Comments by "doveton sturdee" (@dovetonsturdee7033) on "Historigraph"
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@wolfbyte3171 Captain Krancke, commander of Admiral Scheer, paid generous tribute to the gallantry of Fegan & Jervis Bay in his account. He also referred to a small freighter, already on fire, which fired at his ship before she sank. This is believed to have been Kenbane Head. He made no reference to any gun battle with Beaverford, only referring to a ship carrying a deck cargo of timber that Scheer caught up with as it fled at speed far to the south of the main action.
The captain's log from Fresno City, another of Scheer's victims, reported "The Beaverford, bearing 110 degrees East South East was attacked and set on fire, distant about 10 miles". It seems Beaverford was attacked around 50 minutes after Kenbane Head, and about an hour before the sinking of Fresno City. There does not seem to have been, therefore, any time for a four hour engagement.
The account of the Beaverford action first appeared in 1944, in the magazine Canada's Weekly, and it was republished in the Evening Standard in London. Quite how, when the convoy was scattering in all directions, a four hour engagement could have been witnessed in entirety, is not made clear.
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Precisely, Prince of Wales (and Repulse) were both sunk by TORPEDO BOMBERS. The Luftwaffe didn't even have an operational torpedo bomber until mid 1942. Similarly, the 1940 Luftwaffe had not been trained in anti-shipping techniques, hence their failure at Dunkirk.
The Germans only had a small number of operational U-Boats in September, 1940. In point of fact, 27, of which, historically, 13 were actually at sea on any one day in September. Moreover, in October, 1940, the Germans sent three U-Boats into the Channel. All three were immediately sunk. The allies had laid a series of defensive minefields, similar to those which had been so successful against German submarines in WW1.
Condors were long-range search aircraft, and had some initial success against unarmed merchantmen. I do not recall reading of any attempt by a Condor to attack a warship, and historically, once merchantmen received defensive armament, Condor crews were forbidden to attempt attacks, because Condors were too valuable, and there were only ever a few of them.
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By June, 1941, the idea of a German invasion was a distant memory if, indeed, it had ever been much more than a fantasy in the first place, given the naval supremacy of the Royal Navy at the time.
By the way, neither the US nor the Soviets 'came to the rescue.' The Soviet Union was invaded by Germany in June 1941, and the US was attacked by Japan in December, 1941, after which Germany declared war. Stop pretending altruism where none existed.
Incidentally, there are many good books which explain the actual facts in some detail. Perhaps you might read one or two some day?
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Let's see. Over 100 Belgian & French divisions either capitulated or surrendered in 1940. Thirteen British divisions were evacuated (along with 120,000 French troops). The French did better?
The British & Canadians then fought & won the Battle of the Atlantic, the Royal Navy won the war in the Mediterranean, the Royal Navy maintained the supply lines to the Soviets in the Arctic, The Royal Navy planned and executed every major Allied assault landing in the west, The British provided 892 0f the 1213 warships at D-Day, 3261 of the 4127 landing craft, two thirds of the allied aircraft, and the British & Canadians provided two of every three men who landed on the beaches on 6 June.
The RAF maintained a constant air offensive against Germany, the Western Desert Force defeated the Italians in North Africa, and were the dominant partner in the Tunisian campaign. The British & Commonwealth armies fought and won the war against Japan in Burma, inflecting the greatest single defeat on Japanese land forces in the whole of the war, Operation U-Go.
You are an ignoramus or a simpleton. Go away.
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1). Good luck trying to lay mines with your seven minelayers, when the Royal Navy carried our nightly destroyer patrols during the invasion threat period. The Germans did install some 150 medium, heavy & super-heavy guns along the Channel Coast. In the whole of the war, these weapons successfully damaged seven merchant ships, totalling 8,000 tons. They even managed not to hit HMS Erebus when she shelled Calais on 29 September, and HMS Revenge when she bombarded Cherbourg on 10/11 October. You think those same guns would deter fast moving cruisers & destroyers? Think again.
2). You don't think that any invasion force needed resupplying, then?
3). That presupposes that you manage to get an invasion force ashore. Moreover, how long do you think Fighter Command, from bases north of the Thames, would take to react?
4). 'Sitting ducks?' Like the evacuation fleet was at Dunkirk, when the Luftwaffe totally failed to prevent Dynamo? Do you not realise how inept the Luftwaffe was at hitting ships at sea in 1940? Or that it didn't even have an operational torpedo bomber until mid 1942? Or that in the whole of the war it sank 31 RN destroyers, and no RN warship larger than a light cruiser?
5). Nonsense. The only German parachute division had around 4,500 men left in September, 1940, and the Luftwaffe had only around 220 transport aircraft still operational. With no hope of relief by ground troops, exactly how long do you think lightly armed paratroopers might last?
6). Simply not true. Moreover, what happens to your supply vessels and towed barges at night, when the RN can operate unhindered? Even if not actively transporting supplies, thewy would remain helpless.
7). You have to get your troops ashore first, don't you?
8). See 7). above.
9). See 7).above. Moreover, had you actually seen the final German plan, you would know that the first wave was intended to be around 6,700 men from each of nine divisions. These divisions would lackmotor transport, and most of their divisional artillery. As to Panzer Divisions, these were not included in the first wave, as the Germans lacked anything remotely resembling tank landing craft.
10). Aee 7). above. Moreover, other than your fevered imagination, what evidence you have that Churchill would have fled anywhere.
note: Launching Sealion in July. Good idea. At a meeting on 20 June, Raeder ( I assume you know who he was) stated that the Kriegsmarine had no suitable assault vessels, but hoped to have assembled some 45 barges within the next two weeks. Perhaps you should have added?
11). If all else fails, the invasion force could always cross using Montgolfier balloons.
I don't really know why I bothered to debunk your bizarre wish-fulfilment fantasy at such length, when three words would have been sufficient. Perhaps when you grow up, you will learn this?
THE ROYAL NAVY.
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@gregmackenzie5822 What U-boats? In Septermber 1940, the Germans had 27 operational boats, of which 13 on average were at sea on any one day. Moreover, they avoided the Channel, which was heavily mined and defended, after three boats sent there in late 1939 were promptly sunk. Generally, in WW2, U-boats tried to avoid escorts. Seeking them out as you suggest was unlikely to end well for the Germans.
Which S-boats? The Germans had 13 in September, 1940.
Which other naval forces? In September, 1940, the largest operational German warship was a single heavy cruiser. There were also three light cruisers, five destroyers (based in Cherbourg) two destroyers, based in Brest, and seven Wolf/Mowe class torpedo boats.
The actual probability, once the Invasion barges were detected at sea, moving slowly towards the Channel in unwieldy box formations, would be the arrival of Halsey's combined DF 16 & DF 18 from the Nore (9 destroyers), and Pizey's DF21 (8 boats) supplemented by 8 destroyers, of the Rosyth Escort Force, and of 23 Destroyer Division also based at the Nore, from the North. From the West (Portsmouth) the boats of Creasy's DF1 and Stevens' DF8 ( 12 boats), and the 5 French boats of DF23, would arrive slightly later. After that, boats from Plymouth (DF3, DF11, and DF17, 13 boats) could be expected, and a few hours later the Harwich destroyer and light cruiser force would appear. In total, around 70 destroyers and light cruisers, and this doesn't include the five hundred or so smaller vessels, such as fleet minsweepers, gunboats, sloops, frigates, corvettes, MLs, MTBs, MGBs, and auxiliary minesweepers arriving more slowly.
What did the Germans have available to fight these off? A handful of ships as listed above, and a few R boats, akin to British MGBS.
In all probability an action the naval equivalent of the US 'Marianas Turkey Shoot' of the Pacific war.
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@netrolancer1061 Well, not according to Bob Ballard or David Mearns, who both stated that 'the British' sank Bismarck. In point of fact, by the time she sank, she had lost her main armament, her bridge superstructure and command staff, and her internal communications. She was extensively on fire, listing heavily, and settling by the stern. Hardly scratched, in your mind, I suppose?
In fact, she had been reduced to little more than a practice target after around 20 minutes on 27 May. Still, if you wish to believe that, had she been scuttled, it made her slightly less sunk, then enjoy your delusion.
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Yes indeed. Germany had to strike to eliminate those hotbeds of brutal communism :- Denmark, Norway, The Netherlands, Belgium, & Luxembourg.
Of course Britain (not England) and France declared war in 1914 and again in 1939. Your sainted adolf invaded Czechoslovakia & Poland, as well as those listed above, without the courtesy of a declaration of war, as did Kaiser Bill to Belgium in 1914. Usually, large numbers of armed troops crossing a border gives a people a good idea what is happening, don't you think?
In the normal world (you might have read of the concept) if in 1941 hitler wished to make peace, couldn't he have approached the British embassies in Sweden, Switzerland, or Spain? Indeed, couldn't he have approached the neutral United States? Even if hitler knew what Hess was planning, was flying to Scotland, then bailing out near what was believed to be the estate of a minor Scots. aristocrat who might or might not have had some connection with the Westminster government really the best that he & Rudolf could conceive.
You are wrong about hitler, by the way. He was a very fine painter. He could do a whole apartment in a week-end. Two coats! I hope you know the reference.
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Your level of ignorance is quite stunning. The nearest the Germans might have got to any form of air superiority ove SE England was likely to have been the withdrawal of 11 Group to bases north of the Thames, for a period of regrouping & re-equipping. As the British were outproducing the Germans in fighter aircraft from June 1940 onwards, this was likely to have been completed swiftly, and did not preclude an RAF return to SE England in the event of any Sealion attempt.
'Then eliminating the royal navy BEFORE the mainland invasion with hith altitude carpet bombing the bigger ships and using u-boats against the smaller ones plus using the Italian and german navy' As a famous tennis player used to say 'You cannot be serious!' The 1940 Luftwaffe had not been trained in anti-shipping techniques, hence the humiliating failure at Dunkirk, and it didn't even acquire a torpedo bomber until mid 1942.
In fact, in the whole of WW2, the Luftwaffe sank 31 RN destroyers, and no RN warship larger that a light cruiser. To put that into perspective, in September, 1940, the RN had 70 light cruisers & destroyers within five hours steaming of the Dover Straits, supported by around 500 or so smaller warships, and a further 40 or so destroyers further away but still in Home Waters. That does not include Force H, or the Home Fleet, as the Admiralty had no plans to deploy the heavy ships (5 battleships & battlecruisers, and seven cruisers) against the Sealion barges.
German navy? - You mean, I assume, the one heavy cruiser, three light cruisers, and seven destroyers which were all the Kriegsmarine had operational at the time?
Italian navy? - You have a cunning plan for getting it through the Straits of Gibraltar's gun batteries, past Force H, whilst finding a method of persuading the Mediterranean Fleet not to get involved?
U- Boats? On average, there were 13 boats at sea on any one day in September, 1940. Moreover, throughout WW2 U-boats tried very hard indeed to avoid close encounters with escorts and/or destroyers. Now you suggest that they should actively seek them out? That would not end well for your U-boats.
Mines? The RN carried out nightly destroyer patrols through the Channel. The Germans had seven converted minelayers, possibly supplemented by some of their seven destroyers. Do you know what effect the explosion of a 4 inch or 4.7 inch HE shell has on a laden mine deck? Quite spectacular, I believe.
In short, why not read a book or two about the reality of Sealion, before resorting to fantasy?
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Preventing 200,000 or so British troops from evacuating from Dunkirk (the 130,000 or so French troops largely returned shortly afterwards) or a further 192,000 evacuating from west coast ports (Operation Aerial) might have forced Britain to come to terms. If, however, Britain continued to resist (as she historically did) then the Royal Navy still held absolute naval supremacy. How do you suggest large German forces would actually reach Britain?
In late 1940, after heavy losses in Norway and the Netherlands, the Germans only had around 4,000 to 5,000 trained paratroopers left, and the Luftwaffe only had just over 220 operational transport aircraft, for the same reason. Assuming that these paratroopers land, where do they get heavy weapons support, or even supplies from, and what use is an airfield without transport aircraft to land on it?
You don't seem to understand exactly how large the Royal Navy was at the time. Moreover, surely you know how badly the Luftwaffe had failed at Dunkirk? You must do, as you mentioned Dunkirk in your post. In 1940, the Luftwaffe had been trained in air support for ground troops. They were good at it. However, they had not been trained in anti-shipping operations, and they were poor at them. THey did get better in 1941, but even then, in the whole of WW2, they sank 31 RN destroyers, and no RN warship larger than a light cruiser.
Just to explain this point, in September 1940, the RN had 120 destroyers in Home Waters. Of these, over sixty were at bases within fours hours steaming of Dover, supported by several light cruisers, and around five hundred smaller warships.
How long do you think the barges full of troops, even troops with wonderful MP43s, towed at little more than walking pace by tugs and trawlers, and more or less unescorted, would have lasted? By the way, do you know why the MP43 was so called? Because it was introduced in 1943. Something of a problem here!
I do enjoy the posts of Sealion 'would haves,' always pontificating about what the mighty Luftwaffe 'would have' done to the poor old Royal Navy, but never able to explain how it was that, when the opportunity arose, they never managed to do it.
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The Home Fleet was based in Rosyth & Scapa Flow. It would only have entered the southern part of the North Sea if any German heavy ships did, and we now know that the Germans in September, 1940, only had one operational heavy ship, Hipper. The remainder were either under repair, or refitting.
You really don't need battleships, battlecruisers, and heavy cruisers to sink barges. Light cruisers, destroyers, and smaller auxiliaries are much more effective, which is why the RN had around 70 destroyers & cruisers within four hours' sailing time of Dover, together with several hundred smaller vessels, ranging from sloops, minesweepers, gunboats, armed trawlers and drifters to armed yachts. As to 'sitting ducks' the most obvious sitting ducks would have been the invasion barges attempting to cross with minimal protection during the day, and no protection at all at night.
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Nonsense, start to finish. Ohio was transferred to the British Eagle Oil Company specifically in order to have a large fast tanker available for Pedestal. The US War Shipping Administration notified her captain that she was to be requisitioned. Her crew was replaced with a British one because of the critical nature of the mission, and because the British at that time were more experienced in the demands of sailing in convoy. The captain and crew were unhappy at being replaced, but at no time were arrested. In the event, two of the ships which did sail had American crews.
Five ships of the convoy arrived. Ohio was the only one under tow, actually being attached by cables to two destroyers, with a third close astern to help with the steering.
There was no American carrier involved at any time, before or after Pedestal, in escorting Malta convoys, although USS Wasp did carry out two ferry trips, in order to fly RAF Spitfires into Malta, in April, 1942. The British carrier sunk during the Operation, HMS Eagle, was actually torpedoed by a U-Boat, not sunk by air attack.
Might I ask why, when you obviously have little accurate knowledge of the circumstances of Operation Pedestal, you even bothered posting?
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@alexalbrecht5768 Have you actually read the full details of the damage which the 18 inch torpedo caused to Bismarck? It was far more than simply jamming of the rudder, there were also extensive tears in the structure of the ship, serious internal flooding, and significant weakening of the stern. You can look up the full details for yourself, should you so choose. Repulse performed better, in that she was able to avoid torpedo hits for a while.
Barham was hit by three or possibly four torpedoes closely adjacent to each other, something which any capital ship, let alone one 25 years old, could be expected to survive.
By December, 1941, the Kriegsmarine had 250 boats in commission. Sinkings in Nov., 1941 were 76056, and in December 93226. As the monthly target was 600,000, this rather demonstrates the extent of German failure. The only times the Germans actually reached their target was after the US entered the war, when U-Boats had their second Happy Time off the East Coast of the United States because Admiral King chose not to organize convoys, and shore lights were not extinguished. You may be aware that the British & Canadians detached escorts from their own groups to help the US navy out and bring the slaughter to an end.
Yorktown was hit by three bombs at Midway, and later by two torpedoes. Illustrious was hit by six bombs. Yorktown was subsequently scuttled. Illustrious was still able to steam at full speed, and subsequently reached Malta. In total, I would agree that Yorktown took heavier damage, but as she ended up a crippled wreck, I fail to see how her performance was superior to that of Illustrious. Are you familiar with the comment made by a US Navy Liaison Officer aboard HMS Indefatigable on 1 April, 1945, when she was hit by a Kamikaze? 'When a Kamikaze hits one of our carriers, it's six months in Pearl. When one hits a Limey carrier, it's 'sweepers, man your brooms.'
Exactly how did British designs fail so catastrophically in WW1? Tell me in full of a British battleship lost in action as a result of naval gunfire.
'The design and employment of British vessels in WW2 was the worst of the allies and was only compensated for by sheer numbers.' Simply making such a comment doesn't make it so, although it does rather illuminate your prejudices.
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When in Valparaiso harbour after the Coronel action, Spee was entertained by the German business community to dinner. At one point, a German businessman proposed the toast 'Damnation to the British Navy!' Spee refused the toast, remained in his seat, but when everyone else had resumed theirs, rose, raised his glass, and quietly said, 'I drink to the memory of a gallant and honourable foe.'
As it says on the memorial to Cradock & his ships in York Minster, 'God forbid that I should do this thing, to flee away from them. If our time be come, let us die manfully for our brethren, and let us not stain our honour.'
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The Luftwaffe had failed badly at Dunkirk. It had not been trained in anti-shipping operations, and in the whole of the war sank 31 RN destroyers, and no RN ship bigger than a light cruiser. Attempting to attack warships, and in particular destroyers, is the opposite of what U-Boats actually did in WW2. Moreover, the Channel is a death trap where U-Boats were concerned. Three were sent to operate there in late 1939, and were promptly sunk.
When the RN had around 70 destroyers and light cruisers within 4 hours steaming of the Channel, and the Germans were, potentially, trying to cross it by means of Rhine barges towed by tugs and trawlers, and needed eleven days simply to get the first wave ashore, then in all honesty what was happening (or, at night, not happening) was more or less irrelevant.
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Hitler was trying to get Britain to make peace in July, 1940? Really? Why not provide some examples of his efforts? Oh, the 'Appeal to Reason' speech (Surrender or we bomb you) is not a credible one, by the way.
The Luftwaffe lost 1700 aircraft & 2700 aircrew not being 'serious', whilst more than 2000 barges were taken out of the European canal network, crudely converted into landing craft, and sent to Channel ports, together with around 200 freighters, over 400 tugs, and around 1200 motor boats.
Over 20 divisions were allocated to the operation and undertook the necessary training, and a large amount of senior officer & staff time and resources was spent on planning & preparations.
You might ask the people of Czechoslovakia, Poland, Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg, Belgium, & The Netherlands what their opinions of whether the war was necessary or not were, perhaps?
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'The Royal Navy stood no chance against the Luftwaffe.' Oh please! The Luftwaffe had just failed badly at Dunkirk, hadn't been trained in anti-shipping techniques, and didn't even acquire a high performance torpedo bomber until mid 1942.
If you were to look at statistics rather than myths, you would find that, in the whole of WW2, the Luftwaffe sank 31 RN destroyers, and no RN warship at all larger than a light cruiser. To put that into perspective, the RN Pink List shows, for mid September, 1940, some 70 RN destroyers and light cruisers within five hours' steaming of the Straits, with a further 500 or so smaller warships available in support.
That doesn't include the additional 40 destroyers further away but still in Home Waters, or the heavy ships of the Home Fleet at Rosyth and Scapa Flow available to intercept any German surface ships which might have been sent to support an invasion fleet, which consisted, by the way, of converted barges towed at little more than walking pace by tugs and trawlers.
Do you seriously wish to maintain that, having been largely unable to hit RN destroyers either stopped or moving slowly in restricted waters off Dunkirk, the Luftwaffe would have been effective against similar ships, free to manoeuve at speeds of 28 + knots, as they appproached those virtually unprotected barges.
I wonder whether you would have been able to convince Oskar Dinort, the commander of Stuka-Geschwader 3? Dinort had been a leading competition flyer in pre-war Germany, and his unit had had considerable success attacking ground targets in Poland. On 25 May, he led a flight of 40 Ju87s against a Destroyer Flotilla off Calais?. His own bomb exploded over 300 feet from his target, and no hits were achieved by any of his aircraft. His report, which may still be read, concluded that attacks on warships required 'a greater degree of expertise than his aircraft had previously needed to demonstrate.'
Or Wolfram von Richtofen, commander of Fliegerkorps VIII, whose dive bombers would have been expected to protect the barges from the Royal Navy, and who reported to Goering that such a task was utterly beyond the capablities of his crews?
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Sealion, at least from the naval viewpoint, might well have been another Crete, in the sense that ground forces sent to support the invasion would never arrive. One convoy, heading for Maleme, was annihilated by a British cruiser squadron, and the second, heading for Heraklion, returned to Greece to avoid a probable similar fate.
There were not 'a lot of soldiers' available. Because of a lack of towing vessels for the hastily converted barges, the first wave was intended to consist of around 6,700 men from each of nine divisions. This first wave would be lacking motor transport and divisional artillery.
The passage would not have been short. The time needed to extracate these towed barges from their ports, form them up into cumbersome box formations, and set off down the Channel to their beaches meant that in some cases, the voyage would require three days. These formations would be almost devoid of escort vessels, and would sail at little more than walking pace.
Would this air force 'protection' have been supplied by the Luftwaffe, which, untrained in anti-shipping operations, had failed totally to prevent the Dunkirk evacuation?
You need to read a book or two on the subject before embarrassing yourself further.
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Might have been difficult. Graf Spee had been sunk in 1939, Scharnhorst & Gneisenau were both in Brest, damaged, Hipper was under repair between March & November, 1941, Scheer was repairing between April & July, 1941, Lutzow was repairing & refitting between April 1940 & December, 1941, and Tirpitz was not declared fit for operations until January, 1942.
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Firstly, if sufficient resources had been allocated to provide these, then the build up of the German army & air force would, of necessity, have been scaled back, with the result that the conquest of France & the Low Countries would almost certainly not have occurred, the Kriegsmarine would not have had the Atlantic bases from which to operate these boats, and Hitler's over-riding priority, the destruction of the Soviet Union, would have been out of his grasp.
Secondly, should major construction of U-boats commenced, then the British, with vastly greater shipbuilding resources, would have begun producing escort corvettes, sloops, and destroyers in greater numbers.
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@jddallas7274 Congratulations on getting so many facts wrong in so short a post. Quite an achievement.
The Germans had 27 operational U-boats by September, 1940, of which an average of 13 were at sea on any one day. At the same time, they had only seven operational destroyers. For comparative purposes, at the same time the RN had 70 or so destroyers and cruisers based within five hours steaming of Dover, and a further 40 or so destroyers in Home Waters if needed.
Magnetic mines might have caused problems in shallow waters, had the Luftwaffe not managed to drop a couple on mud flats near Shoeburyness in November, 1939. A team from HMS Vernon recovered them and determined how they worked. As early as 27 November, tests (successful ones) were carried out on HMS Manchester, and degaussing methods were rapidly introduced. By 9 March, 1940, over 600 vessels had been successfully treated, and the procedure was quickly gathering pace.
The RN didn't seem to have been 'afraid of getting shot to bits by the Luftwaffe in the channel' at Dunkirk when they evacuated over 323,000 men of the BEF & French 1st Army without serious losses. Nor did they seem deterred as they undertook daily destroyer, cruiser, and MTB patrols through the Channel for the rest of the summer. Out of interest, and because it is clearly another fact of which you are ignorant, in the whole of WW2 your mighty Luftwaffe sank 31 RN destroyers, and no RN warship at all larger than a light cruiser.
'The Germans would have conducted the landing at night and the Royal Navy would not have responded till the day that is a head start. Every amphibious operation of WW2 succeeded and the British destroyers did not have the guns to shoot the German landing craft till 1942' This is idiocy on a masterful level. The Germans did not have any landing craft. They intended to transport their troops in barges towed in pairs by tugs or trawlers. The barges were to be towed in cumbersome block formations. For example, Barge Convoy 1, from Rotterdam, Ostend & Dunkirk heading for the area between Folkestone & New Romney consisted of 150 barges from Dunkirk & 50 from Ostend, together with a further 114 barges & 57 transports from Rotterdam.
Have you even considered how long it would take to extricate these barges from their ports, assemble them into some sort of formation, and then set sail? The quickest convoy required two days, and the largest three.
'The British destroyers did not have the guns to shoot the German landing craft till 1942 the Germans conducted a successful landing without control of the sea in Crete and they were intercepted by the Royal Navy and still all made so just saying your argument is weak not my.' What do you think that the 6 inch and 4 inch guns aboard British light cruisers, or the 4.7 inch, and 4 inch guns aboard British destroyers in 1940 were? Wooden mock ups? Or,of course, the 4 inch & 3 inch guns aboard supporting vessels, such as minesweepers, gunboats, sloops, and corvettes?
The salient point about Crete was that the Axis were not able be land troops from the sea, at least not until the British had decided to withdraw. Two convoys sailed from Greece, one bound for Maleme & one for Heraklion. The Maleme convoy was annihilated by a RN cruiser squadron, and as a result the Heraklion convoy turned back to Greece.
One of your comments, however, is correct, that 'Every amphibious operation of WW2 succeded.' Do you know why that was? Because those in Europe & North Africa were planned and executed by the Royal Navy, and those in the Pacific by the United States' Navy.
I assume from your post that you are just an immature child. The other possibility, that you are a remarkably stupid or ignorant adult, does also exist, however.
Would you like me to recommend a few book for you to read, or have read to you?
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@jddallas7274 Oh dear. Has no-one ever told you that, when you are in a hole, you should stop digging? Oh well.
The RAF not lose the Battle of France. The Allied ground forces did. The RAF was outnumbered by the Luftwaffe throughout the campaign. As, of course, it was during the Battle of Britain, although a combination of the ability to operate on interior lines, and the use of a brilliant use of resources to produce a unique air defence plan, enabled it to achieve victory.
The Germans were able to take Crete by means of their paratroop and air landing capabilities, against Allied forces still disorganised by their evacuation from Greece. Precisely because the Germans did not have naval 'sumperacy' (whatever that is) the Italian navy was not able to deliver additional ground troops to the island.
As a result, the numbers of operational German transport aircraft were severely reduced, and their airborne forces greatly weakened, to the extent that Hitler lost faith in them, and they were only thereafter used as ground troops.
Have you actually read anything at all?
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Bypassed by which paratroopers? The 4.500 which were all that still remained after their losses in Norway and the Netherlands? Transported, presumably, in the 225 or so surviving operational transport aircraft which still survived after similar heavy losses during the campaigns in Norway, the Low Countries, and France?
Oh, and those paratroops were equipped with light arms only, as would be any reinforcements flown in by the non-existent transport aircraft. Moreover, should such a force have landed, then ipso facto the British would know where they were, and would be able to concentrate troops, artillery, and armour against them, as well as deploying fighters to intercept and destroy the (imaginary) transport aircraft bringing supposed reinforcements.
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@TechnologieGlobeOculaire 'even after I explained plainly how to totally circumvent it.' No, you haven't. You simply postulated an idea which, as I explained, had no conceivable basis in reality.
I have already explained to you the number of paratroopers available to Germany, and the number of transport aircraft available.
I have also explained the helplessness of paratroop units which have no hope of relief from more heavily armed and equipped ground troops. In the case of Germany, these could only be delivered by sea. Unless, of course, you have worked out some magical way of transporting Pz IVs using Ju52s, even non existent ones?
