Hi Fester and thanks for writing this. I'm only on page 52 and it has been quite an interesting read. However, I feel the need to offer some (hopefully constructive) criticism. Please don't take this too personally. I don't expect you to revise old parts of the story and it is your story to write however you want. Few things have been bothering me so I wanted to bring them up, perhaps they can be of use to you (or someone else!) in the future.
(1) Luftwaffe performance in both Norway and the West Campaign
LW seems to be performing very poorly compared to what historically happened and unless I missed something, the only difference is that the British Royal Navy Fleet Air Arm has replaced their bi-planes with the early Grumman Martlett. There hasn't been any mention of additional training for British or French pilots. I don't know whether this change regarding the Luftwaffe is something you intended from the start or if it is something that happened by accident as you were writing dramatic battle scenes in the air.
In the Norwegian campaign, you've repeatedly mentioned the Norwegian Gladiators. Historically the Luftforsvaret performed extremely poorly. This was of course due to the extremely limited military budget that the Norwegian government had allocated throughout most of the 1930s. The Norwegian Prime Minister and Foreign Minister were both pacifists. I find it very strange that they would have allowed British military personnel in the country before the war even under disguise but perhaps the politicians didn't know about that - it's not a big deal in any case. My point is that the Norwegians had only 7 working Gladiators on the day of the German invasions and six of those were lost on the same day. They shot down 1 Ju-52 and 3 Bf-110 planes. According to the pilot reports, the planes had issues with the guns not working and the windscreen freezing and their performance was poorly enough that they struggled even against the Bf-110s in dogfights. My source is http://surfcity.kund.dalnet.se/gladiator_norway.htm
Having a little bit of more warning regarding the German invasion would not have made a difference here.
The British for their part lost 112 planes total during the Norwegian campaign, the Norwegians lost almost every plane they had (which wasn't much) and Luftwaffe suffered either 90 (based on LW report) or as many as 240 (based on French historian Francois Kersaudy but I think he uses RAF claims and we know that those are extremely inflated). Truth is that German losses were probably similar to British ones or slightly higher. However, important point here is that a fair number of LW losses would have been to ground-fire when bombing RN ships and doing ground-support missions. In air battles, LW pilots clearly dominated their Norwegian and British counterparts, especially once Germans controlled local airfields and could bring in Bf-109s. Maybe the FAA Martlett makes a difference here.
Over France and the Benelux countries, I have the same unease. ADA was notoriously poorly organized and completely unprepared for the war. You've provided justification for their better performance through the plane imports from the US and while that certainly helps, it does not do anything about the poor organisation, tactics and pilot training. According to Murray Williamson's excellent book The Luftwaffe 1933-1945: Strategy for Defeat, the German AC losses for May-June 1940 were 1129 due to enemy action, 216 due to pilot errors, and 83 lost outside of operations for a total of 1428 which was 28% of total service AC that Luftwaffe had. This however includes losses from Norway but those were small as noted earlier so it doesn't change the big picture. For the same period, Allied losses were 931 for the RAF and 1274 for the ADA, total of 2205 planes - but this number does not include the small amount of planes that the Dutch and Belgians had - I don't have a good source for those. The numbers for Allied losses come from E.R Hooton's 2007 book Luftwaffe at War; Blitzkrieg in the West. He uses British and French archives, not German claims. That number does not include losses outside of operations at least for the British, probably not for the French either. So the numbers to compare are 1345 German losses versus 2205 Allied losses. That's a 1:1.64 ratio but again, losses to AAA distort the picture in the air.
Another thing to keep in mind is that whereas Luftwaffe pilots had on average 200 hours of training and many (if not most) had combat experience from Spain and Poland - which also meant that the LW pilots were utilizing tactics that were known to be working, the RAF pilots had on average 190 hours of training and the ADA pilots less than that. I don't have a source for French training hour numbers - US pilots had on average 150 hours before 1941 so the French number might be closer to that. But they didn't have combat experience at all and few tidbits heard through the grapevine from surviving Polish pilots wouldn't change much.
