Beating a Dead Sea Mammal: How can a non-ASB Operation Sea Lion thread be created?

SsgtC

Banned
Put beautifully there SsgtC... absolutely spot on.

In a withdrawal situation there would be little or no resistance to a raid on Duxford therefore Duxford would have to be abandoned too as any units left there would be highly vulnerable.
Thank you. But I don't think they would abandon Duxford. It's at the very ragged edge of the 109's range. And any intercept launched from Duxford would force the 109s into combat well before they reached the target.

The RAF withdrawing North of the Thames doesn't really let the LW escort raids further. It just gives them the "quiet time" needed over the targets they can reach to ensure accuracy. So the effectiveness of the strikes will go up (not having fighters cutting your formation to pieces tends to do that), but they won't really be able to expand the area of their strikes. Not until they get a proper escort fighter.
 
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Put beautifully there SsgtC... absolutely spot on.

In a withdrawal situation there would be little or no resistance to a raid on Duxford therefore Duxford would have to be abandoned too as any units left there would be highly vulnerable.

Thank you. But I don't think they would abandon Duxford. It's at the very ragged edge of the 109's range. And any intercept launched from Duxfordb would force the 109s into combat well before they reached the target.

The RAF withdrawing North of the Thames doesn't really let the LW escort raids further. It just gives them the "quiet time" needed over the targets they can reach to ensure accuracy. So the effectiveness of the strikes will go up (not having fighters cutting your formation to pieces tends to do that), but they won't really be able to expand the area of their strikes. Not until they get a proper escort fighter.

Exactly - the idea of withdrawal isn't for the RAF to stop contesting any and all LW incursions. That makes no sense at all, and makes me wonder if you're being a bit disingenous.
 
How much steel will go from building Panzers to building landing craft? Also, have fun getting all your multi-engine pilot instructors killed when their JU52s are bounced by the RAF

See Tooze, Chapter 13, "Preparing for Two Wars at Once". The industrial requirements for Barbarossa, to be completed by May 1941, were set in something called Ruestungsprogramm B in which exports were increased but the number of army divisions also increased from 143 to 180. Between the fall of France and the invasion of the USSR, the German army steel ration fell by 1/3rd, to cover the boost in export production, even as its striking power increased. German army manpower at the end of the French campaign was 5.7 million, which increased to 7.3 million by summer of 1941. Ammunition production was 36% of the German army's steel budget, falling to 20% by summer 1941 due to the overstock caused by the unexpected suddenness of the French campaign. The German army steel ration for the 3rd quarter of 1940 was 305,000 tons of a total production of 1,885,000 tons of steel. Ammunition production was roughly 90,000 tons of the 305,000 tons, falling to roughly 70,000 tons in the second quarter of 1941 (20% of army steel allocation).

Total requirement for a landing craft program for summer 1941 might be something like 100,000 tons of steel, with at least another 100,000 tons for the second half of the year. Ammunition production between July 1940 and June 1941 was roughly 318,000 tons of steel. So the answer to your question generally is that ammunition production would have to fall, the armaments to expand to 180 divisions would need to scale back, while labour inputs would need to increase steel production. Without Barbarossa then army manpower, instead of rising to 7.3 million for Russia, might fall to something around 4.5 million. That's a net swing of 2.8 million workers demobilized and entering the work force, which should allow steel production - and industrial production in general - to increase.

None of this mattered for 1940, of course - industry could not deliver anything but an ad hoc solution that year.
 
Exactly - the idea of withdrawal isn't for the RAF to stop contesting any and all LW incursions. That makes no sense at all, and makes me wonder if you're being a bit disingenous.
I asked this question earlier and the only real answer I got was that a withdrawal would be beyond the range of the Bf109 to enable Fighter Command to refit, regroup and retrain. So the assumption I took from it was that for most a withdrawal would mean effectively leaving the majority of south eastern airspace would be uncontested. Although I'm well aware that this is just one option... personally I don't think any kind of withdrawal is an option but I do like to hear others opinions and explore what they mean.
 

SsgtC

Banned
I asked this question earlier and the only real answer I got was that a withdrawal would be beyond the range of the Bf109 to enable Fighter Command to refit, regroup and retrain. So the assumption I took from it was that for most a withdrawal would mean effectively leaving the majority of south eastern airspace would be uncontested. Although I'm well aware that this is just one option... personally I don't think any kind of withdrawal is an option but I do like to hear others opinions and explore what they mean.
Even if the RAF withdrew, they could still contest the southern airspace. Unlike the LW, the RAF didn't have to worry nearly as much about running out of fuel. If the RAF withdrew, while the southern airfields would be largely abandoned, there would still likely be stocks of fuel at them watched over by a caretaker crew. Any Spitfire or Hurricane that ran dry could land at one of these fields and get enough fuel to get back to base. The LW can't do that. If they run dry before home, they end up in the Channel.

For the RAF, while a withdrawal did mean a chance to refit and retrain, it mainly meant a chance to do repairs to aircraft and let the pilots sleep undisturbed. No worries about getting straffed or bombed. It doesn't mean that they withdraw from the skies.
 
