The artic convoys were beefed up with AAA and the guns were manned not by "my Grampa" but by men like his brother (my Great Uncle) who was seconded from 5th AA Division who completed his war landing with the 11th Armoured (D+7 Epsom, Goodwood, Bluecoat, Market Garden and liberating Bergen-Belsen).
This part is good information, for which I am glad and pleased to have, as without you post I likely would never have known it. It is also relevent to this thread, and therefore both on topic and appreciated. Thank you.
This other part I will only respond to once.
I come here, to the alternatehistory.com forums as a hobby, and strictly for entertainment purposes. I don't generally make it a habit to deliberately insult, nor provoke, my fellow forum community members.
So for this part, let me start off by saying, if I have offended, then I hereby and publicly appologise for any and all offense taken.
I find your assertion quite insulting on two levels:
Allow me to explain. First, this was not intended as an insult, nor an assertion of any kind. It was in fact a two part joke. Back in the day, while serving in the US army of occupation of Berlin, I often had occasion to play a game with my comrades in arms called 'axis and allies'. On numerous occasions, a player would engage a sole enemy transport (that has but 1 chance in 6 of scoring a hit), with their bomber (which has a 1-4 chance of scoring a hit), and not only fail to hit the transport, but getting shot down by it. The simple math odds of that are something like 18:1, but it happened often enough in our games, that the standing joke went something like, "Grandma, with her coke-bottle spectacles, once again demonstrates here superior marksmenship by single handedly wiping out the entire enemy bomber squadron with antique deck gun".
The second part, was a Star Trek joke, based upon the scene where (IIRC Christopher Loyd, playing the Klingon commander), orders his gunner to aim for the federation ships engines, with the goal of capturing the ship. The gunner fires on the federation ship, but utterly destroys it, and exclaims (just before being shot by his commander) "Lucky shot, sir"!
Hence, while posting a thread about an alternate Germany, that takes a serious look at what they can realistically do to defeat the UK by building a purpose built "ship hunting" naval aviation force, and reading a response that seems to be implying that a lone British merchantman (even with 11 AA guns), is both going to shrug off the damage from a 5 plane attack, while at the same time infilcting serious losses upon such a force, well.
Firstly this type of German/Nazi/Not-the-Nazis-but-do-as-well timeline dismisses any form of intelligent response from those ranged against your superior warrior race.
A couple things about this part of your post. First, where in the thread do I endorce Nazism? So where, therefore, do I deserve to get slandered by the bolded portion? Second, if you are offended by threads that posit a Germany that is not as badly run as OTL Nazi germany was run, without some form of 'better' French and UK counter, perhaps avoiding those threads (and then being offended all over again), might be a better way to go? IIUC, OTL Nazi Germany beating France was a fluke, not some stroke of genius on the part of Germany, as OTL they didn't have any plans nor forces ready to take the war to the UK.
Secondly, you ignore the likelihood of people reading your witticisms who actually know or knew and were related to those who fought in these campaigns.
This is a fair point, I feel, but I have to respond with an american bit of slang. I really had no idea that folks reading this thread would get
"Bent out of shape" over my previous post.
Once again, I apologise for any offense given.