You appear to think that shipyards can simply switch to building aircraft, which idea can best be described as 'interesting.'
The fact is that, as I wrote earlier, the British were able to outproduce Germany in aircraft.
In terms of fighter aircraft, the actual totals per year were:-
1940. Britain 4283 Germany 2735
1941. Britain 7064 Germany 3744
1942. Britain 9859 Germany 5358
1943. Britain 10722 Germany 10059
Bear in mind, also, that the figures from 1941 onwards do not include fighters either supplied by or purchased from the United States. Nor do they include, from 1942, aircraft of the USAAF based in Britain.
If you seek to make any sort of credible case, mon vieux, perhaps you sjould check your facts first before indulging in fantasies?
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People who use 'lol' in their posts have already discredited anything they have to say, but just to correct you, the Anglo-French alliance ended with the fall of Paul Reynaud and the subsequent signing of the Armistice on 22 June. One of the terms of the armistice, in case you didn't know, was that the French fleet was to be returned to French Atlantic ports and placed under German supervision. The Head of the French navy, Admiral Darlan, sought to reject this clause, until told by Weygand that 'we aren't going to scupper the armistice for the sake of your little boats.'
This was, obviously, something the British could not permit to happen. Accordingly, at Mers-el-Kebir, the British gave Gensoul a series of options as part of an ultimatum, among which was the transfer of the French fleet to the French West Indies, where it could be placed under the supervision of the neutral United States. Darlan might well have accepted this, but unfortunately Gensoul failed to pass on the full text of the British ultimatum, claiming only that the offer said that he must join with the British or his ships would be sunk.
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In September 1940 the Germans had, on average, 13 U-boats at sea on each day. They had attempted to send three boats into the Channel in October, 1939, and all were promptly sunk. The Channel was heavily mined (by the British) and unsafe for submarines. Moreover, your suggestions that these boats would 'ravage' the Royal Navy is directly contrary to the manner in which U-boats operated in WW2, when they attempted to keep clear of destroyers or escort vessels, as such encounters generally ended badly for the U-boat concerned.
As to mines, how were these to be laid? At Gallipoli, the Turks had had plenty of time to lay mines in their own waters, much as the British had in the Channel. To lay mines in hostile waters, the Germans needed a large fleet of minelayers, but in fact only had seven converted merchant ships. By contrast, the British had several hundred fleet & auxiliary minesweepers. Furthermore, the mines would need to be laid at night, and the British carried out nightly destroyer patrols every night, from Plymouth & Sheerness.
The Luftwaffe had had no training in anti-shipping operations at the time of Sealion, and as a result had failed badly at Dunkirk. Neither could they operate at night against ships, and they didn't even have any torpedo bombers until mid 1942. In fact, in the whole of the war, the Luftwaffe sank 31 RN destroyers. In September 1940, the British had around 100 destroyers in Home Waters, supported by several hundred smaller warships.
Sorry, but an utterly implausible scenario, and one which has been discredited and disproven for some time.
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By September, 1940, the British had re-armed and re-equipped. There were 34.5 operational divisions by then, the vast majority in the South East.
What paratroopers? After losses during the Spring & Summer, the Germans only had around 4,500 left. Moreover, in early September, there were only just over 220 operational transport aircraft in Luftwaffe service. So, how do you suggest a small number of lightly armed troops, with no hope of reinforcement or re-supply, would fare?
As the Kriegsmarine had no tank landing craft, how do you suggest that tanks could have got across the Channel, still less to 'Salisbury Plain?' Especially in view of the following:-
The bulk of the RN's anti-invasion forces were at the Nore, Portsmouth, & Plymouth. Some 70 destroyers and light cruisers in all, supported by around 500 smaller warships. The Home Fleet was mainly at Rosyth, but not intended to steam south unless German heavy warships appeared, which was unlikely as there were none in service until November, 1940.
Which U-boats? In September, 1940, there were, on any one day, only some 13 at sea. Moreover, U-boats throughout the war tried to avoid encounters with smaller warships such as destroyers, sloops, or corvettes, yet here you suggest that they would seek them out?
Luftwaffe? You mean the Luftwaffe which had just failed badly at Dunkirk? Which had received little or no training in anti-shipping operations, which was still almost two years away from acquiring a torpedo bomber, and which could not operate at night? That Luftwaffe?
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@bottcherimmobilien4864 Of course the idea of a successful invasion is nonsense. Actually, the Allies used 4127 landing craft on D-Day, just to be precise.
Oh, yes. The Appeal to Reason, which basically said 'Stop resisting or we bomb you.' As to the lunatic Hess mission (or should that read 'The Lunatic Hess's Mission?). Reason would suggest that, if Hitler sought a peace, he would have cautiously approached the British government via Embassies in Sweden, Switzerland, or Spain. Even, perhaps, asking the neutral USA to act as a peace broker. Reason would not suggest that a lone flight to Scotland, which ended by mad Rudolf bailing out near the estate of a minor Scots. aristocrat who might or might not have had a tenuous connection with the Westminster government, was a credible course of action.
Hitler, by the way, didn't stop the tanks. Von Rundstedt did, as the war diary of Army Group A states. The reason was to service the armour and rest the crews before beginning the second stage of the campaign, and because he feared a repeat of the Miracle of the Marne. Hitler had been told on the previous day, by Goering, that the elimination of the BEF & First Army was a 'special task for the Luftwaffe,' and chose to believe him. Seriously, if you want your enemy to come to terms, do you :-
1). Capture his entire field army and put it into prison camps? or,
2). Allow him to lift that army back to Britain, where it can be re-armed and re-equipped behind the impenetrable barrier of the English Channel & the Royal Navy?
Send your answer to anyone except me. I already know the answer.
There was a brief period when, had Dynamo failed, Halifax might have won a power struggle and, effectively, surrendered. After Dynamo, Halifax was a busted flush, abandoned in Parliament even by his own supporters.
The rest of your post is irrelevant. I thought the subject was Sealion?
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Of course Jutland was a British victory, in the strategic sense. Battles are generally waged in pursuit of a wider aim, and in the case of Jutland the outcome was to demonstrate to Scheer that the High Seas Fleet would never be able to break the blockade on Germany imposed by the Grand Fleet. As a result, the High Seas Fleet stayed out of action until it mutinied, and the Royal Navy starved Germany to defeat by late 1918.
As to the subsequent 'massive defeat' I presume you mean like the River Plate action, the first and second Battles of Narvik, the sinking of Bismarck, the Battle of the Barents Sea, the Battle of North Cape, and the big one, the Battle of the Atlantic?
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@hetrodoxlysonov-wh9oo Failing to defeat the RAF in the Battle of Britain is not the same as claiming that Germany attempted to invade, but failed. Certainly, the Germans did convert a large (about 1900) number of barges, which they intended to tow across the Channel using tugs and small coasting vessels, although after their heavy naval losses during the Norwegian campaign they had no navy worthy of the name with which to provide an escort.
Their plan, if it could be so-called, involved using every available towing vessel (there were, literally, no reserves to replace losses) to tow two barges each, carrying in total nine divisions, across the Channel, over a period of eleven days. The divisions would lack most of their wheeled transport, most of their artillery, and would have no tank support, by the way. Absurdly, the Kreigsmarine plan assumed that, whilst this ramshackle ferry operation was in progress, the Royal Navy would not intervene!
The reality is that, if so ordered, the Luftwaffe could have maintained control of the air space over the Channel in September, 1940. What they could not do was prevent the Royal Navy from destroying the invasion fleet en route.
The story of the Battle of Britain, and the heroic Few, is a noble myth, designed by Churchill to win support for Britain in the United States, with the image of a David versus Goliath struggle. The reality is that a seaborne invasion was unthinkable unless the Germans were able to secure the support of the French fleet. Even then, the possibility of success was remote.
Indeed, as early as mid-August, 1940, when the legend would have people believe that Britain's survival was on a knife edge, Churchill sent major reinforcements, including three armoured regiments, to North Africa. Look up The Apology Convoy for proof.
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Perhaps you are unaware that, at the time, Pound was suffering from a brain tumour which killed him less than 18 months later, and which almost certainly warped his judgement? Certainly, Cunningham would have left the decision to Hamilton and Broome, ther men on the spot, but for the actual response of the Royal Navy to Arctic Convoy defence, perhaps you should read about JW51B?
Or consider the statistics? Of 78 Arctic convoys, involving just over 1,400 merchantmen, 85 were lost. Or, in % terms, 6%. Perhaps the Royal Navy was getting something right?
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Actually, it takes 23 hours for a destroyer to steam from Scapa Flow to Dover. HMS Codrington did precisely that earlier in the war. Not that this matters, firstly because the bulk of the Home Fleet was at Rosyth anyway, and secondly because by September 1940 the Admiralty had already positioned around 70 light cruisers and destroyers within five hours' steaming of the Straits anyway, at bases such as Portsmouth/Southampton and the Nore. These were, by the way supported by around 500 smaller warships, such as fleet minesweepers, sloops, corvettes, gunboats, and armed trawlers.
If it takes 'five minutes to sink a battleship when you have air superiority' please reinforce this point by replying with details of which British battleship was sunk in such a manner by the Luftwaffe in WW2.
'People who think a landing was impossible are just imbeciles with zero idea of military matters and this opinion is a recent one not something taken seriously back then.' Oh? If this opinion is a recent one, why did Churchill send a troop convoy to North Africa, including three full armoured regiments, on 22 August, 1940, when myth would have us believe that Britain's fate was on a knife edge? Look up the 'Apology' convoy for yourself. Why, furthermore, did the C-in-C Home Fleet, Admiral Sir Charles Forbes argue with Churchill & the Admiralty (correctly, in my assessment) that too much emphasis had been placed on naval anti-invasion resources, when many of the lighter vessels could have remained on convoy duty throughout, only being recalled when (if) they were needed? Being right isn't always wise, by the way, as Forbes found when he subsequently lost his job!
Right after the fall of France, on 20 June, by the way, Admiral Raeder, head of the Kreigsmarine, attended a meeting with Hitler, Keitel, & Jodl, informing them that his navy had no landing craft, but hoped to have assembled 45 seaworthy barges within a fortnight. I hope that your German assault were excellent long distance swimmers or, alternatively, had access to Montgolfier balloons!
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@ablethreefourbravo You should read 'Invasion of England, 1940' by the German author Peter Schenk, for full details of the German plan.
'It's a mistake to think the Germans would drive their boats straight to the beach and run directly into machine gun fire like we did.' True enough, because the German troops were to be landed from (mainly unpowered) barges, which were to be pushed slowly onto the landing beaches by small motor boats. Assuming, of course, that they could find a way past the RN anti-invasion forces in the first place.
You seem to have a charmingly naive idea that Sealion, or some form of alternative Sealion, would have been successful, without having the faintest idea about how it might overcome the vast number of problems it, in reality, faced.
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'Germany could afford to sustain vast losses of all kinds and still win a direct conflict with England. If the entire first wave of 150,000 men were lost it wouldn't mean anything.' Aside from the fact that the first wave was likely to have been around 60,000 men, I suggest that winning a war against and island when your own country has no fleet would be more than a little difficult.
Sealion was, at best, a one shot weapon, hamstrung by the inability of the Kriegsmarine to assemble sufficient barges.All 400 were to be committed to the first wave. Once they, or most of them, were lost, there could be no second attempt. The Admiralty had no intention of committing the heavy ships (battleships, battlecruisers, & heavy cruisers) to anti-invasion operations in any case, asd they deemed it unnecessary unless German heavy ships appeared.The only operational German heavy ship at the time, of course, was a single heavy cruiser.
'attacked by U-Boats and E-Boats and aircraft the whole time.' Oh dear. In September, 1940, the Kriegsmarine had 27 operational U-boats, of which 13 were at sea on any one day. The last attempt to operate any boats in the Channel had been in October 1939 when three Type IIs were sent there, and were promptly sunk. Moreover, U-boats in WW2 tried to avoid contact with destroyers or escorts. Now you suggest that they would actively seek them out? 'S Boats?' You presumably mean the 13 the Germans had in service in 1940?
'Aircraft?' The Luftwaffe had little experience of attacking shipping, hence their failure at Dunkirk. In the whole of WW2, they sank 31 RN destroyers, and no RN warship larger than a light cruiser. They did not, by the way, even have an operational torpedo bomber until mid 1942.
'And once the Germans had a foothold on the coast, they can recover downed pilots, put every airfield within 20 miles of the coast out of action, all the RADAR and early warning posts are gone.' The key word here is 'once.' When is that? After the loss of the first wave of tugs and barges, what is left? Plenty of barges, certainly, but nothing to tow them, and nothing to escort them.
'It's airpower and land power that decides the fight for the Germans.' No, it isn't. At least, not in 1940. Land power is irrelevant unless it can be magicked across the Channel, which it cannot. The Luftwaffe was a tactical airforce, intended to support advancing troops. It is more or less irrelevant when there are no troops to support.
I really wish you Sealion 'would haves' would do a little reading before pronouncing so apparently sagely about what your mighty Germans 'would have' done in 1940. Oddly, you then struggle to explain why they didn't (actually, couldn't) do it.
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Actually, there was a reason, of sorts, for the seemingly pointless raid. As I recall reading quite recently :- 'The Japanese struck again on 9 April, sinking 23 ships in the Bay of Bengal. However, Japan did not want to invade Ceylon; the offensive was a defensive manoeuvre to raid the British forces and provide cover for their own troop reinforcements being sent to Rangoon by sea. As a result, the Japanese then withdrew and, for the most part, left India and the Indian Ocean alone for the rest of the war.'
So, the Japanese weren't going to invade Ceylon, but, in your mind, were going to invade Madagascar? Could you explain how, logistically, the Japanese could have executed and maintained such an operation? Again, I await with eager anticipation.
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This would be the same Ernest King who refused to consider a convoy system off the US East Coast because convoys were a British idea, and Ernie was Anglophobic because apparently he had not been treated politely enough when, as a junior officer, he served with a US Battle Squadron attached to the Grand Fleet in WW1, would it?
How many US merchant seamen were lost just because Ernie didn't like Limeys?
Fortunately, the RN & RCN provided enough escorts to permit the establishment of a convoy system until US new construction arrived, but, seriously, for an opinion on the RN in WW2, Ernie is not the authority to pick.
One of his daughters said of him "he is the most even-tempered person in the United States Navy. He is always in a rage." He even instituted the court-martial of Captain McVay of USS Indianapolis in 1945 because McVay's father had reprimanded him early in his career. To be fair to him, though, apparently he detested the US army almost as much as he detested the British!
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@julianmarsh8384 Actually, if you had bothered to read a German historian, Peter Schenk ('Invasion of England, 1940 - The Planning of Operation Sealion) you could have answered your own questions.
The landings between Folkestone & New Romney involved 150 barges from Dunkirk and 50 from Ostend. These had to be towed out of the ports in pairs, and formed up into a cumbersome box formation. This was a particularly difficult task where Dunkirk was concerned, as the harbour facilities had been largely destroyed during Dynamo.
Those between Rye & Hasting required a further 200 barges from Calais, which again needed to be extricated from the port and formed up, but this time in full view of observers at Dover.
Those for Bexhill & Eastbourne involved 330 barges from Boulogne & a further 50 from Le Havre.
The final force, in 300 motor boats, was to sail from Le Havre to Beachy Head & Brighton.
You ask how long? From the first barge leaving Boulogne harbour, forming up, being towed to, and arriving at, Folkestone/New Romney, the Kriegsmarine estimated three days. The other barge convoys required two days. The barges were to be towed in pairs, at approximately five to six knots.
'The Germam Air Force would have had a field day' You mean like during Operation Dynamo, when it failed totally to prevent the evacuation?
I hope you took in my details about RN forces within five hours of Dover. In point of fact, in the whole of WW2, your mighty Luftwaffe sank 31 RN destroyers, and no RN warship at all larger than a light cruiser. Indeed, the Luftwaffe, untrained in anti-shipping techniques in 1940, didn't even acquire a torpedo bomber until mid 1942.
'A screen of U-Boats?' Like the three which were sent to operate in the Channel in late 1939? The ones (U12, 8 October, U14, 13 October, & U40, 24 October) which are still there, encasing the bodies of their crews after promptly being sunk?
If you had any actual knowledge of Sealion, you would know that the Channel was a deathtrap for a WW2 submersible. By the way, in September, 1940, the Germans had 27 frontboote (Operational boats) of which, on average, 13 were at sea on any one day. Is that your wonderful U-boat screen? Moreover, normal U-boat operating procedure involved trying to avoid close encounters with escorts, and especially fleet destroyers. Do you suggest that on this occasion they should actively seek them out? It would not end well. For the U-boats, that is.
I do enjoy reading the poorly informed nonsense you Sealion 'Would Haves' post, by which I mean your amusing certainty about what the wonderful Luftwaffe & the mighty Kriegsmarine 'would have' done.
Odd, then, that you are never actually able to explain why, in reality, they never managed to get remotely near to achieving any of it, isn't it?
You should read Schenk's book. You might, even if belatedly, actually learn soimething.
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@nikolajkristensen5960 The bulk of the RN's anti-invasion forces, as I said before, were not in Rosyth, but much further south. The Admiralty didn't intend to use their heavy ships, because there was no need. The small, fast, destroyers and light cruisers were far better suited to the task.
'Germany still had a lot of destroyer u-boats bismarck, tirpitz.' Sorry, that is nonsense. Bismarck was undergoing trials in the Baltic, and was not declared fit for service until May, 1941. Tirpitz was declared operational in January, 1942. The Kriegsmarine had ten destroyers, of which four were refitting in September, 1940, and twenty seven operational U- boats, of which thirteen were at sea on any one day in September, 1940. It really wouldn't have been a good idea to send submarines into the Channel, by the way. The Kriegsmarine sent three in October, 1939, and all three were promptly sunk.
As to the invasion barges, you clearly haven't considered how much time it would take to get large numbers of towed barges out of a port, form them up into some sort of order, and set off for the Channel. The Kriegsmarine estimated that the largest of their convoys would require three days.
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You haven't heard of Dynamo, Aerial, the Battle of the Atlantic, the Arctic Convoys, the Naval War in the Mediterranean, or the defence of the Indian Ocean then? Nor of the various assault landings (Torch, Husky, Avalanche, Overlord, etc) largely planned and executed by the Royal Navy?
Certainly, there was a colossal struggle in the Pacific between the IJN & the US Navy. The US Navy could afford to devote the level of resources that it did to the Pacific precisely because the Royal Navy was everywhere else.
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@jddallas7274 Congratulations on getting so many facts wrong in so short a post. Quite an achievement.
The Germans had 27 operational U-boats by September, 1940, of which an average of 13 were at sea on any one day. At the same time, they had only seven operational destroyers. For comparative purposes, at the same time the RN had 70 or so destroyers and cruisers based within five hours steaming of Dover, and a further 40 or so destroyers in Home Waters if needed.
Magnetic mines might have caused problems in shallow waters, had the Luftwaffe not managed to drop a couple on mud flats near Shoeburyness in November, 1939. A team from HMS Vernon recovered them and determined how they worked. As early as 27 November, tests (successful ones) were carried out on HMS Manchester, and degaussing methods were rapidly introduced. By 9 March, 1940, over 600 vessels had been successfully treated, and the procedure was quickly gathering pace.
The RN didn't seem to have been 'afraid of getting shot to bits by the Luftwaffe in the channel' at Dunkirk when they evacuated over 323,000 men of the BEF & French 1st Army without serious losses. Nor did they seem deterred as they undertook daily destroyer, cruiser, and MTB patrols through the Channel for the rest of the summer. Out of interest, and because it is clearly another fact of which you are ignorant, in the whole of WW2 your mighty Luftwaffe sank 31 RN destroyers, and no RN warship at all larger than a light cruiser.
'The Germans would have conducted the landing at night and the Royal Navy would not have responded till the day that is a head start. Every amphibious operation of WW2 succeeded and the British destroyers did not have the guns to shoot the German landing craft till 1942' This is idiocy on a masterful level. The Germans did not have any landing craft. They intended to transport their troops in barges towed in pairs by tugs or trawlers. The barges were to be towed in cumbersome block formations. For example, Barge Convoy 1, from Rotterdam, Ostend & Dunkirk heading for the area between Folkestone & New Romney consisted of 150 barges from Dunkirk & 50 from Ostend, together with a further 114 barges & 57 transports from Rotterdam.
Have you even considered how long it would take to extricate these barges from their ports, assemble them into some sort of formation, and then set sail? The quickest convoy required two days, and the largest three.
'The British destroyers did not have the guns to shoot the German landing craft till 1942 the Germans conducted a successful landing without control of the sea in Crete and they were intercepted by the Royal Navy and still all made so just saying your argument is weak not my.' What do you think that the 6 inch and 4 inch guns aboard British light cruisers, or the 4.7 inch, and 4 inch guns aboard British destroyers in 1940 were? Wooden mock ups? Or,of course, the 4 inch & 3 inch guns aboard supporting vessels, such as minesweepers, gunboats, sloops, and corvettes?
The salient point about Crete was that the Axis were not able be land troops from the sea, at least not until the British had decided to withdraw. Two convoys sailed from Greece, one bound for Maleme & one for Heraklion. The Maleme convoy was annihilated by a RN cruiser squadron, and as a result the Heraklion convoy turned back to Greece.
One of your comments, however, is correct, that 'Every amphibious operation of WW2 succeded.' Do you know why that was? Because those in Europe & North Africa were planned and executed by the Royal Navy, and those in the Pacific by the United States' Navy.
I assume from your post that you are just an immature child. The other possibility, that you are a remarkably stupid or ignorant adult, does also exist, however.
Would you like me to recommend a few book for you to read, or have read to you?
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@jddallas7274 I presume you mean 'the book' on Sealion?
As I write this reply, the ones on the shelf immediately facing me, above my desk, are, in no particular order :-
Dunkirk. By John Harris.
Hitler's Naval War ( English edition) Cajus Bekker.
Churchill's Moat. The Channel War, 1939 -1945.
Invasion 1940. Derek Robinson.
Hitler's Armada. Geoff. Hewitt.
We Shall Fight on the Beaches. Defying Napoleon & Hitler. Brian Lavery.
Dunkirk The British Evacuation, 1940. Robert Jackson.
Operation Sea Lion. Peter Fleming.
The Evacuation From Dunkirk' Royal Navy Staff History.
Invasion of England 1940. (English edition) Peter Schenk .
The Miracle of Dunkirk. Walter Lord.
Crete 1941 David Thomas.
Silent Victory. Duncan Grinnell-Milne.
Operation Sealion. Leo McInstry.
Hitler Confronts England. Walter Ansel.
The Second World War, Vols. 1 & 2. Winston Churchill.
British & Empire Warships of the Second World War. H. T. Lenton.
Those are a selection, dealing primarily with the topic under discussion, but largely excluding associated topics such as Norway or even the Battle of Britain. Nor do I include documents and archives available to me, which are not readily accessible in book or electronic form.
Tell you what. Instead of simply posting insults, why don't you simply explain to me which parts of my original reply to you were, in your erudite opinion, either wrong, or even inaccurate?
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In point of fact, Admiral Drax, C-in-C at the Nore, where most of the anti-invasion destroyer flotillas were based, had an agreement with the Air Ministry that the RAF would not attempt to bomb German vessels at sea, but would leave the field clear for the Royal Navy.
Bomber Command began bombing barge ports from 5 September, and by the end of September had destroyed 21 transports, 214 barges, and 8 small boats. There were still 159 transports, 1859 barges, 397 tugs, and over 1100 motor boats available. Bomber Harris' post war claims that Sealion was prevented by Bomber Command did not stand up to scrutiny.
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The German plan anticipated that 9 divisions, plus a weak Paratroop Division (actually only about one third strength) would land, but that it would take ELEVEN DAYS to transport these across, using towed barges and small motor boats. Interestingly, the naval plan assumed that there would be no losses of towing vessels (because they had literally no reserves) and that, believe it or not, the Royal Navy would not intervene. This was at a time, by the way, (September, 1940) when the RN had over 70 destroyers and cruisers specifically allocated to anti-invasion duties, together with over five hundred smaller vessels such as sloops, minesweepers, gunboats, and armed trawlers, etc.
Supply by air would have been out of the question, because in late August, 1940, Luftwaffe archives show that there were precisely 226 operational transport aircraft.
Oh, and because of a lack of suitable shipping space, the divisions (all infantry or mountain divisions) would land without their divisional artillery or motor transport, although apparently some horses would have been included.
At the time, by the way, 'the stupidity of Hitler fighting the USSR ' making it possible for the British to hold on, is nonsense, as Hitler wasn't fighting the USSR in September, 1940. Therefore what, apparently, 'we all know' isn't true.
Try changing 'May have been risky' in your post to ''Would have been suicidal' for greater accuracy.
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@georgegonzalez-rivas3787 There was never any suggestion that the Home Fleet would 'rush down' to intercept an invasion. The Home Fleet was at Rosyth, and would only be sent further south if any (actually non-existent) German heavy ships were detected heading towards the Channel. Home Fleet heavy ships were not intended to operate against a ramshackle invasion fleet of towed barges for the same reason that duck hunters generally do not use field guns. The rapid firing 4 & 4.7 inch destroyer guns, backed up by the 6 inch of the cruisers, were far more suited to the task.
There were 61 U-boats in commission in September, 1940. 34 were older training boats, or new boats working up. Of the remaining 27, only 13 were operational on any one day. The rest were either en route to, or returning from, patrol areas, or refitting/repairing after completing patrols.
Prince of Wales and Repulse were sunk by torpedo bombers, flown by crews who had been trained in anti-shipping techniques. In September, 1940, the Luftwaffe had had no such training, and until mid 1942, didn't even have torpedo bombers. Why do you think the Luftwaffe failed so badly at Dunkirk. Furthermore, on what basis do you think they would do any better against fast moving warships, when three months earlier they had proved themselves largely ineffective against ships stopped close inshore? In the whole of the war, the Luftwaffe managed to sink 31 RN destroyers, and no RN warship larger than a light cruiser. In September, 1940 the RN had around 70 light cruisers and destroyers within 5 hours of Dover, and a further 40 or so more destroyers in Home Waters.
The status of the German navy in September, 1940 :- Scharnhorst & Gneisenau were both under repair, which wasn't completed until November 1940. Bismarck was completing trials in the Baltic, followed by modifications in Hamburg until early 1941. Tirpitz did not even commission and commence trials until early 1941. Prinz Eugen's construction only completed in December, 1940. The only heavy ship available at the time was a single heavy cruiser, with three light cruisers and six destroyers also operational at the time.
Finally, I don't do war games, but I did do a degree in Modern History, specialising in WW2 Naval History, and came away with a first.
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@myclearwater1471 America wasn't 'holding back' the destroyers at all. As early as 15 May, the US Ambassador in Paris had spoken to the French Admiralty concerning the supply of twelve such vessels to France. At the same time an approach was made, on the initiative of the US, to Britain, concerning the provision of '50 or 100 such ships' to the RN.
On 1 August, FDR, via the British Ambassador in Washington, suggested that 50 such ships could be sold to Canada, or in exchange for British bases. Churchill rejected the first option, but described the second as 'undesirable but acceptable.' The first destroyers began arriving in Canada on 1 September. The British saw them as useful stop-gaps for convoy escorts until their own new construction of better equipped escorts began to appear in early-mid 1941, but the initiative for the transfer was from the US, not Britain.
