Battle of Britain: Failure

[ATI_7500]

hey,come on. you can't tell me that you have no more ideas...

i'm sure that somewhere in your minds,there's a nice little plan for conquering an island. don't keep it there,tell us about it instead.

what if churchill got assassinated by the germans?

[Smoke2much]

August 1940

German Navy sends heavy elements through the Iceland-UK gap and floods Irish Sea with U-Boats.  Captured French ships manned by German crews attack Gibraltar and Mediterainean fleet.

British Home fleet scrambled from Scapa Flow to meet German threat in North Atlantic.  Light Units of Channel Fleet sent to Irish Sea to deal with U-Boats.

Airfields in Kent targeted for heavy bombing, attacks on German cities ignored.  Airlanding troops sent to capture Airfields in Kent under cover from aircraft flown from France.  When fields nominally secure transports filled to the gullet sent in to land at Kentish air fields.  Ships sent to land troops and tanks to link up with occupied air fields.

Navy decoyed North, RAF pounded, troops landed.  All over bar the singing.

Diplomatic mission sent.  Surrender sought.

German war machine looks east to the plains of Mother Russia........

[ATI_7500]

good plan! i haven't even thought of paratroopers!

i will refine a few things,but it's a very good basis for a successful plan.

[ATI_7500]

sorry for double post,but i've refine will's plan.

german naval forces lock the street of gibraltar and attack every english ship that wants to break through.

another fleet locks the channel between land's end. big fleet number three secures the north sea,covered by "condors" (Fw 200) operating from the netherlands,denmark and norway.

fleet number four sneaks to iceland and invades it. after the island is secured ,a luftwaffe fleet is sent there to attack british air fields in scotland and english convoys in the atlantic sea.

some ships are sent to the irish sea for preventing a possible retreat of english troops to ireland.

air combat action number one: luftwaffe attacks on every air field in southern england.

ground forces action number one: paratroopers are taking english airfields in south west england. reinforcements are sent in immediately ,along with personnel for the establishment of an airbase. other squadrons of the luftwaffe are continuously holding back the RAF and the army.
troop and tank transports cross the channel and reinforce the german "bridgehead".  stukas are now operating from the captured air fields and provide air support for the ground troops.

ground forces action number two:
as soon as the british south east of england is weakened by continuous attacks of the luftwaffe, the wehrmacht invades this part of britain.

"operation barbarossa" is delayed until britain is conquered.

after the new bridge head is secured and enough reinforcemants have arrived, both armies are conquering the whole of england.
some parts of the luftwaffe are transferred to the airbases in south england.

the RAF has been driven back to scotland and ireland,german naval forces are attacking every convoy that tries to cross the irish sea.
supply from america are arriving sparsely ,because german u-boats and ships almost locked every access to england.


the new target for the ground forces: london.
by now,there's a great lack of resources in britain,the RAF is almost gone and german forces are slowly putting a circle around london,while other divisions head for the industrial centres manchester, liverpool and leeds.
a few days after german forces closed the circle around london and slowly pull towards the centre ,the government surrenders and signs an armistice with hitler.

most of the german ground forces are pulled out of britain and head for russia....

[Hagar]

good plan! i haven't even thought of paratroopers!

i will refine a few things,but it's a very good basis for a successful plan.

Attack by paratroopers was the one thing the British government & the general public feared more than any other. In hindsight this was most unlikely with the available troops & equipment.

My somewhat controversial scenario is much easier & would have avoided fighting & bloodshed. If Edward VIII had been allowed to marry & not abdicated the situation would have been completely different. Edward was a far weaker man than his younger brother & a known admirer of Hitler. The much maligned & ridiculed prime minister Neville Chamberlain was a thoroughly decent man with strong convictions. He was a dedicated pacifist who wished to avoid war at any price. Most of his cabinet & many politicians of all parties supported his principles & felt the same way. Winston Churchill was seen by the majority as a warmonger, a political outcast near the end of his career & not to be taken seriously.

I feel that in these circumstances Britain would not have taken much persuading to sign a non-aggression pact with Hitler, leaving his way open to attack Russia which was his real objective. This might not have pleased our European neighbours or our Commonwealth cousins but in my view it would have been accepted by the majority of the British public at that time.

PS. You might find this site interesting. http://herbertholeman.com/para/units/german.php
This quote is from the page on Operation Mercury, the airborne invasion of Crete in May 1941.
[quote]Crete was the scene of the largest German Airborne operation of the war, and the first time in history that an island had been taken by airborne assault.
Afterwards, Crete was dubbed the graveyard of the Fallschirmj

[ATI_7500]

Attack by paratroopers was the one thing the British government & the general public feared more than any other. In hindsight this was most unlikely with the available troops & equipment.

let's say 50 per cent of the german paratrooping missions went wrong,the biggest successes were crete and some action against a war castle in holland in 1940,the rest of the missions were just badly planned and went wrong.