As I stated in my first paragraph, maybe this is just accidental when an author writes battle scenes and wants them to seem dramatic, but the impression I got up to this stage (page 52) is that LW is bleeding far worse in your timeline than they historically did, and the only justification for this is the small increase of modern American-built planes with the ADA and the FAA. Even by July, about 54% of the Fighter Command planes were Hurricanes, according to Kate Moore's Battle of Britain book and they often had trouble against LW Bf-109s. It's only the Spitfire that gives parity and perhaps even an edge to British pilots, hardware wise, against the Germans.
(2) Arras counter-attack against 7th Panzer Division
Very dramatic scene but it suffers from a misguided description of what would actually happen and what did happen in that battle. Note that I don't have anything against killing off Rommel, though having him getting bayoneted by a single soldier is overtly dramatic - Rommel was always accompanied by few staffers and radio operators. Having him be killed by a sniper or an mortar/artillery shell might have been more appropriate but that's nit-picking.
Having the 51st (Highland) Division supporting the British counter-attack is a good idea but it was an infantry formation. Certainly it's artillery regiments would have helped the British somewhat but they would not have been able to keep up with the tanks of the 4th Battalion of the RTR and 7th Battalion of the RTR once their advance got under way. Another thing overlooked was that the Germans never placed their heavy guns in the same defensive line with their infantry. I assume that the battle describes the Left Column as that was the element of the counter-attack that famously ran into the 88s. It's important to remember that while the British had about 74 tanks, only 16 were heavily-armoured and gun-armed Matilda IIs, the rest being Matilda Is with only machineguns. German battle doctrine would have the infantry ahead of the light PaK, and the heavier guns even further back than that. Rommel did not come up with this tactic in North-Africa, though his usage of it there is the most famous example of it, rather it was an organic evolution of German doctrine from WW1, when they first had to deal with Allied tanks. Arras was flat and plain enough that the German heavy guns could (and indeed historically did) use their extended range and took out tanks before they could bring their weapons to bear against the defenders. This was a regular problem for the British until they got sufficient numbers of Shermans with their 75mm guns with sufficiently long efficient ranges. Historically only 28 Matildas (out of 74) survived the day.
In my opinion, the scene would be more accurate if the tanks sacrificed themselves to enable the higher numbers of infantry to push forward through the German infantry and then the British infantry would crush the German gun line like a wave rolling over it. British infantry kept using the charging line attack from WW1 far too long into WW2. As it is, it's as if the presence of the 51st (which had no tanks) made it possible for the British armour to out-shoot the German guns. It's especially jarring because as late as 1944 Normandy, the British Army struggled to break through German gun lines and they had vastly more artillery and air support in North-Africa, Italy and Normandy than they did in Arras in 1940.
(3) Bodø Fallschirmjäger butchery
This is my biggest gripe so far. The failure of the surprise attack against Eben Emael is a fair divergence from what happened historically. Though I rolled my eyes when you wrote that the Belgian forts fought for a month before surrendering despite being targeted by repeated German air and artillery attacks, even by siege units - for comparison: Brest Fortress held out for seven days and is probably the closest comparison, ie a geographically small fortress out of supply and under constant attack. Sevastopol held out for a month under near-continuous assault but was repeatedly supplied via the Black Sea and was a vastly larger area with multiple fortresses. Corregidor fell in only 2 days though it had been under siege for a much longer period of course. But again, that's nitpicking.
The Bodø attack unfortunately comes across as heavy-handed deus ex machina. Especially if the LW and FJ already have had problems in Belgium and the Netherlands, why would they commit to such an risky attack? Norway is fairly slim at that point, the Germans could have easily enough flown via Swedish airspace and Sweden was not in any way capable of stopping such an action, and wouldn't even try. Even more eggregiously, the Luftwaffe does not wipe out opposition before sending in the transport planes. This is insanity and regardless of the mental state of Göring, no LW general officer would have allowed such a plan to proceed, and neither would Student or Dietl. Well, maybe Student is busy in the Netherlands and Dietl got killed in Narvik but the point stands. Luftwaffe enjoyed great success in its bombing operations in Norway. As Norwegian towns are small and the wooden buildings are built close together. Thus it's no surprise that even a small attack by ten or twelve bombers was enough to decimate half or more of a town in one pass. This happened at Voss, Steinkjer, Kristiansund, Åndalsnes, Bodø and Narvik. When Bodø was bombed on 27 May, the attack put the airfield out of action and destroyed two-thirds of the buildings in the town. There is absolutely no reason why LW would not do the same - with airfields near Trondheim available to them, sending in Bf-109s and Bf-110s to wipe out Allied planes is prudent and common sense. That would be followed by bombing attacks to suppress AAA, and only then would the Ju-52s come - and they would fly in from the East to maximize the drop time above Bodø itself as the town is on a west-east peninsula. There is no need for surprise like in earlier attacks. Even if that wasn't possible for some reason, the bay is narrow enough that German artillery south of the town would reach the town. The battle scenes before this attack are not clear on where exactly the front line is - there is a mention that guns were shuttled across the bay so perhaps the front line is too far south.