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Even if the RAF withdrew, they could still contest the southern airspace. Unlike the LW, the RAF didn't have to worry nearly as much about running out of fuel. If the RAF withdrew, while the southern airfields would be largely abandoned, there would still likely be stocks of fuel at them watched over by a caretaker crew. Any Spitfire or Hurricane that ran dry could land at one of these fields and get enough fuel to get back to base. The LW can't do that. If they run dry before home, they end up in the Channel.

For the RAF, while a withdrawal did mean a chance to refit and retrain, it mainly meant a chance to do repairs to aircraft and let the pills sleep undisturbed. No worries about getting straffed or bombed. It doesn't mean that they withdraw from the skies.
Okay... good take on it... You've now got a whole heap of emergency landing grounds, not only that but you can put in place mobile repair crews that can run around the south east doing minor repairs and patch jobs to get damaged aircraft back to base.

Any ideas how far back you'd withdraw?
 

SsgtC

Banned
Okay... good take on it... You've now got a whole heap of emergency landing grounds, not only that but you can put in place mobile repair crews that can run around the south east doing minor repairs and patch jobs to get damaged aircraft back to base.

Any ideas how far back you'd withdraw?
No further than Duxford. Yeah, it's technically in range of the 109s, but the odds of them ever reaching it are miniscule. That still let's the RAF intercept strikes all over southern England (not as effectively obviously, but better than nothing). Anything beyond that and they start to lose the ability to provide even minimal air coverage over parts of the country.
 
No further than Duxford. Yeah, it's technically in range of the 109s, but the odds of them ever reaching it are miniscule. That still let's the RAF intercept strikes all over southern England (not as effectively obviously, but better than nothing). Anything beyond that and they start to lose the ability to provide even minimal air coverage over parts of the country.

Establish a AAA kill zone and contest the gray area to limits of radar coverage. (RTL what the British did in some cases.)
 

Tooze's primary thesis was that Germany never had the capacity to tackle the Anglo-Americans, let alone with the Soviets heaped on top. He dismissed Sealion as an operation, he did not look at the industrial implications of Sealion as a strategy, and did not attempt an opinion on what Ruestungsprogramm B might have looked like if the game was not Barbarossa. The poster asked a question on how many "tanks" landing craft would cause. This is a common misperception, that tank production constituted a large part of German steel usage.
 
Tooze's primary thesis was that Germany never had the capacity to tackle the Anglo-Americans, let alone with the Soviets heaped on top. He dismissed Sealion as an operation, he did not look at the industrial implications of Sealion as a strategy, and did not attempt an opinion on what Ruestungsprogramm B might have looked like if the game was not Barbarossa. The poster asked a question on how many "tanks" landing craft would cause. This is a common misperception, that tank production constituted a large part of German steel usage.

Nope. Read the cite and understand it. The Guardian reviewer got it. You should have been able to as well. Sea Lion was a BLUFF.
 
Ah, that makes sense - you've never actually read Tooze and are relying on a book review.

As I just said, Tooze's position (pg 397-398) on Sealion the operation was dismissive, while Sealion as a strategy was not discussed beyond the general caveat that it was not feasible that German industry could assemble the air and naval forces to dominate the Channel. He goes into great detail about the industrial program for Barbarossa after the fall of France, (from which we can make some pretty general conclusions about an industrial program for the war without Barbarossa), but his quick analysis of a non-Barbarossa hypothesis is left briefly to 424-425. The conclusion on that is it - meaning holding on the defensive and leaving Stalin be - was probably the best German option but that the resources of the Anglo-Americans would eventually overcome the Luftwaffe.
 
Nope. It appears you have never read that odd character, yourself. His economic argument was that Hitler oriented on Russia as a resource base because of his America mania (that book) and never intended Sealion at all, because he knew he, Hitler, lacked the financial resources and industrial base to attempt it. Quite a sound analysis, though his, Tooze's, conclusions in other areas (the air war) are quite strange if not myopic and quite ill-informed. Sort of like some of the erroneous assertions made here. (^^^^).
 
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No further than Duxford. Yeah, it's technically in range of the 109s, but the odds of them ever reaching it are miniscule. That still let's the RAF intercept strikes all over southern England (not as effectively obviously, but better than nothing). Anything beyond that and they start to lose the ability to provide even minimal air coverage over parts of the country.
Okay, here are a couple of limitations with the Dowding system that might affect things.

Firstly there was a limit to the number of squadrons that could be controlled by each sector due to technical issues with radio frequencies. That limit was four, so with 11 Groups seven sectors there would be a limit of 28 squadrons but in reality the number of squadrons never went above twenty three (from memory). Add to this another three from 10 Group and another three from 12 Group and you have 29 squadrons protecting the south east and London at the height of the battle. You can abandon a couple of sectors leaving you with the ability to more or less carry on the same level of protection. Any more than this and the defence is being degraded quite rapidly. Abandon three and you're down to 24 squadrons, abandon four and you're down to 20 squadrons and so on. Setting up new sector operations rooms can take weeks, there was a complex mass of 500 or so phone lines to install for starters.