My somewhat controversial scenario is much easier & would have avoided fighting & bloodshed. The much maligned & ridiculed prime minister Neville Chamberlain was a thoroughly decent man with strong convictions. He was a dedicated pacifist who wished to avoid war at any price.

aye. didn't germany and england have some contracts or agreements before the BoB?

PS. You might find this site interesting.
This quote is from the page on Operation Mercury, the airborne invasion of Crete in May 1941.

i know a man living in my town,who was one of those paratroopers. he was a machinegunner (MG42) and was slighly wounded during the landing operations. he said it was a big mistake to send the paratroopers in in the morning(!) and during daytime, i think this is the main cause for the high german losses. if they had landed at night or during the late evening,they would have had it much easier.

[Hagar]

let's say 50 per cent of the german paratrooping missions went wrong,the biggest successes were crete and some action against a war castle in holland in 1940,the rest of the missions were just badly planned and went wrong.

This is quite common in wartime. As a keen amateur historian I've always said that the victor is the side making the least mistakes. Things tend to look different in hindsight.

aye. didn't germany and england have some contracts or agreements before the BoB?

You might be thinking of the infamous "Worthless piece of paper", the "Peace in our time" Munich treaty signed in October 1938 which caused Chamberlain's downfall & the ridicule he had to put up with for the rest of his life.

Chamberlain read this statement to a cheering crowd in front of 10 Downing St. and said;

"My good friends this is the second time in our history that there has come back from Germany to Downing Street peace with honor. I believe it is peace in our time."

Chamberlain resigned as PM in May 1940 & joined his successor Churchill's war cabinet briefly, resigned in October and died on 9 November 1940. They say he died a broken man as everything he believed in had been betrayed. Hitler had no intention of keeping this treaty any more than the one he signed with Stalin. I think this would have been the only problem with my scenario.

i know a man living in my town,who was one of those paratroopers. he was a machinegunner (MG42) and was slighly wounded during the landing operations. he said it was a big mistake to send the paratroopers in in the morning(!) and during daytime, i think this is the main cause for the high german losses. if they had landed at night or during the late evening,they would have had it much easier.

I think Crete & the later British fiasco at Arnhem proved once & for all the limitations of airborne assaults.

[Scorpiоn]

OK, Exploder.  Since you want to invade Britain so badly...

My Complete Plan
[list]November 1940: RAF activity ceases in the Southern regions.
[*]December 1940: The Bismarck is hastily put through trials, and plans for the Atlantic are temporarily scrapped.
[*]January 1941: [list][*]Luftwaffe ceases to patrol RAF airfields.
[*]The overwhelming bulk of the Kriegsmarine gathers in the English channel, repulsing all Royal ships with U-boats and heavy warships.
[*]The Fallschirmjaeger are dropped in Britain, to clear a landing zone.
[*]Me 321s deliver the first tanks, while Ju 52s drop the rest of the first wave of infantry.
[*]Successive waves follow.
[*]Ground war ensues.
[*]With no air opposition, Stukas and Zerst

[Hagar]

Although, I’m seriously considering Hagar’s theory right now.

Scorpion. I take no credit for the theory. It's nothing new - simply a different approach that I suspected you hadn't considered.

It's your topic & you're free to do whatever you wish, however violent or distasteful. Imprison or even execute the Royal Family & whole British government while you're about it, whatever takes your fancy. I can't think what possible use that or "eliminating" major intellectuals would be. I was hoping to keep the SS & their repulsive ideas out of this.

[Scorpiоn]

Exactly, the option of avoiding war completely never hit me, so now I'm seeing how I could work it into the plot.  The only problem with that is then Japan still attacks America, and we all know how well Japan's chances were.

Right, there was much more about the SS, but I opted to pipe up instead.

In my version, I'd rather keep as much people alive in a puppet government instead.  Realistically (again, hypothetically) speaking, what would've happened to the Royals, Churchill etc?  The topic was glanced before, although not in much detail.

[Hagar]

[quote]Exactly, the option of avoiding war completely never hit me, so now I'm seeing how I could work it into the plot.

[Professor Brensec]

Sorry chaps, been absent for a day or so.

Some interesting comments, and as usual, some education and clarification from Hagar.

