Split Thread WWII & Appeasement

Henri McPhee said:
Yo are just overlooking what happened at Malta, let alone what Japanese aircraft did to American and British Naval shipping:
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No, we're pointing out that German and Italian anti-shipping units hadn't developed that capability until 1941; they weren't anywhere near that good, to the point of being largely ineffective, in 1940. 1938, as we all keep reminding you, is before 1940, so a capability that existed in 1941 but didn't in 1940 can't have existed in 1938. And note that even in 1941, a force of four aircraft carriers, two battleships, seven cruisers and twenty four destroyers, subject to - by your source's own words - a "huge effort" by the Germans and Italians, and tied to a group of slow merchant ships that greatly reduced their freedom to manoeuver, lost less than a quarter of their forces in total; in particular, only a single destroyer was lost, and destroyers alone could easily have prevented a German invasion.

Dave
 
dudalb said:
The Brits, amazing enough for a country so dependent on sea power, had real problems with getting first rate Carrier Aircraft. The attempts to "Navalize" the Hurricane and Spitfire had only modest success,and by the end of the war the ROyal Navy was using mainly US Carrier craft on board their carriers.
The Corsair was particularly liked by the RN pilots.
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No doubt, and it's an observation worth taking to heart.

But in the alternate history scenario that Henri is proposing, the RN carriers would play at best a minor role, if any. Defense against bombers would mainly happen from land based airfields, as would any air attacks on a hypothetical Sea Lion invasion force. As Force Z showed only a bit later, if there was any doubt in the first place, you don't really need a carrier to bomb a ship. If you have bombers that can do the job -- and, as the Cap'n keeps pointing out, the Germans never proved much of a capability there -- their being in range of land airstrips is not really an impediment. Quite the opposite in fact.
 
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dudalb said:
And when it comes to the Gloster Gladiator, let's not forget Faith,Hope,and Charity....
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Hell, you can even throw in the Skua, if things get too desperate. It wasn't much of a fighter against a BF-109, but it showed in Norway that it has no problem shooting some unescorted German bombers full of holes.
 
Dave Rogers said:
Well, it's not as if it got bombed all that much, is it?

Dave
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You must be joking.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Malta_(World_War_II)

The Axis resolved to bomb or starve Malta into submission, by attacking its ports, towns, cities, and Allied shipping supplying the island. Malta was one of the most intensively bombed areas during the war. The Luftwaffe (German Air Force) and the Regia Aeronautica (Italian Royal Air Force) flew a total of 3,000 bombing raids over a period of two years in an effort to destroy RAF defences and the ports.[11] Success would have made possible a combined German–Italian amphibious landing (Operation Herkules) supported by German airborne forces (Fallschirmjäger), but this did not happen. In the event, Allied convoys were able to supply and reinforce Malta, while the RAF defended its airspace, though at great cost in material and lives.
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You know, I've probably played too much Kingdom Come Deliverance. Every time I come here, I want to go, "Hey! Henri's come to see us!" ;)
 
Rereading 'Wages of Destruction' and its noteable that the people running the German military and economy in 1938 didn't share Henri's optimism about how easy defeating Britain and France would be. Oddly enough they seemed to feel that war over Czechoslovakia would doom German.
 
I don't know exactly about '38, but in November '37, Hjalmar Schacht -- you know, the guy who revitalized the economy in the first place -- resigned because of basically seeing the party official drive the German economy straight towards bankruptcy even without a war. After having argued with said official that the rearmament is stalling the economy for years at that point. I can't imagine that he was very happy about it in '38 either, as President of the Reichsbank.
 
HansMustermann said:
I don't know exactly about '38, but in November '37, Hjalmar Schacht -- you know, the guy who revitalized the economy in the first place -- resigned because of basically seeing the party official drive the German economy straight towards bankruptcy even without a war. After having argued with said official that the rearmament is stalling the economy for years at that point. I can't imagine that he was very happy about it in '38 either, as President of the Reichsbank.
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He was not, and the economic situation in '37 was so bad that it actually derailed a large part of the rearmament drive because of the shortage of available resources. The situation in 1938 was only better because of the Anschluss, which injected a large quantity of foreign exchange into the Reich. Overall though the increased armaments drive of '38 came at the expense of crippling the civilian sector, construction and the railways were both in a miserable state already and agriculture was suffering.

