Basically your challenge, should you accept it, is to get the Royal Navy completely clusterfucked, resulting in the Royal Navy being a non factor in WW2 by 1941. POD can be any time after the start of 1938.
AHC: Taking the Royal Navy out of commission by 1941
- Thread starter Enigmajones
- Start date
The United States, Japan, and the British Empire get into a three-way brawl at some point in the early to mid 30s.
We had a discussion here a little while back over the feasibility of the Italian and Japanese fleets managing to trek all the way to the North Sea for an ultimate showdown of ultimate destiny alongside the Kriegsmarine against the RN. We determined it would still be a pretty close-run thing but it could well annihilate the RN completely, though the scenario's implausibility factor is unfortunately very high.
Coulsdon Eagle
Monthly Donor
War in the West (Axis Triumphant) by Brian Clarke destroys the RN in three easy steps with the PoD being the rise to emminence & then power of Reinhard Heydrich, who determines the Enigma code has been broken and uses it against the British.
Step1: Send secret missions to seize the Canary Islands, the Azores, Cape Verde Islands & Ascension Island from which U-boats & Condors will prey on British convoys.
Step 2: Without invading Greece, the Fallschrimjager seize Crete for 24 hours without anyone noticing in time and use it to forward base the Luftwaffe's naval strike aircraft as soon as the RN's Mediterranean Fleet (weakened by Italian mini-sub attacks in port) leave port to meet a sally by the Italian navy. Ambushed by U-boats, bombed by Stukas, the remnants are finished off by the Regia Marina.
Step 3: Having won the Battle of Britain (!?) the Luftwaffe & U-boats wait outside each major British naval base & sink the Home Fleet as it seeks to withdraw to Canada.
See - simple really
It must be the worst AH drivel I have ever had the misfortune to spend money on
Step1: Send secret missions to seize the Canary Islands, the Azores, Cape Verde Islands & Ascension Island from which U-boats & Condors will prey on British convoys.
Step 2: Without invading Greece, the Fallschrimjager seize Crete for 24 hours without anyone noticing in time and use it to forward base the Luftwaffe's naval strike aircraft as soon as the RN's Mediterranean Fleet (weakened by Italian mini-sub attacks in port) leave port to meet a sally by the Italian navy. Ambushed by U-boats, bombed by Stukas, the remnants are finished off by the Regia Marina.
Step 3: Having won the Battle of Britain (!?) the Luftwaffe & U-boats wait outside each major British naval base & sink the Home Fleet as it seeks to withdraw to Canada.
See - simple really
It must be the worst AH drivel I have ever had the misfortune to spend money on
Cook
Banned
If you want to do that, I’d say you have to push back at least ten years and make the Great Depression substantially harder on the British, combined with the pacifist mindset of the late ‘20s, early ‘30s and resulting could be a drastically shrunken Royal Navy.
von hitchofen
Banned
Ritterkreuz des Eisernen Kreuzes mit Goldenem Eichenlaub, Schwertern und Brillianten for the Alien Space Bat
Anaxagoras
Banned
1938 is too late, in my opinion. It's easy to have the Royal Navy suffer much more damage than it did IOTL with a POD that late (worse Norwegian Campaign, better luck by the Italians). But to have it taken out of commission altogether? I don't see it happening.
RamscoopRaider
Donor
Have an accidental ammunition explosion in every single ship
Odds are something like 1 in 10^100 but with an infinite amount of universes you eventually get one where that improbable chain of accidents happens
Odds are something like 1 in 10^100 but with an infinite amount of universes you eventually get one where that improbable chain of accidents happens
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I'm thinking the ONLY way a brawl like that could destroy the Royal Navy is if (somehow) the Empire gets into a war with the US (as both countries were expecting in the 20s) and the Japanese jump in on the side of the US to take advantage of the disaster. I just have no idea how you could set that particular chain of events into motion. Even then the IJN and the USN would be pretty gutted in their own right.
There's War Plan Red which was first written up in the wake of the failed Geneva Naval Conference. That's the best I've got for a POD in that period but it would put the war, and POD, well before 1938 and I'm still not sure if the US and Britain could be easily pushed to war based on a failed naval arms limitation conference.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Plan_Red
It should be noted America had color coded plans for a war with almost every nation with an armed force. War Plan Red wasn't because of any assumed war with Britain, it was in case. Anglo-American relations were pretty solid after WW1. Their biggest perceived threat was Japan. War Plan Orange had the most contingencies.
