Posted on 01/17/2020 10:52:34 AM PST by ProtectOurFreedom
In May 1941, the new German battleship Bismarck was a huge, state-of-the-art warship, equipped with the latest long-range heavy cannon, new stereoscopic range-finders that promised unprecedented accuracy, new ship-based radar, and an intricate system of armor-plating and honey-combed water-tight compartments that rendered her virtually unsinkable. If Bismarck broke out into the vast, indefensible shipping lanes of the North Atlantic, it could wreak catastrophic havoc with the war-sustaining convoys coming across the ocean [from the U.S.]
In 1941 England, it was believed that this single weapon might determine the very course of the war in Europe. Where the entire Luftwaffe had been unable to cripple Britain’s warfighting capability with its aerial assault in the summer of 1940 and bring her to the negotiating table, now—in the spring of 1941—a single warship was threatening to do that very thing.
As the Bismarck and the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen headed towards the open waters of the Atlantic Ocean through the Denmark Strait, they were intercepted by the British battleships Hood and Prince of Wales. Those two ships were all that stood between Britain’s invaluable but vulnerable shipping lanes and what they thought was national survival. In the next few minutes, perhaps the most famous and consequential surface engagement of all time occurred. The big ships fired on each other, their 14- and 15-inch guns booming.
Hood — the pride of the British navy — was struck by a perfectly-aimed salvo from Bismarck and exploded violently, breaking in two and sinking with just three survivors out of a crew of more than 1,400. After 10 minutes of fighting, "The Mighty Hood" was gone. Prince of Wales, despite suffering significant damage herself from Bismarck’s guns, scored some telling blows of her own, such that Bismarck was forced to disengage and head to home for repair.
(Excerpt) Read more at realclearhistory.com ...
The Germans are what I like to call Smart morons. The V2 program is a perfect example. They spent the money of the Manhattan Project on it roughly, and inaccurately delivered a tonnage of explosives on target roughly equal to less than two 1000 plane Eighth Air Force bombing raids. We could better their V2 sum total once a week, and even more during the later stage the war.
And it has the unusual honor of actually killing more people building it than in its use.
The Blockheads either do things two ways amazingly beautiful and perfect, or they screw it up in ways a sane man can’t imagine
I guess it depends on how they were used, and how they functioned in battle.
Well you need staging areas to group forces & supplies. There’s also the issue of land based air from those islands that would threaten your staging areas & your fleet.
Hell, the Navy barely cooperates with other branches of the US Military. The Brits would be out of the question. And you are correct about the Brits helping already with technology, they shared radar before Pearl Harbor, they shared examples of their jet engine while we developed the P-80
“We DID destroy the Japanese Navy. Couldn’t we have just skipped a bunch of islands (including the Phillipines) and only taken those close enough to Japan to enable our heavy, island-based bomber force to launch bombing runs against Japan?”
Possibly. But War Plan Orange — which I believed began in the 1920’s — had a basic 2-prong approach. One thrust up from Australia-New Guinea and another from across the central Pacific. The concept was to keep the Japanese guessing and shifting their slender resources. MacArthur makes a push here while Nimitz prepares his next move elsewhere, and visa versa. Keep them trapped between 2 fires so that they can’t focus their efforts.
As to the island-hopping. You couldn’t move ships unless you controlled the air. You needed an chain of air bases to sustain the air umbrella AND you needed the corridors to be wide enough that the enemy bases were out-of-range. So if you look at where the first thrusts were made (Guadalcanal, Gilberts (Tarawa)) you can pretty accurately predict where the next move would be. In this war the range and endurance of aircraft dictated everything.
The point of declaring war on US was to have Japan follow suit and declare war on USSR.
December 1941 was a time when Hitler’s blitzkrieg failed in Russia and transformed into an attrition war Hitler knew Germany wasn’t geared to wage much less to win.
The Japanese were smarter than the Germans and it didn’t work.
All in all Hitler’s declaration was symbolic. De-facto US already were at war against Germany.
“The Germans are what I like to call Smart morons.”
Excellent tactics, lousy strategy, no/little logistics. A losing prescription.
The Kriegsmarine would have been much better served investing all that money and steel in building several more U-boats.
I once came across an article that broke down the manpower and material used for the railway guns, and translated that into useful armor units.
The US was already providing help to the Brits. Declaring war on the US was dumb but from the view we were already involved essentially a formality on Germany’s part.
Still, got to stand in awe of the strategic incompetence of a guy who declares war on a nation his armed forces can’t even really attack, one with vast resources, but that will be able to attack him sooner or later.
Had he not done so it is possible that WW2 would have developed into two concurrent wars, at least until some later ”provocation” of our alliance with Britain against Japan caused Hitler to be dumb. So ... maybe a few more months ... tops.
Now Italy getting into the war ... THAT was over the top dumb as well as pointless. Old BM (strategically incompetent as they come, maybe even worse that Der Wanker) was hot to trot though to start some more regional wars he had no chance of winning. He also apparently thought he’d get left out of the payola from a presumably quick German victory.
As for Italian preparedness, by some accounts I’ve encountered the Italians had issues fueling their otherwise impressive fleet during peacetime!
Brits gave us: Radar, Sonar, Code-breaking insights, the Merlin Engine, the Whittle Jet Engine and far more.
The US contributed: The Manhattan project, massive license production (Packard-Merlin), gobs of shipping, the 8th Air Force (Daylight Bombing), etc and so forth.
Lots more at the start of the war.
But Hitler didn’t understand their importance in WW1 and so didn’t really support them before WW2. He, like most any guy stuck in the trenches, could understand battleships though.
Taking Russia was just never in the cards. All it would have happened had he made it past Stalingrad is the lines of battle would have been moved back a couple of hundred miles. Taking Moscow wouldn’t have made any difference. It was taken before, and resulted in nothing more than them falling back.
He was doomed to failure for his mass-murdering ways. His only chance what’s the act like a liberator when he went into Ukraine in Eastern Europe. He may have had people join with him. Instead, he acted like a cop shooting a a rapist in the act. And right when the victim feels they are saved, he starts unbuckling his belt.
No matter what minor successes he would have achieved in the East, he was always doomed to complete failure and would have never conquered all of Russia. Lost Cause thinking always imagine scenarios were Hitler was going to win and conquer the world, but it just simply was not in the cards on the day the War began.
Individual Italians are among the best people I know but the way they organize things leaves you speechless most of the time. One might wonder how they are capable to run their country at all, let alone make war.
If you are to look at Costa Concordia sinking that was an epitome of all things Italian from start to finish.
They already built enormous number of U-boat. U-boat haven’t lost the battle for Atlantic because they were outnumbered. Allies developed tactics to effectively defeat them. Having more U-boat could only produce more sunken U-boat and killed crews.
Pffft! Compared to a few commando raids encouraging Der Wanker to keep 200,000 men in Norway for the duration of the war that is not much of a distraction.
They even sent Mr.A.Hitler a nice letter asking where the promised defenders on the beaches were.
Yes we absolutely could have. And that was the Nimitz strategy. But the astonishing ego of MacArthur had to be appeased, and his mom use political influence on FDR to give MacArthur a campaign. Nimitz intent was the basically quickly kill the Japanese Fleet, advance to Formosa, and form bomber bases and navy bases to attack Japan. Douglas MacArthur probably prolonged the Pacific War by 9 months 2 a year and cost thousands of lives.
And utterly immoral. That’s not just a trite platitude. Deep immorality has extremely corrosive consequences.
Exactly correct. There was a massive amount of American British technology Exchange during the war. As usual, penetrating the barrier the US Navy is a little more formidable, but marginally successful also
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