Perhaps your inspiration was the Battle of Dombås, where a German FJ company was dropped over a Norwegian battalion, that German air recon had missed due to low cloud coverage. In that battle, LW lost seven Ju-52s out of 15 used and the FJs suffered serious casualties in the drop. However, the decimated unit kept fighting for five days. That operation was meant to block a road and rail junction behind enemy lines and the FJs were not expected to meet any immediate resistance. In the situation you're describing, the Germans would be fully aware of the heavy resistance by the Allies and would plan accordingly. And before someone starts screaming about Crete, that was entirely different situation as there was no way for ground forces to reach an island in the middle of the eastern Mediterranean. At Bodø, the Germans are not under such limitations. They have multiple divisions landed in Norway, so even if the LW cannot neutralise the Bodø defenders, the whole paradrop is completely unnecessary.
To conclude, I again hope that you're not offended by this. It's just that combining these three bigger things plus some small bits, with the fact you're not using a German Point-of-View in any scene, makes it look like the Wehrmacht is running with an idiot ball after walking under a ladder and seeing a black cat cross the road while breaking a mirror, while the Allies routinely luck out in how the chips fall. Multiple Stukas lost bombing a WW1-era battlewagon, that is repeatedly hit and suffers a secondary magazine explosion and has fires raging for hours yet still manages to beach itself and salvage one battery to support the land battle? That's pretty extraordinary, yet lesser but similar lucky happenstances keep happening to the Allies but not to the Germans.
Thanks for reading and maybe my concerns were premature because I haven't read further yet, in which case my apologies for rambling like this.
(1) Luftwaffe performance in both Norway and the West Campaign
LW seems to be performing very poorly compared to what historically happened and unless I missed something, the only difference is that the British Royal Navy Fleet Air Arm has replaced their bi-planes with the early Grumman Martlett. There hasn't been any mention of additional training for British or French pilots. I don't know whether this change regarding the Luftwaffe is something you intended from the start or if it is something that happened by accident as you were writing dramatic battle scenes in the air.
In the Norwegian campaign, you've repeatedly mentioned the Norwegian Gladiators. Historically the Luftforsvaret performed extremely poorly. This was of course due to the extremely limited military budget that the Norwegian government had allocated throughout most of the 1930s. The Norwegian Prime Minister and Foreign Minister were both pacifists. I find it very strange that they would have allowed British military personnel in the country before the war even under disguise but perhaps the politicians didn't know about that - it's not a big deal in any case. My point is that the Norwegians had only 7 working Gladiators on the day of the German invasions and six of those were lost on the same day. They shot down 1 Ju-52 and 3 Bf-110 planes. According to the pilot reports, the planes had issues with the guns not working and the windscreen freezing and their performance was poorly enough that they struggled even against the Bf-110s in dogfights. My source is http://surfcity.kund.dalnet.se/gladiator_norway.htm
Having a little bit of more warning regarding the German invasion would not have made a difference here.
The British for their part lost 112 planes total during the Norwegian campaign, the Norwegians lost almost every plane they had (which wasn't much) and Luftwaffe suffered either 90 (based on LW report) or as many as 240 (based on French historian Francois Kersaudy but I think he uses RAF claims and we know that those are extremely inflated). Truth is that German losses were probably similar to British ones or slightly higher. However, important point here is that a fair number of LW losses would have been to ground-fire when bombing RN ships and doing ground-support missions. In air battles, LW pilots clearly dominated their Norwegian and British counterparts, especially once Germans controlled local airfields and could bring in Bf-109s. Maybe the FAA Martlett makes a difference here.
