Were the germans wrong?operation sealion

...as he reaches for his ignore button!



John

 

Read some of the Wikipedia articles about WW2 economies and if you manage, try this:



Amazon.com: The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy: Adam Tooze, J. Adam Tooze: Books

Germany didn't have a chance in this war. The discrepencies in long run capabilities, Germany & allies vs. the Allies were simply too titanic.

 

Wolfy;;I'm glad they didnt but the germans could have won,they just tried to fight too many at once.

Economics isnt really my cup of tea but they more or less would have had every monopoly if things went differently.

 

I'm saying that you should read/skim this (because many of the posters here have). There are so much data on the military inadequacies/ capabilities of the Third Reich that it quickly puts to rest the insinuation that Germany could have conquered all of Europe for the 1,000 year Reich in WW2.

It's not even a matter of them making the best strategic decisions...Germany was so resource, organizationally, economically, and industrially poor that they could never consolidate their gains. The Nazi leadership was criminally inept and German intelligence services constantly fed them bad data.

Germany achieved what they did in 1939-1942 because they had a serious head start- they started this war, stockpiled material, and trained men vigorously in the 30s. Once the Allies were on the same game, wiped out the original cadres of professional grade German soldiers, and geared up, the Germans were finished.

 

You can keep repeating it. However we will keep repeating that the evidence from Dunkirk, Crete, Norway, and elsewhere does not support your conclusions and in fact indicates they are incorrect. Repetition will not change the facts.

No body here has claimed they will. What they in concert with the other light units would probably do is shatter the invasion force. Other units could be called in if necessary but it probably wouldn't be. At that point they could pull back out of range of the LW.

They wouldn't in fact they couldn't loose their entire navy there so your question is irrelevant.

In loosing the RN and Norwegians almost destroyed the KM and the Germans had a huge element of surprise. There also were few British assets present when the battle started. You are learning the wrong things form Norway.

 

And the German build up was running out of steam just as that of the allies was really getting started. The aircraft and vehicle production numbers by year are on line. Look them up.

 

SOURCES PLEASE! You have been asked several times! Please provide a reputable source that states the RN would have been uterly destroyed by the KM and LW while the RAF sits around with their thumbs up thier a**es.

 

And, the Luftwaffe never... Let me repeat that.... NEVER stopped the RN from operating in the Channel. They didn't stop daylight operations and they had no effect whatsoever on nighttime ones.

How can you explain away how the Royal Navy operated dozens of destroyers in the Channel, North Sea, Bay of Biscay and, right off the French coast in many cases almost continiously? Or, how they used cruisers like Aurora, Galatea to make nighttime attacks on French ports? Or, how on several occasions they sent a slow battleship like Revenge into the Channel to bombard a French port at night withdrawing by day and not suffering so much as a single retalitory air strike by the Luftwaffe doing it?

German bombers of various sorts did attack RN vessels while underway from time to time but with very disappointing results. An example of this might be the destroyer Newcastle escorting the cruiser Emerald (in daylight) off Brest came under attack by a number of Do 17 bombers. These aircraft attempted to hit both ships but concentrated their efforts mostly on the larger Emerald. After about 30 minutes of attacks the bombers, out of munitions, left with both ships intact and unhit.
The Newcastle suffered an engineering casualty during the attacks that limited her speed to just 16 knots yet she was still able to avoid being hit. At one point Newcastle also stopped to rescue the crew of a Walrus seaplane that had been in the area and damaged by the bombers guns.
Both ships safely returned to Plymouth harbor undamaged.

That is one of but many, many after action reports were the Luftwaffe proved unable to do any significant damage to RN vessels underway.

 

It wasn't intended for his consumption so much as others who can make more use of it

 

I didnt realise i was debating the issue with accountants.

Its like this,if you want to defeat my arguement you have to persuade me that seapower will defeat airpower,
i cannot understand peoples unwillingness to conceed what i and every other person who has thought about it since thinks.
I cant believe that i'm having to do this but,
List of ships sunk by the Imperial Japanese Navy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
As you can see there are over 30 sinkings attributed to aircraft,remember for a ship to survive against aircraft it has to be lucky all the time,for a plane to sink a ship it only has to be lucky once.
I never claimed that the germans could deny the RN access to the channel.

As for germany loosing the war because they were too poor you must admit britain werent exactly too well off either,

Look,i'm not being stubburn and am actually a believer in conceeding wrongs early but i think my position is safe and all the barbs dont change squat .

 

Is it just me or is this thread more at home in the what if

 

The problem is you are not debating. You are simply repeating your opinions.

You've got that wrong. All we've stated is that German airpower of the time was insufficient to defeat the RN in the required time period. We've given both fact and rational to support our position. You have on the other hand repeatedly stated your opinion with little or no fact or rational to back it up. The ball is in your court if you want to have any hope of convincing any one that you have a point.

Again you are making assumptions and stating opinions that simply don't hold up to any scrutiny. Many on this board have almost assuredly thought about and studied this matter in a great deal more detail than you have. As have many others. Note for instance the post war game held with British and German generals as the players. In order to allow for an invasion they made some very generous assumptions on the effectiveness of the LW and KM efforts early in the constest. The Germans still lost because the RN was able to interdict their supplies among other reasons.

