Tovey with two exit points into the wider Atlantic, and four ships with which to block them. Thus, he sent his second and third most capable ships (Hood & PoW) to the Denmark Strait, whilst placing his best and weakest (KGV & Repulse) in the Iceland-Faroes Gap'
The assumption was that either pairing would be able to prevent such a sortie into the wider Atlantic, where Lutjens' squadron would be harder to chase down.
It worked, by the way. The damage Bismarck received in the Denmark Strait was enough to cause Lutjens to abort his mission.
Had you been in Tovey's, or Pound's, situation in May, 1941, what would you have done differently to protect the convoy network?
1
-
1
-
@manilajohn0182 Equally, people seem determined to impose classifications onto things which in reality do not fit easily into any obvious slot.
Hood was redesigned after Jutland and considerable extra armour added. As a result, she was far more of a fast battleship than a traditional lightly armoured battlecruiser. Earlier RN battlecruisers had armoured belts of 6 inches (the Invincibles, and the Renowns) or 9 inches (Lions & Tiger), whereas Hood's was 12 inches, the same as the King George V and Iron Duke classes from WW1.
Indeed, the US North Carolinas had 12 inch belts, and the belts of the South Dakotas & Iowas were 12.2 inches and 12.1 inches respectively. No one has ever called them battlecruisers.
Come to that, the proposed G3 battlecruisers, from which the Nelsons evolved, were called battlecruisers, despite being intended to have 14 inch belts and decks in parts 8 inches thick.
The term battlecruiser within the RN was based on speed, in that it was applied to any capital ship with a speed in excess of 25 knots, as the original concept of the fast, lightly armoured, cruiser killer became outdated.
1
-
1
-
1
-
@LittleMacscorner I'm not getting upset, but I do know quite a lot about Dynamo & Sealion, as they formed the bulk of my modern history thesis.
Many of the German generals did actually believe that Sealion was nothing more than 'an extended river crossing' and Admiral Raeder spent much of the summer of 1940 desperately trying to get them to grasp that it was nothing of the sort.
Hitler's certainly didn't want to attempt an invasion; he assumed that Britain would accept a negotiated peace, and was near to being proved correct. A government led by Lord Halifax wouldn't have had a problem with the idea, and Hitler believed that a neutral Britain left him with a free hand to deal with his true enemy, the Soviet Union. The result of all this was, in Napoleon's words 'how can an elephant fight a whale?'
Certainly, a substantial German force on British soil was unlikely to have been defeated, but, even if a successful invasion was essential, without a navy or even suitable troop transports the possibility of carrying out a successful crossing against the kind of resources available to the Royal Navy was never even a remote possibility. Unlike a land battle, where a smaller force might overcome a larger one by a cunning strategy or as a result of incompetence on the part of the larger force, the Kreiegsmarine, following the mauling it suffered during the Norwegian campaign, knew exactly what the towed barges could expect once they entered the Channel.
It is a bit like the old joke about a motorist asking directions and being told by a local 'If I were you I wouldn't start from here.' In the summer of 1940, the Germans found themselves in exactly the same quandary.
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
The Royal Navy operated nightly destroyer patrols through the Channel every night throughout the invasion period, out of Plymouth and the Nore. Fairly regularly, these patrols inspected the invasion ports, and often shelled them. Coastal convoys also operated through the Channel, mainly consisting of small colliers escorted by, usually, two destroyers and one or two armed trawlers. The convoys, of the CE & CW series, sailed between 1940 & 1944. There were 533 such convoys, totalling 9097 ship voyages. Of the 9097, 31 were sunk.
The Germans sent three small Type II boats into the Channel in late 1939. Together with the remains of their crews, all three are still there. The Channel was a death trap for a WW2 submarine.
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
@johnburns4017 Rather more than that. The barge trains first had to form up in long columns outside their ports. For example, the train carrying the leading elements of 26 & 34 Infantry Divisions, heading for Bexhill - Eastbourne, consisted of 165 tugs and 330 barges from Boulogne, and 25 tugs with 50 barges from Le Havre. Each tug towed two barges, one powered and one unpowered. It would take more than a day to extricate this lot from port, and form them up into any sort of coherent formation. The formation heading for Folkestone-New Romney ( 75 tugs and 150 barges from Dunkirk & 25 tugs with 50 barges from Ostend) had greater problems, given the state these ports were still in.
