Germany Lost the War... So What?

"Keith Willshaw" wrote in message ...
"robert arndt" wrote in message
om...
"Keith Willshaw" wrote in message
...
"robert arndt" wrote in message
m...
The US postwar history:


I could only wish that the political decision to change direction
eastward would have never come and Sea Lion would have happened. What
would have Britain defended itself with then- the Home Guard with
pitch forks and shotguns? You should thank God a lone German bomber
ditched its bombs on London and saved your nation. Germany could have
kept fighting and by the winter of 1940 you would have ran out of
pilots and planes- had the Germans not diverted to civilian targets
like London.


You really are ignorant of the situation in 1940 arent you.

The simple reality is that by the end of August 1940 the RAF were STRONGER
than at the beginning of the BOB. Quite simply they were building aircraft
and training pilots faster than the luftwaffe and more than replacing their
losses. Dowdings idea of readiness meant that each squadron should have
15 operational arcraft and twice that number of pilots. There were aircraft
to spare and while the pilot situation was tighter there were still around
20 piots per squadron

Conversely when Milch surveyed the Luftwaffe front line units at the
same time he found that most Luftwaffe units were between 25 and 30%
under strength. It was the Luftwaffe that was losing the battle of
attrition.
The Ju-87's had already been withdrawn and the Me-110's were now
having to be escorted by 109's

As for Sealion that would have been one of the biggest disasters
of German arms

Setting aside the fact that Britain had 13 combat ready divisions
available in the SE of England there's the little matter of the
Royal Navy. The Kriegsmarine could field 1 BB, 1 CA and 10 Destroyers
The RN had available 5 BB's , 11 Cruisers and 76 Destroyers.

Then of course the RAF has several hundred bomber
tasked with repelling the invasion ready for action

The Invasion fleet consisted of Rhine barges towed at 4 knots
that would have taken 30 hours to make the crossing and would
sink in anything much more than flat calm. They of course had no
LCT's so there chosen method of moving heavy weapons
was to blow off the bows of the barge with HE.

Meanwhile the defences of the target chose, Dover , consisted
of heavy coastal artillery (14",9.2" 8" and 6" guns) augmented by
Army artillery units firing from gun pits behind the town and
in and around it were 2 divisions of the Territorial army,
1 Indian Brigade, 1 New Zealan Division, 1 Armoured division
equipped with Matilda II tanks that were impervious to anything
short of an 88, 1 Canadian division and a further armoured brigde

I had a brother-in-law who was commanding a battery of 105mm howitzers
during the battle of France and he had a younger brother who was an
infantry officer in the same campaign (later killed during the Battle
of the Bulge). Their letters home, which we still have, are quite
revealing.

The battery ended up somewhere in the Amiens area where they had to
prepare and train for Sealion. The brother was near Rouen basically
doing the same thing. At that time the motorised element of the
battery was one motor car and a field ambulance. Everything else was
horsedrawn. They were totally unprepared and untrained for an
invasion and equipment for such an enterprise was not forthcoming,
perhaps because it did not exist in Germany at the time(?). The
professional officers, at least at his level, considered the whole
idea crazy and suicidal. And no amount of national socialist ardour
and chivvying seemed to change that attitude. When Sealion was
abandoned the sense of relief in the letters home is palpable. Its
the relief of professional soldiers when a madcap scheme is finally
ditched as reason begins to prevail.

Eugene