Mistakes during WWII

IIRC (and I may be off, bear with me I'm tired and have been drinking rye and coke) Dowding was asked of Churchill the status of his reserves to which he replied "we have none"

You do remember wrongly.

Churchill visited Uxbridge, not Bentley Priory, on the 16th. IOW, he visited the HQ of #11 Group, not the HQ of Fighter Command. He talked with Park, not with Dowding. There he saw that in the late afternoon, at a time when new hostile plots were moved on the map, #11 Group had no ready reserve.

And he was deeply impressed. He later told his aide, Gen. Ismay, that he had "never been so moved". Ismay himself recorded that seeing that situation, he felt "sick with fear".

You may have conflated this with Churchill's account of an answer by Gamelin, who, according to Churchill, did say "aucune", when asked, a few weeks before, about _ground troops_ reserves.

But neither Ismay nor Churchill understood the whole situation, and plenty of other people have misrepresented it based on their feelings.

For starters, while #11 Group was certainly the front line, it did not control the fighter Squadrons of the other three Groups, so the remark about "no reserves" never applied to Fighter Command as a whole. Units could be moved to #11 Group from the others; later in the battle, #12 Group's Squadrons repeatedly took off in order to cover #11 Group's bases while the latter's units were engaged.

There's more. Park had no _ready_ reserves _at that moment_. Neither Ismay nor Churchill could know how many Squadrons were being refueled and rearmed in that very minute, and be ready to take off again for a second or third sortie in a few minutes more. Park could and did know that.

Park certainly was operating with a narrow margin on that day. Considering how he managed the battle and how seldom was he taken by surprise, we can say that it's highly unlikely it would have happened on that day, at the end of the afternoon by the way.

It is not entirely outlandish to suppose that Park may have not explained Churchill that the situation was not as dire as Churchill seemed to believe it was. After all, what do all commanders want for their commands? More troops. Reinforcements.

Indeed, the air operations on that day were not among the most significant in the battle. The Germans managed to score a couple of good hits on air bases – but both had nothing to do with a lack of reserves and indeed did not take place at the time we're discussing. OTOH, on the day before the Germans had carried out a great effort – and the loss rate had been 2.3:1 in favor of the RAF, and two days later it would be 2:1 in favor of the RAF.
 
OK,

Anything unlikely?

Yes, plenty.

Codes. It's not as if the Germans did not keep upgrading their codes and coding procedures. And the Allies did not just break Enigma once and for all before the war; they kept breaking it, in its various versions and increasingly more secure procedures, throughout the war.

Poland. You'd need to explain how a better military outcome is achieved with the actual forces at hand. The Poles aren't going to surrender. The Quisling Polish government, assuming it is possible to put one together, will have roughly the same reputation as the actual Quisling.

Economy. Contrarily to what you seem to think, Germany was already producing as much as it practically could. The idea that it would only take a political decision to achieve a greater "war footing" comes from Speer's boasts and myths.

Battle of Britain. Read the threads about it. In short, what you propose ain't going to happen. Just to mention one detail, how are the Germans going to destroy the RAF if it withdraws to the Midlands? Which answers your other point about the Germans somehow keeping the RAF destroyed.

The Med. Way too many reality-check objections to list them.

Generally speaking, keep in mind that WWII is a well-trodden path in this forum. This is why something of the above might sound dismissive; the fact is that it's always the same old story. You'd do well to read what hundreds of other posters have said in thousands of other threads containing tens of thousands of posts, before posting what you believe is a new idea.

 
Things were actually pretty bleak and touch and go for the RAF at the height of the BoB, check your sources you'll see what I mean.

I've checked my sources about the Battle of Britain and I disagree. At some point during the Battle, some of the more experienced Squadrons in the frontline #11 Group had pretty much tired pilots. That's more or less all. That the Luftwaffe came close to defeating the RAF is a myth.
 
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