Sealion Question

[AlbertN]

Is it actually worth?

USA production skyrockets to 90% as soon as UK starts to get mauled and loses some cities - and at first glance to me it seems it almost endorse a behaviour of 'Let Germans take UK, I'll gain more yearly production early on".

An amount of UK production just gets redirected from colonies elsewhere (Despite probably being verily short of real industrial capacity to transform these raw materials into proper products); and as manpower is an 'off-map' value there will always be the same amount of Brits around in terms of people ready to fight.

Sure Axis gains Spain - as well as a large amount of additional beaches to defend through UK and Spain (and Portugal) that pratically demands the whole of the Spain forces to be stuck in Spain to guard ports - but I am not really sure it's a worthy tradeoff and it paints the situation as 'UK can do as they please, USA will get almost 100% production to make up for that and free UK as soon as they enter the war'. While the Commonwealth should be quite crippled if they lose the British Islands (Which is not an easy feat and I dare say it is doable only if the Allied player overcommits in other theaters / wants to go offensive early on around the globe).

UK does not seem to surrender anyhow (Which is fair) but they should have a nifty manpower and production reduction in terms of gains (ontop of the cities lost. Maybe production multiplier vanquished or so).

[AlbertN]

USA joined Allies in February'41...

[tyronec]

Is it actually worth?

USA production skyrockets to 90% as soon as UK starts to get mauled and loses some cities - and at first glance to me it seems it almost endorse a behaviour of 'Let Germans take UK, I'll gain more yearly production early on".

If that is how things work it doesn't seem right.

From an historical point of view my understanding is the US would have been less likely to join in if the UK was being trashed, it was things like the British sinking the French fleet that made the US less insular. Who wants to join in a lost cause (unless you are an idiot dictator) ?

From a game point of view would want to have significant benefits for Axis invading the UK. Assuming a tight HvH game building the resources for Sealion is going to really detract from Barbarossa. If Axis don't gain much then why bother, but then you are removing some of the variability in the game.

I hadn't realised manpower is off-map. That is a pity.

[AlbertN]

Manpower may not be off-map but if I start a '39 scenario, and then a '42 scenario, what is shown in production is that Soviets gain 63 manpower in both cases per turn.
If that is a display bug - I do not know. In the Editor locations do not have a manpower value (I think it should go that way).

Alvaro told me when I notified him of that via PM that there is some script that controls manpower gains - but then I'd like to see the visual effect. (Like if Soviets gain 63 in '39, if I start a '42 scenario after they lost X cities ... it should be less than 63).

In that HvH game I can smoothly do Barbarossa. I was not planning and not even remotely building for Sea Lion. It was the opponent to litterally send the whole of the RAF in the Middle East to counter the conquest of Cyprus (and took Cyprus back, butchering 4 Axis troops in there through brutal bombing and severe naval interdiction of the ports). All fine and fair - but he left UK so understaffed that the Luftwaffe whole easily overwhelmed the single RAF fighter unit present, covered the landing by obliterating any Royal Navy that showed up. Sure Germany had 50 Amphibious units (Technically meant for Greece!) but it sufficed to set ashore a unit and seize a port. The rest tend to turn into story.
UK evacuated over time most of their ground units to Canada (no way to stop units departing from ports, I could have done the same with Cyprus but sacrificed these units to keep the RAF pinned there in Middle East).

USA went 90% with UK falling and then Axis pushed in the Middle East that was being undermanned rapidly to rush troops back to UK (at first - in the hope to hold it) - diverting some to Kuwait / Iraq / Persia area - but Italian armour reached there just in time as the Brits were debarking. At some point when Iraq / Persia too aligned to Axis, USA joined the Allies.

It seems like it may be well viable to abandon UK in '39, let the Axis seize it, have USA in the game since mid'40 and retake UK in '41 for a huge Allied profit.

Nonetheless my point is that if the UK goes offensive in '40, and that costs them the United Kingdom - the Allied player should not be rewarded.

[aspqrz02]

From a historical point of view?

IF that is what you want then Sealion is, realistically, quite impossible.

The Germans did not have the capacity to build landing craft in time for Sealion ... and, if they tried, they would have had to take resources needed for unimportant things like, oh, Tanks and Combat aircraft and redirect them. They did NOT have any spare capacity.