The Kriegsmarine estimated that it would take three days to assemble the formations, move them westward down the Channel, turn them towards the English South Coast, and push the barges to shore, using the tugs and a number of smaller, pusher, boats. That was for the first part of the first wave, consisting of about a third of each division, without most of their wheeled transport or divisional artillery. The time needed to get the whole of the nine divisions ashore, still without wheeled transport or artillery, was estimated at eleven days.
This assumes, of course, that weather conditions in the Channel would remain benign (which was, I suppose, possible) and that 'external factors' would not come into play. I believe that the 'external factors' Raeder had in mind were hundreds of dark grey ships, each flying a white ensign.
The whole lunacy is described in considerable detail in a book written some years ago by a German author, Peter Schenck.
1
-
1
-
1
-
@shb7772000if Why were they vulnerable? Didn't you notice the bit in my post where I pointed out that the Luftwaffe, in the whole of the war, sank no British warship larger than a light cruiser?
The reality is that, when dealing with large numbers of small, towed, barges, the most suitable warships are fast, agile ones able to bring large numbers of quick-firing guns to bear. In this case, the British were using ships armed with 6 inch, 4.7 inch, 4 inch, and 3 inch guns, all of which were perfectly capable of sinking small coasters, tugs, and converted barges in large numbers. The Home Fleet itself was based in Rosyth, from where it could counter any move by German heavy ships either to support an invasion, or to break out on an Atlantic raid.
To send capital ships against barges would have been akin, as an American friend of mine once remarked, to 'taking tanks on a duck shoot.'
Surely, this is obvious?
1
-
@shb7772000if What do you think happened to British capital ships in the Mediterranean, where they were frequently under heavy air attack from Italian & German aircraft, usually with little or no air support of their own? How many were sunk by these air attacks? The same comment applies to British capital ships which operated in the Arctic. You do appreciate that British capital ships of WW2 were designed to withstand plunging fire from 15 inch AP shells. A typical such shell weighed around 800kgs. The best bomb the Luftwaffe had in 1940 was 500kgs.
Certainly, attacks by US naval aircraft in the Pacific were more successful, largely because they, like the British Fleet Air Arm, were naval fliers trained in the techniques and skills required to attack ships. By contrast, the Luftwaffe of 1940 had been trained as a tactical air force, to operate in support of ground forces. They had had no training at all in operations against warships, hence their failure at Dunkirk. Moreover, unlike the Japanese, the Luftwaffe had no torpedo aircraft at all until 1942.
Rommel in North Africa is not relevant. Firstly, Italian troops were already there, and he had friendly ports in which to disembark. He was never in a position where he was required to make an assault landing. Sealion would require an assault landing without assault ships with which to carry it out, in the face of a vast number of opposing warships, and land defences which, by September, had been largely restored.
1
-
@shb7772000if October 10, 1940. HMS Revenge with destroyer escorts shelled the barge concentrations at Cherbourg. Revenge fired 120 high explosive 15 inch shells, supported by 801 4.7 inch shells from her escorts. Whilst returning to port, the heavy German gun batteries fired at her, but missed. In point of fact, by the end of August there were over 150 medium, heavy, and super heavy German batteries on the French coast, which began firing at British coastal convoys from 12 August. Between August & December, 1940, some 1880 rounds were fired at these convoys, often involving as many as 200 rounds. Number of hits? NONE. In fact, the batteries, during the whole of the war, achieved precisely no hits on any convoy. So, maybe German land artillery COULDN'T hit ships in the Channel.
Other than that, why exactly should British ships not go into the Channel? There was no actual prohibition, rather their presence there would have served no purpose, unless heavy German ships did the same. The right place for British capital ships in Home Waters was Rosyth, and later Scapa Flow, from where they could intercept a potential German sortie into the Atlantic. Incidentally, the Battleship Queen Elizabeth was in Portsmouth until December, 1940, undergoing modernisation. A sitting duck, perhaps? Not really. During the course of numerous Luftwaffe raids, she received no hits.
The fact that the Channel is not as wide as the Mediterranean is irrelevant, as Luftwaffe & Italian aircraft in the Med. had ample range to reach British ships. Moreover, in the Med. the British, unless they had a fleet carrier available, had no air support at all.
Indeed, the Japanese sank two British capital ships. WITH TORPEDO BOMBERS, a weapon not available to the Luftwaffe until 1942.
By the way, what relevance has any of this to Sealion. I have already told you that capital ships played little or no part in the Admiralty's anti-invasion dispositions, for blindingly obvious reasons.
1
-
1
-
1