Your post confuses me. What do you mean by “american amphibious apc’s” in the “falklands campaign”?
A D-Day failure was not it for the war. Ike knew failure was a possibility. He knew failure would extend the war and fear it would extend it another year or two. But I have never seen a good argument that a failure of D-Day would have equaled a loss for the Allies.
This is the only thing I found on Google Images as to what vehicles the Argentine forces were using in the Falklands: http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.waidev2.com/php/IMAGES/HC_ThisDayInHistory/93---Image_large.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.thehistorychannel.co.uk/site/this_day_in_history/this_day_April_2.php&usg=__gS79RYMELx7giUkD--UeHzyaeFU=&h=237&w=404&sz=18&hl=en&start=54&tbnid=VAomUNNDwIVgnM:&tbnh=73&tbnw=124&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dargentine%2Blanding%2Bfalklands%26start%3D40%26gbv%3D2%26ndsp%3D20%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DN
Ike not only knew the invasion might fail, he wrote a draft statement anticipating it, stuffed it in his pocket and then forgot about it until later: http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.eisenhowermemorial.org/images/failure-note.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.eisenhowermemorial.org/stories/Ike-accepts-responsibility.htm&usg=__Z8qcGNWfDBZbQAFlWBZ41YX_GhU=&h=360&w=230&sz=110&hl=en&start=18&tbnid=GOS0n0wZYmaDBM:&tbnh=121&tbnw=77&prev=/images%3Fq%3Deisenhower%2Bd-day%2Bfailure%2Bnote%26gbv%3D2%26hl%3Den
A failed D-Day invasion would’ve been a huge setback to the U.S., Britain and Canada, but they would’ve tried again using any lessons learned. And the Soviets were still pushing from the east, of course.
And IIRC the first nukes were slated to be used on Germany. Luckily (for them, bad for the Japanese) they lost before the nukes were ready. That alone probably would have ended it.
Rommel shared responsibility for the defenses with another general (whose name escapes me). The other general came from the Russian front and favored concentrations of armor a good distance behind the beaches to attack where the Allies landed. Rommel’s experiences in Africa made him wary of organizing troop movements when he didn’t control the skies, as he wouldn’t in France. Rommel (mostly) won the argument, which is why the Germans tried to stop the invasion on the beaches.
And on checking wikipedia, the other general was von Rundstedt - overall commander of the Western front.
Those amtrac things
It took 3 years to marshall forces for Dday, so while the soviets may have continued the fight, the western allies may have settled for a political solution
I was looking for a cite from churchill, but can’t find it off hand , this one is the next best thing that I can find on short notice.
Not really the site itself , but the quote from Montgomery on the second page.
At the very least , the invasion is pushed back another year. The germans are able to concentrate solely on Russia.
At some point , we may have had to reach an accomodation with Germany to avoid the soviets going all the way to paris.
Declan
Declan
Few knew we were well on our way to having nukes and roughly a year later we did have them (so any General writing what they think would have happened would be in error without that info). I doubt Roosevelt would have gone in for a negotiated solution. If the Germans could focus more heavily on the Russians then the Russians would not have made it to Berlin by April/May anyway much less push on to Paris by then. By August that year we were dropping nukes.
Nah, if the Normandy invasion had failed I doubt they’d have had a second go before nuking Germany which almost certainly would have ended it.
Oh I believe you on the nukes, as they were in the pipeline and yet on the bolded part I see the military side of the coin, but it does not jibe with the political reaction to a massive defeat.
But I think that we need some clarifical questions to frame this
How clean would a withdrawal have been, would the Brits have really lost their only remaining army, if overlord had failed.
Would the atomics used in Japan have generated any different results, ie : Hiroshima and Nagasaki were citys were wood and paper were the predominant contruction material, as opposed to Germany where construction materials would have been brick, stone , mortar and other sundry.
Declan
I can’t actually see the landings at Normandy being defeated, in no small part because of naval gunfire. There was simply too much force behind it, the Allies were going to get ashore and make a beachhead. Once that was done, the Germans were not going to be able to push the Allies back into the sea, even if their panzer divisions were located closer to the landings and were released and arrived sooner. In Sicily, Salerno, and Anzio the Germans had counterattacks supported by armor continuously stopped by naval gunfire.