Instead, they went about repurposing Rhine River Barges which had such low freeboard that, when traversing something like the Channel, would be swamped if there was anything more than the very lightest chop. And 95% of them were unpowered and had to be towed. They were so slow that it was known they would take in excess of 24 hours to traverse the Channel one way ... so there was no possibility of assembling the force and getting across under cover of darkness. They would have been subject to multiple RAF and RN attacks ... in broad daylight.

Heck, even at night it was known that the wake from a passing warship moving at high speed would swamp the barges.

Then there's the initial, somewhat realistic, plan (not the later fantasy dreamt up by the Army with no input from the Kriegsmarine since the KM kept on telling them the truth ... that there wasn't the shipping available and there wasn't the manpower for it anyway and that there was no way they could protect it) ... to land elements (elements, mind, not the whole thing) of twelve Leg Infantry divisions at three widely separated points nowhere near adequate ports ... elements equivalent to 3 divisions (say 25-30,000 men) ... with NO heavier equipment than mortars and no transport, not even horses, and no ability to resupply them for over a week after the landing. They figured how to land a handful of tanks ... by the simple expedient of blowing off the bows of the barge carrying each one ... but with no fuel resupply for a week these weren't going to do any blitz attacks.

They had no plans whatsoever for the actual landing, no training for the crews (which they didn't have in sufficient numbers) of the few powered vessels in actually herding the strings of unpowered barges they were shepherding into actually landing them, no Beachmasters to co-ordinate things (and no concept of even the idea), and the one or two trials they tried of doing a landing in France were unmitigated disasters with the barges being lost or never getting anywhere near the shore.

With no heavy artillery and no adequate protection for the barges while in transit they relied on the Luftwaffe to do three oh so minor things ...

* Gain Air Supremacy (no, not Air Superiority ... but Supremacy ... wiping the RAF from the skies, completely)

* Acting as artillery for the Army ... but with inadequate or nonexistent means for the Army to actually talk with the Luftwaffe on the tactical level needed.

* Acting as protection for the crawling Barge fleet against the entire RN and RAF while it made its 24+ hour crawl to Britain.

Given that the Luftwaffe only ever faced 55% of the RAF and was never able to achieve even localised Air Superiority (let alone Supremacy) anywhere over the UK, they had exactly no chance of achieving it against 100% of the RAF, which would have been committed under such circumstances.

The RN and allied navies had enough ships within steaming distance of the route the largely unpowered Barges would take to make strikes from outside of Luftwaffe range against them at night and then return to those selfsame outside of Luftwaffe range bases. The chances of strings of unpowered towed barges surviving even a high speed pass by of a warship under those circumstances were ... close to nil, if not nil.

Then, of course, the RN had a tradition of not giving a stuff about losses in a good cause, unlike the risk averse Kriegsmarine ...

"It takes the Navy three years to build a ship. It will take three hundred years to build a new tradition. The Navy always supports the Army, the evacuation will continue." Admiral Cunningham at Crete.

"... No captain can do very wrong if he places his ship alongside that of the enemy." Horatio Nelson

They WOULD have attacked in daylight, and the invasion fleet WOULD have been scattered or sunk, those that did not successfully flee (and there would have been damn little chance of that). A handful might have gotten through ... but there chances of capturing a port against the Allied forces in theater (from memory, a fully equipped Canadian Division, several Brigades of more or less equipped British troops equivalent to several divisions, all with plenty of artillery, though the British units had a chunk of repurposed WW1 stuff instead of modern stuff lost in France, and the Armoured division was largely (but not entirely) equipped with Tankettes (since the Germans had, at best, a handful of tanks and few or no anti-tank weapons, good luck with dealing even with tankettes) ... and British/Commonwealth Divisions were around twice the manpower and strength of German divisions to boot.

There is NO WAY WHATSOEVER that Sealion could have been anything but a disastrous failure.

So, if you really want 'history', then it shouldn't be possible. Since WarPlan cannot simulate a lot of these factors in any meaningful way, the Manpower rule that exists plus the US entry rule is probably one of the solutions that rams it home to the German that Sealion is a really really really bad idea.

Phil McGregor

[cpdeyoung]

@Phil

A fun post, and one I agree with.