Britain was not 'getting ready' for invasion in August, 1940, unless you consider sending a troop convoy including three armoured regiments with full supporting artillery & transport an appropriate preparation. This was the 'Apology' convoy, which left the UK on 22 August.
The Italian 'invasion' of Egypt began in September, 1940. Far from attempting to take the Suez Canal, 10th Army advanced about 65 miles, then stopped, setting up a series of fortified camps. In December, 1940 the British, using the reinforcements from the 'Apology' convoy, counter-attacked, totally destroying 10th Army and for losses of 1900 men killed & wounded, took over 133,000 prisoners, and captured over 400 tanks and 800 artillery pieces.
Put simply, the Vichy French & 'the Arabs' were hardly close friends, and there was no threat to the oil fields at the time.
Air fields in Britain at the time generally had grass strips. Certainly, attacks did temporarily reduce their efficiency, but for brief periods only. A far more serious problem might have been a determined attempt to destroy the Chain Home radar stations, but no such concerted effort was made. Of course, if the RAF had been temporarily withdrawn from the Home Counties, all the towed canal barges of the Sealion invasion fleet needed to do was find a way past the seventy of so destroyers and light cruisers, with the support of five hundred or so smaller warships, which represented the force the Admiralty could deploy to meet them in the Channel!
The RAF was never short of pilots. Post-War studies of RAF records actually demonstrate that there were more qualified pilots in non-flying roles during the battle than were actually in aircraft.
Finally, there was a shortage neither of food nor of fuel at the time.
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@myclearwater1471 Indeed, Churchill worked with Stalin, just as FDR did. Both regarded Soviet Russia as the lesser of two evils, and the British worked on the principle that 'My enemy's enemy is my friend' or, as Churchill put it himself, 'If Hitler invaded hell, I would make at least one favourable comment about the devil in the House of Commons.'
Of course Churchill sought help from the U.S. Who wouldn't want the support of a great industrial power, and FDR give that support because it was in the interests of the U.S. to assist the last surviving democracy in Europe.
As to 'nothing to stop an invasion.' Are you aware that, in the whole of WW2, the mighty Luftwaffe sank 31 British destroyers, and no British warship larger than a light cruiser. In September, 1940, there were over 100 RN destroyers in Home Waters alone, of which over 60 were within five hours steaming of the Channel. The Luftwaffe, by the way, had had no training in anti-shipping operations at the time, had no operational high performance torpedo bombers (in fact, didn't get any until early 1942) and had just failed badly to prevent the Dunkirk evacuation. Even senior commanders like von Richtofen & Dinort were outspoken in their beliefs that the Luftwaffe could not protect an invasion 'fleet' of canal barges towed at walking pace by tugs.
Of course, as a Sealion 'would have' (i.e., an enthusiast full of what the Luftwaffe 'would have' done, but utterly unable to explain why it never actually 'did' it) I suspect that you didn't previously know any of this.
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Presumably, naval warfare isn't your strong point. Firstly, when an 11 inch gunned ship encounters an eight inch gunned ship, supported by two 6 inch gunned ships whose guns cannot penetrate the armour anyway, there should really only be one winner. Secondly, the Graf Spee used up so much ammunition that she would have been unable to fight a successful surface action against Cumberland had she left Montevideo. Thirdly, her fuel purification had been disabled, and she had only enough fuel available for 24 hours in any case.
All in all, the first of a series of failures by the German surface fleet in WW2. In this case, a ship supposedly armoured well enough to resist 8 inch shellfire proved herself to be nothing of the kind.
You are, however, correct about Exeter. Langsdorff should have completed her sinking. Not because of your immature comment about body count, but because of the problem this would have given Harwood concerning whether to disengage and pick up survivors, or continue his pursuit of Greaf Spee.
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@WorshipinIdols 1). Hardly a wild success. A nuisance, in that the Allies needed to send Hunting Groups to seek & destroy her. But, there again, that is what the British & French fleets existed for anyway, and the inconvenience was short-lived.
2). An armoured cruiser which couldn't handle the attentions of three smaller cruisers can hardly be considered to have 'outperformed' them. Neither light cruiser was badly damaged, both remained operational, and were willing to continue the action, which was more than Graf Spee was, by the way. Certainly, Exeter was badly damaged, but during the course of the action, Graf Spee expended most of her ammunition, and could not have continued the action after the better armed (than Exeter) Cumberland arrived. In cold military terms, the Germans had three armoured cruisers, the British & French navies had 83 cruisers. The Allies would have happily have exchanged all three of Harwood's ships in exchange for Spee. In the event, they lost none.
3). Casualties are less significant than the attainment of objectives. Do you think that Stalingrad was a Russian defeat, for example? In any case, the point is irrelevant. Langsdorff didn't sink Exeter but, at least in your mind, flushed with the exhilaration of his triumph, he promptly took refuge in Montevideo, destroyed his ship, and shot himself. What do you think he would have done had he been defeated!?
You posted something exactly similar to this drivel a day or two ago. Had you forgotten?
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@fdumbass As the German plan (Read 'Invasion of England, 1940' by Peter Schenck, for full details) required eleven days to land the first nine divisions of the invasion force, and as one of the barge convoys required three days to form up, proceed down Channel, and land the leading elements of that force, a few hours of fog would not help much. Furthermore, as, for example, the initial landings between Bexhill & Eastbourne involved 380 barges being towed in pairs by 190 tugs and trawlers, the chaos likely to have occurred as these vessels, with inexperienced crews without radar or even wireless, proceeding down the Channel in thick fog at 6 knots can only be imagined.
The Germans only ever, until 1944, sent three submarines into the Channel. All three were immediately sunk by the British mine defences.
The British had around 70 destroyers and light cruisers, supported by around 500 smaller warships, in the immediate vicinity of the Channel. The Luftwaffe, untrained in anti-shipping operations, and having just failed at Dunkirk, didn't even have torpedo bombers until mid-1942. In fact, in the whole of the war, even after receiving the necessary training, the Luftwaffe sank 31 RN destroyers, and no RN ship larger than a light cruiser.
The only way the Germans could fake an invasion would be by sending their barges to sea, risking running into the regular RN patrols from Plymouth & Sheerness. Frankly, the RN didn't really much care whether barges they sank were laden or empty. Moreover, the Germans only managed to assemble around 400 tugs, and had no reserves at all.
By the way, in September, 1940, the operational German navy consisted of 1 heavy & 3 light cruisers, 7 destroyers, 7 escort destroyers, 13 S boats, and less than 20 fleet minesweepers.
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@LordZontar The Kriegsmarine had, by September, 1940, converted around 2,000 barges, and moved them into French & Belgian ports. They had also assembled around 550 coasters, tugs, & trawlers, together with almost 1200 motor boats, in the same ports.
In the meantime, the army had ten divisions set aside for the initial assault, with a second wave of nine divisions and a third wave of six divisions, allocated to the operation. They had also positioned around 150 coastal batteries in the belief that these would be capable of protecting the barges from the Royal Navy as they attempted to cross.
Certainly, Raeder had massive and justified misgivings about the chances of success, but his doubts alone were insufficient, in the face of a degree of confidence within the army that, after the simple 'extended river crossing' had been completed, the British land defences would be wholly inadequate.
With the strength of the Royal Navy, there was, in reality, no likelihood that Sealion would succeed, but the order might still have been given, and the German army & navy did far more than simply go through the motions.
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Oh dear, once again the old 'The Germans didn't attempt Sealion because they chose not to attempt it, not because they couldn't.'
By September, 1940, the European canal network had been largely stripped of boats, because some 2100 had been commandeered, modified, and sent to Channel ports, along with 170 freighters, just over 400 tugs, and almost 1200 motor boats.
23 divisions had been earmarked for the landing, in three waves.
The Luftwaffe used 2500 aircraft for Barbarossa. Have lost 1700, and 2700 trained aircrew, during what your apparently believe was part of the bluff, the Battle of Britain.
If you want to know whether Sealion was 'real' or not, you should read the manner in which an amateur author condemned Kaiser Bill for trying to wage a war on two fronts, in a book called 'Mein Kampf.'
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@senakaweeraratna741 'There are so many ' Nanking' type massacres on the side of the Allies.' Really? You are clearly very selective in you admiration of the Japanese. Aside from the German extermination of certain selected groups, there is no other example in recent history of the treatment of innocent people in this manner. You could, by the way, add to it the mass murder of Chinese slave labourers on the Burma railway. Your comment is so immature that it is barely even worth comment.
'The British Empire in Asia collapsed after the Royal Navy was defeated in the Indian Ocean by the Imperial Japanese Navy.' Nonsense. The realisation that the Empire was ending pre-dated WW2. Canada, Australia, New Zealand, & South Africa were independent Dominions, and similar moves were being proposed for India. If you don't actually know history, you really shouldn't post as if you think you do.
'No other country was able to sink so many British Ships as Japan did in WW2' Have you never even heard of the Battle of the Atlantic? The RN lost nine ships of destroyer size or larger to Japan in the whole of the war. Read up on the war in the Mediterranean, or the Arctic convoys, or, as I wrote, the battle of the Atlantic.
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@jimmiller5600 'Slow to detect an invasion?' The time taken to extract the towed barges from harbour, form them up into some sort of box formation, and send them down the Channel at little more than walking pace meant that the sailing time, from the extrication of the first barge to arrival off the landing beach was three days, in the case of the largest convoy. 'Slow to detect an invasion?' As the barges supposedly passed down Channel, Admiral Ramsay would be able to see the things from Dover Castle, for Heaven's sake!
The Royal Navy sailed regular destroyer patrols every night through the Channel from Plymouth and Sheerness, often pausing to shell a barge port or two. Moreover, the Germans had seven minelayers, mainly converted merchantmen, available to them, possibly supported by a small number of minelaying destroyers. The British had, by contrast, several hundred fleet & auxiliary minesweepers, largely courtesy of their huge fishing fleet. Finally, the minelaying could only take place at night, when the destroyer patrols were active. The effect of a 4.7 inch high explosive shell landing on a laden mine deck was likely to be quite dramatic.
The Germans sent three U-Boats into the Channel in late 1939. They, and their crews, are still there. The Channel was a death trap for such boats, which is why the Germans avoided sending any there until after D-Day when, of course, the British & Canadian Escort Groups inflicted heavy losses on them.
The German plan for Sealion envisaged that 11 days would be required to land the first wave. Cerberus involved three heavily protected fast modern warships fleeing west to east through the Channel in a matter of a few hours, at a time when the invasion threat had long passed, and the concentrated RN forces of late 1940 had long dispersed to other duties. Can you really not understand the difference between the two?
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@koookeee How is a 'stalemate' a success? The Germans either land successfully, or they fail.
If I recall correctly, he refers to Admiral Forbes not wishing to commit the Home Fleet. Unfortunately, the Home Fleet was never part of the Admiralty's anti-invasion planning in any case, for the sensible reason that small fast warships with quick firing 4 & 4.7 inch guns are much better equipped to sink barges and tugs than heavier warships.
The RN effectiveness in sinking small convoys. Like the annihilation of one small troop convoy making for Maleme (Crete), and the German recall of the second, Heraklion, convoy? Or the destruction of the 'Duisburg' convoy, or the 'Tarigo' convoy? Those convoys?
The RAF was never intended to attack invasion barges at sea in any case, but was used to bomb barges in the invasion ports, which they began doing from 5 September.
I haven't read the book for years, largely because of the many flaws within it and the basic lack of research, which I am now recalling to mind.
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You make the common mistake of all Sealion enthusiasts, in that you apparently believe that the Luftwaffe was on a par with the Imperial Japanese Air Force. Just to correct you, please note that Prince of Wales and Repulse were sunk by torpedo bombers, whereas the Luftwaffe didn't acquire similar aircraft until mid 1942. The Luftwaffe had just failed to prevent the evacuation from Dunkirk, largely because it had had no training in anti-shipping operations. In fact, in the whole of the war, the Luftwaffe sank no RN warship larger than a light cruiser, and a total of 'only' 31 RN destroyers. To put that into perspective, the RN started the war with 193 destroyers (ending it with over 400) and in September 1940 had around 70 light cruisers & destroyers within five hours steaming of Dover, over 100 in total in Home Waters, and supporting forces of around 500 smaller warships.
Good luck, by the way, with the U-Boats. Generally, U-Boats sought to avoid attacking fleet destroyers, as it tended to end badly for them. In any case, in September, 1940, the average number of boats at sea on any one day was 13. The Germans did try to operate U-Boats in the Channel in October, 1939. The three they sent were promptly sunk.
Finally, surface attack. What with? The German navy had, in September, 1940, one heavy & three light cruisers, seven operational destroyers, and precisely thirteen S Boats.
The probability is, indeed, of slaughter in the Channel, but of towed German barges, not of the (huge) Royal Navy.
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What makes you think that this was a Japanese 'offensive?' It wasn't. As the title suggests, it was a 'raid,' intended to ensure the safety of a large Japanese troop convoy from Singapore. There was no wider ambition on the Japanese part, no large landing force intended to occupy Ceylon or Madagascar.
You apparently feel able to talk glibly about the destruction of the Eastern Fleet as being acceptable if in exchange a Japanese warship or two might have been damaged. How would this have been acceptable? What strategic benefit to the Allied cause would have been accrued if Somerville had sought a surface action, when only one of his battleships and two of his carriers were modern or modernised, whilst his four old 'R' class ships, although marvels of WW1 technology, were utterly obsolete, and fit for nothing except Atlantic convoy escort duty, acting as a Fleet in Being, or, as they later demonstrated, use as naval artillery in support of assault landings? How could the Eastern Fleet have made any significant contribution to defence of Colombo from bombing?
Perhaps you feel able to make such damning judgements from a comfortable chair 80 years after the event. Perhaps you might answer the questions I asked above without waxing lyrical about 'cowardice?'
Oh, and it seems you are in ignorance about Dunkirk as well. Perhaps you might explain what a BEF of 13 divisions was supposed to do after the Belgian army had capitulated, and most of the French army had begun to collapse? Perhaps you would recommend the same action as you require Somerville to have taken, charging blindly into certain disaster?
In point of fact, Dynamo was far from panic. Ramsay's plan brought out 336,000 troops, of which around 120,000 were French, and the British had begun landing new divisions in Cherbourg until told by General Weygand that the French army was no longer capable of organised resistance. The French and Belgian armies, by the way, totalled just over 100 divisions. As I said, the BEF consisted of 13.
Still, well done for making a comment about the Indian Ocean raid. Even if it was a facile and ill-reasoned one.
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The German fleet was built as part of the Franco- German naval race, and not as a challenge to the Royal Navy. Put simply, the Weimar Republic came up with the panzerships to intercept French troop convoys. The French responded with the Strasbourgs. The Germans responded with the Scharnhorsts, the French with the Richelieus, and the Germans with the Bismarcks.
If Germany started building U-boats, then these could only be aimed at Britain. The British response would be to commence an enhanced programme of escort vessel construction. Should the Germans focus on anti-ship capability for the Luftwaffe, then firstly, how do these aircraft even approach the Royal Navy, and secondly how does the invasion of France succeed without the airborne artillery close support that was the Luftwaffe. Serious planning against Britain could only commence after a successful invasion and conquest of France.
The Germans had no choice other than to pause after Dunkirk? How could they possibly consider an invasion of Britain with no assault ships, or landing craft. Indeed, without even the towed barges they later assembled. Moreover, the completion of the invasion of France required another two weeks.
Mine the Channel? With the seven auxiliary minelayers they actually had available? Mining in daylight was not a realistic option, if for no other reason than minefields are of limited use if your enemy (with over 400 available sweepers) knows where they are. At night, of course, what happens when the layers run into one or other of the regular RN destroyer patrols through the Channel?
Fix Enigma? First, they need to know that it wasn't totally secure.
Win the Battle of Britain. Didn't they try?
In short, none of the 'creative' ways have any basis in reality.
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@bobcougar77 There is rather more evidence that the Halt Order on the Aa Canal was issued by von Rundstedt. Indeed, Army Group A's War Diary confirms as much. In common with a number of other senior commanders, von Rundstedt feared a repeat of the Miracle of the Marne. He wished to rest & service his armour before getting into the next stage of the campaign. Hitler, who knew the country around Dunkirk from WW1, agreed with the order, especially since on the previous day Goering had told him that the elimination of the Allied forces trapped around Dunkirk was 'a special job for the Luftwaffe.'
More generally, there was a general difference in attitude between the Germans and the British. Von Rundstedt and his peers viewed an army backed against the sea as trapped, whereas the British, with their history of naval superiority, saw the sea as an available open door.
Certainly, Hitler did not want to attempt an invasion, but his assumption that Britain would come to terms was a major strategic blunder.
As to Sealion, no amount of creativity could make it work. Napoleon had expressed the issue neatly when he referred to his own invasion problems with the question 'can an elephant fight a whale?'
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@Andy-ub3ub 'Minutiae?' Since when have accurate historical facts been so described?
Your observations simply do not stand. On the one hand you come up with a whole series of 'would haves' ranging from questionable to impossible, and then you blithely assume that all subsequent events of WW2 still proceed as they historically did.
You take the same approach as those who merrily claim that, if Germany had built vast numbers of U-boats in the lead up to WW2, then they 'would have' won the Battle of the Atlantic. Utterly ignoring the fact that, had this actually happened, then the British, understanding that such construction could only have been aimed directly at them, 'would have' accelerated construction of escorts to a vastly greater degree than, historically, they did.
Thank you for your 'very very small acknolegement.' I don't much care, as I am right, and you are wrong.
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Sorry, but simply not true. Ohio arrived in the Clyde on 21 June, 1942. On the same day, the US War Shipping Administration informed Texaco that she was being requisitioned. After waiting in the Clyde for two weeks, she was visited by Texaco's London agent, accompanied by a representative of the (British) Ministry of War Shipping, and her captain informed that his ship was to be handed over to British ownership, and his crew replaced by a British one. Captain Petersen and his crew disembarked, and were, understandably, unhappy at the way they had been treated.
Perhaps high-handed, but niceties were few and far between in mid-1942. Therefore, contrary to what you might claim, no 'attack' by savage Limey thugs. The original order for the requisition of the Ohio, by the way, came from Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In no way was there any 'act of piracy.' A sister of Ohio, by the way, Kentucky, had previously been transferred in a similar manner, and lost earlier in June, 1942. She wasn't seized by pirates either.
As to reading 'Guns of August' presumably by Barbara Tuchman, and 'No Man's Land' by John Toland, both are about the First World War, in which The Netherlands was a neutral country. How exactly did the Limeys bring about the fall of Amsterdam, exactly, and which ships were 'hijacked?'
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Except of course the British were not intending to order their military and their civilians to undertake massed suicide attacks, as the Japanese were. You might take Okinawa as an example. The US landing forces suffered 6,821 killed and 19,217 wounded. Although most in the 20,000-strong Japanese garrison were draftees, they refused to surrender, fighting tenaciously until only a few hundred remained alive to be taken prisoner.
By contrast, the British had a more credible approach, which involved the use of their overwhelming naval supremacy to intercept and destroy the towed barges which the Germans intended to use to transport their troops. Put simply, the British knew that they could defeat Sealion. The Japanese hope was that mass slaughter would so sicken the US leaders that they would eventually choose to come to a negotiated peace. As to the 'bloodbath' idea, look at the casualty levels that the planners of 'Olympic' expected.
Oh, and as to 'They had no interest in occupying Britain, and their real goals were always eastwards.' Certainly the Germans would have preferred the British to come to terms, but the fact that they requisitioned and converted around 200 transport ships, 2000 barges, 400 tugs, and over 1100 motor boats, and were willing to accept the loss of over 1700 aircraft and 2500 experienced aircrew in pursuit of air superiority over the Channel & the English south east coast, tells a rather different story about German intentions, I suggest.
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@Mondo762 Ohio unloaded in the Clyde in June 1942. She was transferred to the British Eagle Oil and Shipping Co., and her American crew disembarked on 10 July. She was re-fitted with extra bofors and oerlikon AA guns, and had special bearings fitted to her engines, and extra protection added to her steam pipes, because comparatively minor damage to Kentucky had resulted in her loss. Kentucky, by the way, also swapped crews. The transfer of these two tankers to the British was a generous act by the US Maritime Commission as fast (16 Knot) tankers were like gold dust at the time and the US Navy were requisitioning them for use in the Pacific. Incidentally, Santa Elisa was a last minute addition to the convoy. She was actually loading in South Wales for the US when she was ordered to discharge her cargo. I have no idea why, although, without Santa Elisa, there would have been 13 merchantmen in the convoy. Perhaps someone was superstitious?
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@thedreadpiratewesley2301 The difference being that a large number of transport & supply ships, not to mention the American landing forces themselves, had been imperilled by Halsey's impetuous acts.
In the Indian Ocean, the Japanese had no such targets. Their raid was defensive in intention, in order to screen a large troop convoy for Rangoon. The British had a fair idea of the composition of the Japanese force, knew that no transports were involved, and that the probability was that of a limited air attack on targets in Ceylon. Unlike the gallant American action at Samar, there was no major strategic threat involved which demanded a quixotic action by Somerville. The maintenance of his Fleet in Being was of greater importance at that time in the war.
Incidentally, Somerville did attempt to use the one positive asset in his armoury, his radar-equipped torpedo bombers, to carry out a night attack, but failed to locate his target, just as Nagumo's aircraft failed to locate Somerville.
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@nikolajkristensen5960 It appears that revealing your errors and lack of knowledge has annoyed you. Indeed, the Kriegsmarine had a heavy cruiser. They also had three operational light cruisers. At the same time, the British had 1 battlecruiser, 1 carrier, 2 heavy cruisers and 2 light cruisers at Scapa Flow, 2 battleships, 1 battlecruiser, 3 light cruisers at Rosyth, 3 light cruisers in the Humber, 2 light cruisers at Chatham, 1 light cruiser in Portsmouth, 1 battleship, 2 light cruisers in Plymouth, and 1 light cruiser in the Firth of Clyde.
The British would not be under air attack 24/7 as you elegantly put it, because, whilst the RN could indeed operate 24/7, the Luftwaffe could only operate in daylight. This, by the way, is presumably the same Luftwaffe which had failed so badly to disrupt the Dunkirk evacuation, which had received no training whatsoever in anti-shipping operations, which didn't even develop a high performance torpedo bomber until early 1942, and which in the whole of the war sank 31 RN destroyers, and no RN vessel of any kind bigger than a light cruiser. That Luftwaffe?
The rest of your post is barely coherent gibberish, by the way. I don't feel inclined even to attempt to decipher it.
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@nikolajkristensen5960 Tirpitz? Crew training? She hadn't even finished being built! Knickebein could guide an aircraft to a large, static, target such as a city, but was useless for targeting ships at sea. Surely you know that?
D- day was far from 'a bad idea.' It involved 4217 landing craft, 1213 warships, and 11,600 aircraft. The Germans in 1940 had no landing craft, about 30 warships, and around 2000 aircraft of all types.
You clearly haven't grasped the length of time needed to extricate large numbers of barges from ports and form them into so sort of order; still less have you grasped how many warships the British had within close range of the Channel, so I won't bother repeating the details.
In fact, I won't bother replying to you again, as there are numerous other people, with much greater knowledge and much more intelligent opinions, who make more interesting correspondents.
In the time that you could save by not replying to me, why not buy a book on the subject of Operation Sealion?
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@nikolajkristensen5960 How would theoretical air superiority have meant that 'they' could get over without much trouble? Purely imagination on your part, in defiance of the actual performance of the Luftwaffe in 1940.
The difference between Sealion and D-Day should be obvious. The US troops involved were already in Britain, and the Allies had overwhelming naval and air superiority. Your idea of using the Italian navy to support Sealion is simply fantasy. You are grasping at non existent straws to support your obsessive delusions.
I agree that you cannot analyse a battle which didn't happen, but you can make deductions based on things which did. In this case, the heavy losses by the German fleet off Norway, the lack of training the Luftwaffe had received in anti-shipping operations, the poor performance of the Luftwaffe at Dunkirk, the vast resources of the RN in home waters, and the manner in which the RN subsequently prevented Crete being reinforced by sea, even when the Luftwaffe's earlier lack of training had been remedied. You can add to the the utter impossibility of your foolish suggestion that the Italian fleet could support anything.
What is this bizarre reference to Harry Potter, by the way?
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@nikolajkristensen5960 The British had been the dominant naval power for over 200 years. If anyone had an understanding of the issue, going back to the Seven Years' War and earlier, the British did.
Delay the invasion by a year? Aren't you aware that, from June 1940 onwards, the British were outproducing Germany in aircraft? For example, by May, 1941, the RAF had 56 fighter and fighter-bomber squadrons carrying out regular sweeps over Northern France. If you are going to continue to fantasise about air cover, then how would delaying the invasion by a year possibly have helped? As to the production of warships, the comparison would be ludicrous. Between September 1940 and May 1941, the Germans had brought into service one battleship, one heavy cruiser, and four destroyers. Would you like me to list British & Canadian production during the same period?
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@nikolajkristensen5960 Your ignorance astonishes me. During the Battle of Britain, Fighter Command rotated the squadrons in 11 & 12 Groups on a regular basis. After a period in the Front Line, a squadron would be sent to 13 Group, in the North of England & Scotland, to rest & recuperate, and a rested squadron would replace it. Similarly, experienced fighter pilots would be sent to training units to teach new pilots the tricks of the trade. Furthermore, many qualified pilots were actually in administrative positions, and not in the front line at all.
The Luftwaffe had no such policy. Their aircrew remained with their units throughout. As to your imaginary British 'shortage of pilots,' you obviously haven't heard of the 'British Commonwealth Air Training Plan,' which trained over 130,000 Allied pilots & aircrew in Canada alone.
Do you actually know anything at all about Sealion or the Battle of Britain?
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@nikolajkristensen5960 You really shouldn't regard Wikipedia as the fount of all knowledge. Of the 'sea craft' lost, 162 were small motor boats or barges, of which 150 were not sunk but simply abandoned at the conclusion of the operation. Of the damaged destroyers, all except three were back in service by 18 June.
I would recommend the official Naval Staff History, 'Operation Dynamo, 26 May - 4 June, 1940' but it is out of print, and probably too complicated for you to grasp anyway. What you describe as 'stats' are more correctly described as 'facts.'
One fact in particular being that the Luftwaffe attempted to prevent the evacuation of 40,000 troops, yet in the end failed to prevent the evacuation of over 338,000.
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@nikolajkristensen5960 'whats wrong with that.' Apart from it being in no known language, you mean? You have been posting things about Sealion (and the Battle of Britain) which show a stunning lack of knowledge and, as I have plenty of spare time, I am more than happy to amuse myself pointing out your almost inexhaustible store of mistakes and factual errors.
Incidentally, I notice that one or two of your comments are not actually reaching this site. Perhaps it is finding you too preposterous to stomach? However, in response to:-
1). 'wikipedia isn't knowlegde ?:) you jsut stated everything they said was true but when used against you not true ty for making me see your as you are, a guy from britain who woulnd't believe britain could lose nothing more.' I actually said that 'Wikipedia isn't the fount of all knowledge.' Largely because it isn't.
2). 'google it, if they wasn't short on pilots why did the polish and americans join the eagle squadron freely.' The Poles didn't join the Eagle Squadron, but seven Americans did take part in the Battle of Britain. Similarly, 147 Polish pilots also took part.