We never claimed that planes couldn't sink ships. But consider at the start of WWII the IJN, RNAF and USN were the premier anti shipping air forces in the world. The LW had hardly even considered it as a mission. Consider that LW arial torpedoes had even worse problems than the US ones. Then there's the question of how many sorties were flown to achieve these sinkings. Note that Japanese doctrine encouraged strikes of 50+ planes. Oh yes how many of those ships were moving at full speed when sunk? Then look at the time frame. If the RN DDs and other light vessels can get into the convoys they can (as demonstrated at Crete) savage them in a single night. There is little or nothing the LW can do to interfere with such an operation.

If they can't do that they can't save the invasion force and they don't have time to cause serious damage to the RN.

But Britian didn't start the war and went about securing all the help they could get.

The evidence doesn't support this contention either.

 

Good plan there JW. It is turning into an opinionated position without support.

 

You aren't debating accountants. You are debating people with a very deep understanding of warfare and World War 2.

In the case of Japan versus the US in the Pacific what you miss in your argument is that both combatants possessed naval air power; that is, aircraft carriers and naval aircraft. Land based air power did not defeat the Japanese navy. Carrier based airpower did. The Germans have exactly ZERO carrier based air power.
What you are doing is looking at a result without understanding the cause. Carrier based airpower is an extension of sea power. In WW 2 carrier based planes acted in concert with other ships to extend the range of their firepower at sea. But, the crucial aspect of this was that the aircraft were with the ships and acted in concert with them.
Carrier planes could be held on the carrier until a naval enemy presented themselves and then be launched against that enemy. Today, missiles replace much of the anti-ship function of manned aircraft but the point remains valid: Naval airpower is available when it is needed to project seapower.

Land based airpower on the other hand is far more limited in usefulness against seapower. This is why the Luftwaffe would (and did) fail against the Royal Navy. It is also why you see so little land based air power projection into naval battles other than attacking ships in harbor.
Yes, there are singular instances of land based airpower working but they are the exception not the rule. There is obviously the case of the Prince of Wales and Repulse as a success but that is due mostly to poor tactics and a lack of good antiaircraft systems on the British ships. On the other hand, the Italians never managed to get land based airpower to work with their navy. Then there is the late war example of Empress Augusta Bay where four US light cruisers and four destroyers were attacked by over 100 G4M bombers (the same ones that sank PoW and Repulse.
This time, the US ships deployed in a tight and correct anti-aircraft formation and shot down over 30 of the attacking aircraft and damaged most of the rest. The bombers scored a single bomb hit on a light cruiser killing 5 men and knocking out one 5" gun.

If we go to Crete, the best contemporary example to the one at hand, we find that the Germans deployed somewhere in the neighborhood of nearly 500 aircraft total against the RN there. Yet, if you look case by case, the ships they sank were for the most part either at anchor or had run out of AA ammunition. Many of the ships they attacked were damaged and survived including one of two carriers attacked.

The problem in the BoB / Seelöwe scenario for the Germans in this respect is two fold: First, they cannot use their entire airforce against the RN. They will need the greater bulk of it to support their land forces in the invasion and for air defense against the remaining RAF forces. Second, their air force is neither trained, equipped nor, orgainzed for a naval war. They have next to zero maritime patrol aircraft and the few they do possess are short ranged for the most part. That is, they cannot scout effectively for the Royal Navy at sea. Range also limits their aircraft to just coverage of the Channel and portions of the North Sea for the most part.
What this means (and the British know it) is that the RN is effectively safe from Luftwaffe attack outside a very limited area. It also means that the RN holds the initative on attacking German naval forces. The British know when and where their ships will appear. They can support those operations with naval or land based air power far more easily than the Germans who will have to maintain standing patrols whenever possible.
This means the Germans would have to have a number of partol aircraft they don't possess flying far out to sea looking for the RN's approach. Without these, their only other choice is to stack armed bombers and fighters over their invasion forces continiously.
But, this later choice dilutes the number of aircraft they have available for this mission based on their loiter time (ie how long they can hang around before running out of fuel). Here, the problem is that the Luftwaffe opted for payload over range so this is limited and frequent changes of patrol aircraft would be required.
Since the British know this they could simply wait outside the area where the Luftwaffe was effective and then enter this area after dark, engage the German naval forces at night and, withdraw by daylight. Even in the Pacific air power didn't get the tools to be effective at night for the most part until 1943 - 44. So, the Luftwaffe finds itself powerless to stop this sort of incursion on the fleet and the Germans lacking sea power of their own are defeated at sea.
The other scenario is the British attack in daylight. Here the few Luftwaffe aircraft on standing patrol do what they can to stop the British ships. They may get a few hits and force a ship or two out of how many ever the British send to either withdraw due to damage or even may sink one or two. But, this occurs close to the German fleet due to the lack of patrol aircraft.
Reinforcements from French airfields might take as much as 30 minutes to an hour to get airborne and fly to the engagement. These aircraft would have had to be fueled and appropriately armed, ready to go and held for such a mission. This represents alot of wastage of aircraft as they could not be used for other missions if held ready for this one.
In any case, when they arrive the British are now engaged at close range with the German ships. How does the untrained Luftwaffe pilot tell friend from foe? Flags or markings on deck generally won't help. The Italians went so far as to paint the ENTIRE forecastle of their ships (the deck forward of the front gun turret etc) with red and white diagonal stripes yet, their ships were still occasionally attacked by their own aircraft.