Chuck

[AlbertN]

I respectfully disagree with what you say, Phil - but that's nothing new.

Long story short, if that was truly the case - why the Brits were so dreading to be invaded and even up to late '41 there were concerns of being invaded (That by the writings of Wiston Churchill - not some historian that came after. The very direct excerpt of Churchill).

I just keep to game terms - and most of the WW2 ETO or Global games envision the possibility of a Sealion. And usually it's a hard if not impossible feat if UK defends UK. (Which as I underlined, it was not the case there). It's a matter of gameplay. It's the same discussion as 'Should Germany be able to knock Russia out of the war?'.

It's gameplay and no one in general wants to side with the faction that is 'fated' to lose since the beginning, do a game like you want and you play it vs the AI or simply have a '43 or '44 start.
Or buy Battle for Germany. That's tabletop. A player is Western Allies and East Front Germany; the other are the Soviets and West Front Germany. Who reaches Berlin first wins! - It starts in '44, and it's an interesting game where both players at the same time are taking the beating here and kicking arse there.

What you depict is pratically 'Axis must do what they did in history, and the variety is if they last X months less or more than what they did historically". That murders player decision capability and annihilates the game in its being a game. One can buy a history book, or a dozen, and read them, and that's their 'game'.

[battlevonwar]

You must have Sea Lion so that some UK player doesn't pull a gamer move like Bleed Germany dry in France for Free.

Or another one like it...

USA entry doesn't shock me, of course if they didn't declare war they would have started to prepare for it on an intense level... Wouldn't you?

[AlbertN]

I still put it down to gameplay level.

To have UK invaded should be a -penalty-, not a -bonus-. And quite a severe penalty. UK player first concern should be to keep UK in their own hold, even if it costs them colonies or the like.

It's same concept - go to France, or go to Lybia in '40 in a heavy way? But to have USA react in that way is simply enabling that kind of UK behaviour. It's okay to up USA production %, but up to 90% and then instant war entry? - Given we're in the what-if zone there and none of us can say what the USA would have done.

So it's still required to look through the perspective of gameplay. Gameplay, USA needs a degree of beefing up in production to make up for the loss of UK production (Otherwise the Allies remain behind too much), but that should not outweight what is lost, otherwise it turns into a net gain of production!

[battlevonwar]

Cohen,

You must also take into consideration that the Allies really don't or shouldn't have a base of operations from which to launch any sort of real meaningful landings? That represents a bit more history to me.
Without England would Torch/Normandy have even been possible? I don't really know the logistics there but I doubt that US Troops could of embarked and traveled 2 thousand miles to land in North Africa/Spain or England after the fact it was taken over?

The harsh reality in reverse to the above harsh treatment of the Fantasy of Sea Lion is without England the Western Allies are really done and the game is over. The USA would take likely forever to dream of invading Europe. Look at the logistics that went into Japan and the required bases? Was there a way around those Island Hopping bases if you wanted to actually invade Japan?

Even if this game is abstract for the benefit of Strategy then how do we realistically add the longer consequences of the loss of England? I would think that the Allies should resign with the loss of their Island not that the Russians couldn't win alone. The USA could lend a ton of resources.. the British would fight on in isolated pockets? What is justifiable and semi-realistic and yet not gamey?

[aspqrz02]

Um. The fact that 'games' envision the chance of a Sealion is hardly an argument in support of it ... hell, they're games ... and they allow it because many players want to have the chance to conquer the world as Germany, not at all because any of it had any realistic chance of success.

The Brits were, indeed, worried about an invasion attempt ... because they didn't have the full picture at the time. The fact is that, as we now know, Sealion was a non-starter.

Heck, the Kriegsmarine knew as well. A lot of what I pointed out was actually stuff brought up by the Kriegsmarine planners involved in the first plan ... they carefully demolished the wishful thinking fantasies of the Heer staffers to the point where Hitler issued a directive that expressly prohibited them from offering any objections at all to anything the army proposed ... which is why the later plans were complete fantasy. All the KM staffers could do was to scrawl rude comments all over their copies of the Heer submissions.

I'd suggest that any German player du ... er, unwise ... enough to attempt a Sealion invasion of the UK in 1940 not only will lose the game, but should lose the game.

Nudge, nudge, hint ... Sealion is a game losing proposition.

