current law of the sea still has a legal injunction against undeclared shoot on sight and sink merchant ships in war
The operative law at the time was, merchants acting as
de facto auxiliaries were exempt from the protections. Since Brit merchies were ordered to report sub sightings, they were exempt. Also, most of them were armed, the other way to make yourself exempt... Convoys, of course, made merchants fair game, even if they were escorted by "neutral" nations, because of the
naval escort--which also, AIUI, made the escorts fair game, too. (The Neutrality Patrol was selling bullshit, but nobody who actually understood the issue would be buying it.)
You need to conduct the analysis before you know the fate of France and Norway.
Actually, you don't. The numbers don't change. What changes is what it takes to achieve them. The fall of France will make it easier. Norway's merchant fleet falling into British hands, harder. Since neither can be predicted, it will obviously have to be dealt with, as it was OTL, "on the fly".
Don't forget, it shouldn't take the destruction of the entire British merchant fleet to achieve victory in the BotA, either. The U.S. sank about two-thirds the available tonnage.
Well 4 patrols with 1 x 3000 tonne freighter sunk per patrol x 500 boats
Let's be clear. It's not "500 boats". It's 500
patrols. 500 boats will make more than 500 patrols in a year; it's going to be more like 6 or 8 patrols/boat/year (maybe as few as 4), or (at the OTL rate) about 25000 tons/boat/year (times the sustained force on station). Given U-boats are more effective, it's likely not to be that low, either. Recall, it took the Pacific Fleet Sub Force eight torpedoes to sink a ship, & that was with the lousy Mark XIVs. The Germans shouldn't need anything like so many--& if we're giving them radar firecontrol, fewer still. Is two/ship too good a score? So seven ships
per successful patrol? Which brings the sustained force down from 85 to more like 20... Split the difference & call it 40?
the 1 year one has to achieve stalemate.
One? More like three, isn't it? 1940, 1941, & 1942. Or, allowing British ASW ramps up radically (& that presumes
BdU does nothing in response, which is pretty absurd), 1940 & 1941.
How badly can the improved
BdU hurt the Brits in even two years?
And I'm going to keep asking until I get an answer: what about crippling the British economy by sinking every tanker
BdU can find? That's not a 20 million ton project, & at 25000 tons/boat/patrol, it ain't gonna take 3 years, neither. As noted above, it's likely to be a lot more than 25000 tons/boat/patrol...
Force the RAF to fight OVER WATER and splash them 3 to 2 as did happen in the BoB and run them out of pilots. Subs can help here, but it is a naval air war, with anti-ship attacks and mining the harbor approaches as the heart of the air campaign. Use the naval geography for instead of against Germany. 90 days to build a plane, 180 days to train an air crew. (9 months to build a U-boat and 1 year to train a crew.). The Germans have to win quickly or they lose the whole set, match and game.
This I entirely agree with.
Johnson? I have no idea why he lost control of his Defense Department and let lunatics loose to run it for four and a half disastrous years. I honestly still do not see how it happened.
I can't, either, but he appeared to think he could treat the war like a political campaign & reason with Ho & the DRV as "good Christians"...
How he came to that delusion, IDK.