You appear to have some sort of idea that Fighter Command was some sort of exclusive club for English Gentlemen. It wasn't. The Poles ( and by the way, pilots from other non-English speaking countries such as Czechoslovakia, Belgium, & France) had arrived in Britain after enduring many privations. They were experienced & capable pilots, who wished to continue the fight against Nazi Germany. Once they had demonstrated sufficient command of English to work within the constraints of Fighter Command's control systems, why shouldn't they be given the opportunity?
Similarly, the American pilots, and a further ten from another non-Commonwealth country, Ireland, made the effort to get to Britain to fight against Fascism. Doubtless, had Fighter Command not accommodated them, someone as ignorant as you would have accused the British of being prejudiced, I assume.
Not, of course, that this is in any way relevant to your fantasy about an (imaginary) British shortage of pilots. For that, you need to look at the Luftwaffe records, old chap.
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@nikolajkristensen5960 Very good. Now do you know how wide the Straits of Gibraltar are, and what there is there? Seriously, this is rather like pulling teeth, but fortunately not mine.
Mussolini went to war so that he could put, in his words, a few thousand Italian dead on the Peace Table. Like Hitler, he assumed that Britain would come to terms after France. When this didn't happen, like Hitler, he had few options, especially when his Armies in Africa were annihilated. Far from supporting Hitler in an attempted invasion of Britain, his surface fleet spent much of the war avoiding action, and by early 1941 he was begging for German support to shore up his troops in Libya.
'They shoulnd't meet britain there before the atlantic if they had some out there, would be very risky for britain to sail between gilraltar and marokko.'
Really? Odd then, that the RN and later USN sailed through the Straits will impunity throughout the war, wouldn't you say?
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@nikolajkristensen5960 1). These perhaps?
Alexander Battery: (South Mole, sea level) Pom-pom and one Bofors to protect the south side of the harbour.
Bombproof Battery: (North side of the Rock part of 18th Century defence lines) 17 Pounder anti-tank gun, 25 Pounder Gun. Also had many Vickers emplacements, will show a photo later in the thread, and rifle ports.
Breakneck Battery: (Upper Ridge, top of the Rock) 1 9.2 inch gun.
Buena Vista Battery: (West Side, commanding views of entrance to anchorage) 4 inch naval gun.
Buffadero Battery: (South facing, field of fire to east (med), west (atlantic) and south (straits). 9.2 inch Battery and 2 Bofors.
Catalan Batteries: (North West Facing, covering harbour, airfield and landward approaches) 3-pdr QF Gun.
Couvre Port Battery: (Covering Landport Gate, only land entrance to Gibraltar at the time) 1940: One 4 inch naval gun and 6-pdr 7 cwt both in an anti-tank role.
Crutchett’s and Castle Batteries: (North facing running down the slope from castle) Searchlight emplacements still there.
Detached Mole Battery: (Mole running S-N at harbour mouth) One twin mounted 6-pdr at either end, 2 3inch 20-cwt and 2 Bofors.
Devil’s Gap Battery (Half way up the Rock, west facing covering harbour and Spanish hinterland) 2 6 inch Mk VII guns (guns still there).
Edward VII’s Battery ( 85 feet above sea level, south/west facing) 2 9.2 inch Mark X guns.
Engineer Battery: (Beside Alexander Battery) Searchlight emplacements.
Europa Advance Batteries: (Southern most point of Gibraltar) Two 4-inch BL Mark IX QF guns on CP Mk I mountings. 1 Bofors.
Farringdon’s Battery: (North Face, commanding views of Spain and airport) Fixed searchlight emplacement.
Forbe’s Battery: (North face, part of landport defences) 40mm Mark 3 gun on a mobile mounting.
Genista Battery: (South Facing) Two 6 inch Mark VII guns.
Half Way Battery: (East Facing) DEL equipped with a 90 cm Mark V Projector.
Harding’s Battery: (South Facing) 1 Bofors.
Hutment Battery: (South facing) 1 Bofors.
King’s Lines: (Part of Landport Defences covering land approaches. Most of these are cut into the Rock itself and you need to go through the Tunnels to get there) Many Vickers MG emplacements, two 6-pdr. 6cwt Hotchkiss anti-tank guns.
Levant Battery: (East/West Facing) Two 9.2 inch guns, one facing east the other west.
Lewis Battery: (West Facing) 1 DEL emplacement, 1 Bofors.
Lighthouse Battery: (South facing, beside lighthouse) 4 heavy 3.7 inch anti-aircraft guns.
Lord Airye’s Battery: (1,358 feet above sea level, south/west facing) One 9.2 inch Mk X gun.
Mediterranean Battery: (Just below Lord Airey’s. North/east facing) Two 4 inch naval guns.
Middle Hill Battery: (West facing) One Bofors.
Montagu Bastion (West facing covering northern side of anchorage) Two 3.7 inch AA guns.
Napier of Madgala Battery: (Beside Engineer/Alexander Batteries, west facing) Four 3.7 inch AA guns.
New Mole: (Southern side of harbour, west facing) 2 Bofors, one 4 inch QF gun, two twin mounted 6 inch guns.
O’Hara’s Battery: (1,400 feet above sea level, west/east facing) One 9.2 inch Mk X gun that last fired in 1976 (my father-in-law was part of the gun crew).
Orange Bastion: (Sea Level, west facing) One 40mm Bofors.
Orillion Battery: (Part of Landport defences cut into the Rock) 1940, one 6-pdr. 6 cwt anti-tank gun, replaced by a 17-pdr gun in 1943.
Parson’s Lodge Battery: (West facing covering Camp Bay) Disguised pill boxes and MG positions as well as DEL emplacements and one 40mm Bofors.
Princess Anne’s Battery: (West/north facing.) Four 5.25 inch high angle guns.
Queen Charlotte’s Battery: (NW facing) One 75mm anti-tank gun.
Rock Battery: (1,360 feet above sea level. 360 degree arc of fire. ‘Rock Gun’.) One 9.2 inch Mk IX gun.
Rooke Battery (West facing) DEL emplacements and location of Fire Command HQ.
Royal Battery: (1,256 feet above sea level) One 40mm Bofors.
Signal Hill Battery: (1,200 feet above sea level) Two 3 inch 30-cwt. AA guns and one 40mm Bofors.
South Batteries: (South Facing) Four 3.7 inch AA guns.
Spur Battery: (Just below O’Hara’s) One 9.2 inch.
Tovey Battery: (West Facing) Two six inch BL MK VII guns, one is still there.
Waterport Battery: (North facing and covering northern part of harbour and airfield) Two 3.7 inch AA guns.
West Battery: (West facing) Two 9.2 inch Mk X guns.
White Rock Batteries: (East facing covering possible invasion beaches) Two 3.7 inch mobile AA guns.
Windmill Hill Batteries: (West/South facing) Four 3.7 inch AA guns, two 9.2 inch guns.
Woodford’s Battery: (South facing) DEL emplacement.
Did you really not know that Gibraltar was the main British naval base in the Western Mediterranean. The above are 'only' the shore guns. You can add the warships of Force H & North Atlantic Command ( 1 battleship, 1 battlecruiser, one carrier, and 15 destroyers of the 8th & 15 destroyer flotillas, and probably a fair proportion of the Mediterranean Fleet itself. At the time, 4 battleships, 2 aircraft carriers, 3 heavy & 5 light cruisers, 22 destroyers, & 13 submarines. You can also add the aircraft based on Gibraltar, and the air groups of the carriers, whose torpedo bombers crews had had considerable training in anti-shipping operations. Gibraltar was, of course, out of range of all but a tiny number of Italian shore based aircraft.
The Straits, by the way, are 8 miles wide.
Actually, that was precisely the reason Mussolini went to war. He even said as much to Count Ciano, his Foreign Minister and Son in Law.
'His support to north african has nothing to do with sea lion, and yes they did sail trough there later it was a none battlefield so if they could italy could to.' Don't be obtuse, of course it does. The British would have unopposed freedom to attack the Italian army in North Africa, and to shell any Italian port, from the sea.
The difference between the British using the Straits, which they did right from the start of the war, and the Italians using them, is that the British coast defences would not be shelling British ships. Are you really this clueless?
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@nikolajkristensen5960 You have demonstrated your cluelessness in a whole series of posts, culminating in your apparent ignorance of Gibraltar as a major British naval base. 'Clueless?' Of course you are. I am simply calling a spade a spade.
I notice that another post from you hasn't appeared on here. This one :-
'how do you figure they would have unopposed attack in north africa? how does sea lion make a diffents to italy war in north africa? I do know they have all that but they will have to launch some operations against that base first yes kinda says itself ty for information me I'm just information you about italy thats all nothing more you asked yourself I answer hard to get?, you really like calling me clueless when you have writen to me for over 100 messages xD I don't care what you think will stop it I said some of my plan quess the rest on the way because im done typing to you.'
As I derive considerable entertainment from replying to you, then, as a gift, here is my reply to that:
1). If a large proportion of the Italian navy was no longer in the Mediterranean, or at least above the surface in the Mediterranean, then Cunningham can use his ships to shell Italian positions all along the coast, to disrupt Italian supply lines along the coast, and to transport supplies to British forces near the front without the need to use valuable trucks and fuel carrying these supplies along the coast road.
2). The same answer. You wish to send most of the Italian fleet to the Channel. Ignoring the sheer impossibility of this, surely you can grasp that, if the bulk of the Italian fleet vanishes, point 1). above applies, and every Italian mainland port becomes a juicy target for an aggressive commander like Andrew Cunningham.
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@gruenergermane The second unrestricted campaign began in February, 1917, and was thereafter the policy of the Imperial Navy. Where have you got the '5 german submarines' nonsense from? Similarly, 'history tells us the US-ship transported amunition under false flag' What history would that be, then?
The Blockade, by the way, continued until World War 1 ended, in late June 1919 when the Treaty of Versailles was signed. If the Allies really wanted 'to kill as many huns as possible' it would have been far easier not to have agreed to a November, 1918 Armistice, but to advanced over the wreckage of the German army into the German heartland, as, I believe, Black Jack Pershing wished to do.
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During Operation Berlin, Scharnhorst & Gneisenau had the opportunity to attack HX106, protected by HMS Ramillies, an old 'R' class battleship. Later, they encountered SL 67, escorted by HMS Malaya, an unmodernised Queen Elizabeth class battleship. On neither occasion did Lutjens, the fleet commander, risk action. German warships in WW2 generally sought to avoid action, as comparatively minor damage would inevitably lead to their destruction, Bismarck being the obvious example.
By the way, the Deutchlands were very poorly armoured, up to heavy cruiser standard at best, as was demonstrated at the Plate, when Spee's armour was penetrated by Exeter's eight inch shells. I doubt that a Deutchland would have coped with an engagement with two Counties, let alone any of the five British & French battlecruisers capable of catching her.
As to two PBs and a battlecruiser (I assume you mean a Scharnhorst, actually a fast, lightly gunned, battleship) the Germans had their opportunity when both Scharnhorsts encountered Renown off Norway in April, 1940. Once again, after Gneisenau was damaged, the Germans refused action.
The reality is that the Deutschlands were planned in Weimar Republic days as a means of attacking French troop convoys in the event of a war with France, or France & Poland. The French produced the Strasbourgs in response. Once the Germans found themselves trying to deal with the Royal Navy as well, the Deutchlands became, in reality, largely irrelevant. Hence their lack of employment after early 1941.
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@ParabellumStoria Sorry, but my information about the raid on Alexandria is rather different :- 'Fortunately for the Allies the enemy was not fully aware of the precarious position of the Mediterranean Fleet. To fool Axis reconnaissance aircraft into thinking that the raid had failed, apparently normal operations were conducted on a day to day basis. Smoke came out of funnels, guns were trained, and all the routine ceremonial rituals performed as if nothing had happened. In fact below the waterline frantic repair efforts were being made which lasted several weeks. Had the Axis realised the truth then Admiral Cunningham, with only a few operational ships at his disposal, could have been driven out of the Mediterranean, with potentially disastrous consequences for the Allies.'
Certainly, the morning after the attack, Cunningham conducted the Colours ceremony, with the Royal Marine Band, on Queen Elizabeth's quarterdeck, and foreign correspondents were even invited to attend. If, as you say, the success of the attack was known, why was there no attempt by the axis to exploit their naval superiority?
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@myclearwater1471 There is no 'if true' about it. It is a fact. You may choose to question what motivated them, I will simply stick to the truth.
Your understanding, as seems to be a consistent thread, is wrong.
What has the nationality of the commanders to do with anything? In fact, unlike the US Army of the time, the British Armed Forces did not have a policy of racial segregation. A typical Indian division had a mixture of British & Indian units within it, and generally Indian units were commanded by Indian officers who, should the situation arise, also had authority over British units. Agreed, at the Corps and Army levels, the officers were mainly British, Australian, New Zealand, or Canadian, largely because that is where the career soldiers of the time came from.
Your prejudice, and your ignorance of the period, continues to amaze and amuse me. Just for your information, at the height of the Raj, around 320,000,000 Indians were administered (in your perverted view, oppressed) by 20,000 British administrators.
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@youraveragescotsman7119 Moreover, the High Seas Fleet, whilst it made two brief sorties later in 1916, carefully avoided risking any further encounter with the Grand Fleet, but largely stayed at anchor in the Jade. As a result, the British Northern Patrol maintained the Blockade, and systematically starved the German population. Anyone who believes that Jutland was anything more than, as far as the battlecruiser forces were concerned, a tactical success for the Germans would do well to read about the 'Turnip Winter.'
No wonder that, by late 1918, Germany was on the verge of revolution, and the High Seas Fleet had mutinied.
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@youraveragescotsman7119 He was appointed to command of V Corps, responsible for the defence of Hampshire & Dorset, in July, 1940. His immediate superior was Auchinleck, who was C-in-C Southern Command. At about that time, Monty began a long-running feud with the Auk, which seems to have continued for the rest of his life, and even resulted in the publishers of his autobiography having to include an apology in them for certain claims made by Monty which might have resulted in legal action.
I believe part of his doubt concerned the one undeniable weakness suffered by the Home Guard, their lack of mobility arising from their lack of transport. I think the Auk envisaged a more static defence in the event of a German landing, which would allow the RN to cut their supply lines and starve them to defeat, whereas Monty had a more mobile defence in mind.
Clearly, Monty had not been told about Corporal Jones' van, or the strategic importance of the Novelty Rock Emporium!
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@WorshipinIdols Except that, as a result of the battle, Bismarck, listing, down by the bows, and short of fuel, promptly abandoned her commerce raiding mission and made an unsuccessful, slow speed, run for St. Nazaire. As none of the hits on Prince of Wales actually exploded, because none hit her all-or-nothing belt, she was only lightly damaged, and actually re-engaged later in the day.
To judge who were the strategic victors, ask yourself:
1). What was Bismarck's strategic objective?
2). How much of it did she achieve?
Incidentally, I said 'a series of failures,' I did not say that there were no successes, even though they were few and far between.
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@WorshipinIdols Where have I lied/
1. If you can't be bother checking your own posts, why expect me to guess at their meaning?
2. I don't think I have mentioned ranges or gunnery, but I do know the details of the action, clearly better than you do. Bismarck opened fire at 22,000 yards, and scored the decisive hit or hits at around 18,000 yards.
What is a 'state-of-the-years' 380mm rifle, by the way? Do tell.
3. I did in fact refer to the hit which caused 600 tons of water to enter Prince of Wales amidships. As I also said, I have read Leach's full damage report. The hit caused a temporary two knot speed reduction, although this appears to have been restored quickly. Leach withdrew following the loss of Hood because he was aware that his half worked-up ship should not attempt to challenge Bismarck unsupported, and because one of the troublesome quadruple turrets had jammed. He did precisely the right thing, joining the senior officer present, Wake-Walker, and helping to shadow the Bismarck as she made for St. Nazaire. Tovey later agreed that this action was the correct one.
Again, where have I lied?
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@WeMustResist Simply not true. Firstly, for a time aerial bombing was the only physical way that Britain could strike back at Germany, and, secondly and more importantly, the Royal Navy had plenty of resources given to it.
Aren't you even aware of the large number of escort ships built, the huge number of assault ships and craft without which landings would have been impossible, and the number of cruisers and destroyers built during WW2?
The Royal Navy had 200,000 personnel, including Royal Marines & Royal Naval Reservists, in 1939. In 1945 it had 800,000 personnel, with a further 73,000 WRNS. In terms of ships, 15 battleships & battlecruisers, 7 carriers, 66 cruisers, 184 destroyers, 60 submarines, and 45 escorts in 1939. By 1945, 15 battleships & battlecruiser, 55 carriers, 67 cruisers, 308 destroyers, and 161 submarines I won't even bother to tell you the number of escorts in service in 1945.
Those 1945 figures, by the way, are after wartime losses have been deducted.
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Actually, there was little to choose between the two battlefleets. The British had 296 guns of 12 inch and above, and obtained 110 hits. (0.37 hits per gun.) The Germans had 200 guns of 11 inch and above, and obtained 80 hits (0.40 hits per gun.)
British overall figures are skewed by the poor performance of the Battlecruiser fleet. Beatty had always placed rate of fire ahead of accuracy (hence his foolish encouragement of his captains to store cordite above the protective blast doors) with the result that Jellicoe's Grand Fleet (and Evan Thomas' BS5) fired 2626 heavy shells to obtain 98 hits, or 26 rounds per hit, while the battlecruisers fired 1650 shells to achieve 26 hits, or 64 rounds per hit.
The most accurate shooting by either side by individual squadrons was by Evan Thomas' superb 5th Battle Squadron of 'Queen Elizabeths.'
You are right about internal design, but this was to a large extent inevitable. The Germans built their heavy ships to operate in the North Sea at short range for short periods. Crew facilities were cramped and uncomfortable, but in harbour crews could use accommodation ships and shore barracks. The British, because of their world wide commitments, built ships which could operate for extended periods away from shore facilities, hence the need for more open spaces within the ship itself.
As to what was wrong with 'our bloody ships,' my view is that the main problem was the free and easy, 'it will be all right on the day' attitude of the man who said it, David Beatty.
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@julianmhall I didn't say that they 'sat on their hands and did nothing,' only that the Admiralty regarded the interception and destruction of a ragged fleet of towed barges with minimal defensive support was a task best left to the surface fleet, which had overwhelming superiority in the Channel area.
The best aircraft available to the FAA at the time were the Fulmar, in service from March 1940 with 806 Squadron, operating from HMS Illustrious in the Mediterranean at the time, and the Swordfish, equipping both carriers and ground based FAA squadrons. The only carrier in home waters at the time, HMS Furious, with 18 Swordfish, 6 Sea Gladiators, and 12 Skuas, was based at Scapa Flow, with the battlecruiser Repulse, two heavy cruisers, Berwick & Norfolk, two light cruisers, Glasgow and Curacoa, and seven destroyers.
In short, there were no large enemy surface ships in the area which might have been targetted by Swordfish.
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Had Sealion been attempted, September, 1940 was the likeliest date. So, here goes:-
Bismarck 6 months away from completion.
Tirpitz 8 months away from completion.
Gneisenau Repairing torpedo damage. Estimated completion November 1940.
Scharnhorst Repairing torpedo damage. Estimated completion late October.
Lutzow Repairing torpedo damage. Estimated completion April 1941.
Scheer Preparing for commerce raiding. Sailed 23 October, 1940.
Hipper Operational with care - defective engines.
There were two light cruisers (Koln & Nurnberg) operational, as was an older, training cruiser (Emden).
The German navy had lost 12 of 22 destroyers by September, 1940. Three of the remaining 10 were refitting.
There were also a number of Torpedo Boats, which were similar to the British escort destroyer or the US DEs. By some, I mean 9.
There was also a new class of Torpedo Boat, the Elbing class, which had unreliable high pressure boilers, and were armed with a single 105mm gun, facing aft. About 7 were available.
That is it, I am afraid. A rather one-sided sea battle at best, after which it is possible to deduce what would probably happen to the canal barges towed by tugs and trawlers when the 70 or so RN destroyers and cruisers on anti-invasion duties came across them.
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Not correct. Dudley Pound, who made the wrong decision to scatter the convoy, was in the early stages of a brain tumour which first paralysed and then killed him, but he didn't resign until September, 1943.
As to 'from that day forward US Navy warships escorted American cargo ships to allied countries under American Command' I presume you are, in view of this statement, unaware of the fact that there were twenty-three Arctic outward bound convoys after PQ 17, all with Royal Navy escorts. These convoys included at least 348 US flagged nerchantmen.
Furthermore, from late 1942, there were eleven Atlantic Escort Groups protecting SC, HX, & ON convoys. Six groups were British, four Canadian, and one American, which consisted of a mixture of British, Canadian, and (two) American warships. After the two American coastguard cutters were withdrawn from this Group, it was redesignated as a Canadian group.
By Mid 1943, there were seven British groups, and five Canadian ones. There were no American groups operating in support of SC, HX, & ON convoys.
Would you care to re-consider your earlier claim?
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@joegatt2306 'I re-consulted the book and discovered that I missed out totally the tables on pages 349 and 352!' I rather thought that you had.
Actually, statistics can be twisted to suggest whatever someone wishes them to say.
In point of fact, the stats. are as follows :-
Rounds Hits %
BCS 1 & BCS 2 1469 21 1.43
BCS 3 373 16 4.29
BS 5 1099 29 2.64
BS 1, BS 2 & BS 4 1593 57 3.58
Total 4534 123 2.71
1st Scouting Group 1670 67 4.01
1st, 2nd, & 3rd Battle Squadrons 1927 57 2.96
Total 3597 124 3.44
The inference from this is that the Rosyth based BCS 1 & 2, which had not had any opportunity for regular gunnery practice, and had a commander who was foolish enough to regard rate of fire as more important than accuracy, dragged down the efficiency of British gunnery statistics to a remarkable. Especially when the figures for Hood's BCS 3, which had been transferred to Scapa Flow precisely for exercises are viewed, as they suggest what a properly trained Battlecruiser Fleet might have achieved.
In terms of the main fleets, the Grand Fleet & the High Seas Fleet, the three RN Battle Squadrons demonstrated themselves markedly superior to Scheer's Fleet.
No wonder, then, that Scheer reported to Kaiser Bill that the HSF should not be risked in such a manner again, and that unrestricted submarine warfare was the only way forward. However, catastrophic that eventually turned out for the All Highest and his Empire.
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@LordZontar You appear to think that I believe that Sealion was possible. I don't and never have. Indeed, my book on the subject was rather well received when published a few years ago. In short, I am certain that an attempt had no hope of success.
However, that does not mean anyone went through the motions. In point of fact the military archives at Freiburg detail a number of exercises carried out in 1940 involving loading troops onto barges, putting a short distance out to sea, and carrying out landings. The barges, by the way, were capable of withstanding normal Channel conditions. They, and their tugs, could not have withstood what the resources available to the Admiralty would have sent against them.
Would you like me to provide you with a list of the dates of the meetings held between Hitler and the naval and army staffs during the period, or details of the reports from Generals Busch & Strauss, of 9th & 16th Armies, that their preparations were complete, which reached Hitler on 13 September? Hitler, in response to a request from Raeder that the attempt be deferred until 8 or 24 October, when the moon & tides were favourable, informed him that a decision would be made on 17 September, which left open the possibility of D-Day being 27 September.
By 15 September, the transports were in position, and the troops of 9th & 16th armies ready to board. By then, von Richthofen, of Fliegerkorps VIII, had openly voiced his doubts, which supported those of Raeder. Coincidentally, on 14/15, 15/16, and 16/17 September, the regular RN destroyer patrols from Portsmouth & the Nore inspected the coastal barge ports as usual, and, with storms in the Channel on 17 September, Sealion was indefinitely postponed.
You don't need to try to lecture me on the shortcomings of the planning, or of the extreme improbability of success, but there is nothing, at least until mid-September at the earliest, in any German archive to suggest that it was merely a bluff.
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@senakaweeraratna741 Of course they were. Are you entirely ignorant of allied naval strategy? Clearly you are. The Royal Navy concentrated in the west, and defensively in the Indian Ocean, thus leaving the US navy to operate almost exclusively in the Pacific.
The British lost, in terms of significant warships, two cruisers and one small carrier in the Indian Ocean. If you think that represents 'The pride of the Royal Navy' then you are very ill-informed.
'The Imperial Japanese Army defeated the British Army in Burma, Hong Kong, Malaya and Singapore, Papua new guinea among others.' I urge you to read up on Operation U-Go. 55,000 Japanese casualties, greater than the massive US victories in the Pacific. The British were never in New Guinea. The Japanese there were defeated there by Australian & American troops.
'Japan had support throughout Asia as a fellow Asian country.' Yes, it must have been delightful to be beheaded by a fellow Asian.
Are you aware of the fact that 2.5 million Indians volunteered to serve with the allies in WW2?
Indeed, are you actually aware of much at all?
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@trumbettier Clearly, your need to resort to obscenities (or, rather, the same obscenity. Couldn't you at least think up a few others?) demonstrates the true validity of your argument, but, more in hope than anticipation, I feel I should ask you, if the British did not save Malta, where the five merchantmen which reached Malta with 32000 tons of supplies came from? Likewise, where did the November convoy, MW13 (Stoneage) come from?
Furthermore, I doubt there was anything in the Atlantic Charter which surprised Churchill, largely because he helped to compose it. I agree, there were aspects to it which he certainly didn't like, but equally the same comment could be applied to FDR.
Yes, the British Empire was largely history by 1960. All empires are transient, whether they be Roman, Spanish, or British. Indeed, historians of the future will probably identify the immediate past as the time when the United States began to decline in prestige and authority, with the rise of the next great world power, China.
Your post, by the way, rather reeks of hubris. You should be aware that generally follows is nemesis.
Odd that you should suggest that the British hadn't learned the importance of air power by mid 1942, when they were clearly well aware of it in 1940. They certainly understood it in 1944, when two thirds of the 11600 aircraft at D-Day were British. Mind you, so were 892 of 1213 warships, two thirds of the troops who landed (British & Canadian,) and 3261 of the 4127 landing craft were British manned. Furthermore, whilst the Supreme Commander was American, the heads of the three armed services were all British, and the naval landings were planned by a British Admiral, Bertram Ramsay.
One final thing. How did Churchill 'bait' Germany between the wars when he held no political office of any kind between 1929 & September, 1939?
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@trumbettier Brisbane Star did nothing of the sort. She had been damaged and could only make 8 knots, and her captain, Frederick Riley, concluded that she could not reach Malta on 13 August without protection, especially since she had been spotted by a Sicily based Sm79. Consequently, he took his ship into French territorial waters and the aircraft, obeying the rules of war, did not attack.
At 1000, Brisbane Star began receiving signals from the Vichy authorities at Hammamet, but ignored them. Around 1700 a Vichy patrol boat appeared and Brisbane Star was boarded by two officials, who insisted that she should be interned. After some discussion, and liberal doses of whiskey, the officials left, boarding their patrol boat, taking a badly injured crewman with them, and even signalling 'Bon Voyage.' Riley kept Brisbane Star behind a series of shoals and sandbars well inshore until nightfall, before continuing on his course for Malta, where she arrived at 1530 on 14 August, a gaping hole in her bows notwithstanding. For most of the last day, she was actually protected by Beaufighters, until she came within range of Malta's Spitfires, by the way.