This was not a country even remotely ready for war in 1938, Tooze argues it wasn't Chamberlain's 'diplomacy' that prevented war, but the chorus of warnings from inside the Reich that forced Hitler to take what he could get and postpone the war so Germany would be strong enough to face its enemies. Had Churchill not been so stubbornly resistant to peace talks in 1940 the strategy of postponement could have been a total success for Germany.
 
Henri McPhee said:
Yo are just overlooking what happened at Malta, let alone what Japanese aircraft did to American and British Naval shipping:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/wwtwo/siege_malta_01.shtml
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We are talking about 1938 and invading the UK. I gave the example of the Channel in 1940 where they Germans halittle success at hitting everything.
Similarly in the Med, the RN only started to suffer when all of the European coastline and all the North African coastling as far as Egypt were under Axis control.

Also ships tied to escorting a convoy of slow merchantmen are at a disadvantage from the start. free sailing Destroyers and Cruisers were difficult to hit.

My uncle Martin served on Ajax in WW2. He was at the River Plate and was in several actions in the Med including the Battles of Cape Passero and Cape Otranto and was hit by bombs from Stukas at the Battle of Cape Matapan. They also escorted Malta Convoys


Not the situation in 1938.
 
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Captain_Swoop said:
We are talking about 1938 and invading the UK. I gave the example of the Channel in 1940 where they Germans halittle success at hitting everything.
Similarly in the Med, the RN only started to suffer when all of the European coastline and all the North African coastling as far as Egypt were under Axis control.

Not the situation in 1938.
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And again, that situation was better demonstration as to why a German invasion wasn't going to work. Any German Navy would have been useless unless it was protecting the invasion barges, whereupon it would have been extremely vulnerable to the (and I use this phrase after much thought) full might of the Royal Navy.
 
In case Henri might be tempted to suggest that the Royal Navy might not be committed to destroy any invasion fleet that the Kriegsmarine might send against Britain, here's a quote from Admiral Cunningham, during the evacuation of Crete, when it was suggested to him that the RN should withdraw, as it was suffering serious losses:

"It takes the Navy three years to build a ship. It will take three hundred years to build a new tradition. The evacuation will continue."

I need hardly say that he was just one of the Royal Navy's admirals!
 
I would add, though, that as later Bismark and Force Z demonstrated, ships CAN be hit if they have no air cover and you can cripple them with torpedo bombers. And as the Bismark demonstrated, Kriegsmarine designs had a major AA flaw, in that their AA guns couldn't depress enough to offer nearly enough protection even against obsolete biplanes if they come very low at you to do a torp run. So unless you have fighters to see them off, you have a problem.

So that brings us to what the situation would have been: The RN had torp bombers, while the Lufwaffe had a bit of a range problem to protect a hypothetical '38 invasion against them.

Also let's not forget that the problem isn't just bringing the troops. Let's say somehow the first run gets half the barges to the shore (and I'm very generous there, since they weren't that sea worthy even without the RN and RAF wanting to play)... Now what? You have to also bring them supplies, fuel, fly bomb runs to support them, etc. The Wehrmacht never came up with an equivalent of PLUTO. So you have go back and forth with those barges to supply them. It's a war of attrition you can't win.

In fact, interesting fact here, to counter some "but they could have come up with their own PLUTO" idea: even in '44, when faced with an invasion, the Wehrmacht HQ didn't imagine the Allies would do something like that. They reasoned that an invasion would come in summer, which was the last bit of reasoning that would be actually correct. But they also reasoned that therefore their horses can simply graze, while the fully mechanized British would have trouble bringing fuel for their trucks and tanks over the channel without holding a port. And since tanks can't graze, HAHA, Germany wins. It was quite the nasty surprise when they actually could just pump the fuel under the channel.
 
Pluto took several attempts, there were a number of failed pipelines laid beofer it was reliable.
Until it was in place all the fuel still had to come over the beaches.
The Germans just didn't have the shipping to do it even if they had captured a port intact. Look at the problems they had supplying Rommel.
 
Rincewind said:
I need hardly say that he was just one of the Royal Navy's admirals!
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To be fair, ABC was one of the greatest admirals in the illustrious history of the service. But, yes, his attitude was typical of the RN in WW2, which time after time committed everything to achieving the important goals despite appalling losses. If Germany had tried to invade, I think the RN would quite literally have fought to the last ship to stop them.

Dave
 
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