What the above boils down to is:

1. Land based air is far less effective against ships than carrier air power.
2. The Germans cannot devote hundreds of bombers to a mission of sea denial simply because they cannot afford to waste that many aircraft sitting doing nothing most of the time.
3. The Germans lack the orgainzation and correct types of aircraft to carry out such a mission in any case.
4. The Luftwaffe is ineffective a night and cannot deny the approaches to their fleet to British naval operations meaning the British can and will be able to operate freely after dark.

Basically, the Luftwaffe is all but powerless to stop the Royal Navy.

True. The Germans were a land power. That is, they had a large army and land based air force. The British are a sea power. They have a large navy and small army. In this situation, the Germans cannot defeat the British unless the British choose to take on their land power. At the same time, the British cannot defeat Germany except on land.
So, a stalemate ensues.

In true historical fashion the British went shopping for allies which is what sea powers have done for thousands of years. The US (an historical exception being both a sea power and land power) joined the war. Now, the Germans were finished. They were now fighting Russia a land power, the US a land power and, Britain a sea power. Both Russia and the US were superior land powers in terms of economy and resources to Germany. Germany's defeat was inevidable.
The British role in this was primarily political. They got the coallition together with a bit of idiotic cooperation from Hitler (eg., he attacked Russia and po'd the US).

Seelöwe represents an operation where a land power attempted on the fly to project sea power against a sea power. The Germans, like you Macker, thought air power could substitute for sea power. General William Mitchell and Guillo Douhet also thought this was true. They all were wrong. Land based airpower cannot and is no substitute for sea power. It wasn't in the Pacific. It wasn't in the Mediterrainian. It wasn't more recently in the Falkland Islands.
You need a navy to defeat a navy. The Romans figured this out in the Punic Wars. The Spartans figured this out in the Pelopennisian Wars. Alexander figured a way around it as a land power against Persia by luck of geography, something the Germans didn't have the luxury of.

So, the bottom line here is if Germany launches Seelöwe, it would have failed disasterously.

 

That's pretty much what it's been from one side from the start. The refusal to move beyond that is irritating.

The exception to this would be the RN who equipped and practiced for it a couple of years earlier. That certainly doesn't help the Germans however.

 

This is the best statement I have seen, so far:

So, the bottom line here is if Germany launches Seelöwe, it would have failed disasterously.

I would like to add that if SeaLion had been launched, it would (itself) have doomed the Nazis to defeat sooner than happened historically. Hitler would have been so depleted of both land, sea, and air forces he wouldn't have been able to follow his original plan of eastward expansion into the Polish/Ukranian/Soviet landmass.

For the Nazis, the abandonment of this amphibious cross-channel attack was likely the only good military decision Hitler made. Every offensive he instituted from this point on lead only to humiliation and ultimate defeat.

 

Yeah,this is my last post on sealion because i think its gone as far as its going to go.
IMO,because the question was did the germans make the wrong choice in going for the RAF first it doesnt belong in whatif.

to sum up.
1.i know people are holding back playing the RAF card..
2.I think its gross negligence to dumb down german capabilities,
i have been learning about wwii for 35 years and i say this,people you are wrong,the german army were the smartist most dynamic army of WWII,
No army until the russians developed defence in depth could stand up to them.
I will conceed the lack of forethought from the germans with regards to any invasion plan.
3.also to me the arguement is coloured,people are seeing the numbers but not the sum,
I still maintain that some of the first german elements could have made it across without interdiction from the RN,the rest is whatif.

the question was only a fun question and was never intended to turn into a match,thanks lwd,gardner,slip,wolfy and others for using meat.

 

What alternative do you propose? They did go after the channel traffic before the BOB I believe and the Stukas got chewed up pretty badly. But the RAF is really their only target. Most of the RN is beyond their reach.

What do you mean by this?

Yet you say they made the wrong choice above?

Smartest? Not sure how you would judge that. Most dynamic? The British army and the US army fought in more places in more ways and showed an ability to learn and improvise that went beyond the Germans.

The British didn't do all that bad in some of their early encounters. Poor logistics (planning and execution) and the Soviet refusal to quit was what stopped the Germans to a large extent in the Soviet Union.

How? The invasion fleet was going to take at least 12 and more likely in excess of 24 hours to cross the channel. The RN was paroling the channel nightly and RAF aircraft were flying recon over the invasion ports. The RN had litterally hundreds of small craft capable of intercepting the invasion fleet before it reached the beaches. Once there the German plan required 9 days to unload!

Next time PLS bring some substance to your posts. We have continuoulsy replied with fact and logic and you have done almost nothing to support your opinions other than to repost them. You haven't even indicated you have read most or any of the references we've supplied.