Riley never at any time sought succour from French authorities. He made a considerable effort to avoid being interned, and his ship was capable of far more than 3 knots. It looks like you have been reading wikipedia, rather than a proper account of Pedestal written by a professional historian, of which there are several available. Even wikipedia does not suggest that Riley sought help from the French. That, presumably, is the bit you invented all by yourself.
You are therefore, utterly wrong in your facile comments.
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@trumbettier My opinion on David Irving, and my views on Brexit, are irrelevant to Pedestal. Buchanan's book might well appeal to those who have a superficial, at best, knowledge of the facts, and/or have existing prejudices which they seek to reinforce. I really don't care what you think about his work as that, also, is irrelevant to Pedestal.
By the way, you do know that Churchill held no political office between 1929 & September, 1939, do you? Whatever his own views, he had no influence at all on British governance during that period. In fact, he was widely regarded as a renegade, especially since he had crossed the floor of the house twice.
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@trumbettier I assume that, by 'intransigent comments' you mean indisputable facts which you don't like. Just for information, the Germans didn't start fitting turbines in their capital ships until the Kaisers of 1912. The British had been using turbines since Dreadnought. Furthermore, the last of the class, Prinzregent Luitpold, was supposed to have been fitted with a diesel engine driving her centre shaft, but never was. This also applied to the succeeding Konig class, which, likewise, were never fitted with the intended diesels and, indeed, resorted to partial coal firing, with 12 of 15 boilers being coal fired. Even the last two, German battleships, Baden & Bayern, had 11 of 14 boilers coal fired. No German battleship in WW1 had a diesel engine. Oh, and the 'enormous fire power' is interesting. I presume you mean the German 11 inch and 12 inch, as opposed to the feeble British 12 inch, 13.5 inch, & 15 inch. Only the last two German battleships, the Baden & Bayern, carried 15 inch guns, in comparison to the (entirely oil fired) Royal Sovereign & Queen Elizabeth classes (10 ships in all) of which the QEs were some four knots faster than the Badens.
By the way, the (oil fired) Bismarcks were hardly wonder weapons. Both had outmoded incremental armour, whereas every British capital ship since the Nelsons had adopted the Nevada type, vastly more effective, all-or-nothing system. Bismarck was able to sink a twenty year old, unmodernised, British battlecruiser, but was quickly reduced from a warship to a slowly sinking, helpless, target in about twenty minutes by HMS Rodney on 27 May, 1941. The other two WW2 German battleships, Scharnhorst & Gneisenau, were also oil fired, although the panzershiffs, often wrongly called pocket battleships, were diesel powered, but hardly formidable vessels, as their performance in WW2 clearly demonstrates.
There were no British capital ships reliant on coal in WW2, by the way.
If Churchill was 'able to stir and keep the drums of war beating' between the wars, he couldn't have been much good at it, given the appeasement policies followed by a series of British governments at the time, could he? He did consistently argue that a resurgent, re-arming, Germany, after 1933, was a threat to European stability. Was he wrong?
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RN bases were at the Nore (25 destroyers), Portsmouth (20 destroyers) and Plymouth (12 destroyers). Steaming at 20 knots, although even a 'Hunt' class could manage 25, and the rest were capable of 30+, this means that after receiving an invasion alert, boats from the Nore could reach Dover in 3.5 hours, from Portsmouth in 3.5 hours, and from Plymouth in 8 hours. Additionally, four light cruisers could accompany them.
As to mining the Channel, how would you suggest the Germans achieved that, with only seven converted freighters to use as minelayers? Certainly, the Germans did have an elaborate plan to undertake the laying of eleven mine barriers, which would commence nine days before Sealion was attempted. However, as the go-ahead was never given, neither did the minelaying commence. Probably just as well, as the Royal Navy carried out nightly destroyer patrols, and the effects of a 4.7 or 4 inch HE shell exploding on a laden mine deck could not be taken lightly.
Actually, the British mined the Channel heavily, sinking three U-Boats there as early as October, 1939.
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@koookeee By 'sanguine' I mean his confidence that the Germans could actually achieve a landing at all. The source for the losses suffered by the Maleme convoy which Forczyk uses is questionable (Vincent O'Hara) and the vast majority of other sources do not agrees. Park, 'The Battle for Crete' Annapolis Naval Institute Press, as an American example, for one. There are several others.
'A handful of old destroyers between Harwich and Portsmouth.' Which is why I referred to the Pink List of 16 September, 1940. This shows 16 destroyers and a light cruiser at Portsmouth, and 24 destroyers and two light cruisers at Sheerness (both ports were 3.5 hours from Dover at 20 knots, by the way). He seems to have forgotten Plymouth, as well, by the way, where there were 16 destroyers and two light cruisers. Mr. Forczyk, if he thought this represents 'a handful' must have had large hands. I would be happy to list every one of these vessels, by the way. I DO have the Pink List for 16 September, 1940.
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@koookeee As I understand it, Mr. Forzcyk questioned the ability of the RN to deal with convoys. I have simply corrected this misconception. As the earliest actions against axis convoys took place in the Mediterranean in early 1941, then upon what did Mr. Forzcyk base his claim?
Moreover, the Sealion vessels were actually towed barges, moving at little over walking pace, not convoys in any real sense at all. The Royal Navy by the way, was the best trained in the west in night operations. At the time, only the distant Japanese were their equals.
It appears that you prefer Mr. Forzcyk's alternative approach to that of most authors writing on the subject today. Fair enough, but please don't be so confident in his 'critical analysis,' as you describe it, when there are significant flaws in it.
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@koookeee The Royal Navy already carried out patrols of the Channel from both ends on a nightly basis, usually involving four destroyers from Plymouth and four from Sheerness. During the day, any concentration of barges heading into the Channel would actually be visible from Admiral Ramsay' headquarters at Dover Castle.
What German shipping did pass through the Channel at the time was usually comprised of small groups of ships keeping close to the French coast, and able to retire into any of the many ports in the event of any perceived threat. In point of fact, barge concentrations in French & Belgian ports only really began in early September. In September, the Royal Navy began attacks as opposed to patrols. Such attacks took place on 7/8 September (4 MTBs attacked shipping in Calais, supported by four destroyers from DF1 out of Portsmouth), 8/9 September ( 3 MTBs attacked a small group of ships near Ostend, before entering Ostend harbour and attacking shipping with torpedoes and machine guns, whilst 2 cruisers & 6 destroyers entered Boulogne & shelled the inner harbour, and four destroyers supported an attack by MTBs on Dunkirk harbour), 9/10 September (6 destroyers shelled Calais & Boulogne harbours, supporting attacks by 4 MTBs) 10/11 September (3 destroyers of DF 16 engaged and sank a number of tugs & barges off Ostend) 11/12 September (destroyers from Plymouth, Portsmouth, and Sheerness swept the coast from the mouth of the Meuse to Cherbourg, shelling shipping in several of the ports) 12/13 September ( 3 destroyers of DF 16 swept from Boulogne to Cap Gris Nez, but found nothing at sea) and 13/14 September ( the same destroyers of DF 16 sank or damaged a number of German patrol trawlers). That is a summary of the operations for the first half of September. I haven't listed patrols where nothing was detected.
Of the destroyers in Plymouth, Portsmouth, and Sheerness, there were 4 V&Ws at Plymouth, 4 V&Ws and old S class at Portsmouth, & 17 V&Ws at Sheerness. Of the remainder, the oldest were 3 ten years old B class, whilst 6 were brand new J/K class destroyers ( 6 x 4.7 inch guns, specifically moved to Plymouth to counter the German destroyers at Cherbourg) and the others six years old at most.
The V&Ws were mixed, by the way. Some, the Modified V & Ws, carried 4.7 inch mark 1 guns, capable of 5-6 rounds per minute, whilst the older V & Ws were fitted with 4 inch mark Vs. These, when introduced in 1918, did indeed have separate ammunition, but used fixed ammunition by 1939, and had rate of fire of 8-10 rounds per minute. Most V & Ws carried one or two x 0.5 inch pom poms, and a 3 inch AA gun (which could also be used as a low angle weapon) in place of one set of tubes.
I would agree that the old V & Ws were not suited to fight major fleet action by WW2, but in this case they were actually intended to be used against barges & tugs, where a rate of fire of 5 or 6 rounds per gun per minute for the modified V&Ws, and 8-10 rounds for the V&Ws, was probably more than adequate.
A pity Mr. Forczyk didn't do his research on the V & Ws (and the Scott and Shakespeare class leaders which accompanied them) as these are a particular interest of mine.
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Perhaps you should actually read what the terms of the Total Exclusion Zone were. They stated that any sea vessel or aircraft from any country entering the zone may be fired upon without further warning.
Rear Admiral Allara, who commanded the Belgrano Task Force, later said, "After that message of 23 April, the entire South Atlantic was an operational theatre for both sides. We, as professionals, said it was just too bad that we lost the Belgrano". The message of 23 April, of course, was the British declaration of the TEZ.
On the same day, a message was passed via the Swiss Embassy in Buenos Aires to the Argentine government, that the British Government had determined that any Argentine ship or aircraft that was considered to pose a threat to British forces anywhere in the South Atlantic would be attacked.
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This was not the 'worst naval decision of WW2.' For that, simply look at Admiral King's refusal to set up a convoy system for the East Coast of the United States, despite being warned that, after the German declaration of war, U-boats were on their way, as part of Operation Paukenschlag. The result? Over 600 merchant ships, mainly American, sunk, and around 5,000 merchant seamen killed, often within sight of the (still fully lit) lights of the US coast.
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@nickdanger3802 Oddly, enough, it didn't. My research only uncovered real facts. Such as how the 'little help' against the Japanese involved the campaign in Burma, culminating in the defeat of the U-Go offensive and the 55,000 casualties suffered by the Japanese army during that one battle.
Or the fact that escorting North Atlantic supply convoys was almost entirely the responsibility of RN & RCN Escort Groups. From the winter of 1942, there were eleven Escort Groups responsible for SC, HX and ON convoys, of which six were British, four Canadian, and one American Look up 'Mid-Ocean Escort Force' and you will discover that, by the summer of 1943, United States Atlantic escorts had focused on the faster CU convoys and the UG convoys between Chesapeake Bay and the Mediterranean Sea; and only British and Canadian escorts remained on the HX, SC and ON convoys.
Specifically, there were seven British, four Canadian, and one US Escort Groups, (B1-B7, C1-C4, and A3), after the Britsh B5 group had returned from detached service. Even then, this is misleading, as A3 consisted of two US Coastguard Cutters and a number of Canadian corvettes. Indeed, when the cutters were detached, the Group became a fully Canadian one, renumbered C5.
The enormous contribution of US industry to the war effort has never been denied, but this fixation you and others seem to have for listing it is on a par with giving the credit for a Home Run to the bat, rather than the batter wielding it. Moreover, I notice that you neglect to refer to the range of technological advances which the British developed, and which were made available to their American allies. The trade, despite your evident fixation, was not one-sided.
You write as if the British Commonwealth and Empire were mere bystanders, gratefully accepting the noble generosity of US largesse. This odd insistence by some that only the United States played any relevant role in WW2 is an odd and strangely perplexing one. National pride is one thing, but not when it degenerates into one-eyed jingoism. I correspond with a number of American historians as part of what could perhaps be considered my 'day job.' Most of them are equally puzzled.
Oh, and how is any of this relevant to 'The Worst Naval Decision of WW2?'
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@Andy-ub3ub No you are totally missing the point. Your first post read 'If germany had invaded, Britain wouldve never gone to north africa.' However much you refuse to accept it, there were already British forces in North Africa before WW2 began. Why do you find this simple fact so difficult to grasp?
Your posts are riddled with 'would haves.' You assume that Germany had the resources to attempt an invasion (she didn't) and you assume no supplies 'would have' been sent to North Africa. Actually, supplies and reinforcements were being sent in August, 1940, when the possibility of an invasion attempt still existed.
Then you fantasise about convoys to Russia (only begun in August 1941), and Operation Pedestal (August, 1942). The British actually maintained Malta throughout the war. You might find it difficult to accept, but the British were fully aware of the importance of the middle eastern oilfields.
'Yes, the british army had escaped at dunkirk, but it had lost all of its heavy equipment.' Yet, by the time the Germans were even notionally able to attempt anything (September) the British had 34.5 operational divisions in the UK alone.
Had Sealion been attempted, and failed, the British could actually have been as well, if not better, placed to support the Soviet Union from June 1941.
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@larryclemens1850 Glorious, as the time of her last voyage, was being used as a ferry carrier. Of her usual 48 aircraft air group, she had left behind in Scotland all but 12 Sea Gladiators (802 Squadron) and 6 Swordfish ( part of 823 Squadron). Her role was to re-embark 263 Squadron's 10 RAF Gladiators from Norway. In the event, the commander of 46 Squadron, decided to try to save his 6 remaining Hurricanes by attempted to land them aboard Glorious. Ark Royal had a longer flight deck, but at the time was carrying her full air group, and Glorious' lifts were wider, which meant that the larger Hurricanes could be taken into the hangar.
Glorious' normal operations shouldn't have been compromised, although her only offensive capability was 6 Swordfish. These could have been kept at immediate readiness, or even ranged on the flight deck, ready for launch, but they weren't. Indeed, a survivor subsequently reported an 'end of term' atmosphere aboard Glorious, and that torpedo warheads were in the process of being removed and placed into secure storage.
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@suryaprakash2126 The German Naval Ordnance Department, on 31 December, 1938, produced a report entitled 'The Feasibility of the Z Plan' which described the problems involved in such a programme. The demands in manpower and raw materials were such, that the whole of German Industry would need to have been placed at the disposal of the Kriegsmarine, with the army & air force starved of investment. Thus, the successful German campaign in the west would have been impossible, not to mention the fact that this would have been politically impossible for Hitler.
Even had this impossibility become fact, then just imagine the German fleet you have proposed, in attempting to break out of the North Sea (without, of course, access to any French or Norwegian ports), sailing straight into a new Jutland, as the RN would have six Lions (9 x 16 inch guns) five KGVs, (10 x 14 inch guns), and Vanguard (8 x 15 inch guns), supported by Ark Royal and up to six Illustrious class carriers, four Audacious class carriers, and four Malta class carriers, and a vast array of cruisers and destroyers. As France would not have fallen, and would presumably have remained Britain's ally, you can add to the mix the four modern French battleships of the Richelieu class ( 8 x 15 inch guns.)
I hope that whoever led this German fleet would have been well aware of Admiral Scheer's 'Battle Turn Away' tactic.
Sorry, Plan Z was simply a pipe dream
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Jutland wasn't intended to be a fleet action. The intention was to lure the Grand Fleet to sea, over a number of pre-planted U-Boat traps. The German hope was that the British numerical superiority could be reduced by U-boats and mines. The trap failed entirely. Of 19 boats allocated, only 2 sighted the Grand Fleet, and only one made an attack, which failed.
Scheer then found himself in a battle which he desperately did not want to fight, had his T crossed, with visibility against him. Certainly, he extricated his fleet with a mixture of skill and good fortune, but he knew how lucky he had been, and never took a similar risk again.
The reality is that, strategically, Jellicoe won simply by not suffering losses from within his battleship fleet. British control of the North Sea and therefore, maintenance of the Blockade, continued unimpaired. The effect of the Blockade was made manifest during what the Germans called the 'Turnip Winter' when possibly as many as 700000 German civilians died of starvation & hypothermia.
As a New York newspaper commented of Jutland, 'The German Fleet has assaulted it's jailer, but it is still in jail.'
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Some people need to do a little more reading, then. Aside from the fact that the German army was still busy in France until after two weeks after Dunkirk had ended, the German paratroop force, following heavy losses in Norway & the Low Countries, was down to around 4,000 effectives at the most. Furthermore, the Luftwaffes' stock of operational transport aircraft at the time was less than 230.
Landing a small force of lightly armed paratroopers, with neither artillery nor armour to support them, and with no hope of being relieved by better armed ground troops, would simply have been to throw them away, although it would have given the British an important victory at a critical time.
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Well, apart from the River Plate, first & second Battles of Narvik, sinking of the Bismarck, the Barents Sea, North Cape, Battle of the Bay of Biscay, and the Battle of the Atlantic, I can't think of one either. It is difficult to win a major fleet action when your enemy doesn't have a fleet.
Unless, of course, you wish to discuss the Mediterranean?
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In retrospect, you are correct, in that Glorious should have been better escorted. At the time, however, there was no intelligence to suggest that Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, and Glorious should have been fast enough to out run any threat.
The true problem was her commander, d'Oyly Hughes, who was later described as someone who would have been a superb cruiser captain, but was probably the last man in the navy to have been given command of a carrier. Glorious was an unhappy ship, and there seems to have been an 'end of term' atmosphere aboard her at the time of her sinking. She was actually sailing independently of any other large warship because, astonishingly, d'Oyly Hughes was eager to get back to Scapa Flow to court-martial one of his own officers. d'Oyly Hughes was personally a brave man, who had received the DSO in WW1, but there seems little doubt that he was, at the time of his death, an unstable character. He was, oddly, born in Salt Lake City, by the way.
Even though Hurricanes had been landed aboard, Glorious should have been able to operate CAPs, and indeed should have done when so close to the Norwegian coast. In fact, four aircraft were at 10 minutes readiness, but none was aloft.
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@BA-gn3qb The Arctic Convoy was actually PQ17, which was scattered as a result of an error of judgement by the First Sea Lord, who, wrongly, thought that a strong force led by Tirpitz was rapidly approaching, and that an unscattered convoy would be annihilated. Nobody 'ran away,' the Anglo-American cruiser covering force thought they were about to engage the Tirpitz force, in the hope that they could delay it long enough to enable the (again, Anglo-American) battleship force to intervene. Those destroyers of the close escort with torpedoes joined the cruiser force, whilst the smaller escorts stayed in the vicinity of the scattering convoy. Generally, facile comments such as yours dissolve when the facts are examined.
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@BA-gn3qb So, taking four heavy cruisers and four destroyers, supported by two or three older destroyers from the close escort, to engage what might have been one battleship, two pocket battleships, one heavy cruiser, ten destroyers, and two torpedo boats is 'running away' in your world is it? A curious world you inhabit. Feel free to criticize Dudley Pound for his decision, which may have been influenced by the fact that he was suffering from a brain tumour which was shortly to kill him, but please don't accuse the British (and American) commanders on the spot of cowardice.
As to 'Pedestal,' which British admirals 'took their warships and ran away' please? By 'ran away' you need to demonstrate that they did this in defiance of orders. Following a pre-determined plan which specifically excluded the presence of capital ships in the Narrows where they would be more of a hindrance than a help cannot be equated with 'running away.' Please feel free to quote from any naval historian who agrees with your opinion.
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@BA-gn3qb I'll do one final post, and then give up on you, as apart from chanting 'Brits. are cowards' endlessly, you really don't seem to know anything. There were 78 Arctic convoys during the course of WW2. 792 vessels sailed to Russia, and 739 returned. Of the 792, 62 (7.8%) were lost. Of the returning convoys, 28 vessels, (3.8%) failed to arrive. Some 4,000,000 tons of supplies were dispatched, including 5000 tanks & just over 7000 aircraft, all but 300000 tons arrived. Throughout this period, the merchantmen and escorts had no, or minimal, air cover, and were operating far from friendly bases, whilst the Germans had battleships, heavy cruisers, pocket battleships, light cruisers and their entire destroyer force, together with a large number of U-Boats and bomber & torpedo aircraft, close at hand. Despite this, one one occasion only was a convoy subjected to heavy losses, and that because a senior officer in London made an error of judgement, rather than due to any failure of the men on the spot. 829 merchant crewmen and officers died. The Royal Navy lost two cruisers, six destroyers, three sloops, two frigates, and three corvettes. 1840 officers and men were killed. I won't bore you with further details of warships which were damaged but survived, as I imagine from your previous posts that you are reaching the end of your attention span. Please feel free, in the light of the above, to post inanely about the cowardly Brits. By the way, I wouldn't need to read anything you might care to write, as I have already had a number of my own published.
That's all, please feel free to post further nonsense, but I won't waste any further time upon you.
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@Litany_of_Fury No, it wasn't. The Admiralty had no intention of using anything bigger than light cruisers. The capital ships & carriers (actually, just one carrier) were at Rosyth & Scapa Flow, along with 24 destroyers, 5 light and 2 heavy cruisers. There was one old battleship at Plymouth, but there was no plan to use her for anything other than night bombardment of barge concentration ports anyway (which she duly did, on 10 October.).
Given that the invasion forces consisted of barges towed by coasters, tugs or trawlers, supported by a tiny number of destroyers and torpedo boats, the heavy ships were not needed, and it was far easier to destroy such targets with quick firing 4 inch, 4.7 inch, or 6 inch guns than with the bigger guns fitted to heavy cruisers and above. In short, the big ships would have got in the way!
The actual whereabouts of all RN warships can be ascertained from the RN 'Pink List.' My information is from the List of 16 September, 1940 (ADM 187/9).
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Captain Krancke, commander of Admiral Scheer, paid generous tribute to the gallantry of Fegan & Jervis Bay in his account. He also referred to a small freighter, already on fire, which fired at his ship before she sank. This is believed to have been Kenbane Head. He made no reference to any gun battle with Beaverford, only referring to a ship carrying a deck cargo of timber that Scheer caught up with as it fled at speed far to the south of the main action.
The captain's log from Fresno City, another of Scheer's victims, reported "The Beaverford, bearing 110 degrees East South East was attacked and set on fire, distant about 10 miles". It seems Beaverford was attacked around 50 minutes after Kenbane Head, and about an hour before the sinking of Fresno City. There does not seem to have been, therefore, any time for a four hour engagement.
The account of the Beaverford action first appeared in 1944, in the magazine Canada's Weekly, and it was republished in the Evening Standard in London. Quite how, when the convoy was scattering in all directions, a four hour engagement could have been witnessed in entirety, is not made clear.
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@garygemmell3488 Not at all. I was simply, evidently, unsuccessfully, trying to explain the reality of the situation. The reconstituted German navy was never intended to challenge the Royal Navy, as German shipbuilding capacity was nowhere near that of Britain.
From Weimar times, the belief had been that any future war in which Germany might become involved would be with Poland, or Poland & France. Thus, Weimar build commissioned commerce raiders, the Deutschlands, intended to intercept French troop convoys. The French responded with the Strasbourgs. The Germans then produced the Scharnhorsts, the French began building the Richelieus, and the Germans the Bismarcks.
In short, it was a naval race between two medium/small naval powers. There was no expectation until 1938 at the earliest that the tiny German navy would ever be asked to challenge the Royal Navy. Raeder was always aware that this was a task totally beyond it.
The German navy in 1939 was as ready as it was ever likely to be. It was, however, totally outmatched, and had been placed in an impossible position.
You should read about the largely forgotten Franco-German naval race, as it is fascinating subject.
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@krackerman3628 Odd how people use insults when they aren't really sure of their argument, but thank you for proving the point. Do you really not understand the naval strategy of WW2? The Royal Navy took responsibility for the Atlantic, the Arctic, and the Mediterranean, leaving the US Navy to concentrate almost entire on the Pacific. Moreover, after Midway, the Japanese navy was a busted flush. Japanese naval successes seem to have consisted of a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, sinking a few scattered allies cruisers off Java, a brief raid into the Indian Ocean (with no obvious objective in mind) and a pyrric victory at Savo Island.
Ask the German U-boat arm, or the crews of the German destroyers at Narvik, or of Bismarck, or of Scharnhorst, how poor the Royal Navy was.
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@ComradeOgilvy1984 Siegfried Breyer argued that the High Seas Fleet lost it's raison d'etre when the British decided that, in the event of a war with Germany, they would institute a distant, rather than close, blockade. German assumptions had been that they would be required to meet the British navy either in, or close to, German home waters. Once the British changed their strategy, then the Germans, with a smaller fleet, would be obliged to fight in the northern North Sea.
Apologists for WW1 German naval strategy would claim that the High Seas Fleet was never intended to challenge the blockade. This does, however, rather beg the question, if the High Seas Fleet wasn't intended to challenge the blockade, then what exact purpose was it intended to serve?
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The actual text of the signal, addressed to R.A.A., (Admiral Wells, Rear Admiral Aircraft Carriers) was as follows:- 'R. A. A. FROM GLORIOUS (corrupt group, possibly CONFIRM) MY 1615 2 P.B. TIME OF ORIGIN 1640'
The signal of 1615 said, according to a Glorious survivor who was a telegraphist in a Swordfish and heard it on his headphones, 'TWO BATTLESHIPS BEARING 310 DEGREES DISTANCE EIGHT MILES,' followed by a position. It would probably have been sent on the Aircraft Carrier wave, but no British warship or shore station either acknowledged it or even recorded receiving it. More importantly, the B-Dienst team aboard Gneisenau didn't receive it either, even though they were monitoring British frequencies.
Devonshire received the second signal at 1720, but without the first signal it would surely have been meaningless.
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She was renamed Uckermark, and was a supply ship for Scharnhorst & Gneisenau during their Atlantic operation of January-March, 1941. On September, 1942, she sailed for Yokohama with a cargo of vegetable oil and fuel, and actually got there on 24 November. On 30 November, 1942 she was ripped apart by an internal explosion which destroyed her, the raider Thor, and the captured liner Nankin. It appears that a repair crew attempted to carry out welding repairs in a fuel tank recently emptied of gasoline, which really was not a good idea.
53 of her crew were killed in the explosion, and most of the rest were embarked on the blockade runner Doggerbank, which sailed for France, but on 3 March, 1943 was torpedoed by U 43. Of 365 aboard, only one survived.
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@HerrMau The Fleet Air Arm had trained in torpedo attacks on warships for years before the war. The Germans in 1940 had a handful of obsolete seaplanes capable of launching torpedoes. Certainly, pilots can be trained, but this takes time, and the pilots could not have been retrained in time for an invasion attempt in September, 1940. Even then, this would have been in the use of bombs only, not torpedoes. Furthermore, the Kriegsmarine estimated that eleven days would be required to get the first wave across, and even then it would have been lacking motor transport and divisional artillery. Every night, the invasion barges would be exposed to attack by RN destroyers and smaller warships, with virtually no surface protection, and no air protection at all.
The date of the invasion was absolutely critical, given the likely weather conditions in the Channel from late September onwards. Similar constraints did not apply to the attack on France.
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@somefurryguy1811 Thatcher was Prime Minister at the time. Her army and air force advisors, as well as the vile John Nott, advised against military action, but Sir Henry Leach, First Sea Lord at the time, when asked if retaking the islands was possible, replied "Yes we can recover the islands." He then added "and we must!" Thatcher replied "Why?" Leach responded, "Because if we do not, or if we pussyfoot in our actions and do not achieve complete success, in another few months we shall be living in a different country whose word counts for little."
By the way, the Falklands were and are just as much a part of Britain as any British town or city, and just as deserving of protection.
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Captain Krancke, commander of Admiral Scheer, paid generous tribute to the gallantry of Fegan & Jervis Bay in his account. He also referred to a small freighter, already on fire, which fired at his ship before she sank. This is believed to have been Kenbane Head. He made no reference to any gun battle with Beaverford, only referring to a ship carrying a deck cargo of timber that Scheer caught up with as it fled at speed far to the south of the main action.
