Posted on 11/15/2009 5:11:45 AM PST by Homer_J_Simpson
William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
Pray let me have details of the proposed first Canadian convoy. How many ships, which ships, how many men in each ship, what speed will convoy take, escort both A.S. and anti-raider? Place of assembly and date of departure should be mentioned verbally.
Winston S. Churchill, The Gathering Storm
http://www.onwar.com/chrono/1939/nov39/f15nov39.htm
Nazis confront Prague demonstrations
Wednesday, November 15, 1939 www.onwar.com
In Occupied Czechoslovakia... There are large-scale demonstrations at the funeral of Jan Opletal, a medical student who was mortally wounded in Prague on October 28th. Police forces (possibly including elements of the Gestapo) make numerous arrests of Czech nationalist protesters. Casualty reports range from 12 injured to suggestions of summary executions.
In Berlin... German Foreign Minister, von Ribbentrop, formally rejects the offer of Belgium-Dutch mediation made by King Leopold and Queen Wilhelmina in meetings with official representatives. He states that as a result of the “blunt rejection” of the German peace appeal by Britain and France, the German government considers the matter closed.
In France... Three hours are added to the working week, making it 43 hours long.
In China... Japanese forces capture the port of Pakhoi.
In the Indian Ocean... The German pocket-battleship Admiral Graf Spee sinks the British tanker Africa Shell south of Madagascar.
you have to love the fins. i wonder when the russians actually invaded and how long that war took? i guess the US looked the other way, hoping to keep stalin on board? be curious how the current border of finland relates to the border when WW2 broke out. have the finns ever got their teritory back?
fascinating article on how japan views the situation. pearl harbor is two years away, but japan is calling out the US as a possible war adversary, but only after Germany finishes off the europeans. just guessing but i bet the Japanese thought that after Hitler got as far as Moscow suburbs in december 1941, that the war was pretty much over so they could attack. oops.
also, fascinating that the Japanese dont see the US Navy as a credible opponent. In this they were pretty much right, up until 1944 the USN had poorer ships, planes. By then of course, US production kicked in and the US produced in that year alone new ships, carriers, planes greater than the entire Japanese Navy, essentially producing a new Navy per year. The Japanese were unable to replace their losses. Interesting statistic, but the US produced over 400,000 combat planes in WW2. the japanese around 50,000.
I guess the other lesson from the Japanese 1939 view is that weakness invites attack.
Front page story, but not until day after tomorrow. And the attacker is not identified. Rumored to be "one of the three German pocket battleships." Rumors discounted by "experts."
Had Hitler carried through with his invasion of England in the fall of ‘40, would it have succeeded?
What do you think?
The Red Army will be enjoying a white Christmas in Finland. Excursion scheduled to begin at the end of November. They may be having a white Valentine's day, also. The survivors's, anyway.
i guess the US looked the other way, hoping to keep stalin on board?
I'm not sure we considered Stalin to be on board at this point.
Not with the way the Battle of Britain went. The RAF would have controlled the air and the Royal Navy would have had a field day. And by then the British home army was well organized to fend off an invasion, either a large force at one point or several small simultaneous landings.
Or so says Churchill and I won't argue with his analysis.
An interesting think to think of is that often military leaders often “lose the victory” by not exploiting a breakthrough. Had Hitler had a plan to follow through after Dunkirk, things might have been different.
The victory over France was so swift, it surprised everyone, I suspect. Hitler never really put together a real plan for operation Sea Lion.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sealion
some historians think hitler let the brits of easy at dunkirk hoping that if they avoided total humiliation they would settle with him.
you get the impression that even hitler is alarmed at the big war he has started.
just read some finland history. hadnt realized that they were actually part of russia until the 1918 revolution, then fought a civil war internally between the rightists and the reds, executed a bunch of “reds” so there was a lot of bad blood and history there.
at the end of ww2, they had to cede a 10% of their country to the reds, they got a small part back in the 50’s, but to this day the russians have a chunk, particularly the all weather port.
but as a country, finalnd is a 20th century appearance. most of its histpory it was part of sweden or russia.
who knew?
Good point. Like most bullies, Hitler may have been shocked when the Brits (led by Churchill) decided to not roll over.
Almost certainly not true. In his 2004 book "Target America," James Duffy discusses German military contingency plans -- called Winterarbeiten -- going as far back as the late 1800s -- for a German invasion of the United States!
Duffy does not mention German plans to invade Britain, but it's hard to imagine they would assign staff officers for the US invasion until after they had fully examined requirements to invade a more likely future enemy, much closer to home.
Just compare Operation Sealion in 1940 with Operation Overload in 1944:
Troops to land, 1st day:
Sealion: nine divisions with airborne, 67,000 men to land first day.