Whether the Germans can (or could have) conquered Russia is more problematic ... they certainly couldn't have conquered Russia to the Urals, not realistically ... and there was no realistic possibility of a meaningful Russian surrender even if they did given the Nazi racial policies in the East. None. For the Russians it was, almost literally, fight or die ...

Within the constraints of the game (ending in late 1945 or so) I suspect that the Germans might barely have been able to 'beat' the Russians in the sense that they might have been able to do so much damage that the Russians would have taken one or more years longer than they did historically to bounce back ...

Perhaps the Germans might do so much damage, in fact, that on 6 AUG 45 a nuclear attack destroys Berlin and on 9 AUG another destroys Hamburg ... followed by a third one against one of the Ruhr cities a month or so later, and another every month till early 46 when the rate goes up to 10 a month and then 20 a month by mid 46.

That's the best 'victory' the Germans can achieve (the B-29, a FY40 program, was already in hand before US entry and was designed to be able to bomb Europe from bases in the continental US ... so even if the Germans take the UK they're done for).

YMMV.

Reality is a bitch.

Phil

[aspqrz02]

August 1945, USAAF B-29 bombers based in Canada make atomic attacks against two German cities, destroying a huge proportion. Every month thereafter till early (February IIRC) they make another atomic attack against a German city, then, from February 46 they destroy TEN cities a month till the middle of 46 when they destroy TWENTY cities a month.

THAT is the reality of the US Atomic program.

Germany had no capacity to catch up, let alone match it.

Germany, in effect, loses in late 1945 no matter what.

As for the Allies not being able to invade without the UK as a base ...

"A Western Task Force (aimed at Casablanca) was composed of American units, with Major General George S. Patton in command and Rear Admiral Henry Kent Hewitt heading the naval operations. This Western Task Force consisted of the U.S. 2nd Armored Division and the U.S. 3rd and 9th Infantry Divisions—35,000 troops in a convoy of over 100 ships. They were transported directly from the United States in the first of a new series of convoys providing logistic support for the North African campaign."

The US did long range invasions in the Pacific quite handily and they could take North Africa and use it as a base from which to invade mainland Europe ... perhaps the D-Day landings might, then, have been in the South of France first ...

Phil

[battlevonwar]

The Scale of Torch vs the scale of Normandy are uniquely different. Though it's a possibility. (35,000 men would also met Rommel with the DAK in full force and been pushed into the sea and had their own version of Dieppe Raid)

I don't know and why would the USA do this? The Under Belly Strategy was Churchill's idea and the USA didn't even like it. Sure the US troops were supposedly less green after their experience there but would they ever be a fighting force in game terms to truly invade mainland Europe by 1945?
Also The Bomb doesn't really even fit in the time frame of the game. Nor were their endless bombs they had to build them and that would take time. Probably 1946ish...
Before that happened the Russians would likely have beaten the Germans or worse case scenario without the support of Great Britain a lot of quality divisions would of been freed up to be turned East that would have helped drag the war on a lot longer or make it a lot bloodier. Remember Moscow didn't fall during '41 due to the fact the Germans were outnumbered not cause of snow and mud alone. Just read Kiev 1941, fact is the Germans were outgunned on the Eastern Front in the beginning. 1 Million men not pointed West but Pointed East would have hurt the USSR and in game it should.
The Russian defeated the German Army or the portion pointed East. The Americans and British defeated the remnants in 1944. The forces and resources tied up in the West did count for a lot mind you just we will never know how much...

A-bombs were not modern day Nuclear Bombs either. 1000 Heavy Bombers were as effective at killing people. The only difference I feel is Atomics have a better gift at leaving the land scorched permanently. So you would need tons of them!

[tyronec]

Um. The fact that 'games' envision the chance of a Sealion is hardly an argument in support of it ... hell, they're games ... and they allow it because many players want to have the chance to conquer the world as Germany, not at all because any of it had any realistic chance of success.

The Brits were, indeed, worried about an invasion attempt ... because they didn't have the full picture at the time. The fact is that, as we now know, Sealion was a non-starter.