The captain's log from Fresno City, another of Scheer's victims, reported "The Beaverford, bearing 110 degrees East South East was attacked and set on fire, distant about 10 miles". It seems Beaverford was attacked around 50 minutes after Kenbane Head, and about an hour before the sinking of Fresno City. There does not seem to have been, therefore, any time for a four hour engagement.
The account of the Beaverford action first appeared in 1944, in the magazine Canada's Weekly, and it was republished in the Evening Standard in London. Quite how, when the convoy was scattering in all directions, a four hour engagement could have been witnessed in entirety, is not made clear.
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@adambrande Have you actually seen what a WW2 Type VII or Type IX was like? The movie 'Das Boot' gives some idea. There was barely room for the crew, let alone survivors.
The occasion to which you are referring involved a liner, Laconia, torpedoed by U156 in September, 1942, when carrying around 2,500 Italian PoWs. around 1,500 of whom died.
The Japanese rarely tried to pick up allied survivors. The very fact that 'Ikazuchi's' actions were so noteworthy is simply an exception which proves a more general rule. She was, by the way, under no particular risk as the Allied force at the Java Sea had largely ceased to exist.
On 8 June, 1940, after sinking HMS Glorious and her two escorting destroyers off Norway, the German battleships Gneisenau & Scharnhorst left around 2,000 men in the water, by the way.
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@00billharris Firstly, your first paragraph contradicts itself. First you say that 'The Brits did not suffer from an inferiority of manpower or quatitative material on either front.' Then you say 'they were out fought, out thought and suffered a qualatative lack in material.' Well, which is it?
Secondly, the Allies were out thought in 1940? The British contributed 13 divisions to the Allied forces in France & Belgium, the French and Belgians a hundred. The planning for the defence against a German attack was largely the responsibility of General Gamelin and the French High Command. The Belgians capitulated, and the French collapsed. What alternatives do you suggest the British had?
Churchill did not become Prime Minister until the day of Blitzkrieg. I assume you actually know that? The failure in France was not of his making. Moreover, Britain's ability to defend herself was not compromised. The Royal Navy was never challenged for control of Home Waters, and the Germans failed in the Battle of Britain. Indeed, as early as August, 1940, the British were sending substantial troop reinforcements to Egypt to oppose the Italian invasion.
What '2 front' war? There wasn't one until December, 1941. When it began, the British had withdrawn their naval forces, other than a small number of old destroyers and a few cruisers, to Home Waters or the Mediterranean, and Far Eastern forces consisted mainly of infantry. If anything, the British sent too few resources to Malaya. Certainly, tanks were noticeable only by their absence. A belated attempt to remedy this by sending Force Z, intended, by the way, to deter Japanese aggression, failed, but are you seriously suggesting that the British should simply have abandoned Singapore & Malaya without attempting to defend them?
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@spankthatdonkey Indeed, think of Prince of Wales & Repulse. Both were sunk by high performance torpedo aircraft, which the Luftwaffe didn't have. The bombs used by the Japanese against them were ineffective. Both were hit by one bomb, which didn't penetrate the deck armour of either ship. There was no reason for the British to bring the Rosyth based Home Fleet south anyway, unless German heavy ships supported an invasion attempt, and as there was only one operational German heavy ship at the time (Hipper) that wasn't going to happen. Heavy cruisers and battleships are not particularly useful at sinking towed barges; more agile destroyers and small supporting vessels are far superior at the task. Oh, and the largest RN warship sunk by the Luftwaffe in WW2 was a light cruiser.
In September 1940, the British had their older, Queen Elizabeth class, battleships, supported by six cruisers and twenty two destroyers, in the Mediterranean, but, as Japan was neutral, only a half flotilla of WW1 destroyers in the Far East, and almost nothing in the Indian Ocean. By contrast. in Home Waters & at Gibraltar, there were 116 destroyers, plus 17 undergoing refits & repairs, of which 64 were on anti-invasion duties. At the time, the RN was not particularly stretched, especially since destroyers which could have been used as convoy escorts were held in Home Waters.
Your suggestion that German forces in Britain could have crippled the British radar network, is something of a chicken and egg.
They have to get there first, and such was the strength of the RN's resources that, as Raeder knew, that was a virtual impossibility
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@smokejaguarsix7757 They didn't need to be dive bombers. Swordfish were perfectly capable of dropping conventional bombs, as some did, for example at Taranto. After the second Battle of Narvik, Swordfish regularly attacked enemy targets in the vicinity of Narvik for two weeks, bombing ships, land facilities, and parked enemy aircraft. Read 'The Fairey Swordfish Mks. I-IV' by Ian Stott.
Moreover, whatever you might believe, Flag Officer, Narvik would have disagreed with you, when he asked Glorious to attack German troops on the Mosjoen-Mo road, in a signal of 26 May. Indeed, aircraft from Ark Royal had carried out a similar attack, successfully, only a few days earlier.
The orders as finally issued by D'Oyly- Hughes envisaged the use of five Swordfish, each carrying six x 250lb & four x 20lb bombs, and escorted by three Sea Gladiators to take off at 2000 on 27 May. The air officers, Slessor & Heath, objected to the operation because of the lack of defined objectives, by the way, not because of any feeling that the operation would be suicidal. After Heath refused to produce a plan, he was suspended from duty and confined to his cabin.
Feeling within the aircrew was far from supportive of Heath. When he left the ship, they were asked to cheer him off from the quarterdeck. Apparently, half refused, one saying 'We will not. We don't agree that those Swordfish should not have gone.'
In short, it was not seen at the time, by anyone at all, as a 'suicide mission.' Swordfish had carried out numerous similar operations during the campaign, without suffering any such losses.
In short, your comments do not accord with the facts. Perhaps you might wish to read 'Carrier Glorious' by John Winton, which is far from sympathetic towards D'Oyly-Hughes, but gives an even-handed account of the circumstances surrounding the proposed raid.
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@smokejaguarsix7757 'Apparently you cant or didnt bother to read my first comment. You provide no source for your information which I requested in my original post smart ass.'
I did. In my response I told you what D'Oyly-Hughes intended, and then suggested that you read John Winton's book. Apparently you didn't bother to digest my reply fully. I won't resort to insults, but will simply leave that to others.
'All aircraft are capable of bombing.' I know, which is why your earlier comment 'The aircraft they were flying were Torpedo bombing Swordfish' needed, disappointingly, to be corrected.
As 'German air coverage was excellent,' don't you consider it odd that Fleet Air Arm ground support operations in Norway to date had suffered few losses? Why should this proposed operation be any different? During the whole of her time operating in Norwegian waters, Ark Royal, despite the number of ground support operations her Swordfish undertook, lost a total of five, at least three of which were the result of forced landings.
Indeed, on 2 June, four Swordfish from Glorious, led by a Swordfish & three Skuas from Ark Royal, launched at 0200 to attack General Dietl's HQ at Hundallen, and landed back at 0530. Vice-Admiral Wells, in Ark Royal, evidently did not consider this to be a suicide mission. It wasn't, by the way.
Simply read Winton's book, instead of merely assuming that the orders were 'insane.'
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@smokejaguarsix7757 What is still secret are the events surrounding the loss of the ship, not the events of 26/27 May. Swordfish, by the way, were not simply torpedo bombers. During the course of the war, they carried, in addition, bombs, mines, depth charges, flares, and rockets. History shows them to have carried out a large number of ground attack operations, both in Norway & in the Mediterranean. As has been pointed out, Ark Royal's aircraft had already successfully undertaken a number of such operations. Why should Heath simply assume that Ark's aircraft were in some way better than his own. Incidentally, Stephens, commander of 823 Squadron, was willing to make out the operation order, until, effectively, his feet were cut from beneath him by Heath. That, by the way, explains why he was not disciplined. Heath wrote a letter to Hughes saying that he was unable to act upon the orders given to him by Hughes, who had received his own orders from Admiral Wells. When an officer flatly refuses to obey orders, what alternative does his commander have?
As to what the orders were (which the squadron commander was willing to act upon, when his superior was not, by the way) as given by Hughes to Heath they were that five Swordfish & three Sea Gladiators would take off at 2000 on 27 May and fly to Hemnes. They would then 'bomb any suitable objective that can be found, including troops & transport, on the road between Hemnes & Mosjoen, small bridges or viaducts, and enemy aerodromes' They were to attack nothing north of Hemnes because allied forces might be there. After the attack, any aircraft that failed to locate Glorious at the ETA was to land at Bodin. I suggest that there is nothing here which could be considered 'idiotic.' Ark Royal had been given similar missions on a number of occasions, and successfully carried them out.
Winton, the only source to my knowledge who has written upon these events in detail, and whose sympathies were with Heath & Slessor rather than Hughes, feels that the poisonous atmosphere between the air commanders and the captain had reached a point which had led Heath & Slessor automatically to assume that any order issued by Hughes must automatically be 'ill-advised or even hare-brained.' He suggests that, had Heath been Commander (Air) aboard Furious (Captain Troubridge) or Ark Royal ( Captain Power) and received similar orders, he would have produced an operation order and the mission gone ahead. The reality is that Hughes was simply seeking to obey orders from his Admiral, who in turn was seeking to relieve pressure on hard-pressed Allied troops in the Mosjoen area. Perhaps Heath allowed his feud to cause him to lose sight of this. Certainly, whatever the rights and wrongs, Heath never received a front-line command again.
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@smokejaguarsix7757 'First you have no idea from where they were supposed to launch, how far from land etc. Those planes have limited fuel and bomb load in colder climes.' Yes, I do. D'Oyly-Hughes intended to bring Glorious within 40 miles of the coast. The aircraft would then fly to Hemnes, then 40 miles south to Mosjoen . The sun sets in those latitudes at around 0030, by which time the aircraft would either have returned or diverted. Even then it is still almost daylight. Bad weather is merely an excuse, as in such circumstances the operation would have been postponed or cancelled anyway. How do you know the weather was going to be bad, by the way? Instead of thinking up every imaginative reason under the sun to justify inactivity, why not read the book?
'They had clear orders previously and known mission targets.' really? what is your source for this claim? Please refer me to it. Incidentally, you refer to the open cockpit of Glorious' Swordfish. Were the cockpits of Ark Royal's Swordfish any less open? Moreover, only the Sea Gladiators aboard Glorious had enclosed cockpits. Would you suggest that the Fleet Air Arm ceased operations until the Albacores arrived in November, 1940?
Heath wasn't subsequently court-martialled because his accuser was dead, by the way, as were most of the witnesses. Clearly, you have made up your mind, although I wonder if, given your attitude, the British Fleet Air Arm would ever have been allowed to have taken off from their carriers at all in WW2. Certainly, I assume you would have stopped Captain Maund launching his aircraft against Bismarck in the rough seas of 26 May, 1941, or Illustrious' Swordfish attacking the Italian at Taranto. What! A night attack? Out of the question!
I thought chain of command went something like :- Admiral to Captain to Commander (Air). At what point does the third link in the chain have the right to choose to ignore orders from his superiors?
'Your arguments are illogical but do show that youre one of those people who think rank makes right.' You don't know anything about me, so please don't make unwarranted assumptions, and from your catalogue of imaginative excuses for inactivity it is fairly clear that you have absolutely no knowledge of the Norwegian campaign of 1940. You are actually aware that the British were at war, I suppose?
Finally, a word from Dick Leggott, of 802 Squadron, who survived the sinking, and would have been one of the Sea Gladiator pilots on the mission :-
'I think we should have flown something. I would not denigrate D'Oyly-Hughes as much as many have. When it came to Flag Officer, Narvik sending a signal saying we would like you to try and do something to assist the army ashore, the least we could have done was to send off an armed reconnaissance. Three Swordfish & three Gladiators could have carried out the necessary patrol; it was daylight 24 hours a day. It could have been done. There was only a twenty to one chance of anybody even seeing a Swordfish in that sort of terrain. There weren't German fighters in every square foot of air there. That really to me is where the affair doesn't entirely devolve upon D'Oyly-Hughes. The majority of the pilots in the Swordfish squadron were put out about it. My own squadron C.O. refused to be drawn into it. It was not good enough. Something could have been done. Still, as you said earlier, what would the mere pilots know?
Please don't bother to respond.
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@persimmon93 Actually, I got the information from the Parachute Regiment's own website, which claims this :- 'Impressed by the success of German airborne operations, during the Battle of France, the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, directed the War Office to investigate the possibility of creating a corps of 5,000 parachute troops.
On 22 June 1940, No. 2 Commando was turned over to parachute duties and on 21 November, re-designated the 11th Special Air Service Battalion, with a parachute and glider wing. It was these men who took part in the first British airborne operation, Operation Colossus, on 10 February 1941.'
Even it it isn't true, I'm not going to argue with them. The ones I have met are all bigger than me!
Didn't know that about the Japanese, but will look it up out of interest.
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@leonidfro8302 Oh? For a delusional individual, he seemed to do quite well for himself, I suggest.
Oh, and as Clement Attlee stated in the House of Commons in April, 1946,
'In the period from 1st October, 1941, to 31st March, 1946, we supplied to the Soviet Union 5,218 tanks, of which 1,388 were from Canada. We supplied 7,411 aircraft, including 3,129 aircraft sent from the United States of America. As previously explained on the 10th May, 1944, the aircraft from the United States of America were sent on United States Lend Lease to the Soviet Union as part of the British commitment to the U.S.S.R. in exchange for the supply of British aircraft to United States Forces in the European Theatre. The total value of military supplies despatched amounts to approximately £308 million. We have also sent about £120 million of raw materials, foodstuffs, machinery, industrial plant, medical supplies and hospital equipment.'
Was old Clem delusional as well? In fact, is everyone who questions your opinion equally delusion?
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The Germans did build eight U151 class boats in WW1, which were originally intended to be unarmed cargo carrying submarines, as a means of evading the blockade imposed by the Royal Navy's Northern Patrol.
The first, Deutschland, mad two successful round trips to the US, but the second, Bremen, was lost on her maiden voyage, probably either to a mine or to a torpedo from a British boat, G13. The remainder were completed as warships, with two bow tubes and two deck guns. Deutschland was similarly converted, but with six tubes, and the boats were numbered 151 to 157, the ex Deutschland being 155.
Although impressive as a means of propaganda, and very large by contemporary submarine standards, the cargo capacity was, at 700 tons, relatively small.
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@mirkonavarra1517 Try again. 13 ships were lost during Pedestal. One carrier was sunk by a German U-Boat, one AA cruiser by an Italian submarine, one cruiser by an Italian Mas boat, one destroyer by Italian aircraft, four merchantmen by German aircraft, three merchantmen by German S boats, one merchantman by an Italian Mas boat, and 1 merchantmen by an Italian submarine.
So, five ships were lost to aircraft, four to German U & S Boats, & four to Italian ships.
Oh, and the Italian battlefleet remained immobile, an Italian cruiser squadron refused to engage, though two cruisers were torpedoed and never repaired, and two Italian submarines were sunk. The German liaison officer, Admiral Weichold, said that 'a more useless waste of fighting power cannot be imagined.' He was not writing about the British effort.
You sure that was a 'huge victory?'
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@mirkonavarra1517 What about Ithuriel? She sank Cobalto, not vice versa.
Ohio delivered her cargo to Malta.
My source isn't a single one. It is simply the facts gleaned from several books on the subject. Try 'Pedestal' by Peter Smith, 'Pedestal - The Fleet that Battled to Malta, 1942' by Max Hastings, (2014). Operation Pedestal. The story of convoy WS21S in August 1942, 'Operation Pedestal. The story of convoy WS21S in August 1942' by Brian Crabb, and half a dozen others.
Just to correct your errors, Eagle was sunk by a German U-boat, Cairo, by an Italian submarine, Manchester scuttled after being torpedoed by a MAS boat, Foresight sunk by Italian aircraft, Deucalion by German aircraft, Clan Ferguson by German aircraft, Empire Hope by an Italian submarine, Wairangi by an S boat, Almeria Lykes by an S boaty, Waimarama by German aircraft, Dorset by German aircraft, Glenorchy by an S boat, and Santia Elisa by a Mas boat.
13 losses. As I wrote earlier. If you choose to claim that losses attributed to German vessels or aircraft were actually the results of Italian efforts, then argue that one out with your former allies.
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You think so? Two capital ships, one (second line) carrier, four cruisers, and six destroyers.
As the Royal Navy fought, and won, their campaigns in the Atlantic Ocean, the Arctic Ocean, the Indian Ocean, and the Mediterranean Sea, leaving the US navy to concentrate almost entirely in the Pacific, I wouldn't be surprised if Chester Nimitz often had the same view of the Royal Navy.
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You can add the length of time it took the two biggest navies on the planet, one of which had been carrying out amphibious operations for almost 300 years, to put the plan together. The idea that the Germans, with minimal experience of amphibious assaults, and no fleet worthy of the name, could put together a workable plan, using barges towed by tugs, trawlers, and coasters, in a matter of weeks, is too ludicrous to contemplate.
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The deciding factor was certainly the erratic behaviour of Guy d'Oyly-Hughes, but that doesn't really have any relevance to the 'Edwardian upper-class system embedded within senior leadership,' given that Guy d'Oyly-Hughes was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, and his father was a doctor. He joined the Royal Navy as a Midshipman in 1909, and worked his way up, having a successful and, indeed, courageous, career.
Almost certainly, he would have made a successful cruiser captain, but was utterly unsuited to the command of a carrier.
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There is a full description of the proposed Operation Paul by Peter Hore, entitled 'Operation Paul -The Fleet Air Arm Attack on Lulea in 1940' which confirms much of what you have posted, except for one vital difference. The downgraded attack, using one carrier & 18 aircraft, was to be made by 810 & 820 Squadron, FAA, and launched from Ark Royal. Both squadrons were part of Ark's air group at the time.
The written order was signed by Dudley Pound on 8 June, but obviously Ark Royal, at sea off Norway, couldn't receive it, so an amended order was transmitted by signal at 2033 on the same day. This, of course, was after Glorious had been sunk.
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@kms_scharnhorst I was actually referring to the Hood of 1939. After her Special Large Repair of 1939, she achieved 31 knots on trials. The 28 knot reference was to her state in 1941, after 18 months of hard work. Perhaps I should have made this clearer. After her modernisation, Renown was measured at 29.9 knots in July, 1939, and would indeed have had the edge by 1941. Repulse, with her older machinery, almost certainly wouldn't, although there are no records of any trail speeds from the relevant period.
I wasn't 'focusing' on German warships. I simply give them as an example. The Littorios, by the way, only appeared in late August, 1940, about the same time as the British KGVs, of course. If you wish to discuss the Japanese fleet, perhaps you might wish to reconsider your 'laughable' reference to Hood's deck armour, by comparing it to the thinner deck (and belt) armour of pre- Yamato Japanese capital ships?
The Royal Navy actually launched 141 destroyers between the end of WW1 & the start of WW2, most of which (apart from 20 or so) were less than ten years old in September, 1939. The older boats, the V & Ws, Ss, Scotts, and Shakespeares had been mothballed, and were still effective warships. You do understand that there were several different categories of destroyers in the RN, and that the fleet boats, the Tribals, J & K, classes and the later A-I classes were generally less than five years old, I suppose?
In terms of cruisers, there were only 17 vessels launched during WW1, plus a further 8 of WW1 design. still in service. Of these, nine had been rebuilt as AA cruisers. The RN had launched 49 cruisers of post WW1 designs by September, 1939, of which 27 were less than ten years old. Again, you don't seem to have much understanding of the difference between the RN concept of the 'Fleet' and the 'Trade Protection' cruiser.
You keep making dogmatic statements such as :- 'The main problem with the Queen Elizabeth class BB is the fact that UK could've spent the resources which it did historically on other projects and ships which would have helped them a lot more in ww2' without explaining what these projects and ships might have been.
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@kms_scharnhorst I assume it hasn't occurred to you that the US, Japanese, & Italian navies all modernised their older capital ships, most of which were inferior to the QEs, and you haven't criticised them, yet you criticise the RN for doing exactly the same thing?
The 16 older RN cruisers were not 'lying around' but were used in secondary theatres, just as the US navy did with their Omahas.
You seem to assume that the Admiralty of the mid 1930s ought to have been aware that France would collapse in 1940, and should have planned accordingly. In point of fact, the Admiralty worst case scenario, that of war against Germany, Japan, & Italy at the same time, made no such assumption. The expectation was that the Western Front would remain much as it was in 1914-1918, and that the Royal Navy would fight a new Battle of the Atlantic, provide a battle fleet for the Far East, and re-impose the Northern Blockade, whilst the French navy would play a major role in the Mediterranean. Moreover, as any German U-Boat force would only be able to reach the Atlantic via the north of Scotland, it would be much less capable than, with the use of French Atlantic bases, it historically turned out to be.
I accept that there was a shortage of ASW ships, but because the RN was obliged to fight a war for which no planning had prepared it. In point of fact, as Doenitz based his calculations on those that von Holtzendorff had reached in 1917, that 600,000 tons of Allied shipping per month needed to be sunk to bring Britain to her knees, and as up to January 1942, sinking had only achieved more than half of this target on three occasions, the argument about the U-Boat peril is overstated.
Finally, 'Navalised Spitfires & Hurricanes.' The first Hurricanes only reached the RAF on 25 December, 1937, and the first Spitfires in August, 1938, whereas the modernisation of Malaya began in 1930, of Warspite in 1934, of Renown in 1936, and of Queen Elizabeth & Valiant in 1937.
You appear to be saying that the Admiralty ought to have held off modernising the Battle Fleet because, just possibly, a modern high performance fighter might be able to fly off a carrier in a few years time, with a bit of luck, without explaining precisely how this would have been a better option.
By the way, I suppose you know that procurement of aircraft for the Royal Navy was, until May, 1939, in the hands of the RN's most intransigent and implacable of enemies, the British Air Ministry?
Moreover, would high performance fighters have been all that much use at Matapan?
Finally, instead of explaining exactly why, you still persist with your dogmatic 'refitting HMS Hood instead of Queen Elizabeth, Valiant or Warspite' fixation.
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@kms_scharnhorst You 'don't think the Royal Navy was bothered much by the fact that their aircraft procurement was managed by the British Air Ministry?' Actually, they were appalled, and spent much of the inter-war period trying to recover control. The result of this foolishness was that Naval Air Service, which on 1 April, 1918, operated 2949 aircraft & 103 airships, had been reduced by September, 1939 to 232 aircraft, of which around 30 could be considered modern.
oh, and I didn't say that the ASW capabilities wouldn't have been as important. I said that there would not have been a shortage of ASW vessels.
Finally, 'No I am not saying the admiralty shouldn't modernise its battle fleet, I am saying that the admiralty shouldn't have been bothered to modernise ww1 era super dreadnoughts' The British battlefleet was restricted by treaty to fifteen capital ships. In the British case Five 'R' Class, Five 'QE' Class, two 'Nelson' class, two 'Repulse' class battlecruisers, and a fast Battleship, Hood. As they shouldn't, in your view, modernise the QEs, that really wouldn't leave much else, would it?
Again, I didn't say anything as absurd as your suggestion that the QEs were modernised in order to fight Matapan. I asked what benefit would have accrued if the RN had high performance carrier fighters at Matapan, but had not modernised the ships which fought it? You don't think the radar on the modernised QEs played a role, then?
Please don't bother to reply, I think this nonsense has gone on long enough, and I have more constructive things to do than fill in the gaps in your knowledge of between the wars British naval policy.
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Really? During the Norwegian campaign, the German navy lost 50% of their total number of destroyers (10 of 20), 2 of 6 light cruisers ( a third had already been crippled in the North Sea in December 1939 and was only fit for use as a training ship thereafter), both battleships were damaged and not repaired until November, 1940 (thus, not available to support a Sealion attempt), one pocket battleship badly damaged, and not repaired until April, 1941 (a second had already been lost), and one (of 2) heavy cruisers sunk by Norwegian shore defences.
By the time the campaign was over, there wasn't really much of a German navy left to mess with!!
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@alexalbrecht5768 Force Z didn't sail to a war zone, but was sent in the hope that it would deter Japanese aggression in the area. Considering that the Royal Navy had based all pre-war planning on the support of the French Fleet in the Mediterranean, they actually, with the support of Canada, handled the U-Boat threat rather effectively. In point of fact, Doenitz took von Holtzendorff's estimate of the need to sink 600,000 tons of shipping per month in order to starve Britain out, but in the event only achieved 50% of this target on for or five occasions prior to January, 1942, and on several occasions the figure was below 100,000 tons.
In point of fact, no British armoured carriers were sunk. Only one modern carrier, Ark Royal, was lost, to U-boat attack, and she wasn't armoured. The KGVs did not suffer a design flaw. The torpedo hit on Prince of Wales would have had a similar effect on any other battleship in existence at the time, the Bismarck being the obvious example. PoW was actually sunk by four torpedoes, by the way.
Which two battleships were lost to damage control failures?
Finally, compared poorly to which other navies? The German? hardly, The Italian? don't be silly!. The US? In terms of major fleet actions possibly, but there again the British won the major fleet actions which they did fight, and the two navies weren't in competition in any case. The RN & RCN, with some US support, did, of course, win the one major battle in the west which really mattered, the one in the Atlantic.
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@alexalbrecht5768 You might wish to compare the warhead weights of Japanese aerial torpedoes with that of the German G7e, before claiming that the German weapon was inferior.
The three battlecruisers at Jutland were lost not because of design flaws, but because of the foolishness of the commander of the Battlecruiser fleet, who insisted upon rate of fire, and encouraged the stowage of cordite above the blast doors, and even around turret interiors. The practice was discontinued after Jutland, and was never followed in the Grand Fleet itself. The Royal Navy, just like every other major navy, was not immune from fools in high places, although these were, fortunately, few in number.
Hood was more a fast battleship than a true battlecruiser, and her loss was not a result of the same circumstances. She was, of course, 20 years old in 1941.
I enjoyed your comments about the Nelsons. Even with their hull problems, they served successfully for 20 years. In terms of speed, they were actually the fastest capable of 23 knots. The best that a US battleship of the time could manage was 21. The Japanese Nagato was four knots faster, but her armour was seriously inferior. The British, within the terms of the Washington Naval Treaties, had been able to build two capital ships with superior firepower and armour to anything else which put to sea in the next 12 years, other perhaps than the slower Colorados. Bismarck, despite an extra 15,000 tons of displacement, was inferior in armour design, weight of armour, and weight of broadside. Of course their only surface action successes were against Bismarck. After her sinking the German surface fleet was conspicuous only by absence and the Italian Navy, when presented with an opportunity to take on the Nelsons with their own modern battleships, preferred not to make the attempt.
Nelson remained in service until late 1947, by the way. Her scrapping was not because of poor material condition, but because she was no longer needed.
Oh, and which 'battleships' sunk by mines in WW1? Unless you wish to refer to pre-dreadnoughts, that is?
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The 36 is correct, assuming that the two fleet oilers, Aldersdale & Grey Ranger, are counted separately, and not included as part of the convoy. 21 US registered ships, 13 British (including the rescue ships and the two oilers), 2 Russian, 1 Panamanian, & 1 Dutch.