Over France and the Benelux countries, I have the same unease. ADA was notoriously poorly organized and completely unprepared for the war. You've provided justification for their better performance through the plane imports from the US and while that certainly helps, it does not do anything about the poor organisation, tactics and pilot training. According to Murray Williamson's excellent book The Luftwaffe 1933-1945: Strategy for Defeat, the German AC losses for May-June 1940 were 1129 due to enemy action, 216 due to pilot errors, and 83 lost outside of operations for a total of 1428 which was 28% of total service AC that Luftwaffe had. This however includes losses from Norway but those were small as noted earlier so it doesn't change the big picture. For the same period, Allied losses were 931 for the RAF and 1274 for the ADA, total of 2205 planes - but this number does not include the small amount of planes that the Dutch and Belgians had - I don't have a good source for those. The numbers for Allied losses come from E.R Hooton's 2007 book Luftwaffe at War; Blitzkrieg in the West. He uses British and French archives, not German claims. That number does not include losses outside of operations at least for the British, probably not for the French either. So the numbers to compare are 1345 German losses versus 2205 Allied losses. That's a 1:1.64 ratio but again, losses to AAA distort the picture in the air.
Another thing to keep in mind is that whereas Luftwaffe pilots had on average 200 hours of training and many (if not most) had combat experience from Spain and Poland - which also meant that the LW pilots were utilizing tactics that were known to be working, the RAF pilots had on average 190 hours of training and the ADA pilots less than that. I don't have a source for French training hour numbers - US pilots had on average 150 hours before 1941 so the French number might be closer to that. But they didn't have combat experience at all and few tidbits heard through the grapevine from surviving Polish pilots wouldn't change much.
As I stated in my first paragraph, maybe this is just accidental when an author writes battle scenes and wants them to seem dramatic, but the impression I got up to this stage (page 52) is that LW is bleeding far worse in your timeline than they historically did, and the only justification for this is the small increase of modern American-built planes with the ADA and the FAA. Even by July, about 54% of the Fighter Command planes were Hurricanes, according to Kate Moore's Battle of Britain book and they often had trouble against LW Bf-109s. It's only the Spitfire that gives parity and perhaps even an edge to British pilots, hardware wise, against the Germans.
(2) Arras counter-attack against 7th Panzer Division
Very dramatic scene but it suffers from a misguided description of what would actually happen and what did happen in that battle. Note that I don't have anything against killing off Rommel, though having him getting bayoneted by a single soldier is overtly dramatic - Rommel was always accompanied by few staffers and radio operators. Having him be killed by a sniper or an mortar/artillery shell might have been more appropriate but that's nit-picking.
Having the 51st (Highland) Division supporting the British counter-attack is a good idea but it was an infantry formation. Certainly it's artillery regiments would have helped the British somewhat but they would not have been able to keep up with the tanks of the 4th Battalion of the RTR and 7th Battalion of the RTR once their advance got under way. Another thing overlooked was that the Germans never placed their heavy guns in the same defensive line with their infantry. I assume that the battle describes the Left Column as that was the element of the counter-attack that famously ran into the 88s. It's important to remember that while the British had about 74 tanks, only 16 were heavily-armoured and gun-armed Matilda IIs, the rest being Matilda Is with only machineguns. German battle doctrine would have the infantry ahead of the light PaK, and the heavier guns even further back than that. Rommel did not come up with this tactic in North-Africa, though his usage of it there is the most famous example of it, rather it was an organic evolution of German doctrine from WW1, when they first had to deal with Allied tanks. Arras was flat and plain enough that the German heavy guns could (and indeed historically did) use their extended range and took out tanks before they could bring their weapons to bear against the defenders. This was a regular problem for the British until they got sufficient numbers of Shermans with their 75mm guns with sufficiently long efficient ranges. Historically only 28 Matildas (out of 74) survived the day.
In my opinion, the scene would be more accurate if the tanks sacrificed themselves to enable the higher numbers of infantry to push forward through the German infantry and then the British infantry would crush the German gun line like a wave rolling over it. British infantry kept using the charging line attack from WW1 far too long into WW2. As it is, it's as if the presence of the 51st (which had no tanks) made it possible for the British armour to out-shoot the German guns. It's especially jarring because as late as 1944 Normandy, the British Army struggled to break through German gun lines and they had vastly more artillery and air support in North-Africa, Italy and Normandy than they did in Arras in 1940.
