soc.history.war.world-war-ii

In article ,
Andrew Clark wrote:
>"David Thornley" wrote
>
>> What assumptions? I'm going with the 1945 USN vs. 1940 Luftwaffe
>> scenario that was proposed.
>
>The phrase "all over German occupied Europe" is clearly an assumption that
>Germany is occupying parts of Europe other than Germany. That isn't a given.
>
I'd thought we were coming to some sort of agreement on the scenario,
but apparently not. This is rapidly becoming even more pointless
than than it has been.

In mid-1940, Germany occupied a large portion of Poland, and all
of Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, and much of France.
I think you've mentioned airbases in Norway, so presumably Germany
has made some conquests.

In any case, the 1940 Luftwaffe existed in the context of a war.

>> All easy to destroy. The submarines are likely to last the longest,
>> but be the least useful.
>
>A sub is not easy to destroy, particularly with 1940 USN technology and
>experience.
>
Not too difficult if it's caught on the surface in the daytime, since
the carriers will be able to have lots of dive bombers on ASW patrol.
At night, they're much harder to kill, but they aren't real good
scouts anyway.

>And the issue isn't whether spotters are easy to destroy but whether they
>can be destroyed before they report back on the location and course of the
>carrier fleet. Soviet Bears, anyone?
>
The Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine had problems coordinating their
navigation, and it won't be easy reporting a course from what
a sub can see in a periscope.

The biggest threat the subs would provide would be torpedo attack.
Of course, in 1940, German torpedoes didn't work very well anyway.
Better than contemporary US torpedoes, but they're still less
of a threat than they should be.

>> There's a difference between knowing there are enemy carriers in
>> the area, and knowing exactly where they are and what they're doing.
>
>True and I'm not under-estimating the difficulty of the task. But neither am
>I under-estimating German resourcefulness.
>
I think you're way overestimating German resourcefulness here.
The Germans adapted well to some things, and badly to others.
Nor are they likely to have a lot of time to figure out what
works and what doesn't, at least initially.

You might want to look at the Pacific war. The Japanese were
technically inferior to the Germans, but they did have other
advantages. Japanese submarines concentrated heavily on supporting
the fleet, as opposed to attacking enemy shipping. How did the
Japanese find enemy carriers?

>> As I mentioned, shore-based radar will not find carriers at any
>> useful distance.
>
>That depends. 1940 Seetakt in a coastal emplacement with an elevated array
>could accurately plot a large ship at 100 miles and give a bearing to a
>convoy at 150 miles.

Maybe. On a good day. Figure half that distance normally, and that's
a range the USN doesn't have to get into.

>> Hydrophones will be useless in locating the
>> carriers.
>
>Not quite useless, although not sufficiently precise. The KM was quite good
>at hydrophone technology although it tended to get the frequency ranges
>wrong. But even shore-mounted hydrophones will get a rough bearing and more
>importantly a bearing change, indicating course and speed. As part of a
>package, hydrophones have a role to play.
>
How much did the Germans use shore-based hydrophones? And how
well did they work? I really haven't encountered much use of them
in WWII before.

>Really? Could the USN in the relevant period conduct flying operations,
>fleet manoeuvres and replenishment ops in radio silence?
>
Why not? There are other methods to communicate ship-to-ship.
As a general rule, ships at sea do not transmit unless they
don't care about being spotted.

Is there something particular about the USN that strikes you as
radio-happy?

>> Do you have any actual support for that statement?
>
>In 1940 and throughout WW2, the RN was better than the USN at ASW, and I
>certainly wouldn't say that any U-boat in the North Sea was inevitably dead
>meat at the hands of the RN, because that claim would be laughably untrue.

In other words, no, you don't have support for the original statement
of mine that you deleted. Otherwise, you wouldn't have had to delete
that and address another statement entirely.

>That's why it seems unlikely to say the least that the USN in 1940 would be
>capable of sinking every U-boat that strayed their way, which was *your*
>original proposal.
>
Depends. The USN could do a pretty good job of keeping its immediate
area clear of surfaced U-boats during the daytime, and that's really
the most important thing. The difference between the USN in this
scenario, and the RN, is that the USN can keep lots of aircraft
over the desired area.

>And every USN raid runs the risk of encountering a concentration of superior
>numbers of German fighters, or the home carriers being attacked by a
>superior force while the raid escorts are away from home.
>
It's hard to concentrate that many hundreds of fighters that fast on
defense. It's really hard to find a carrier force with a really
big coordinated attack.

>My point - harking back to my original throwaway remark - is that the USN
>could not do to Germany (or Britain or the USSR or even France) what it did
>to Japan, because Japan was an intrinsically weaker and lower class opponent
>than the European powers.

I'd say it was mostly because of the geography. Germany is difficult
to approach from the sea, while Japan is a long chain of a few big
islands.

Japanese radar in 1944 was probably better than German radar in
1940. The Japanese did have terminally-guided missiles, which
they used in large numbers in 1945. The Japanese had plenty of
submarines. The Japanese studied air attack on ships intently.

The Japanese certainly couldn't do everything as well as the
Germans, and in fact they didn't. Their army was lightly
armed compared to the Allied or German armies (their experience
against even more lightly armed armies in China was wrongly
taken as generally useful).

They could do some things as well as Germany, and in fact did some
things better.

US experience in WW2 against Japan as a whole has
>to be viewed through that prism, which it very often isn't.
>
Thing is, we know what the Japanese could do. You're making
assumptions about what the Germans could do that I find
doubtful.

