E Boats for Sealion
- Thread starter Alan
- Start date
McPherson
Banned
If he had put up his giant death mirror into orbit, he could make his own ice age.
The Sun Gun: The Nazi Plan to Build an Orbital Death Ray ...
That's the parts I'm interested in.
Schenk notes in his book how many of the ideas the Germans had (and can't use or build), were the same solutions the Allies did and used.
Where? In any official record of the event, where does it say that? Personally I've never seen it stated but willing to view anything that does and I'll gladly be educated if I've missed something.
Yes they did, they deliberately held back anything larger than a patrol boat/MTB from attacking the 1st wave/crossing. Despite the fact that historical deployment of the RN in Sep40 has far more within striking distance of the invasion fleet
There is a reason why the wargames was held at Sandhurst.
So unless you can think of a compelling reason why in real life the RN wold let an invasion fleet land with only a few MTB contesting it while the rest sat it out, I'm all ears.
Do you have specific evidence that supports the collective assumption that the Daily Telegraph wargame held at Sandhurst unrealistically allowed the first wave to land unapposed?
Just had a look at Richard Cox's "Operation Sealion" write up of the wargame & it starts with the German forces arriving at the correct beaches at the correct time, which is more than the Allies managed at Normandy, with what seems to be total surprise on the British side then proceeds with the ground & airborne operations.
Yes the fact they had RN just sat there letting it happen barring a handful of MTBs in the area and only decided to interdict the following waves despite no real change in situation and the fact they could easily have interdicted the first wave if they had chosen to.
Now I'm sorry that is not the same as one of the planners of the wargame signing something in his own blood, but historical evidence is often not like that and at some point you have to take reasonable view of things rather than just playing devil's advocate for a dead horse beyond the point of reasonable return..
so I ask again can you think of a compelling reason why in real life the RN wold let an invasion fleet land with only a few MTB contesting it while the rest sat it out?
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Quite, and while I can see why if you were determined to prove the Sealion naysayers wrong that might lead one to exclaim "aha J'Accuse"
The simple explanation is not that the Germans managed to make everything go 100% perfectly well with their bathtub invasion fleet, a host of other crippling disadvantages and all while the RN forget it's primary task for hundreds of years and just sits there. It's that the wargame was designed to look at what happens if a lot of Germans got shore and then take it from there.
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but the Panzers don't start in the cold.
Lots of dump trucks and fill in the ditch.
Armoured Polar Bears.
Haven't you read Phillip Pullman's series of books about SeaLion called "His Dark Materials" everyone thinks it's about a girl called Lyra but that's just meta fiction.
The poster whom I was replying to described scorched earth, which is why I referenced operation Alberich, people do not do Alberich on their own territory, even Nazis and Stalinists; moving stuff out of the way, such as Soviet shipment of factories east of the Urals yes, burning farms and poisoning wells, no
No army plans to give booty to the enemy
The British army didn't plan or intend to leave the kit and support infrastructure of 12 divisions for the Germans to feast upon in France in 1940
The British army didn't plan or intend to leave an entire corps worth of fuel depots behind in Greece in April 1941, which the Germans captured in tact, and a division and a half worth of POWs either
They didn't plan to leave all the booty that Rommel took from them the first 18 months of the North African campaign (except maybe the El Adem thing at Gazala which was inexplicable incompetence)
Their planning wasn't even wise enough to transfer all the Luftwaffe POW's the French where holding before they asked for the armistice, returning over 400 crew members to the Luftwaffe who could have been shipped back to Britain and taken off the board (which would have significantly delayed the BOB and diluted the LW pilot pool, rendering the battle far easier and likely shorter)
Keeping in mind that I reject every sealion scenario with any POD after 1935 as being 10,000 percent impossible, I would also just as firmly reject any notion that the British Army of July 1940-October 1940 is the one British army that wouldn't leave booty behind if defeated in battle, even though in the battles before and after with the same leadership structure... they left booty behind, I don't let false nostalgia or victors history blind to me to what was... the dad's army/home guard would not have done anything more against regular army field divisions that Hitler's Volksgrenadier divisions or Stalin's militia divisions
Part of the plan for Sealion involved the Germans gathering together the invasion fleet off Calais over a period of three days. Yes, Calais, what you can see from standing on a cliff top with a pair of binoculars. I don't think they'd get the advantage of surprise.
As for the fuel situation once ashore, the Petroleum Warfare Department had already made sure they'd be plenty of petrol waiting for them once they got ashore and started to push inland.
Speaking of those inventive chaps at the PWD, during summer 1940 they were working on Operation Lucid. The plan was to load up old tankers with oil, petrol and explosives and then sail them into the invasion ports. Given that the plan involved each ship carrying a thousand tons of fuel it would have been quite spectacular had they worked out the practicalities.
As for the fuel situation once ashore, the Petroleum Warfare Department had already made sure they'd be plenty of petrol waiting for them once they got ashore and started to push inland.
Speaking of those inventive chaps at the PWD, during summer 1940 they were working on Operation Lucid. The plan was to load up old tankers with oil, petrol and explosives and then sail them into the invasion ports. Given that the plan involved each ship carrying a thousand tons of fuel it would have been quite spectacular had they worked out the practicalities.
Churchill and some of his chronies where prone to delve into imaginative but wholly impractical plans (which thankfully adults talked him out of), MTB's and destroyers could just sail into the ports and shoot the barges at point blank range because the ports where undefended by proper minefields and coastal artillery; the big daddy coastal artillery wasn't in place till late september; and afaik never actually damaged a war ship... the entire war; I am not aware of serious defensive minefields starting to be deployed around the ports until November 1943 when Rommel started building the atlantic wall
"Those four weeks were a bit hairy because the tanker was full up with fuel oil when it came to us and it was primed and ready to explode and there were air raids at night. When you're in a tanker, sitting on all this explosive material and the Germans are coming over and dropping bombs, it's not very ... shall I say 'sleep inspiring' experience."
Ironically considering the wider topic of sealion while they got as far as setting out and attempting it they abandoned the missions over several nights for several reasons:
1). the not very sea worthy ships getting into difficulty in the channel
2). unexpected weather changes in the Channel
3). not wanting to waste the element of surprise when only a partial force could make it to the target
4). the scattering effects of mines on larger convoys that included not very seaworthy vessels
hmmm...
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Where's your sense of adventure? Actually, reading up on this they twice tried to carry it out but called it off both times, on one occasion one of the ships was only 7nm from Boulogne. The plan was basically drop most of the crew off early and the last four or five would fix the steering and jump ship into speedboats, very generously provided by the RN.