ORIGINAL: Curtis Lemay
ORIGINAL: ColinWright
Launch a Seelowe doomed to failure? First off, I'd object to this on purely military grounds.
Probably a failure as a successful invasion. But perhaps not as attrition of the British defense forces, leading to ultimate success down the road. It can also shake out amphibious issues for subsequent invasions - like Dieppe did for the Allies. If so, not a failure at all.
Dieppe was an abject failure itself -- and subsequent attempts to rationalize it as 'preparation' for D-Day aren't very convincing. One might as well congratulate the Americans for all they learned by cleverly letting the Japanese sink their fleet at Pearl Harbor.
However, to return to the point, I doubt if the Germans would inflict much attrition on the British defence forces in exchange for the loss of 50-100,000 assault troops. For one, men drowning in the middle of the Channel aren't in a position to inflict losses on anyone.
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.
The loss of the divisions could be sneezed at - from the perspective of 1945. And they need not be their best divisions, if they're just bait. The particulars of what the relative naval losses would be are unknown. I'm not sure the Germans should even risk many warships on the first attempt, considering the attritional strategy.
There's a certain air of unreality about this proposal. Is it likely that we would lure out guerillas in Iraq by sending masses of semi-trained recruits up the road as 'bait?' Of course not -- the political fallout would be totally unacceptable.
Hitler and the Germans were subject to the same limitations. As I noted, Hitler veered away from the proposal for precisely this reason -- and the next year he was horrified by the losses (ca 6000 casualties or something) suffered in taking Crete. The Germans -- no more than any other modern society -- simply couldn't fling away troops on operations that were expected to fail. It would have destroyed that foundation of consensus and trust which the state requires to function. If nothing else, German troops are going to perform rather badly in the future if they start wondering if the missions they are being sent on are even
intended to succeed.
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.
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.
All of this is pure speculation. We don't know what the relative loss rates would have been between the RN and the transports, or what the pace of attrition would have been.
No, actually it's not pure speculation. The forces the British were planning to commit are a matter of record, as are the forces the Germans had available to oppose them. I guess I'm going out on a limb when I predict that a destroyer can win a fight with a river barge...
It's possible that a large number of small ships are a more difficult target for aircraft than a smaller number of larger ones. Note the German lack of success against the Dunkirk evacuation. And the Crete example was surely against a much smaller Luftwaffe concentration, operating over longer ranges, and covering a larger area, than the Channel would face.
And this is before Taranto, Pearl Harbor, or Force Z. The world hasn't yet figured out just how vulnerable warships are to air attack. The RN might be in for a sucker punch.
The world may not have figured it out, but the British had. The RN was quite aware of the threat posed by German aircraft. 5-10 British destroyers had been sunk by them by this point in the war, including several off Dunkirk. Moreover, the battleship Barham had taken bomb hits off Norway -- which was one reason the British had no intention of committing any capital ships to the Channel if they could avoid it. The R.N. isn't going to steam in mass formation into the Channel -- no fear.
And in the end, the Germans will be trading mostly river barges for British warships. Meanwhile, German production could be shifted to building real transports. Throughout the invasion attempts, the Germans will be risking cheap transports while the British must risk expensive warships. It could be an equation that ultimately favors the Germans, once the ground forces are seen as expendable.
The river barges will be filled with troops that -- as I've pointed out -- are emphatically not expendable in this manner. Moreover, you've yet to demonstrate that a single British warship will be lost. In point of fact, the invasion flotillas were going to be out in the Channel for about sixty hours. How's the Luftwaffe at pinpoint bombing at night?
And there is no certainty that the invasion would be intercepted before it gets ashore, especially if it crosses at night. Or, if intercepted, what its losses would be. If it mostly gets ashore, the action in the channel may last weeks, requiring multiple costly RN sorties.
No. Where're talking about thousands of craft packed into a limited area of sea. The British won't be able to
avoid intercepting them.
As to the RAF and Luftwaffe, we do know that the RAF came close to throwing in the towel in the historical battle, where the playing field was tilted in their favor. Under the more equal conditions of fighting over the Channel and charged with anti-shipping duties, they would certainly fare even worse.
How close the RAF came to 'throwing in the towel' is questionable. Historically, 11 Group was starting to suffer from the strain, and Fighter Command was
contemplating going over to the 'ABCD' scheme, which would have concentrated the more experienced pilots in those squadrons doing the bulk of the fighting in the South. However, notions that Fighter Command was on the verge of collapse are more romanticism than anything else.
It is true that Fighter Command will do worse if it's forced to fight over the Channel. But for how long will it be forced to fight? You yourself intend to use substandard troops to fill those barges -- and you've yet to show how many of those barges reach Britain. In the intended invasion sector, the British had three and half divisions or so defending the beaches -- and four-six standing by around London as a counterattack force. So say twenty thousand-odd disorganized, demoralized, substandard infantry crawl out of the butchery in the Channel. It'll be Dieppe in reverse -- and with a vengeance. The 'invasion' will last about a day. At a guess, Fighter Command is going to feel decency requires its presence over the Channel for a couple of days. This isn't going to see its destruction.
Now, given some changes in Hitler's attitude and consequent German actions going back to about Dunkirk, a potentially successful German invasion of Britain in the summer of 1940 is possible to envisage. However, as the situation developed historically, it had no chance. Moreover, there's no reason to imagine an unsuccessful
Seelowe would have inflicted fatal losses on the British -- indeed, the Germans probably accomplished more by
not launching it and keeping so many destroyers tied up waiting for it and off convoy duty. On the other hand, the political and moral effects of such a defeat on the Germans would be extremely serious. A failed
Seelowe is a good way for Germany to lose the war considerably earlier than when she did.