Wouldn't the RN have felt the same way given the resources they put into the Singapore facilities?
As to inflicting crippling loses to the RN by 1941 I'm not certain how you get to that point without a fairly large amount of handwaving to generate the numbers to achieve that. Certainly you could up the losses and damage numbers but I think you would have to assume the same level of damage to whoever goes against them.
sharlin
Banned
For a simple way of doing it read this 'story'
https://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?t=234421
Disengage your belife fields.
https://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?t=234421
Disengage your belife fields.
Oh God that thread
I'm presuming that Enigma would like something that has the least amount of handwaving, and doesn't require the senior officers of the British forces to have lobotomies after drinking Lead paint.
Given that the KGV's were under-construction along with the Illustrious class if you have significant damage to the older ships by 1941 these might be accelerated in production to make up the loses in the fleet.
I think for this to work you would not only need to reduce the RN by a fairly large amount while at the same time degrading the ability for the UK yards to either make good the damage or replace them with new hulls.
Sounds like a complete Axis-wank to me.It must be the worst AH drivel I have ever had the misfortune to spend money on
That still leaves the Home and Mediterranean fleets mostly intact, because any attempts to attack them will mean operating a long way from friendly bases.
Deleted member 1487
War in the West (Axis Triumphant) by Brian Clarke destroys the RN in three easy steps with the PoD being the rise to emminence & then power of Reinhard Heydrich, who determines the Enigma code has been broken and uses it against the British.
Step1: Send secret missions to seize the Canary Islands, the Azores, Cape Verde Islands & Ascension Island from which U-boats & Condors will prey on British convoys.
Step 2: Without invading Greece, the Fallschrimjager seize Crete for 24 hours without anyone noticing in time and use it to forward base the Luftwaffe's naval strike aircraft as soon as the RN's Mediterranean Fleet (weakened by Italian mini-sub attacks in port) leave port to meet a sally by the Italian navy. Ambushed by U-boats, bombed by Stukas, the remnants are finished off by the Regia Marina.
Step 3: Having won the Battle of Britain (!?) the Luftwaffe & U-boats wait outside each major British naval base & sink the Home Fleet as it seeks to withdraw to Canada.
See - simple really
It must be the worst AH drivel I have ever had the misfortune to spend money on
Yeah, that's really bad. There is no way to totally eliminate the RN as a force by 1941, but it could be hurt much worse than IOTL.
1)The Germans need to figure out pre-war that their torpedoes aren't working, which would cause vast amounts of damage to the RN in 1939-1940. The Nelson, the fleet flag ship, was IOTL torpedoed 3 times by a Uboat while Churchill and most of the Admiralty were onboard, but all three did not detonate/connect because of various faults in the German pre-war torpedoes.
The Ark Royal should have been sunk too on September 14th 1939.
http://www.uboataces.com/articles-wooden-torpedoes.shtml
And just for the Norwegian Campaign:
2)If the Germans focused on building up their Uboat force pre-war instead of starting Plan Z in 1938, then they would have been formidable by 1940 and likely causing some unpleasant losses. Since Uboats took so long to make and there needed to be more investment in dock capacity, if the build up started pre-war the British were less likely to immediately react with new escort building, because (1) the Germans were still less than their treaty limit IOTL at the start of WW2, (2) the British overestimated the effectiveness of ASDIC and HK groups, and (3) historically the British did not start to build up their escorts when Hitler renounced the naval treaty with the British and expanded the Uboat force to a lower, though still threatening level.
3)Create a naval air arm worthy of the name prior to WW2 and give it to the navy, rather than leaving it as part of the Luftwaffe. Not only that, but have a air dropped torpedo operational in 1939, which probably means just licensing the Italian Fiume Whitehead, which was a proven design.
4)Wait to use the magnetic naval mines until there are over 1000 of them and the naval air arm is ready to launch a full effort against the British. IOTL they were used too early with an inexperienced air-mining force, which resulted in one being captured intact and the weapon being neutralized. Debute them at Dunkirk and watch the British be forced to abandon their army on the beaches after they lose several ships and cannot sweep the mines. Also install an anti-diffuse device in the mines, so they cannot be recovered easily, unlike OTL, where the first versions did not have such a device, which meant they were easily captured, disarmed, and studied.
These things together would help render the RN less dangerous and put it on the defensive, but would not neutralize it. Still the RN would be badly hurt and far less able to conduct operations.