Heck, the Kriegsmarine knew as well. A lot of what I pointed out was actually stuff brought up by the Kriegsmarine planners involved in the first plan ... they carefully demolished the wishful thinking fantasies of the Heer staffers to the point where Hitler issued a directive that expressly prohibited them from offering any objections at all to anything the army proposed ... which is why the later plans were complete fantasy. All the KM staffers could do was to scrawl rude comments all over their copies of the Heer submissions.

I'd suggest that any German player du ... er, unwise ... enough to attempt a Sealion invasion of the UK in 1940 not only will lose the game, but should lose the game.

Nudge, nudge, hint ... Sealion is a game losing proposition.

Whether the Germans can (or could have) conquered Russia is more problematic ... they certainly couldn't have conquered Russia to the Urals, not realistically ... and there was no realistic possibility of a meaningful Russian surrender even if they did given the Nazi racial policies in the East. None. For the Russians it was, almost literally, fight or die ...

Within the constraints of the game (ending in late 1945 or so) I suspect that the Germans might barely have been able to 'beat' the Russians in the sense that they might have been able to do so much damage that the Russians would have taken one or more years longer than they did historically to bounce back ...

Perhaps the Germans might do so much damage, in fact, that on 6 AUG 45 a nuclear attack destroys Berlin and on 9 AUG another destroys Hamburg ... followed by a third one against one of the Ruhr cities a month or so later, and another every month till early 46 when the rate goes up to 10 a month and then 20 a month by mid 46.

That's the best 'victory' the Germans can achieve (the B-29, a FY40 program, was already in hand before US entry and was designed to be able to bomb Europe from bases in the continental US ... so even if the Germans take the UK they're done for).

YMMV.

Reality is a bitch.

Phil

_____________________________

Author, Space Opera (FGU); RBB #1 (FASA); Road to Armageddon; Farm, Forge and Steam; Orbis Mundi; Displaced (PGD)
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Email: aspqrz@tpg.com.au

This all neglects the fact that this is a game in which players can play in a different way to history.
So the Allied player may not leave enough forces in the UK to defend it, in which case Sealion could well be on - as we have already seen in one AAR.
Or the Soviets may make more mistakes than Stalin, and lose the USSR.
Or someone may be playing the AI, on different difficulty settings,...

[aspqrz02]

Well, yes.

But, as I have said before, if you are going to give the Nazis fantasy abilities that they simply did. not. have. then I expect to see the Allies given the same number and depth of fantasy abilities ... what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

So, I reckon that in any game we should allow as how the French and British had much greater manpower and logistic reserves that are allowed for in the game as it stands ... and they should have, as, in my attempts to give them historical at start forces you simply cannot do it within either the Manpower or Logistical constraints ... and, yet, historically they DID do just that.

One example of the lop-sided pro-Nazi fantasy abilities is that the Germans start with all their forces at full strength and can then build up to the size they historically had in 1940 when, in fact, they had many more forces than the 'at start' 1939 forces ... but the at start also hobbles the Commonwealth and, more importantly, the French.

The Germans can, and seem to easily do, take Denmark and Norway in 1939 and even attack and take France successfully as well, well before the pitiful at start forces the French have can be brought up to full mobilisation ... something, in the real world, they managed to achieve well before the fall of Poland and any chance the Germans would have had to redeploy. There was no 'slow and steady' build up ... there were slow and steady re-requipment with better planes and more and better tanks, but the units were basically at full strength.

And you cannot get the French army to full strength before the historical May 1940 invasion ... and, even if they had the time, their manpower and logistics are insufficient to build the actual army they fielded. The Netherlands is over-endowed with forces, so it isn't a problem, but Belgium is under-endowed. If the Germans had to contend with the French army AS IT ACTUALLY WAS then they would be defeated bloodily if they were quite stupid enough to invade in 1939.

Also, if you allow the Germans to invade Norway and Denmark (or even The Netherlands) in 1939 there should be an immediate boost to the French and the Commonwealth in the form of more manpower and more logistics representing a worried US ... but, of course, it's only fair to allow the Nazis fantasy abilities, isn't it?

If the Germans can created Landing Craft from whole cloth in a few months with no real impact on producing Tanks and Planes, then we should give the Commonwealth and the French like abilities to produce Transports, Merchantmen and Convoy Escorts with magickal speed and at infinitesimal real world cost.

And that Strategic Bomber unit that has been deleted? Bring it back. And reduce the German AA or add more Commonwealth SBs ...