EG1, commanded by Jackie Broome, consisted of six destroyers, Keppel, Fury, Leamington, Ledbury, Offa & Wilton, four corvettes, La Malouine, Dianella, Lotus, & Poppy, three minesweepers, Halcyon, Salamender & Britomart, two AA ships, Palomares and Poizarica, two submarines, P614 & P615, (both boats building for Turkey in 1939, and taken over by the RN, incidentally), and four armed trawlers, Lord Austin, Northern Gem, Ayrshire, & Lord Middleton,
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@WorshipinIdols I simply pointed out that the loss of the fuel, and the fact she was down by the bows, meant that Bismarck was no longer able to steam at her maximum, but had been obliged to slow down. I did not say that 28 knots was slow. However, by mid afternoon on 25 May, Bismarck had been forced to reduce to 20 knots. That IS slow. Read Robert Winklareth's account if you don't believe me (or anyone else, I suppose).
You clearly haven't read Captain Leach's damage report concerning Prince of Wales (not Whales, by the way. Didn't your interest in history tell you that?) 7 hits, all on the unarmoured part of the ship. None penetrated the armoured deck. She did take on around 600 tons of water amidships, but was able to renew the action, and maintain her position as a shadower, until she detached short of fuel.
It wouldn't have been a trade acceptable to Raeder, still less to Hitler. Bismarck was supposed to seek out and attack convoys, and to avoid a major encounter with the Royal Navy. Inevitably, she failed.
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@WorshipinIdols No. If I meant 'belt,' I would have said 'belt.' I check my posts for accuracy, whereas accuracy doesn't seem to interest you much at all.
What you recall is what I told you, but, just to try once again. There were seven hits. None pierced the 6 inch armoured deck (1.3 inches thicker than Bismarck's, by the way). One ( 8 inch) partially detonated on the armoured deck, and one (15 inch) passed through the bridge, without exploding. The remainder hit the unarmoured parts of the ship's side, and one caused flooding, although none actually exploded.
Unlike Bismarck, by the way, with her outdated WW1 type incremental armour, the KGVs (and the Nelsons) had all-or-nothing armour copied from the US Navy.
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@WorshipinIdols You really should buy a book. I thought you claimed to study history? Exeter was around 10, 000 tons deep load. Not that this is even vaguely relevant to anything at all. How was Graf Spee's mission successful? What is this gibberish reference you keep making to 113 Tons?
Graf Spee was merely a nuisance, causing, with Deutschland, a larger number of Allied ships to search for them. Having said that, in 1939, what else were these ships needed for anyway? There was no German battlefleet able to sortie out into the North Sea, still less the Atlantic, and the only other potential threat, Italy, was still neutral.
Harwood did precisely what any other cruiser admiral of the day would have done. He shadowed Graf Spee, seeking to remain in contact with her until Cumberland, Ark Royal, & Renown arrived. Langsdorff, in the event, saved him the trouble. Harwoods' cruisers did not suffer 'multiple hits.' Both, after the action, remained on station.
'Oh and Btw. I’ll trade a 13,000+ standard weight cruiser over 113,00 tons of cargo sunk any day.' As I said, you don't know an awful lot about the subject. Do you really think that, losing one of only three armoured cruisers in exchange for nine merchantmen (your frequent references to 113 tons are meaningless, of course) was a cause for celebration in Berlin, especially since the nuisance Graf Spee had caused lasted for three months only but, more importantly, the German belief that the armoured cruisers could cope with 8 inch hits proved ill-founded? From now on, the Germans knew that the remaining two were vulnerable not only to the five faster British & French capital ships, but also to every British & French heavy cruiser.
No wonder Scheer only carried out one raiding operation, before being decommissioned in January, 1943, and Deutschland did, after sinking three merchantmen in the North Atlantic, virtually nothing at all.
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Langsdorff, in my opinion, should have completed the sinking of Exeter. This would have given Harwood the issue of whether to continue attempting to shadow Graf Spee, or to abandon the action in order to pick up survivors.
The safe harbour he chose was an odd one, in that Buenos Aires was more pro-German, although there was a risk of fouling up Graf Spee's water intakes in the shallow channel.
Other than that, he had two insurmountable problems. Firstly, he had used up most of Graf Spee's ammunition in the first action, and was in no state to fight a second, but even more seriously, damage to his fuel purification plant meant that he only had around 24 hours of usable fuel left.
If Langsdorff had turned away immediately upon sighting Harwood's squadron, he might just have escaped unobserved, (as Admiral Graf von Spee might just possibly have done when he arrived at the Falklands in WW1). Once he mistook the three ships for a light cruiser & two destroyers, he was committed. The other shock, of course, was discovering that Graf Spee's armour was not proof against 8 inch shellfire, as the designers of the Deutschlands had claimed.
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@FLORATOSOTHON No axis surface troops landed until the decision had been made to evacuate, and the Royal Navy transferred from anti-invasion duties north of Crete to evacuation operations south of Crete.
Good to see the old chestnut about Force Z being aired once again. Force Z was sunk by Japanese torpedo bombers flown by crews who had been trained in the skills needed to attack warships. In September 1940 the Luftwaffe had had no such training, and didn't even, until mid 1942 at least, have an operational torpedo bomber. Their failure at Dunkirk rather demonstrated their shortcomings in 1940, by the way.
It is always pleasant to read another Sealion 'Would Have' post, explaining in detail what the mighty Luftwaffe 'would have' done. Odd then, that in the whole of the war, the Luftwaffe managed to sink 31 RN destroyers, and no RN warship larger than a light cruiser.
Just to put that into perspective, in September 1940, the RN had around 70 light cruisers and destroyers within five hours of Dover, supported by around five hundred or so smaller warships. There were around 100 destroyers in Home Waters at the time. I haven't, by the way, even mentioned the heavy ships of the Home Fleet, because they weren't needed to dispose of large numbers of river barges being towed by tugs and trawlers.
Your use of the word 'disastrous' is certainly apposite, however. It can readily be applied to any German attempt to carry out a surface invasion with unescorted barge trains, in the face of total RN supremacy in the Channel.
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Hasn't it occurred to you that the Royal Navy of 1917 learned fairly quickly? Von Holtzendorff managed to get unrestricted submarine warfare introduced in February, 1917, and the Royal Navy began operating a convoy system from 24 May. As a result, ship losses were reduced from 413 in April to 285 in May, 286 in June, 224 in July, 186 in August, 158 in September, 159 in October, & 126 in November, despite the number of U-boats at sea actually increasing, from 40 in March, to 56 in October. This at a time when many of the refinements in anti-submarine techniques had not yet been created, asdic/sonar being the obvious one. Although depth charges did exist, the early ones were far more ineffective than those available by 1939. Nor, of course, was there anything like an HF/DF to warn of the locations of boats, or, of course, radar.
This explains why the British introduced the convoy system from the first day of WW2. It does not explain why King, with all this evidence in front of him, and knowing from the British about the impending Operation Paukenschlag, chose not to allocate US Atlantic Fleet destroyers to convoy escort duties along the US East Coast in early 1942, despite Adolphus Andrews almost begging him for help.
You really cannot compare the performance of the US Navy on the Eastern Seaboard in 1942, with that of the Royal Navy in 1917. For an obvious reason.
As Shakespeare wrote of Hamlet, in the words of Fortinbras 'For he was likely, had he been put on, to have proved most royally.' The US Navy would, almost certainly, also have proved most royally against Paukenschlag. Had not Ernie King prevented it from so doing.
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@halowerder3356 Sorry to spoil the illusion, but actually it was Warspite which hit Guilio Cesare from 26,000 yards, rather than the other way round. Warspite was not hit during the action. Calabria, as the British call it, was indecisive at best, although it was beneficial to the British in that it enabled Cunningham to argue that the obsolete Royal Sovereign be replaced in his fleet by the faster, modernised, Queen Elizabeths.
Oh, and this 'The British officers were baffled by the accuracy of Italian Battleships and after the battle tried to deny the hits Warspite received because they didn't want to admit they got outgunned by the Italians' by the way, is simply nonsense, as 'The Naval War in the Mediterranean, 1940–1943,' by Jack Green &, Alessandro Massignani, makes clear.
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@sandrodunatov485 What research into this imaginary hit? What sources?
You are posting nonsense, or at least indulging in a wish-fulfillment fantasy.
Incidentally, what 'superior' forces did Cunningham have? His two old battleships could not keep up, and the rest of his force consisted of Warspite, one carrier, five light cruisers, and sixteen destroyers, facing two battleships, six heavy cruisers, eight light cruisers, and 16 destroyers.
Certainly, Warspite remained in service later in the war after suffering damage, but as a bombardment ship, not as a front-line fleet unit. Surely you understand the difference?
Still, enjoy your fantasy. Just don't expect to be taken seriously.
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@hetrodoxlysonov-wh9oo They were trying to secure air superiority over the Home Counties, in accordance with the theories of air power expounded by Guilio Douhet. Put simply, he argued that the air force that could achieve command of the air by bombing the enemy air arm into extinction would doom its enemy to perpetual bombardment. Command of the air meant victory, because civilian populations faced with this would rise up against their governments and impose new ones which would negotiate a surrender. He stated that 'the bomber will always get through.' His writings identified five basic target types: industry, transport infrastructure, communications, government and "the will of the people".
WW2 proved this to be a false dogma, of course, but people such as Billy Mitchell, Arthur Harris (indeed, the whole British Air Ministry) and Hermann Goering were enthusiastic supporters, probably because they could use it to argue for greater spending on their respective air forces.
As to the ramshackle invasion fleet, on simple terms the Kriegsmarine assembled it because, on 16 July, 1940, Hitler issued Directive 16, for the invasion of Great Britain, and it was unwise, in the Germany of 1940, for Raeder or, indeed anyone in authority, to ignore a führerbefehl.
Quite possibly, Raeder hoped that Goering's faith in Douhet was well founded, that Britain would come to terms, and that his barges would be used for a ceremonial landing only, akin to the American landings on mainland Japan after the Japanese surrender. Whether on not this was true, Hitler had given the order, and he was obliged to obey it.
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Pound's intelligence staff could not give any reassurance to him that Tirpitz had not sailed, but told him that they would have expected to have received more definite information if she had. Pound chose to ignore this, and ordered the scattering of the convoy at 21.36 on 4 July. Tirpitz and her battlegroup did actually sail on 5 July, but returned to port almost immediately once it became clear that the convoy had scattered.
Pound should have left the decisions to Hamilton, the commander of the cruiser covering force in the area, who had four heavy cruisers and supporting destroyers, and was joined by additional destroyers from the close escort once the scatter order had been given, in the mistaken belief that the Admiralty had more definite information, and that they were about to fight a desperate, against the odds, action. For some months thereafter Hamilton's cruiser, HMS London, was known within the Home Fleet as the 'Wop Flagship.'
In December, 1942 protecting JW 51B, a British force of four fleet & one escort destroyers successfully fought off a German force of two heavy cruisers and six destroyers, before two supporting light cruisers engaged and damaged one of the heavy cruisers, which then returned to port at high speed.
Possibly Pound's medical condition let to his misjudgment. I doubt his successor, Andrew Cunningham, would have made a similar decision.
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No one told the Poles to fight anyone. Poland was invaded without warning, rather like Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, & Belgium, and was obliged to resist.
No one offered half of Europe to the Soviets. The Soviets simply took it, after themselves being attacked without warning. Perhaps you believe that the Western Allies should have themselves attacked the Soviets in 1945. After years of praising the gallant Uncle Joe and the noble Russian people, how would you have sold that to the citizens of the US, Britain, & Canada?
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@touristguy87 I am not quite sure what you are talking about. I have simply corrected your misunderstanding that Tirpitz was intended to be on a lone mission. She was intended to lead a powerful Task Force, every ship of which was already based in Norway.
Just to clarify, this was to consist of Tirpitz, the heavy cruisers (pocket battleships) Lutzow and Admiral Scheer, the heavy cruiser Admiral Hipper, the destroyers Friedrich Ihn, Hans Lody, Karl Galster, Theodor Reidel, Richard Beitzen, Z24, Z27, Z28, Z29 & Z30, and the torpedo boats T7 & T15.
However, several ships ran aground when leaving their fjords, and the operation was abandoned when news of the scattering of PQ17 was received.
I wouldn't have expected the RAF to have played much of a role in protecting the convoy, by the way.
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@touristguy87 Perhaps you might explain the relevance of the Bernau Post Office to PQ17? I, and most people, I suspect, am struggling to understand it.
Oh, and eight of the 24 merchantmen lost were sunk by aircraft, and several others sunk by U-boats after being damaged by aircraft. The losses were not 75%, and nor were they all the results of submarine attack. I wonder if you actually know any of the facts about PQ17 at all, frankly?
Of course none of the convoy were sunk by surface action, because the task force never sailed. By the way, what is the reason for the speech marks, as in "heavy battlecruisers" Are you suggesting I made such a reference earlier. Rather unlikely as, evidently unlike you, I know that the German navy in WW2 never had any such vessels.
What is the 'concept' which you think confuses me, by the way? Why are you getting increasing choleric about my simple correction of your original error,
I have, of course, ignored your second paragraph about Chinese bombers and the 'Battle of Linconshire' as it seems to me to be irrelevant, demented, rambling.
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The Royal Navy was 'crushed' was it? The British lost a carrier, 2 light cruisers, 7 destroyers, and 4 submarines. The Kriegsmarine lost 1 heavy cruiser, 2 light cruisers, 10 destroyers, and 4 U-boats. The destroyers, by the way, represent 50% of the total number of destroyers in service with the Kriegsmarine at the start of the Norwegian campaign. The Kriegsmarine on 1 April, 1940, by the way, had 8 heavy & light cruisers, of which one (Leipzig) had already been so badly damaged as to be unfit for anything other than training purposes. Therefore, Germany lost 43% of their operational cruiser force during the course of the Norwegian campaign.
If you add to these the damaged ships, which consequently could not make any contribution to any potential 'Sealion' (Gneisenau, Scharnhorst, and Deutchland) then it is clear that your contention is absurd. The reality is that the Norwegian campaign, from the perspective of Admiral Raeder, was a disaster from which the Kriegsmarine never recovered.
As to the British being saved by the French army, certainly French troops made a valiant contribution to the defence of the Dunkirk perimeter, but the reality is that the 10 divisions of the BEF could do nothing other than withdraw once the French & Belgian armies, some 100 divisions strong, had collapsed.
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@cliveengel5744 'The Soviet Invasion was priority you know that so why pretend - what could Germany gain from an UK Invasion, nothing.'
'But you know this and keep on arguing the point!'
The problem is that many of us base our judgements upon actual historical evidence rather than upon political prejudice. The evidence that Sealion was a serious plan is clear and unambiguous, from both German archives and what, in the latter half of 1940, the Germans actually did.
If they took the time to read “My Beliefs” then they would have understood it was about the “Living Space in the East”
" If they took the time to read “My Beliefs” then they would have understood it was about the “Living Space in the East” Presumably, the latter phrase is your euphemism for 'mass extermination of whole populations?'
'They spent most of the Great Patriotic War defending their Trade Routes in the Med and North Africa than fighting the German Wehrmacht in Europe, they only became active once the Americans arrived.'
Which 'Trade Routes in the Med. & North Africa' might these have been? The British were fighting in North Africa because that was the only place they could bring axis forces to battle on land, and because they had been attacked by Italy in June, 1940.
'The Soviets paid the price and carried the victory towards Berlin!' True, they did indeed pay the price for agreeing a cynical pact with Germany in 1939, and then supplying much of the raw materials upon which Germany depended, until Genial Uncle Joe was surprised by events in June, 1941. Your use of 'liberated' by the way, is open to question.
'Enough said.' Congratulations. At last you have got something correct.
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@REgamesplayer 'That is a quote from wikipedia and I had read it too.' Both are indeed from wikipedia, but both originally came from books written by the two authors to which I referred. I have both books.
R. A. Burt, for one, has researched the design and construction of British capital ships for many years. Would you consider that, for example, Eustace Ternnyso-D'Eyncourt or Stanley Vernon Goodall to have known less about warship design and capability than John Jellicoe or David Beatty, on the grounds that they were 'merely' naval architects, rather than serving sea officers? The last serving sea officer to design a British major warship was HMS Captain, designed by Captain Cowper Phipps Coles. Look what happened to her!
'As you can see from our conversation, he is wrong in his assessment.' No, to be pedentic, you claim that he is wrong. I suggest that you are in a minority of one in this.
'Agincourt wasn't a good battleship if you intended to duel other battleships with it.' What else would she be expected to do? She lacked the speed to get close to cruisers, and her likely opponents in South America, had WW1 not intervened would have been the Argentinian 'Rivadavia' class, or the Chilean 'Almirante Latorre' class, all four of which were superior.
Clearly, Brazil decided to cut their losses and sell her off to the Ottoman Empire for a reason, however much you may choose to laud her capabilities.
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@REgamesplayer Armoured cruisers ceased to be built after 1910, when the battlecruiser became a more attractive proposition. The last British ones were the Minotaurs of 1909, the last German ones the Scharnhorsts of 1908, unless you count the Blucher of 1909 the last US ones the Tennessees of 1906-8.
You are really stretching a point beyond breaking if you think that Agincourt when ordered would be expected to fight 1890s period cruisers. However necessary it might be for you to make the claim to justify her design flaws.
'Are you aware that cruisers of that era also sailed at around 20 knots? A lot of navy cruisers which were built up in 1890s sailed at 20 knots. Dreadnaughts of that era also sailed at those speeds.' No, I'm not, because there were no Dreadnoughts in the 1890s. However, if all the Brazilians expected to encounter were elderly armoured cruisers like the 1895 Garibaldi, why bother acquiring battleships at all?
Instead of Minas Gerais, Sao Paulo, and Rio de Janeiro, why not just buy, for a fraction of the cost, a few modified Defences, or Scharnhorsts, at a fraction of the cost. Perhasps because Argentina had, and Chile were acquiring, their own dreadnoughts?
'Do you know how much outdated their fleets were compared to Agincourt? No, because the ships I have named were far from outdated when compared to Rio.
'Not sure about people you are referencing. I do however think that asking historian to pass judgement on a naval design is generally a wrong thing to do. The fact that you don't seem to know of these people is hardly a reason to question their judgement.
You are becoming increasingly fanciful and disconnected from the facts of early 20th century naval warfare. In your first post, you argued that Rio/Agincourt 'prioritized firepower and had to engage other battleships at closer ranges.' Now you seem to be trying to say that Rio was a good battleship against elderly cruisers, but not against other battleships.
As your arguments are becoming increasingly contorted, I will leave you to your own opinion, even if it unencumbered by facts.
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The conclusion that Jutland was a British strategic victory is based on the fact that the High Seas Fleet never again risked encountering the Grand Fleet in battle. A Trafalgar style victory wouldn't seriously have affected the German war effort, which was almost entirely land based.
In effect, after Jutland, the High Seas Fleet became a nebulous, 'Fleet in Being,' rather than a credible threat, which prevented the British from using their battleships elsewhere (although, unlike in WW2, it isn't easy to see where they could have been used anyway) but didn't even stop the transfer of some Grand Fleet destroyer flotillas to the Battle of the Atlantic in 1917.
Furthermore, all the time the High Seas Fleet swung peacefully around cables in the Jade, the British blockade imposed increasing misery upon the German civilian population (read up on the Turnip Winter) and destroyed their morale, whilst Scheer's enthusiastic support for unrestricted submarine warfare eventually brought the United States into the war on the Allied side.
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@JimmyJamesJ Glorious sank at around 1745 on 8 June. No distress signals were received by any British ship or shore
station. Only at 0901 on 9 June did the battleship Valiant receive news from the hospital ship Atlantis that a transport (Orama) had been sunk by 'a battleship & two destroyers,' and transmitted this report. Devonshire, receiving Valiant's transmission, then herself transmitted that she had received a garbled message from Glorious at 1640 on 8 June.
Until receiving Valiant's message, there had been no knowledge of any German battleship in the area. Upon receipt, Forbes, C-in-C Home Fleet, immediately sent orders to Repulse, Sussex, & Newcastle, with six destroyers to join the evacuation convoys, and himself sailed fro Scapa Flow in Rodney, with Renown & several destroyers.
The first actual news of Glorious' sinking came in a German broadcast at 1500 on 9 June, which claimed the taking of 'many prisoners.' By this time, few of Glorious' complement would still have been alive, but aircraft from Ark Royal carried out several searches, without success. Even by the evening of 10 June, the Admiralty still had no idea of Glorious' position when she was lost. At around 0045 on 11 June, Borgund came across the few remaining survivors.
So, your comment that the failure to send rescue ships was a 'crime' takes no account at all of the reality of the situation.
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@guntherultraboltnovacrunch5248 Seized from whom, exactly? Spain's garrison evacuated the island in 1811. A small settlement was established by a German born merchant, Vernet, in 1826 to exploit fishing and feral cattle on the islands, until a dispute over these fishing rights led to the arrival of USS Lexington, whose commander Silas Duncan declared the dissolution of the island's government.
An Argentinian garrison which had landed in 1832 mutinied, and a British force landed in 1833, but left after rerstoring order, leaving no formal administration.The German merchant's deputy, a Scotsman, Matthew Brisbane, landed during the same year in an attempt to re-establish Vernet's business, but he was murdered by a group of gauchos led by one Rivero. Survivors of Brisbane's people hid in a carve to avoid the same fate, until a British force returned, once again to restore order.
This time the British stayed, and in 1840 the Islands became a Crown Colony, with a group of Scottish settlers landing at around the same time to establish the first settlement.
So, seized from whom? A murderer who had killed a business rival over a grudge?
Sorry, but no more. Educating people with false agendas has never really appealed to me.
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@trumbettier Yes, you are right. A first in History and a number of published books and articles clearly demonstrate how little I have read. I don't propose to comment on Brexit, because the connection to Pedestal is somewhat tenuous, don'y you think? The ships used for Pedestal were overwhelmingly British, and Ohio, though American built, was British crewed.
Pedestal, far from being a disaster was a strategic success. If Malta had not been re-supplied, surrender would have been unavoidable, and the successes against supply lines to Axis forces in North Africa achieved by Malta based strike forces of aircraft and submarines would not have happened.
As to D-Day, I have already told you the actual figures.
Still, I am sure your blind prejudice will, doubtless, see things differently.
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@JackNiles-hc8yz I assume by that flippant comment you don't actually know.
When Admiral Adolphus Andrews, commander of the US Eastern Sea Frontier begged King for additional resources, and was refused, surely it was clear that something was seriously wrong.
At the start of the second Happy Time, to defend the entire US Easr Coast, Andrews had seven Coast Guard cutters, four converted yachts, three 1919-vintage patrol boats, two gunboats dating back to 1905, and four wooden submarine chasers. Fortunately, from late April, the Roya and Royal Canadian Navies sent some of their own escorts from their Mid Ocean Escort Force to protect convoys, after heavy losses, including 95 tankers (73 of which were US registered) were lost, and ihis was having a seriously detrimental effect both on oil supplies to Canada & Britain, and US attempts to strengthen their Fleet Train in the Pacific.
From your posts, it seems that you didn't know any of this. Perhaps you might read a book or two? I could recommend some.
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@Ocrilat Glorious wasn't intended to be the single carrier finally intended for Operation Paul. The much reduced operation was to have involved 810 & 820 Squadrons, FAA, both of which were part of Ark Royal's air group. Moreover, on the morning of 8 June, Ark Royal was off Northern Norway, and Pound, the First Sea Lord, had already issued orders for Ark Royal To carry out the operation. Glorious had already, at 0253 on 8 June, sailed for Scapa Flow.
The reason for Glorious rushing back to Scapa relates to the conflict between her Captain & her Commander (Air) J.B. Heath. d'Oyly Hughes had received orders to carry out an operation in support of the army. He had given orders to Heath, who had refused to carry them out, stating that the orders did not represent a proper use of naval aircraft. Whatever the rights and wrongs (and I personally do not believe that Heath had any right to refuse legitimate orders from a senior officer), it seems clear that d'Oyly Hughes took a number of strange decisions. He should not have requested permission to leave ahead of the main evacuation convoy (frankly, the Flag Officer Aircraft Carriers should not have given it anyway) but, having been released, he should have maintained a state of alert aboard Glorious, and have had aircraft in the air maintaining patrols around the ship or, at the very least, had aircraft armed and ready on deck at immediate readiness.
Squadron Leader Cross, who had previously landed a number of RAF Hurricanes aboard Glorious in an attempt to avoid destroying them, and who was one of the few survivors, later commented that there was an 'end of term' atmosphere aboard the carrier, because Glorious was widely believed to be in an area where she was in no danger.
The fuel reference does not hold water. If Glorious was short, she should have been kept with the evacuation convoy, which would have been steaming at a much more economical speed, as Churchill, when this claim was put forward, was one of the first to point out.
I fear that the truth is that d'Oyly Hughes, though undoubtedly personally brave, was totally unsuited for command of a carrier. He would probably have been outstanding on the bridge of a light cruiser in the Mediterranean, but the appointment to Glorious was a serious misjudgment by the Admiralty, especially since almost all his previous command experience had been within the submarine service. The author of 'The War at Sea,' Captain Stephen Roskill, subsequently questioned Hughes' mental state.
Despite all the above, however, I really cannot believe that there was any 'Operation Paul' cover-up involving Glorious.
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@Ocrilat I never said that Glorious was not part of the original plan. I said that the original plan included three carriers, which were Ark Royal, Glorious, and Furious, using 78 Swordfish. On 6 June, at a meeting of the Chiefs of Staff Committee, Pound described the original as 'now impracticable' but went ahead with a much reduced version, using aircraft already available, from Ark Royal.
All this is in Captain Hore's article, and the very fact that he makes this clear is in itself the most obvious refutation of the Glorious/Paul cover-up nonsense. Why, when the possible inclusion of Glorious in the operation had been discounted on the morning of 6 June, would she sail for Scapa Flow two days later to collect extra Swordfish? The only squadrons actually nominated were 810 & 820, and both of these were already aboard Ark Royal.
The suggestion that Glorious was expendable is nonsense by the way, unless you can present supporting evidence. The only carrier still in the area on 8 June was Ark Royal, protected by the Royal Navy units assembling the final evacuation fleet. If Glorious had not, unwisely, been given permission to proceed, she would have had similar protection. You do understand, by the way, that the 'modifications' to the Swordfish were minor, I suppose? Swordfish were designed to carry additional fuel tanks, because they were Fleet TSR aircraft. The fitment of these tanks to Ark's Swordfish was a simple task. Ark also carried the necessary mines, and no particular special training was required for the crews to deploy them. You seem to think that what would have been a fairly simple operation by Ark's experienced crews was a complex one. It really wasn't.
Certainly, the Fuel Shortage explanation for Glorious' loss is improbable, but probably far less improbable than the idea that she, by 8 June, was still involved in Operation Paul. As to your claim that I argued that Captain Hore's article refutes the theory when it does no such thing, how much more definite evidence for the fact that Glorious was no longer part of Operation Paul do you need than the copy of the first page of the Operation Order, signed by Tom Phillips, dated 8 June and addressed to HMS Ark Royal & the Flag Officer Aircraft Carriers do you need?
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@Ocrilat The fact is that d'Oyly Hughes did indeed seek to get back to Scapa Flow as quickly as possible in order to have Heath court-martialled. There is even the evidence of Glorious' signal to Admiral Wells, aboard Ark Royal, witnessed by HMS Diana. The request was for permission to part company and proceed ahead to Scapa Flow for the purpose of making preparations for impending courts-martial. Not a cover story, but a fact for which there were numerous witnesses. There was considerable personal antipathy between d'Oyly Hughes and Heath, but whether this can be taken as evidence of any mental imbalance is not for me to say. Certainly, Glorious was not a happy ship in May-June, 1940.