For my 2 cents worth, I'll add:

As far as the tragectory of a bullet over the short distances they are fired from in air battle: I've spent the last couple of months, on and off, studying the armaments and effectiveness of all the fighters used in WWII (almost all, anyway). Simply, by the time a bullet begins to 'drop' due to gravity's effect, it will have lost most of it's kinetic energy which will render it relatively harmless to an aircraft, especially an AP round. So the point is moot.

As for how well the opposibg fighters during the BoB armed:
A reasonably simple calculation, involving the weight and muzzle velocity of a round and then factoring in the number of rounds per second, gives a pretty effective 'rating' for the power and effectiveness of the armament on a fighter. In short the British planes come out well short of the German planes of the same era.

My 'Fighter Gun Table' gives me the following figures:

Spitfire Mk1 and Hurricane ( 8 x .30's) = 1.72 (rating)
Bf109E-4 (May '40) (2 x 20mm 2 x 7.92 = 2.37 (rating)

Even the Mark Vb Spit has a slightly lower rating (than the Bf109) of 2.24, even with the 2 extra Mg's.

As for the Paratroops, I saw another of my famous Histiry channel Doco's on the Crete invasion. As Hagar says, this is a perfect example of the side which makes the most mistakes loses.
The Germans, in fact, came very close to losing. it was all down to the holding (or taking, depending on which side), of 1 particular airfield. The germans prevailed, only just, and were able to bring in fresh reinforcements. Without them, they would have been defeated.
The British made several mistakes (there were in fact many Australians and NZ's in Crete). I personally, think the largest was underestimating the ability of the Germans to mount such an attack, and not supplying the few heavy guns and extra fighters which would have tipped the balance.
Even after the German success, Hitler (who could usually see nothing that made sense) even had the sense to realise that airborne assaults, especially in daylight proved to costly. I believe he banned any further such attacks. The specially trained and highly motivated and valuable Paratroops were then relegated to ordinary Infantry units. Very sad actually.

[ATI_7500]

the big mistake japan made after the attack on pearl harbor was ignoring the american carriers ,which were somewhere on the pacific,instead of being in the hawaiian port.
if they had managed to sink them,the pacific war could have turned out quite different.

[Scorpiоn]

Just to "conlude" the two theories, cause and effect needs to be clarified a bit(at least for me).

Invasion

• Civilian elements are never targeted (September 7), pressure on the RAF is kept up.

Peace

• Umm, I don't really know.  From Hagars post I take it Edward VIII staying in power would have been the deciding factor.

Relief for the hard pressed RAF was at hand, however, but from the least expected source - the Reichmarschall of the Luftwaffe himself!  Goaded by Hitler following the bombing of Berlin by the RAF, driven by his own ambition, and advised by the wishful thinking of his Intelligence Staff and some of his commanders that Fighter Command was all but finished and that either RAF reserves must by now have been consumed, or alternatively that further attacks on the airfields could only lead to a withdrawal to those north of London, beyond the range of the Jagdlfieger, he ordered the main weight of the attack be turned onto London - just as the defenders were on maximum alert for an invasion.

Duel for the Sky.  Shores, Chistopher.
Grub Street, London. (c)1999

[Professor Brensec]

Umm, I don't really know.  From Hagars post I take it Edward VIII staying in power would have been the deciding factor.

Either that, or Churchill not becoming PM and a less capable 'motivator and figurehead' being the one to face Hitler during that period. Imagine if Chamberlain had still been PM and the BoB had been lost and the skies were clear of the RAF. I think an 'armistice of some sort' would certainly have been on the cards.

the big mistake japan made after the attack on pearl harbor was ignoring the american carriers ,which were somewhere on the pacific,instead of being in the hawaiian port.
if they had managed to sink them,the pacific war could have turned out quite different

The BIG mistake was not realising that the Industrial Might of the US would put them well ahead of Japan in as little as 12 months. Even if the AC carriers had been destroyed and Coral Sea and Midway never occurred, the Yanks would still have replaced the two Carriers present near Hawaii (plus another 2 -3) in the space of 12 months. At most, I think the destruction of the Enterprise and Lex(?) at that time, would have only prolonged the war by a year or so, as the Japanese couldn't really have gone much further than they did, had they taken Port Moresby and Midway, which were the only two significant events influenced by the Carriers prior to the US becoming a viable force in the Pacific again.
The Japanese never had the raw materials or the manufacturing power to fight the protracted war that eventuated. That was the purpose of the raid in PH. To knock out the Pacific Fleet in one fell swoop.
They just couldn't grasp what Yamamoto knew. They could expect 6 months of inimpeded progress. After that they would be in troubl. And that's exactly how it happened.  ;D

But then who knows..............................??  ;D