>about strategic military goals. The only point of sending a USN carrier
>fleet to attack Germany would be diplomatic.
>
If the idea is to go in, hit German bases hard once, and leave,
the USN can do that. Sort of like a Doolittle raid. It won't
do any lasting damage, but it can be done. If the idea is to
conduct some anti-shipping strikes, that can be done too.

>You haven't as yet addressed the point that the USN will lose aircraft to
>German AA, perhaps on a significant scale.

Didn't I mention the aircraft replenishment capability? The fleet
had a lot of escort carriers to feed replacement aircraft into the
carrier force. There are always operational losses, and the USN
prepared for significant losses.

So, the Germans will shoot down some USN planes, and the USN will
replace those planes from the immediate reserves. If those reserves
are drawn down, they will be replaced.

>It has rough parity in fighter numbers if it keeps its fighters
>concentrated. It can't raid and defend the carriers at the same time.
>
It can keep a decent defense over the carriers with a large strike
escort. Again, it's hard to coordinate a large maritime strike
against a moving opponent.

>German land-based AA in 1940 was as good as anyone else. Given that the
>German navy is not a factor in this scenario, looking at the KM AA is not
>very helpful. And how good was USN maritime AA in 1940?
>
The medium and light AA wasn't all that impressive (better than the
KM, but that's not really relevant here). The heavy AA was. Lots
and lots of excellent 5" guns.

>The Luftwaffe was certainly not very good at maritime attacks in 1940, but
>it is not true to say it had "no good ship-attack bombers".

True, that was a misstatement. Let's say no first-rate ship-attack
bombers.

The Ju 87 was a
>very good ship-killer in certain combat environments - ie where the enemy
>fighters have been suppressed.

And, judging by 1941 experience, when the enemy ships are out of AA
ammunition. The 1941 Luftwaffe was important in the Med, but the
British were able to, and did, operate under German air attack,
without British fighters, for some time. It eventually became
expensive.

That environment may be unlikely, but it's
>not impossible.

In this context, it's pretty close to impossible. The USN maintained
CAP as a matter of course.

And even level bombing from medium bombers can hit ships as
>big as carriers.
>
Okay, how often did medium bombers hit ships while level bombing?
The Japanese didn't think the Kate a good anti-ship bomber while
carrying bombs. The US medium bombers were not all that effective
against ships until they tried skip-bombing. I'd like to see
some examples.

>I agree that the lack of a capable long-range dive bomber or torpedo bomber
>would greatly hurt the Luftwaffe's ability to attack the carriers, but there
>would still be some ability.
>
Another issue would be pilot training. The Luftwaffe pilots were
really bad at hitting moving ships until 1941, at which time they
were pretty dangerous against maneuvering ships that couldn't shoot
back.

>On the other hand, the Luftwaffe was a clever and resourceful opponent
>possessed of immense technical skill and resourcefulness.

Which doesn't mean they can suddenly use 1943 technology in 1940.
Or shall I put Corsairs on the US carriers?

Faced with the
>problem of a carrier fleet cruising off shore protected by an invincible air
>armada, perhaps they would accelerate their weapons programme.

Maybe. Maybe they'd even come up with something interesting.

The Germans were not all that good at looking at potential threats
and coming up with good defenses. They tended, more than the Allies,
to scatter their research unless faced with a practical situation.
They were good, sometimes very good, at adapting to existing
situations over time.

Some sort of
>pilotless remote-guided aircraft is within their 1940 capability, in fact I
>think they may have been testing one in 1939. Of course, as you say, those
>sort of drones are easy meat to fighters by day, but perhaps not by night.
>
Doesn't matter. It really, really doesn't matter.

The only cases I'm familiar with of effectively hitting ships at
night with aircraft in WWII are torpedo bombers, which the Germans
don't have.

Remote-controlled drones are tough to get right anyway, given WWII
technology. Getting them to hit anything at sea at night is
ridiculously difficult.

>I think this still counts as a nationalistic analysis.

Are your beliefs about my nationalism relevant here? Wouldn't you
be better served making arguments rather than ad hominems?

>weapons systems, but they still have their limits. You don't seem to want to
>acknowledge those limits, which is why I made up this scenario in the first
>place...
>
However, you've shown a certain lack of acknowledgement of limits of
German 1940 capabilities. The homing missiles are the biggest
example.

>ship-killing ability. But in an extended campaign, measured in years, all
>things being equal, the advantage will switch to the land-based power,
>eventually decisively.
>
Given that Germany is mostly inland, there's no real point in
an extended campaign. There isn't much either side can do to the
other.

Also, the USN will get better at things than it was in 1940.
By 1945, the USN was capable of far better AA than in 1940.

>> Iceland is there, just like Saipan and Ulithi. It's even relatively
>> close to the US.
>
>Assuming that Britain and France do not prevent US occupation, of course. Or
>that the Germans get there first.
>
If the Germans get there first, the US can kick them out again. How
are Britain and France going to stop US occupation? If we're going
to assume that Britain and France are de facto German allies, we're
torturing history to the point of uselessness.

>Does Iceland have the large sheltered harbours in which a very substantial
>replenishment fleet can take shelter?
>
I don't know in detail. However, it does have that really irregular
coastlilne. Since the replenishment doesn't have to involve the shore,
the terrain at the shore really doesn't matter.

It looks very likely to me that there's some place in Iceland to
conduct replenishment.

--
David H. Thornley | If you want my opinion, ask.
david@thornley.net | If you don't, flee.
http://www.thornley.net/~thornley/david/ | O-