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ColinWright -> RE: What WW2 Scenario Would We Like? (11/11/2006 7:29:04 PM)
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ORIGINAL: Curtis Lemay
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ORIGINAL: golden delicious
I think I misunderstood you- you're just explaining Manstein's position?
No, but I was pointing out that his perspective was post-war. From that perspective, I think he had a point.
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Germany's manpower, industrial capacity, motorisation, logistics and winter combat were all far better and far more easily built up than was her naval situation in 1940.
Relative to the needs of the respective campaigns, that's debatable. She was inadequate in all those factors in the Soviet Union, and they were telling in the campaign. Just how much of a navy does she need, on the other hand, to get across the channel?
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If one is to speculate how things might have gone if Germany had gone ahead with Seelowe, I don't see why it's inadmissable to speculate how things might have gone differently in Russia, too. That war was winnable for Germany. They certainly made it look that way for the first year, anyway.
Of course. But for sure it was going to be very costly and very risky. From hindsight, we now know that the Soviet Union wasn't the house of cards everyone had thought in 1941. Once one comes to grips with the huge cost and risk of the operation, you can look at Seelowe with a different perspective.
Looked at from a 1940 perspective, those assault troops are precious and must be given all the protection possible. Air superiority must be gained to limit losses to the RAF and RN. This requires an air superiority campaign that must be fought well inside England, to the RAF's combat radius advantage.
Looked at from a 1945 perspective, however, one notes that the alternative is to lose something like (very rough guess) 200 divisions on the eastern front. Now the huge ground force advantage the Germans had over the British can be seen as an expendable reserve. Forget the air superiority campaign and just throw the invasion across the channel. Don't expect it to survive.
But it will cause the RAF and RN to be attrited in the process. The air war will be fought over the channel, not well inside England. And the RAF will be occupied with anti-shipping not just air defense. Thus, the air equation will be equalized if not reversed. The RN will have to sortie into the channel, subject to air attack.
Once that's over, throw another invasion across, etc. The Germans aren't going to run out of divisions. The question is whether the RAF and RN will last longer than the German transports. And I will just point out the huge cost and lead-time differential between warships and transport ships. Given a year or so of this, with re-focused German production on airforces and sea transport, they might reach a situation where the RAF and RN are attrited away, while the German transport stream is steady.
Now, I'm not saying that that's all sure to work. I'm just saying that once one starts to allow for Eastern Front type losses in Seelowe, the equation for it changes.
Launch a Seelowe doomed to failure? First off, I'd object to this on purely military grounds.
Germany is going to lose the bulk of the combat elements of nine of her best divisions. She'll also lose much of what's left of her surface navy and perhaps half her trained naval personnel. That's nothing to sneeze at.
Moreover, no decisive advantage will be gained as a result.
Since one can assume the invasion will be largely broken up in the Channel, it's going to rather rapidly become apparent that the British Army has the situation well in hand regarding those elements that do get ashore.
So -- say -- that the R.A.F. is going to feel obliged to be suicidally gallant over the Channel for about four days. Let's figure they lose four hundred fighters and four hundred bombers.
So what? First off, even if this gives the Germans air supremacy over Britain, that won't win them the war. Witness the less than decisive results of the Allies gaining similar supremacy over Germany in 1944 -- with an incomparably stronger bomber force. In point of fact, since the British nightfighters of the era were largely ineffective, the Germans had air supremacy at night during the winter of 1940-41 -- and they didn't even come close to breaking England's ability to wage war. No doubt they can do better by day -- but eight hundred He-111's being able to run wild isn't going to win the war...particularly as they won't be able to run wild for very long. Shooting down four hundred British fighters isn't going to permanently put Fighter Command out of action. It'll take them a month to recover from the loss in planes and perhaps six months to recover from the loss in pilots. Within a month, even semi-trained pilots will be preventing unescorted bomber raids: Do-17's and He-111's weren't Flying Fortresses. The Luftwaffe isn't going to be able to pound Manchester into rubble at its leisure as a result of this.
Now for the Royal Navy. Historically, the British planned to respond to the invasion with a force of (as I recall) eight cruisers and twenty destoyers -- perhaps 20% of their total assets. Now, since the failure of the invasion will rapidly become apparent, we can assume Britain's losses will be confined to these units. Going by Crete, we can figure even total German success against this force means a third will be sunk and the remainder forced to turn back with damage. In other words, the Royal Navy will permanently lose two-three cruisers and perhaps eight destroyers. Again, hardly fatal.
Going beyond the strictly military, the idea also ignores political factors. When it was first proposed to him, Hitler objected to Seelowe on the ground that it would result in a lot of German casualties, and that the German people would not accept this.
He had a point. Whatever the form of government, Hitler was a political leader, and he had essentially sold aggressive war to the Germans as fun and not especially painful. Catastrophic losses in a cross-Channel attack were no more attactive to him than Bush would be enamored of a plan for winning in Iraq that involved a hundred thousand American casualties.
Politically, Hitler launching a Seelowe that was destined to fail simply wasn't a practical idea. Moreover, it's not an especially attractive one. Even from a strictly military perspective, the Germans will find their losses at least as painful as the British will find theirs.
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