The second constraint was the range of the HF radio sets which was only 40-60 miles... so from Duxford you can control fighters to as far as the southern portion of London out to the Thames Estuary so there is going to be far more reliance on patrol lines. As it is in OTL only one third of RAF fighter sorties were successfully vectored to make contact with the enemy, this figure will drop the more patrol lines are used.
 
I can safely say with all of the civil discussion that the unnameable mammal is ASB.

Even if Germany got past the RAF and RN, the beaches can be shelled with chemical weapons. Alan Brooke in his diary mentioned that he "had every intention of using sprayed mustard gas on the beaches" should Adolf order his armies to embark upon sea mammal adventures. The British manufactured mustard, chlorine, lewsite, phosgene and Paris Green and stored them at airfields and depots for use on the beaches. They can use chemical weapons to decimate invading forces before an irate Hitler orders retaliatory attacks.

Keep in mind, however, in an alternate TL where the invasion of France resulted in a stalemate, people may say that the Germans could never have defeated France. IOTL they did with a combination of superior tactics and dumb luck. Unfortunately this argument cannot be applied with a successful invasion of Britain.
 
Nope. It appears you have never read that odd character, yourself. His economic argument was that Hitler oriented on Russia as a resource base because of his America mania (that book) and never intended Sealion at all...

Next time you want to convince somebody you've read a book try citing from the book itself rather than from some random book review.

Tooze spends almost no time whatever on Sealion. We're literally talking a paragraph or two. The index doesn't even have "Sealion" in it. Tooze's economic argument about the purpose of Barbarossa was that it was intended for war against the United States and Britain. The chapter I cited from earlier, as I said at the time, was called "Preparing for Two Wars at Once". The first being against Russia, the second against the United States. Tooze's verdict on the Barbarossa strategy, I seem to recall, was that it was doomed to failure and could never deliver as intended because Germany did not have the resources available to exploit the Western European economies the 1940 campaign had captured.

In terms of steel production, (ie, the issue you are attempting to distract from), assuming Barbarossa was off the table there was room for a landing craft production scheme, assuming a target date of something like May 1941. The big cost to Barbarossa was in the expansion of the army to 180 divisions and large scale re-equipping. Tooze does not offer an opinion on the amount of labor that might have been freed up with a demobilization of, say, a third or half the army, but it would have been in the millions.
 
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Even if Germany got past the RAF and RN, the beaches can be shelled with chemical weapons. Alan Brooke in his diary mentioned that he "had every intention of using sprayed mustard gas on the beaches" should Adolf order his armies to embark upon sea mammal adventures. The British manufactured mustard, chlorine, lewsite, phosgene and Paris Green and stored them at airfields and depots for use on the beaches. They can use chemical weapons to decimate invading forces before an irate Hitler orders retaliatory attacks.

In your opinion, would the introduction of chemical weapons favor the Luftwaffe or the RAF?
 
You're forgetting that after FDR died Britain lost all access to the Project - including the stuff they'd done! That, and there was uncertainty initially about how permanent their exclusion from Manhatten was going to be (Attlee wrote a few letters to Truman saying "We control the most deadly etc" as per the original Quebec terms, rather than you control). Therefore it was only the start of 1947 that Britain released they were shut out for good, couldn't even have their own research back (!) and had to start from scratch. Even then, Attlee managed to get Truman back on side by 1949 but he wasn't able to convince the atomic establishment to sign off on letting Britain back in.

Doing that, at the same time as completely rebuilding a war devestated economy, the sterling crisis, Indian independence etc was pretty difficult, whereas the focus during the war would have been solely on getting the thing complete.

Early British nuclear reactors were based on American designs. Detailed and voluminous technical nuclear weapons data (stolen documents) was supplied to the Soviets by Klaus Fuchs, the same person who gave the British information as well. Fuchs stole the designs to Fat Man. The Soviet bomb was an exact copy of the Fat Man design. The same man that helped the Chinese build theirs.

Fuchs gave Gold technical information in January 1945 that was acquired only after two years of experimentation at a cost of $400 million.

Although, even without Fuchs, the British scientists had technical information in their own heads from working on the project. And they had their notes. "Tuck's Bible" by James Tuck, for example.

No, I am afraid you are wrong, the British did not leave the Manhattan project empty handed.

And budget isn't everything. Lack of scientists, that also makes a difference. And you have no evidence the British weren't trying as hard as they could post-war to get the bomb.

Operational by 1953 - just the bombers capable of carrying the thing weren't ready til '56!. I know it looks like I'm splitting hairs but if we're talking about the bomb itself, rather than the ability to deploy, it's 1953. The fission device itself was tested in 1952, and produced a higher yield than Fat Man.

Very well. Yet that goes further to prove that 1950 (if not later) is the earliest that the British could have hoped for the bomb itself to be ready against Germany, as it adds an extra year before the bomb is really ready to be used.
 
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