The probability is that the Admiralty were well aware that the appointment of d'Oyly-Hughes to Glorious had been a mistake, but were not willing to confess it in the circumstances which existed in the summer of 1940.
I have read Barker's arguments and much of his case seems to depend upon his conviction that numerous individuals were drawn into a conspiratorial web, and that certain documents do not mean what they say. The beauty of taking such an approach is that, when convincing evidence is produced to contradict a theory, it can easily be discounted because the source of the evidence must have either been compromised, or the documents doctored. At what point, I wonder, was Captain Peter Hore drawn into this devious web of deceit, when he wrote his account of Operation Paul?
Finally, even if d'Oyly-Hughes had been rushing back to Scapa to collect Swordfish for Operation Paul, does that really excuse him from having no air patrols up, half Glorious' boilers not in service, and no lookouts up top?
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What inspires you to say that HMS Jervis Bay 'failed'?
Captain Krancke, commander of Admiral Scheer, paid generous tribute to the gallantry of Fegan & Jervis Bay in his account. He also referred to a small freighter, already on fire, which fired at his ship before she sank. This is believed to have been Kenbane Head. He made no reference to any gun battle with Beaverford, only referring to a ship carrying a deck cargo of timber that Scheer caught up with as it fled at speed far to the south of the main action.
The captain's log from Fresno City, another of Scheer's victims, reported "The Beaverford, bearing 110 degrees East South East was attacked and set on fire, distant about 10 miles". It seems Beaverford was attacked around 50 minutes after Kenbane Head, and about an hour before the sinking of Fresno City. There does not seem to have been, therefore, any time for a four hour engagement.
The account of the Beaverford action first appeared in 1944, in the magazine Canada's Weekly, and it was republished in the Evening Standard in London. Quite how, when the convoy was scattering in all directions, a four hour engagement could have been witnessed in entirety, is not made clear.
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@thomaswirkkala7230 Your 'evidence' is somewhat at odds with the facts.
Assuming merchant vessels only, British losses between September 1939 and the end of December, 1939, were actually as follows:-
Mines:- 32, U-boats :- 66, Aircraft :- 9, Surface Craft :- 10, Other Causes:- 4
This information is from 'British Vessels Lost At Sea, 1939 - 1945' a document originally published by HMSO in 1947. The document lists every vessel by date, name, tonnage, location, and cause. There is a separate list for RN crewed vessels.
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@RomanHistoryFan476AD It is always entertaining to read such posts. A few accurate facts. In late August, 1940, the Luftwaffe's actual records show, for 17 August, 1940, 1186 operational fighters and fighter bombers of all types, 294 dive bombers, 960 twin engined bombers, and 226 transport aircraft. The Germans did place a number of heavy gun batteries on the French coast, and they fired on British coastal convoys throughout the war, scoring precisely no hits. The British used the full resources of the Royal Navy and Mercantile Marine in Home Waters to lift 338000 men from Dunkirk, mainly at night. The small civilian boats ferried men from the beaches to the larger ships offshore. Civilian boats such as these actually brought around 6000 men back to Britain. In September, 1940, the Germans had around half a division of Paratroopers available, and only just over 220 transport aircraft operational in any case. The Kriegsmarine plan estimated that nine divisions of the first wave would be landed from barges towed by tugs and small coasters, but this would take eleven days, and, absurdly, assumed no losses among the towing vessels, of which the Germans were seriously short. The biggest warship available to the Germans was a single heavy cruiser, supported by twelve or so destroyers and escort destroyers, and around 16 minesweepers. The Royal Navy had 70 cruisers and destroyers within 5 hours' steaming of Dover, supported by around 500 smaller warships. This doesn't, by the way, include the Home Fleet, based at Rosyth.
I think that covers it, not that the 'what the Germans would have done if...' clowns would take any notice anyway.
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@nickdanger3802 In September, 1939, there were 57 U-boats, of which 39 were operational boats. By January, 1942, there were 250, of which 88 were operational. Between Sept. 39 and January, 42, 69 boats had been sunk. The U-boat arm reached it largest size in January, 1945, with 453 boats. What do you think any of this proves? Perhaps that boats under construction in shipyards are more difficult to destroy than boats actively in combat?
During the Battle of the Atlantic, 808 boats were lost. Of these, 84 were destroyed in harbours or shipyards near the end of the war, and 86 to various causes (collision, accident, scuttling, internment, etc.) Of the remaining 638, 257.5 were lost to RN or RCN warships, 196 to Coastal Command, 86 to USAAF & USN aircraft, and 48.5 to US navy warships. The source is 'The U-boat Offensive, 1914-1945' by V.E.Tarrant, if you choose to doubt my word.
I'm not sure why you feel the need to refer to WW1 when the subject is 'the worst naval decision of WW2,' but a few other facts of interest concerning Paukeschlag, and Ernie King's lack of response to it.
Merchant ship losses :-
Jan. 1942 Losses 56. In convoy 6. Stragglers 7. Independents 43
Feb. 1942 Losses 72. In convoy 10. Stragglers 1, Independents 61
Mar. 1942 Losses 93. In convoy 3, Stragglers 1, Independents 89
Apr. 1942 Losses 81. In convoy 3. Independents 78.
May 1942 Losses 129 In convoy 14, Independents 115.
Jun. 1942 Losses 136 In convoy 14. Independents 122.
Just for comparison, losses for the last six months before the entry of the United States into the war :-
July 1941 Losses 26. In convoy 10. Stragglers 2. Independents 14.
Aug. 1941 Losses 27, In convoy 18 Independents 9.
Sept.1941 Losses 57. In convoy 39. Stragglers 4. Independents 14.
Oct. 1941 Losses 28. In convoy 17. Independents 11.
Nov. 1941 Losses 15. In convoy 7. Stragglers 2. Independents 6.
Dec. 1941 Losses 23. In convoy 6. Independents 17.
Odd that the in convoys losses don't change significantly, but the independents do. Perhaps more detailed examination of the locations of the Independent losses might shed some light on the issue, I suggest?
Don't bother. I did it some years ago as part of my degree.
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@cliveengel5744 I don't use wikipedia, as I have access to a whole host of primary sources. You do understand that the Germans did indeed practice loading troops onto the converted barges, I suppose? Why would you think that, once the exercise was completed, the troops wouldn't simply disembark again?
You do know that the Germans didn't use tanks against the Channel Islands, I suppose? Clearly not.
You do know why the Germans stopped on the Aa canal, I suppose? Again, clearly not. The order was given by von Rundstedt, in order to rest & service his armour for the remainder of the campaign against France. Hitler could have rescinded the order, but chose not to, firstly because of his doubts about the use of tanks in the Dunkirk area from his WW1 experience of conditions, but mainly because Goering had told him that the Luftwaffe alone could destroy the pocket and sink the invasion fleet.
Seriously, surely even someone with your lack of knowledge and understanding should be able to grasp that, if you want someone to come to terms, you are more likely to achieve that with 200,000 of their soldiers in prison camps, rather than by letting them evacuate them from under your nose?
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@cliveengel5744 I don't recall ever claiming that the Sealion campaign ever took place, only that it was never, despite your absurd statement, nothing more than a myth. The rest of your post has no bearing on this point, and I am well aware of the important role of the Soviet Union.
You, however, obviously have neither knowledge nor understanding of German planning between June & September, 1940 (when of course, the Soviet Union had a non-aggression pact with Germany, and Stalin was still indulging his hobby of butchering Soviet citizens), so further exposition of this ignorance would be superfluous on my part.
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@cliveengel5744 There was no meeting of 23 July. On 25 July, Raeder met Hitler, when he asked for, and was given, permission to requisition shipping from ports throughout western Europe, and authority to carry out the necessary modifications in various shipyards. No date for the operation was set in the Directive, only the duties allotted to each branch of the military. On 22 July, the army had stated that preparations could not be completed by 15 August. At a further meeting on 31 July, two suitable periods when tide & moon were suitable were determined, these being 20 - 26 August (too soon) or 19 - 26 September. On 1 August, hitler issued Directive 17, and by 15 September, the barges were ready, and the coastal batteries had been installed.
I appreciate that you don't know, or don't want to know, much about that period of the war before Barbarossa, but inventing false 'facts' does nothing for your credibility.
That, by the way, is it. I am done with you.
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If the Germans had devoted the necessary resources to building the Plan Z fantasy fleet, then they could not have expanded their army or air force as they historically did. Consequently, an attack on France and the Low Countries would not have happened, and there wouldn't have been any possibility of anything like Sealion, as the Germans, of course, wouldn't have had access to Belgian & French ports, but would have been as hemmed in as they had been in WW1.
Furthermore, any expansion of warship building by Germany would ring alarm bells in the UK, as the warships could only be targeted at one power. The British would retaliate with an expanded shipbuilding programme of their own, and British yards could comfortably outproduce anything the Germans could build.
It is all meaningless talk anyway, as Hitler always regarded the Soviet Union, not Britain, as his principal foe.
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@suryaprakash2126 But surely you can grasp that, if the Germans devoted their entire economy to building the Plan Z ships, then their successes in the west in 1940 couldn't have happened because they would have had neither the army nor the air force to bring them about?
If France doesn't fall, the Germans don't have the French bases to launch an invasion of Britain, but it doesn't matter anyway because, being in the middle of building their fleet, which presumably wouldn't be ready until 1946 at the absolute earliest, they would have had neither the air force to bomb Britain from their airfields in Germany, nor the army to cross the Channel from the ports they didn't control anyway!
While, of course all this is going on (or, more accurately, isn't going on) an undefeated France is building up her own armed forces preparatory to an offensive against Germany, and the Royal Navy is imposing the same kind of blockade that effectively starved the Kaiser's Germany into submission in WW1.
The fact is, for a regime intent upon conquering the Soviet Union, a large fleet was an utterly useless luxury.
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@suryaprakash2126 The peace was offered because Hitler knew that he could never successfully invade (as Napoleon said 'can an Elephant fight a Whale?) and he needed the British to give him a free had in eastern Europe. He was, apparently, willing to guarantee the British Empire, largely because he had no means of threatening it anyway. It was a major gamble on his part, and it failed.
Graf Spee sank nine merchantmen in four months. She was a nuisance, but that was what allied naval superiority was all about. In the event, she encountered the weakest Hunting Group, and couldn't cope.
German technology, at least at sea, was over-rated, in that the gunnery radar fitted to their ships was delicate, to say the least. Look at Bismarck. She fired off a few shells at HMS Norfolk, and in so doing put her own forward radar out of action. British & American sets were much more robust.
Yes, the Germans built 1156 U-boats in six years, but only because they abandoned Plan Z more or less from the start. This number, by the way, is about 200 less than the number of destroyers and convoy escorts either in British service in Spetember, 1939, or added to the fleet during WW2.
The Germans, in military terms, gave more than they got from the German Soviet Commercial Agreement of 1940. The Soviets supplied oil, raw materials (predominantly Manganese & Rubber) and grain, whilst the Germans received the incomplete Admiral Hipper-class cruiser Lützow, the plans for the battleship Bismarck, information on German naval testing, "complete machinery for a large destroyer", heavy naval guns, other naval gear, and samples of thirty of Germany's latest warplanes, including the Bf 109 fighters, Bf 110 fighters, Ju 88 and Do 215 bombers.
The Soviet Union also received oil and electric equipment, locomotives, turbines, generators, diesel engines, ships, machine tools and samples of Germany artillery, tanks, explosives, chemical-warfare equipment and other items.
Stalin was never going to supply the vast amounts of iron ore Plan Z would have needed, still less the manpower to build the ships. In any case, by the time of the agreement, Plan Z was history.
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@111076tom Try the early pages of 'The Doomed Expedition - The Campaign in Norway 1940' by Jack Adams. Presumably you weren't aware that, immediately after the Altmark incident, the French government were advocating an immediate landing in Narvik, ostensibly to support Finland, and that, on the very same day that the Altmark incident took place (16 February) the French had created a force 50000 strong, consisting of Chasseurs Alpins, Foreign Legion units, and Polish units, called the 'French Expeditionary Force in Scandinavia?' The Chamberlain government, by the way, refused to participate in the proposed action.
On 21 March, Reynaud demanded more aggressive action by the allies. The allies delivered a note to the Swedish & Norwegian legations in London, protesting about the violation of Scandinavian waters by German vessels, and warning that mines would be laid in Norwegian waters if action was not taken. Reynaud pressed for use of the French force, but the British cabinet turned down the proposal.
Not, of course, that any of this relates to my original question. Why, in your view, were the British the villains here, and the French (and the Poles under their command) excused criticism?
On second thoughts, don't bother to reply, do a little reading up on the facts first.
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You obviously don't know much about British defence policy between the wars, and in particular from the late 1930s, when a potential triple threat, of Germany, Italy, & Japan, emerged. The worst case assumption, of war with all three, still assumed to support of France. British (and French) planners expected that a western front, similar to that of WW1, would emerge, the small German fleet would be penned in the North Sea, and the Northern Blockade of WW1 would be re-imposed. The sizeable French fleet would support the British in the Mediterranean, and the Italian North African empire would be threatened by the French from Tunisia & the British from Egypt. This would enable a sizeable British fleet to be sent to the Far East. No-one at all anticipated the collapse of France.
After June, 1940, the British found themselves needing to retain most of their fleet in Home Waters, whilst at the same time needing to maintain a powerful fleet in the Mediterranean, as well as reinforcing the Western Desert Force against attack from Italian Libya.
Of course Churchill's main concern was events in the west. The one positive fact of 1941 was that Japan was still neutral. Even so, there were around 140,000 British & Commonwealth troops stationed there by the end of 1941. Singapore was not starved or neglected. There was a substantial army in Malaya already. After the Japanese attack, incidentally, the C-in-C Middle East offered to sent some of his light tanks to Malaya, only to be told that they were not needed as Malaya was unsuited to tank warfare. This decision was made from Singapore, not from London, by the way.
Of course Churchill was more concerned about the situation in the west. Axis success in North Africa, and even the possibility of an invasion of Britain herself, would have a greater effect on the prospects of survival than the possibility of a Japanese attack in the Far East.
You seem to forget that Britain and the Commonwealth & Empire were actively fighting two major military European powers. Resources were not infinite.
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' 'Overlord". That hadn't happened in 1940, it happened in the future.' Your depth of research is admirable'
Has it, however, explained why, in 1940, the Kriegsmarine commandeered and converted almpst 2,000 barges, almost 200 freighters, around 400 tugs, and over 1,100 motor boats?
Moreover, the 'merciless application of air power' only began in early September, 1940, when it had become clear even to Hitler that a seaborne invasion was an impossibility. Additionally, any such use of air power required a substantial force of strategic bombers, which, of course, the Luftwaffe never possessed.
You have concisely described Douhet's theory of Air Power, believed by Goering, the British Air Ministry, and many US air strategists. Of course, the theory was proven to be a false one.
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Because the loss of a few small warships would be barely noticed by the RN, which in September 1939 had almost 200 destroyers alone. The only serious contribution the u-boat arm could make was by waging a trade war and cutting off supplies to the UK, as had been attempted during WW1. Furthermore, u-boats tended to avoid attacks on small, fast vessels with ample depth charge resources and asdic/sonar, as there was significant danger of the hunter becoming the hunted. See '2nd Support Group, Captain Walker' for further information. Occasional u-boat successes against larger vessels (cruisers, battleships, & carriers) might have been high profile, but barely made a dent in allied naval supremacy, as the Germans didn't have a surface fleet to exploit any such successes.
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@Cervando The Americans were our allies? In May 1916? Try again. In May 1916 there was considerable anti-British feeling in the United States as a result of the Contraband Control operations being carried out by the Royal Navy. Understandably, the US Government was more than a little disgruntled at their merchant shipping being intercepted on the high seas by the British. In any case, wasn't the remark correct? Didn't the German Navy assault it's jailer, and wasn't it, after the assault, still in jail?
German planning prior to Jutland involved two ambitions. The first was to use U-boat traps and mines to sink a few British Battleships, and the second was to isolate and destroy a Battle Squadron from the Grand Fleet in order to make fleet action feasible. They never came remotely near to either.
As to losses, the bulk of British losses occurred to the Battlecruiser fleet in the early part of the action, largely due to the shortcomings of it's commander, David Beatty. In the main action between the battlefleets, the Germans scored precisely two hits on one British battleship, Colossus, whilst suffering almost 40 hits on their own heavy ships. As a result, Scheer, shrewdly, ran for safety, and never risked the High Seas Fleet again.
The question no one seems able to answer is ' if the High Seas Fleet was unable to challenge the blockade, then what purpose, if any, did it serve?' The blockade strangled the life out of Germany, and all the time the High Seas Fleet swung peacefully at anchor in the Jade.
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@Cervando Well, however you view it, after Jutland the Germans abandoned attempts to challenge the Grand Fleet, the British control of the North Sea continued, and the Blockade starved Germany into submission.
Your comments on the Spanish Armada don't recognise the wider picture. The Armada was sent to convey an invasion force across the Channel. It failed. The Battle of Gravelines forced the Spanish ships to cut their anchors and head north around Scotland. In total, possibly as much as a quarter of the fleet failed to return to Spain. To suggest that the action was not an English victory is absurd, on a par with those who claim that the British didn't sink the Bismarck because scuttling charges might have been detonated a few minutes before she sank, bringing forward the actual sinking by a few minutes.
Certainly, the English Armada failed, but there again so did the Spanish Armadas of 1596 & 1597. The Treaty of 1604 certainly didn't favour Spain. It confirmed that Spain would no longer seek to impose Roman-Catholicism in England, and would acknowledge the legitimacy of the Protestant monarchy.
Not, of course, that any of this has the slightest relevance to Jutland
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@Cervando In point of fact, in May 1916 Germany was viewed with more sympathy in the United States than Britain. As Professor Kennedy wrote, 'Germany retained a more favoured position within the American Congress and large swathes of the public in the spring of 1916. That governmental and public perception of Germany would change rapidly as the autumn of 1916 came to pass, and that change was a direct result of the Battle of Jutland. While Germany was held in good odour in the United States in the immediate aftermath of the great sea battle, the question of Germany’s desire and willingness to use unrestricted submarine warfare was an issue of concern to America.'
As to arguments about the Armada, or the War of Jenkins' Ear, from my experience most people in the UK under the age of about 40 know virtually nothing about British history, or, come to that, any history, at all!
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@leondillon8723 General Alexander von Kluck died in October, 1934, aged 88. He actually commanded the German First Army during the early part of the First World War, but retired in October, 1916, after being wounded.
His army never entered the Netherlands because the Netherlands was neutral during the First World War, and this neutrality was respected by both sides. Thus, the 'Limey' army never entered The Netherlands either, and the 'Limey' navy never hijacked US ships carrying supplies to the Dutch Army,
I don't know what you are drinking, but it must be extremely potent!
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@leondillon8723 Perhaps you didn't know that the design of the tanker class to which Kentucky & Ohio belonged was influenced by the United States' Navy, and that the vessels were earmarked for use as naval auxiliaries in time of war? As you don't even seem to grasp that The Netherlands was neutral in the First World War this wouldn't surprise me in the least.
Oh well. The telegram sent to Texaco by the United States' War Shipping Administration simply stated that Ohio was being 'requisitioned pursuant to the law.' The British government had asked the United States for the services of two fast tankers, and the War Shipping Administration, acting on the instructions of President Roosevelt, made firstly Kentucky and later Ohio available.
This was a generous act, at a time when the United States' Navy needed fast tankers for their fleet train in the Pacific, but taken for the greater good of the allied cause in mid-1942. It does, however, give the lie to your nonsensical claim that 'limey sturmtruppers attacked' the Ohio in a Scottish port.
As to whether the United States' government reimbursed Texaco, I neither know, nor care. Perhaps you may wish to investigate this matter of American jurisprudence; for my part I can' be bothered. Prior to the First World War, certain medium sized British liners had contract conditions which rendered them liable for requisition in wartime as armed merchant cruisers. Possibly something similar applied to the American fast tankers.
Alternatively, you might consider stopping posting nonsense, or at least making some attempt to check your facts.
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@jpmtlhead39 Research? Well. let's see.
Prinz Eugen survived the war largely because she contributed almost nothing to the German war effort, and stayed out of danger. She later acted as a floating gun battery in the Baltic, where her only achievement was that of almost sinking, by ramming ,a light cruiser. A German one, however. Being used for atomic bomb tests was, by the end of the war, about all she was fit for.
Scharnhorst & Gneisenau had a single successful raid, Operation Berlin, in early 1941. After that, Sharnhorst made one attempt to attack an Allied convoy, but was sunk a a result. Gneisenau was crippled in port, and was subsequently abandoned as a hulk.
Hitting Glorious from 26 miles was certainly an outstanding feat. It might stand comparison with HMS Warspite's hit on Guilio Cesare from the same distance. However, unlike Scharnhorst, the Old Lady went on to have an outstanding war record.
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@jpmtlhead39 'the Prinz Eugen contributed almost nothing...Well,She survived the war.' Yes, she did. Having, as I wrote, contributed almost nothing to the German naval war effort, apart from a small number of minor, HE, hits on Hood & Prince of Wales. Watching Bismarck sink Hood, then being sent to operate independently as a commerce raider, but almost immediately retiring to Brest instead, is hardly the stuff of legend, is it?
By the way, except in your mind, Prince of Wales was not seriously damaged. Indeed, the damaged which she inflicted upon Bismarck was far more important, in terms of 'mission kill' as Lutjens immediately abandoned his mission and headed for St. Nazaire instead.
I have already told you about Cerberus, and Raeder's assessment of it as a major strategic defeat, so no need to repeat the fact. I would add, however, that at the time S, G, & PE fled through the Channel, the RN's main forces were in the North, protecting Arctic convoys from a possible attack by Tirpitz, as the possibility of an attempted invasion had long passed.
Indeed 'the rest,' of Scharnhorst's sinking, Gneisenau's hulking, and Prinz Eugen's irrelevance, is history.
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@shanemcdowall Just to correct the emotive language, the British, French, & Dutch colonies were not slave colonies. The Japanese were considered a threat, and the British & Americans underestimated their military capabilities, but after the collapse of the French army the actual immediate threat to Britain was, for obvious reasons, given priority.
The campaign in Greece had little hope of success, but was undertaken primarily for political rather than military reasons, to demonstrate to other nations that, however hard pressed, Britain would support anyone who sought to resist the axis. Certainly, from a strictly military point of view, O'Connor should have been allowed to complete his victory, as Wavell argued at the time.
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There was no need to 'lure' the RN into the Channel. In September 1940 the RN had around 70 light cruisers and destroyers within five hours steaming of Dover, over 500 small warships available in support, and around 100 destroyers in all in Home Waters. The Germans had seven auxiliary minesweepers. The British had literally hundreds of fleet & auxiliary minesweepers. The Germans could only lay their fields at night, which would be something of a problem at the RN sent destroyer patrols through the Channel from Sheerness and Plymouth every night. I suggest that the results of a 4.7 inch shell exploding on a laden mine deck would be quite noticeable.
U-Boats. In September, 1940, the Germans had, on average, 13 boats at sea on any one day. Moreover, the three they sent into the Channel late in 1939 are still there, as are their crews. The Channel, heavily protected by British minefields, was a deathtrap for U-Boats. Furthermore, the idea of U-Boats seeking out destroyers is utterly contrary to the use of U-Boats at the time, when they sought to avoid escorts in order to attack merchantmen. Attacking a destroyer flotilla usually ended badly for the U-Boat, which is why it rarely happened.
Luftwaffe. The same one which had failed at Dunkirk, couldn't operate effectively at night, hadn't had any training in anti-shipping operations, didn't have a torpedo bomber until mid 1942, and which, in the whole of the war, sank 31 RN destroyers, and no RN warship bigger than a light cruiser? That Luftwaffe?
Naval superiority. With, in September, 1940, one heavy cruiser, three light cruisers, six or seven destroyers, a similar number of smaller torpedo boats, 13 S Boats, and about a dozen fleet minesweepers. Naval superiority? Hardly!
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@Litany_of_Fury What is a 'misleading under-representation of the situation at the time?' The Home Fleet was mainly at Rosyth because, from there, it could be called upon to challenge any attempt by German heavy ships to venture into the southern part of the North Sea in support of Sealion, but was also available for use against a sortie into the Atlantic.
The battlecruiser & carrier were at Scapa Flow in order to be able to operate against a potential sortie by a panzerschiff. The British at the time did not know that virtually every German heavy ship was out of action for one reason or another, but Forbes, C-in-C Home Fleet, was already complaining (correctly, in my view) that there were too many resources tied up on anti-invasion duties, when they could have been more profitably assigned to convoy duty, with the proviso that they remain within 24 hours of the Channel. In other words, three days out, one day back.
Incidentally, only an hour ago, you wrote ' the plan was to floor the channel with everything they had available.' Now, you say that ' British Battleships were on call to repel Sea Lion, but only if they were needed.
' Aren't you rather contradicting yourself here?
Battleships & heavy cruisers were neither designed nor intended to sink barges. Isn't this rather like going duck-shooting with a field gun? Which is why Pound & the Admiralty had neither the need nor the intention to do it.
Seriously, simply read any Staff History on Sealion defence preparations. There is absolutely no suggestion in any that that the Home Fleet was going to charge into the Channel trying to depress 15 & 16 inch guns low enough to hit towed barges.
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@shanemcdowall In mid September, 1940, of 10 surviving destroyers in the Kreigsmarine, five were operational, based in Cherbourg. Four were refitting in Wilhelmshaven, one of which transferred to Brest on 22/3 September. The tenth destroyer transferred from Wilhelmshaven to Brest on the same date.
There were also a number of Wolf/Mowe class torpedo boats, ships built in the mid 1920s and comparable to the British 'Hunt' class or the later USN DEs, although they were also torpedo armed. There were five based at Den Helder, one at Le Havre, and one at Cherbourg.
At the same time, the British had around 70 destroyers and light cruisers within five hours steaming of Dover.
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The convoys in the movie 'The Imitation Game' were supposed to be SC122, HX229, & HX229A, from March 1943. Nothing to do with PQ17. The story in the movie is false. There was a period between February & October, 1942 when the Germans had introduced a four rotor Enigma machine, which the British were unable to break. On 30 October, however, a machine and codebooks were captured from a sinking U Boat by HMS Petard, two of her crew being drowned aboard U559 when she sank. By March, 1943, using these documents and the captured books, the four rotor Enigma had been broken. It didn't happen as the rather disappointing movie suggested, and it had nothing to do with PQ17.
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@ComradeOgilvy1984 I agree with you. There was, incidentally, an alternative course of action which the German navy could, just possibly, have followed, put forward by an Admiral called Wolfgang Wegener, which ended in him feuding with Erich Raeder and being prematurely retired from the German navy in 1926. If you search for RAEDER VERSUS WEGENER, there is an excellent description written by Kenneth Hansen for the US Naval War College in 2005. There are arguments on both sides, but, from the German point of view, surely the fleet simply sitting in port until the Blockade destroyed German morale and the German war effort was unacceptable. Yet, effectively, that was what they did.
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