It's always worth looking at Bairoch, via…
[snip]
…the Peruvians and Chileans.
Best,
I'm afraid this doesn't strike me as an appropriate measure to take. Approximating results of wars by industrial capacity only works in a long total war where both sides have time to bring their full industrial potential to bear against the enemy. This is not an appropriate measure in this scenario.
And experience may be useful, but will it let the US Navy defeat a German naval force that vastly outnumbers them? I doubt it.
I agree entirely that Germany will almost certainly lose this war, but I don't agree with the reasons you've proposed for why.
5,000 holding Manhattan at any point after about 1830 is pure, unadultered fantasy. 5,000 men is a raid in force able to get in, destroy whatever is in reach, and get out again with a barely acceptable level of casualties.
And what the Germans were planning
was a raid, not a prolonged invasion to conquer and hold U.S. continental territory. Strawmen are fun, aren't they?
Thousands upon thousands of National Guard personnel aren't days away by train, they're hours away. New York is the center of a vast rail net that extends well into the Great Lakes region. Units from up and down the Hudson will be available for use on the ground within a day and as the days and weeks go by the area can be flooded with hundreds of thousands of soldiers if need be. Not all states had as effective and well-trained a National Guard organization as New York did, but training and equipment aren't going to let the Germans face down the escalating numbers of men the US is going to be able to bring to bear very quickly.
Now this is an entirely respectable and valid point, and it's why, unless the U.S. manages to be horrendously and bizarrely incompetent, the Germans are doomed.
And people may talk down about armed partisans but they would have the exact same effect in the US as they have had in every heavily armed society that has undergone occupation: To disrupt and disorganize enemy forces so they aren't going to be operating at 100% efficacy when the regular military arrives.
They would indeed be able to do that, as nobody disputes. What people including myself
are disputing is this absurd, ridiculous idea that American civilians are going to single-handedly throw out the Germans so quickly that American military forces won't have even arrived by the time American victory is achieved.
To those proponents of this idea (not
ManintheField, who did not propose this, but to those who did), my challenge remains unanswered:
If you want me to take this seriously, please do me the service of telling me one occasion in the twentieth century when a very large-scale surprise attack on a previously peaceful city was greeted by the civilians coming out en masse with weapons and attacking the invading army, rather than most of them trying to avoid the fighting and a very small number of hotheads trying to help their own army fight the invaders. And if you say "Yeah but those civilians weren't American civilians! America f*** yeah!" I'll lose any interest in continuing this discussion.
Research has shown that even in the case of violent crime being conducted very near them, people tend to do nothing. An invading army in a surprise attack—with shells and bullets flying in the air, the sound of shelling booming, houses burning, people screaming
et cetera—is much, much scarier than an individual violent criminal.
And the Germans are not going to want to go into full scale reprisal mode against partisans if they are really interested in a negotiated peace. More than a few dozen civilians killed (armed or not) and the US is going to say fuck your peace and go into full war footing very easily, not really being willing to give up until no German hull larger than a toy sail boat with a rubber band launcher installed remains afloat.
…Who was talking about Germany going into 'full scale reprisal mode' against partisans? No-one.
What I
was saying was that any American civilian who's probably never fired a gun in anger who, while panicked and terrified while the sound of shelling is in the air, shoots at a German soldier is likely to miss, be noticed by the sound of the gun and then be shot.
The truth is, this kind of operation is much more likely to start WWI a decade early than it is to be the kind of limited use of military force some junior staff officers were imagining, except this time Germany will be the unequivocal aggressor and the US will be 100% committed from the get go.
That would be true… if the German fleet got through to the United States. In truth, of course, the Germans would never have launched the operation, because they must have known that if they had done so the Grand Fleet would have had a perfect excuse to destroy the German dreadnoughts that some Britons had been so worried about, and Germany would be unable to do anything about it.