70 years ago - The Blitz. An entire nation, Fullbore.
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Friday, September 10, 2010
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I'm going to be spending some quality time with the list of Southern cocktails from Garden & Gun through the new year.
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12 comments:
That was their finest hour, truly. With US still sleeping across the Ocean, Europe conquered and Stalin virtually allied with the Hitler, the refused to bow down.
Also it seems a good moment to point the critical weakness of RN then - lack of escorts (a kingdom for 50 destroyers!) . USN may wake up to the same reality once after allocating all Burkes to CVNs it finds itself with no escorts for the rest of the navy - let alone merchant marine.
Following up on my tweet -- the RAF is live-tweeting the 1940 logs from one of their bases in real time: http://twitter.com/RAFDuxford1940
Seventy years ago this coming Tuesday, 15 September 1940, Hitler permanently postponed Seelowe, the planned invasion of the British Isles. Goering's Luftwaffe never subdue RAF Fighter Command, whose pilots numbered sometimes no more than 800. Churchill's tribute captures it beautifully.
My brother's mother in law is an English woman whose brother was an RAF fighter pilot in the battle. He was wounded badly near the end of the battle and spent 18 months in the hospital. When he got out he volunteered to transition to Typhoons, and was shot down and captured in 1944. His harsh treatment by the Germans while in captivity shortened his life considerably, and he died in his 40s.
Fullbore
US, GBR, AUS, CAN: we're not perfect, but we're not chicken $h1t either...and we deliver fullbore broadsides when destiny calls. It's good to have cousins such as these.
A bit of my own national pride:
Defeated in homeland, defeated in France, Polish pilots regrouped in the UK just in time to make one of the finest kill ratios in the Battle: Squadron 303.
Truly dangerous times. Had the RAF (and Fleet Air Arm) failed and the Germans launched Operation Sealion, the UK may well have gone under. The German OOB was over 27 divisions, among them four panzer divisions, two panzergrenadier divisions, two mountain divisions and an airborne division, with a total strength of around 500,000 troops for the first three waves. They would have mainly faced the shattered remanants of the BEF that fought in France - 12 divisions with the 215,000 evacuated from France under Operation Ariel. 500,000 hardened combat veterans from the best units in the group that took Poland in 36 days and France in six weeks against 215,000 troops that had just been defeated plus Britain's Home Guard and a Royal Navy stretched thin across the globe. Pretty long odds. Thank God it never happened. A Cold War against an extremely competent Nazi Germany is far more chilling than the Cold War we actually had against a comparatively inept Soviet Union.
Churchill was absolutely right when he said "Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few". God bless those wonderful guys.
Good that Kriegsmarine was badly mauled after Norway, with 2 light cruisers and 1 heavy, and whopping 10 destroyers lost - half of its whole destroyer force in fact! To add insult to injury many ships were badly damaged (like Hipper after the Glowworm ramming), and would be unavailable for Sealion should it came into execution.
All this meant that even weakened RN could massacre the invasion force unless Luftwaffe managed to gain total air superiority over Channel, and rain Stukas unopposed on RN ships.
As it happened, Luftwaffe lost this attempt and by next "good" weather season it was poised to strike in a very different direction...
"An entire nation - fullbore":
Not us, not now. Our first, and greatest strategic mistake, in the present war.
IMO.
Hooh-rah!
Yes, Guest, because the global war on terrorism (AKA the global war on 12th-century Islamofascism) is an existential threat today in the same way Axis aggression was seventy years ago. {/snerk}
WTF. I say we take off and nuke Mecca from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
Um, no. As Ewok has pointed out, the German Navy pretty much destroyed itself during the Scandinavian operations. The Battle of Britain demonstrated the flaws contained within the organization and the doctrine of the German Air Force at the time. In the face of a nearly-nonexistent Navy and a significantly-flawed Air Force, I doubt the Germans would have proved successful.
The German OOB might have been impressive, but if and only if it could be successfully transported to the English shore. I hesitate to quote such an old chestnut here, but "amateurs study tactics; professionals study logistics." In this case the Germans would have faced a virtually impossible challenge. Please regard their many logistical failures in Russia before you get back to me. :)
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