There are far far far too many pro-Nazi fantasy exploits possible and virtually no pro-Commonwealth ones ...

But YMMV,

Phil McGregor

[aspqrz02]

Look, if you want a Nazi weighted fantasy, fine ... but, again, you are ignoring physical reality.

The Torch landings were possible from the Continental US ... did you know that the Allies relied on ONE set of Landing Craft and Landing Ships that was shifted between the Pacific and the Atlantic at will? The reason the Torch landings were so small, relatively speaking, was because in 1943 they were still building up to the size force they needed for D-Day, but, even then, they had to pull most of them back to the Pacific only a month or so after D-Day which is why Anvil-Dragoon was so small and, indeed, was the core reason why there were only the two attempts to turn the Axis defences in Italy ...

As for Torch, the logistic capabilities of the transport net in North Africa were ... limited ... and the Italian Merchant Marine was insufficient for supplying the original DAK (they lost most of their ships and virtually all of the tiny number of oil tankers they had in 1940 - by 1943 they were reduced to shipping oil to North Africa in 44 gallon drums in regular merchant ships, and, in absolute desperation, flying it across in Me-323s in 44 gallon drums ... they were NOT living in a high logistics environment), let alone the large, mostly immobile, leg infantry units the DAK was reinforced with in 1943 ... the Germans simply didn't have the supply capacity to send more armoured units ... and supplying them down the Tunisian and Algerian coasts? Just the train lines were of limited capacity and there was even less rolling stock ... and the Germans had, throughout the entire war, problems with producing enough rolling stock.

As for the A-Bombs, the actual production schedule based on the scaling up of the fissile production facilities coming online, was 1 bomb per month after the first 3 available in August-September, then 1 bomb per month till January-February when it would reach 5 bombs per month, then 10 per month from February to mid-46, then 20 per month thereafter.

If you want Nazi fantasy then I want equal opportunity Allied reality,

YMMV

Phil

[jjdenver]

I think part of any strategy game is the ability to organize your forces differently, prioritize different research, form different long range plans - than countries did historically. With this in mind if the Germans had planned for Sealion from 1937 or 1939 maybe by end of 40 or 41 they could have developed different capabilities. They could have practiced landings somewhere in the Baltic to work out how to do invasions. Just because the guys in charge in Germany in the actual war were in many ways idiots doesn't mean the gamer controlling Germany has to play an idiot role too. The game doesn't simulate things at this level. For example if I want to prioritize Sealion planning and research the game doesn't give me a "button" to do that. So to me Sealion should be _possible_ in the _game_, and the British should have to defend against the possibility in some fashion.

Lost in all of the talk above (I think) is that losing Britain is a big loss for the allies as it's a giant airbase, naval port, and invasion launching pad close to occupied France and low countries. So there is a loss to the allies when Sealion is effective I think?

[aspqrz02]

Again, this is a Nazi victory fantasy.

You cannot build a massive LST/LCM/LCI fleet as Germany in secret. Sorry, cannot be done. Not even if you make a magick wish.

Ergo, the Allies know about it from the get go and, see, even Chamberlain wasn't a complete clot ... he accepted Munich but began serious rearmament anyway 'in case' ...

For the Germans to get that massive amphibious fleet to get anywhere without becoming mincemeat you need also to create a massively expanded Kriegsmarine surface fleet (do I really need to explain why Submarines are useless for this ... and especially why they're useless for it in the Channel?) ... and, let's get real here, that's a DIRECT threat to the RN and Marine Nationale ... so out goes peacetime spending and in comes massive naval, air and army spending. Or, at the very least, massive and accellerated naval and naval air spending.

Then there's to oh so sad problem that the Germans actually had a plan to expand the Kriegsmarine massively ... the Z Plan ... and it was actually implemented ... for some limited values of 'implemented' from around 1937. It was intended to build a Battle Fleet that could take on the RN or Marine Nationale, but not both, and, oh deer, it was planned to be completed by ... wait for it ... 1949+!

The oh so sad part of the problem was that they simply didn't have the metals to a) build all those fancy planes for the Luftwaffe, b) build all those fancy tanks, trucks and artillery pieces for the Heer AND also complete the ZPlan. Since the main aim of the Nazis was Lebensraum ... in the east, mind, not the west ... they put their limited metals resources (mainly iron/steel) to a) and b) and c) got the dregs ... there was, effectively, no chance that the Z-Plan was going to be achieved even by 1949 with the resources allocated.