Overlord: nine reinforced divisions, including three airborne, 175,000 men to land first day.
Transport:
Sealion:
Overlord:
Air and naval superiority:
Sealion: none
Overlord: total
Following waves:
Sealion: German Army Groups A & C = 13 divisions, maybe 300,000 troops.
Overlord: three army groups, over 2,000,000 troops.
And remember too, Goering had convinced Hitler the Luftwaffe could reduce England to surrender via air power alone, IIRC. I just don’t think Hitler’s heart was really keen on an invasion of the UK.
His personality was when he set his mind on doing something, it got done, regardless of outcome.
The photo of the D-Day beachhead is amazing. They had way more barrage balloons aloft than the Luftwaffe had available aircraft. That is assuming the scene in “The Longest Day,” where the two planes make a pass over the beach, is accurate.
Plus, like their Fuehrer, the German Army might be heroes on land, but were cowards at sea. They wanted no part of an invasion of Britain; and planned an invasion of a sufficiently large scale that they knew the Navy couldn't handle.
nice post bro.
what exactly is the purpose of a “barrage balloon” i never understood what it does.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrage_balloon
A barrage balloon is a large balloon tethered with metal cables, used to defend against low-level attack by aircraft by damaging the aircraft on collision with the cables, or at least making the attacker’s approach more difficult. Some versions carried small explosive charges that would be pulled up against the aircraft to ensure its destruction. Barrage balloons were only regularly employed against low-flying aircraft, the weight of a longer cable making them impractical for higher altitudes.
thanks. doesnt seem like that would make much of a difference but i guess it must from the number that are flying in the picture.
Could such an invasion have succeeded immediately after Dunkirk, assuming proper planning and supply?
The reason I ask is that time and again in warfare we see failure to capitalize on a tactical victory results in strategic setbacks.
On our side, the failure to close the Falaise Pocket and the stupid decision to do Market Garden rather than follow up on the rapid advance of Patton as examples of mistakes that were game-changing.
My point is Hitler had no follow up ready to go when France collapsed.
The UK might could have been successfully invaded IF Hitler had followed the retreating BEF across the Channel and pushed on immediately.
He stopped and was hoping the UK would sue for peace. It gave them time to recuperate.
It was a grave error.
Second, except for the airborne forces available [7th Fallschirmjaeger, and 22nd Air Landing Div.], the Germans had no quick response troops available to invade England. [And Kurt Student had been seriously injured in Rotterdam in a ‘friendly fire’ incident by troops from the Leibstandarte, and would be out of action for almost a year.
Third, there was no detailed plan. And due to a lack of close cooperation between the planning staffs of the OKH and OKM [and limited interaction at OKW, there was no agreement on the size, scope and location of any landings.
Fourth, the ports were not in shape for seaborne traffic, having just been fought over, requiring either their repair, or launching an attack from German ports, over a longer water route, under more exposure to the Royal Navy [bearing in mind that at that point, the supremacy of air power over naval power hadn't been conclusively proved.
Can’t disagree with your analysis. It’s interesting to do “what ifs” after the fact and with the benefit of 70 years of historical study to back up thinking.
Agreed. Though for this particular case we only have 69 1/2 years of historical study to rely on.
You and most historians agree.
Hitler's main ambitions in 1939-40 were not to conquer either Britain or the whole of France. What he really wanted from them was "permission" for his invasions and "restructuring" of eastern Europe.
So in essence, Operation Sealion was a big bluff -- hoping to force the Brits to sue for peace on Hitler's terms. And his biggest term was: recognition of German sovereignty over Eastern Europe, especially including western Russia.
Might Hitler's bluff have worked? Yes, with some British leader other than Churchill. There were, after all, plenty of Brits sympathetic or simply defeatist towards Germany -- and some Americans too, Ambassador Kennedy comes to mind.
But Churchill, aside from his pugnacious nature, had something else of ultimate strategic importance on his side -- he had Franklin Roosevelt. Months before "today," Roosevelt had begun communicating directly with Churchill, to stay in touch and informed on what was going on. So Churchill gambled, successfully it turned out, that eventually he would be able to convince the Americans to join the war -- just as they (we) had in 1917.
So Churchill would accept no deals with Hitler. Regardless, Hitler decided to abandon Sealion and instead go ahead with Operation Barbarossa, in 1941.
Any realistic hope of an Invasion of England ended when the Luftwaffe switched to bombing cities, instead of bombing airfields, fuel storage, aircraft production and radar sites, on the order of Goering and Hitler.
They almost had the RAF on it’s knees at that point, and all it took was a few days of respite in attacks on the RAF’s infrastructure to give it time to reform a cohesive defense.