(3) Bodø Fallschirmjäger butchery
This is my biggest gripe so far. The failure of the surprise attack against Eben Emael is a fair divergence from what happened historically. Though I rolled my eyes when you wrote that the Belgian forts fought for a month before surrendering despite being targeted by repeated German air and artillery attacks, even by siege units - for comparison: Brest Fortress held out for seven days and is probably the closest comparison, ie a geographically small fortress out of supply and under constant attack. Sevastopol held out for a month under near-continuous assault but was repeatedly supplied via the Black Sea and was a vastly larger area with multiple fortresses. Corregidor fell in only 2 days though it had been under siege for a much longer period of course. But again, that's nitpicking.
The Bodø attack unfortunately comes across as heavy-handed deus ex machina. Especially if the LW and FJ already have had problems in Belgium and the Netherlands, why would they commit to such an risky attack? Norway is fairly slim at that point, the Germans could have easily enough flown via Swedish airspace and Sweden was not in any way capable of stopping such an action, and wouldn't even try. Even more eggregiously, the Luftwaffe does not wipe out opposition before sending in the transport planes. This is insanity and regardless of the mental state of Göring, no LW general officer would have allowed such a plan to proceed, and neither would Student or Dietl. Well, maybe Student is busy in the Netherlands and Dietl got killed in Narvik but the point stands. Luftwaffe enjoyed great success in its bombing operations in Norway. As Norwegian towns are small and the wooden buildings are built close together. Thus it's no surprise that even a small attack by ten or twelve bombers was enough to decimate half or more of a town in one pass. This happened at Voss, Steinkjer, Kristiansund, Åndalsnes, Bodø and Narvik. When Bodø was bombed on 27 May, the attack put the airfield out of action and destroyed two-thirds of the buildings in the town. There is absolutely no reason why LW would not do the same - with airfields near Trondheim available to them, sending in Bf-109s and Bf-110s to wipe out Allied planes is prudent and common sense. That would be followed by bombing attacks to suppress AAA, and only then would the Ju-52s come - and they would fly in from the East to maximize the drop time above Bodø itself as the town is on a west-east peninsula. There is no need for surprise like in earlier attacks. Even if that wasn't possible for some reason, the bay is narrow enough that German artillery south of the town would reach the town. The battle scenes before this attack are not clear on where exactly the front line is - there is a mention that guns were shuttled across the bay so perhaps the front line is too far south.
Perhaps your inspiration was the Battle of Dombås, where a German FJ company was dropped over a Norwegian battalion, that German air recon had missed due to low cloud coverage. In that battle, LW lost seven Ju-52s out of 15 used and the FJs suffered serious casualties in the drop. However, the decimated unit kept fighting for five days. That operation was meant to block a road and rail junction behind enemy lines and the FJs were not expected to meet any immediate resistance. In the situation you're describing, the Germans would be fully aware of the heavy resistance by the Allies and would plan accordingly. And before someone starts screaming about Crete, that was entirely different situation as there was no way for ground forces to reach an island in the middle of the eastern Mediterranean. At Bodø, the Germans are not under such limitations. They have multiple divisions landed in Norway, so even if the LW cannot neutralise the Bodø defenders, the whole paradrop is completely unnecessary.
To conclude, I again hope that you're not offended by this. It's just that combining these three bigger things plus some small bits, with the fact you're not using a German Point-of-View in any scene, makes it look like the Wehrmacht is running with an idiot ball after walking under a ladder and seeing a black cat cross the road while breaking a mirror, while the Allies routinely luck out in how the chips fall. Multiple Stukas lost bombing a WW1-era battlewagon, that is repeatedly hit and suffers a secondary magazine explosion and has fires raging for hours yet still manages to beach itself and salvage one battery to support the land battle? That's pretty extraordinary, yet lesser but similar lucky happenstances keep happening to the Allies but not to the Germans.
Thanks for reading and maybe my concerns were premature because I haven't read further yet, in which case my apologies for rambling like this.