Sure, go ahead, put all your resources in 'Phibs and Surface fleets and build no Luftwaffe or Heer units, especially no Armour or Mech, and see how well that invasion of Russia which is the whole purpose of the Nazi military expansion goes.

Again, this is Nazi wish fulfilment fantasy ... 'Nazis are superhuman geniuses while Allies are subhuman morons' ...

The fact is that the Allies had the capacity to outbuild the Kriegsmarine ... even if most of their naval shipyards hadn't been closed down and slighted as a result of the 1919 Armistice. And the workforce lost. And bugger all new ones trained to replace them. They simply didn't have the shipyard space for large armoured warships such as the Kriegsmarine needed, or even for large lightly armoured warships.

Worse, they had, from memory, exactly ONE mill left capable of producing armour plate of the thickness required by major combatant vessels ... all the rest had been shut down, sold off, and basically lost after the 1919 Armistice, and, yes, their workforce dispersed and not replaced. See, it's not a mere matter of waving a magick wand and these things reappearing overnight when they don't exist or exist in inadequate numbers or have inadequate capacity.

The Brits and French (and the other Allied nations) had plenty of miltary rated Shipyards, plenty of plants capable of producing armour plate in the required quantities, and large trained workforces to man them ... so, if it had come down to a naval armaments race, the Germans had Absolutely. NO. Chance. ... and it WOULD come down to such a race.

The Germans were very much aware of their production based inadequacies and came up with a number of plans to try and get around them, but they all failed in the face of the reality that they were, at best, a third rate industrial power facing off against THREE Second Rate ones with the likelihood of a fourth FIRST rate power supporting those three and, likelihood it would eventually enter any conflict on the side of those three.

See Tooze's "Wages of Destruction" which is mentioned in the reading list in the Manual for WarPlan ... it explains in fairly accessible language just how deep a hole the Germans were in, sans Nazi victory fantasies they tried to fool themselves with ... reality was (and remains) a bitch.

Sealion, if attempted in the historical timeframe, was GOING to be a huge disaster ... for the Germans. If attempted from an earlier timeframe it would trigger allied rearmament earlier and harder and with no chance of outbuilding the Marine Nationale or RN anyway while making the invasion of Russia effectively impossible in 1941, and probably for several years after that.

You might care to read about the wargaming reruns by Sandhurst ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation ... _(wargame)

... with the caveat that the German invasion fleet was based on the Heer (i.e fantasy) plan the Kriegsmarine were told they could not critique, but which they had explained, in detail, previously, was impossible.

And the Germans still lost. Resoundingly.

Phil McGregor

[battlevonwar]

Though if you defend the UK it's impossible to take without heavy losses and you lose the game. So you do have your history pretty much if the Brits are wanting it that way and Germans stubborn enough to try to invade. British are unconquerable in the hands of wise player, pretty much guessing it is I tried against the AI it was impossible earlier today.

Cause then there will be no German Army/Air force/Navy left even if you succeeded to fight the war with. Game over 1940

[aspqrz02]

Even Hitler, the fantasist supreme, realised this ... by some accounts the 'planning' for Sealion was a gambit by Hitler to try and force the British to negotiate a peace giving him a free hand in the East (after all, that had been the reason for invading the West in the first place ... Hitler realised from Germany's WW1 experience that a two front war was ... bad, very bad ... for Germany) ... by those accounts, he had no intention of actually carrying through with it.

Even if that is wrong, he never lost sight of the need to be ready for Barbarossa in 1941 and, eventually, pulled forces and resources from Sealion planning to use or repurpose for Barbarossa.

For example, the massive Barge fleet that was massed on the coast for the invasion forces took a nontrivial chunk out of Germany's logistics capacity inside Germany ... a heck of a chunk out of the river and canal capacity that moved a lot of Germany's raw materials and finished products from place to place. That was enough by itself, even without repeated RAF raids which sank a significant chunk of them, to force Hitler's hand and have them sent back, gradually, to their normal duties.

At this point in the war Hitler hadn't completely lost any contact with anything resembling reality.

Phil McGregor