Norseman2 said:
On the other hand, if you split that up into two airfields, you can arrive in 10 minutes either way, but you only arrive with half of your aircraft.
The British
did have a lot of aircraft. The RAF was almost as large as the Luftwaffe in 1940 and had the major advantages of fighting over it's home territory and drawing on internal lines of communication and a very robust aircraft industry.
Note that the allied invasion targeted beaches. There is no reason the Germans couldn't have done likewise.
Er, yes there is - it took the Allies years of preparations until they had the specialised shipping and doctrine needed to sustain a major offensive across open beaches. As late as the 1942 landings in North Africa they were reliant on the early capture of ports to supply the ground troops (hence the decision to send destroyers loaded with troops straight into heavily defended north African ports in an attempt to sieze them). This reliance only ended when the massive US shipyards delivered LSTs in huge numbers from 1943 onwards, and even then it wasn't until mid-1944 that enough of these ships were available and they had to be supplemented with the construction of sophisticated artifical harbours which took months to prepare. As the Germans didn't have LSTs, the capacity to build LSTs, the facilities to support LSTs or the doctrine to effectively employ these ships even if they did have them they had no chance of mounting an invasion without quickly capturing a major port.
Amphibious warfare is incredibly difficult and the Germans didn't understand just how hard invading Britain would be. Before WW2 the US Marines and British military were the leaders in developing amphibious doctrine and the equipment needed to mount amphibious operations. Despite this, the British totally messed up their first amphibious operations of the war (eg, Norway and Dieppe) and the USMC came close to disaster during the Makin Island raid and the first stages of the invasion of Guadacanal. As the German military had no amphibious warfare doctrine worth mentioning (they thought that crossing the Channel would be a large-scale river crosssing!) they simply didn't have a chance of sucessfully invading Britain. There's a lot more to amphibious warfare than loading troops into river barges and pointing them towards the British coast. The first wave might have gotten there, but they would have probably staved to death.
There are two quick solutions here. The first is modified fighters as well.
Seeing as Germany never developed high performance fighter aircraft with sufficent range to do this (though some of the later models of the FW-190 would have come close), I don't see how this is possible. German aircraft development was such a mess that they had no hope of building an aircraft as capable as, say, the P-51D Mustang, which is what they would have needed.
Personally, I think that's a wasteful solution. Much more elegant and inexpensive would be to have submarines, or submarine deployed commandoes, set bonfires near the ports.
The British would have had great fun slaughtering those submarines as they hung around in coastal waters and rounding up the commandos as they came ashore. Anyway, as the Germans didn't have many submarines or commandos in 1940 and had no experiance at all in the very complex task of mounting commando operations from naval vessels this simply isn't possible. Seeing as the German sabatours landed in the US didn't achieve anything, I don't see how sabatours landing in a better prepared country could have stood a chance.
I don't think it would be much of a technological challenge to make a floating torpedo that spills oil when it reaches land, and then sets off an incendiary. Nor do I think it would be much of a military challenge to get a submarine in position to do that.
True. And all you need to do to counter such ineffective weapons is to build breakwaters that restrict access to ports and then rig nets across the harbour entrances. The British did this and the only time the Germans used torpedos to attack shore targets was during a one submarine raid on ships tied up in a relatively minor Canadian port (the Royal Oak was also sunk by a German submarine which penetrated the RN's defences at Scarpa Flow in 1939 but these were rapidly upgraded). As torpedos aren't capable of rising from the sea they can't damage surface targets other than piers (eg, by destroying the peir's supports). As a result even if they can be delivered into coastal harbours they're useless in the land bombardment role.
Ah, it's quite easy. Instead of targeting cities specifically, they could spread out. Have each bomber go to a different location, either an open field, city, or forest during the dry months, and drop an incendiary bomb.
What dry months? Are you talking about Britain here?
I really don't see how scattering incendiaries across Britain's soggy fields and forests is a war-winning idea! Anyway, I'm sure that the RAF would appreciate the opportunity to pick off German aircraft flying by themselves. The same bomb tonnages would achieve a lot more if they were dropped on, say, the main dockyards and weapons factories. As the Germans couldn't reliably deliver bombs to these targets it's a bit of a pointless topic to speculate on.
GinandTonic said:
Hitler didnt need to invade britan, only to force the commonwealth to the table.
India was the key to forcing the commonwealth to the table.
Suez was the key to India.
Malta was the key to Suez.
None of the stratagies to taking britan is worth the effort. Their only benefit is closing the western front - but by closing that front via threatening india has the benefits of mideast oil (for all that it was underdeveloped) and african rubber. With those two resorces available it would not have been necessary to involve russia or the usa.
The Suez Canal was for all intents and purposes closed to Britain from the moment Italy entered the war in June 1940 until the conquest of Scily in mid-1943. As the presence of powerful Axis forces in the Med closed the sea to British civilian shipping the Canal could not be used to ship anything to India during this period. Despite this the British sucessfully sustained their Armies in Egypt and India by sending shipping there via the Cape of Good Hope and drawing on supplies produced in India, East Asia and Australasia. The Commonwealth Army in Egypt seems to have been better supplied than the Axis armies which enjoyed much shorter lines of communication back to Italy.