The idea was after gaining control of the air, they could seal off both ends of the Channel by air, and keep the British Navy away from the invasion fleet.
Also, in the fall of 1940, after Dunkirk, the Home Army would have been NO MATCH for the Germans. They didn’t even have enough rifles then to arm the regulars, let alone the militias, and most of the UK’s heavy equipment had been left on the beaches in France.
The strategic blunder’s of Hitler’s political decisions would pile up, one upon the other, until they were just too big to overcome.
“The Great Ressetlement” of Baltic Germans (Volksdeutsche) from Estonia ends today, and will end in Latvia on Dec. 12
These Baltic German “repatriants” were at first settled in the regions annexed from Poland October 12 (the former “Polish corridor” that Germany forfeited as a result of the Treaty of Versailles) that were now the Reich provinces Danzig-Westpreussen and Warthegau.
In order to accommodate the Baltic Germans, and compensate them for the material possessions left behind in Estonia and Latvia, Poles and Jews were displaced, their property and possessions confiscated and they themselves were taken to occupied regions of Poland (the General Government), from June 1940 onwards.
With increasing numbers of ethnic Germans arriving, increasing numbers of Poles and Jews had to be displaced thus creating growing problems for the technocrats in charge of displacement, encouraging them to seek more radical solutions, especially with respect to the future fate of the Jews.
The Baltic Germans were followed by ethnic Germans from Volhynia, Galicia and Narew in the first months of 1940, and in the summer, Germans from the territories of Bessarabia and Bukovina annexed by the Soviets from Romania and from the Romanian territory of Dobrudja.
These were in the end followed by Germans from Lithuania in early 1941 and Nachumsiedler (late resettlers) from Estonia and Latvia. By March 1941 some 500,000 Volksdeutsche were returned, half of whom were still in camps, but from these regions 408,000 Poles and Jews were displaced to the General Government.
It is no coincidence that this happens at the same time as the systematic destruction of Jews begins.
The airplane that flew over Paris suburbs last Tuesday was a German machine, which dropped communist pamphlets,............
I would guess that the Germans were just trying to stir up trouble. Communism had a big presence in France at the time. If the Germans could exploit it if they might cause trouble for the French economy in the form of strikes or general opposition to government policy. I don't think idealism was involved.
This is a subject we can happily debate for at least another year, before moving on to Barbarossa. ;-)
And there is much to be said, on both sides. For example, the Brits were not quite as helpless as it may seem at first glance. And the Germans -- well, how were they going to get their heavy tanks across the channel in little river barges?
It was certainly a hot topic in London and Washington, all through the summer and into fall 1940. In reading ahead in Churchill's memoirs to prepare for future posts I discovered that he spent about as much time - or at least paper - on invasion contingencies as he did on the Battle of Britain. Churchill appreciated the difficulties inherent in an amphibious operation of that scope. More so, apparently, than the public at large. He kind of hoped the Germans would try an invasion and thereby offer a great opportunity to inflict a major blow to their war machine.
IF the Germans had established air supremacy/superiority [and that’s a BIG ‘if’], they might not have needed the tanks, at least initially. They could have air transported infantry to captured air fields, a la Norway, and used the Luftwaffe as flying artillery [a la Crete, where they were outnumbered 3 to 1, and where the Luftwaffe damn near destroyed the Mediterranean Fleet]. Then they could have freightered the tanks in as they did in North Africa].
According to Wikipedia:
"In wargames conducted at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst in 1974, which assumed the Luftwaffe had not yet won air supremacy, the Germans were able to establish a beachhead in England by using a minefield screen in the English Channel to protect the initial assault.
"However, the German ground forces were delayed at the "Stop Lines" (e.g. the GHQ Line), a layered series of defensive positions that had been built, each a combination of Home Guard troops and physical barriers. At the same time, the regular troops of the British Army were forming up.
"After only a few days, the Royal Navy was able to reach the Channel from Scapa Flow, cutting off supplies and blocking further reinforcement.
"Isolated and facing regular troops with armour and artillery, the invasion force was forced to surrender."
As I understand, "air superiority" is not exactly the same thing as "air supremecy," and there must be degrees and shades of each. So is it realistic to expect the Luftwaffe could have ever maintained an air umbrella over its invasion force?
Consider for example, Rommel in North Africa -- what percentage of ships sent to resupply him reached their destinations? Could freighters carrying heavy equipment to Britain have been more successful?
Possibly Churchill had a longer memory? No doubt it was hard for him to forget his own Gallipoli amphibious operation of 1915. ;-)
The article was written by an American source. A lot of assumption about what the pamphlets said. Might have been anti communist but lost in translation?
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