Salerno was the worst case for the Allies/best case for the Germans when facing amphibious landings. The landings were in the sector of 16th Panzer Division, and the first counterattack with armor occurred at 0700 the day of the invasion, September 9. The British and American beachheads were unable to link up, the Germans were able to gather 6 panzer or panzergrenadier divisions to launch a concerted counterattack by Sept 12, and Salerno was at the limit of Allied fighter cover, so the Luftwaffe was able to make attacks on the beach and the ships offshore. A number of these used radio guided bombs. Oh and the Allies were under the command of Mark Clark, so the Germans even had that going for them. While the situation got desperate, none of the German counterattacks was able to reach the beaches largely due to naval gunfire. In General Vietinghoff’s own words:
This was actually done with just cruisers and destroyers; Vietinghoff wrote in on September 14 and the battleships Warspite and Valiant didn’t arrive until the 15th. The best that the Germans could have hoped for in Normandy was to contain the beachheads to a small size and create an Anzio-like situation where the Allies had a lodgment but were stalemated and unable to break out.
Well…the political reaction would be hard to gauge. Almost no one knew about the Manhattan Project. IIRC Truman was only informed once he became President. I am not sure if Churchill knew but I think he did. So while a lot of politicians may have screamed for this or that action Roosevelt would have known we had an Ace up our sleeve and likely have acted on it in the face of whatever others wanted.
And while Japanese cities were more susceptible to the damage from the nuke it is still a nuke. It is more about the shock and awe factor that one bomb did it. We had been fire bombing German and Japanese cities for a long time by that point. The firebombing of Tokyo killed more people than either nuke did (by itself).
Further, Europeans tended to be more pragmatic. Once you lost you lost and gave up (how long did the French hold out?). The Japanese were almost constitutionally incapable of accepting defeat. Even after their Emperor demanded surrender after the nukes there was a serious attempt at a Coup and they viewed him as nearly a god. Had that been successful (and it almost was) the war would have continued.
I cannot say for certain but I am pretty sure the Germans, who were well aware of what a nuke was (maybe the Japanese knew what one was too but the Germans had a nuclear program), would have bowed to the obvious and inevitable conclusion that they lost. Of course Hitler was a nutjob so who knows but I think in the face of that those around him would have said that’s that and be done.
Thanks for this and shows my point earlier that naval gunfire can make a huge difference.
While in this case it seems it was not battleships I am unsure that we have any serious gunboats left in the arsenal. Many have a token cannon on the front but nothing like the bristling with guns ships of WWII.
Remind anyone of when the US removed guns from out fighter jets thinking missiles were all that was needed? They learned the hard way that was a mistake. That the guns on a fighter plane still had a place and are there to this day despite ever better and smarter missiles and acquisition systems.
Aye, I’ve never denied the power of naval gunfire. It might not always work so well in pre-invasion bombardments if the defender made serious efforts to hide their positions and didn’t try to stop the invasion at the beach line, but trying to counter-attack and drive the invaders back into the sea in the face of naval gunfire never worked in WWII, even at Salerno which was about as good as the Germans could get to attempt it.
Even the Japanese shift to defense in depth from Peleliu onwards was just the acceptance of the reality that they were not going to defeat the landing and to fatalistically accept that they would lose. Rather than throwing their lives away in suicidal Banzai charges and trying to stop the invasion on the beach they took the more realistic road of digging in as deep as they could and selling their lives at the greatest possible cost. As far as it goes, it did work; American casualties were ~10,000 and Japanese casualties were about the same, although the Japanese casualties were almost 100% KIA.
The US Navy could probably do with a look at making a vessel dedicated to and capable of delivering serious support to a beachhead, be it through gunfire or other means. It’s not going to be a battleship in any recognizable form, and likely will never be made until there is a bloody nose if it ever happens. The last opposed amphibious invasion that I can think of that the US did was at Ichon in 1950.
Eh, since I’ve been talking about Peleliu I can’t help to but mention and recommend E. B. Sledge’s With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa highly enough to anyone who hasn’t read it.
This is an interesting discusiion but refighting WW2 isn’t relevant with modern technology. As pointed out earlier, any modern American beach assault/defence would be carried out by all-weather attack planes using whatever combination of bunker-busters/cluster bombs/naplam/FAE’s required. Dropped precisely on target with precision guidance.
And in the (very unlikely) event USA doesn’t have air supremacy? Well then they just wouldn’t launch it until they did. I’m not being flippant. There is no way an attack would be launched in the face of serious air opposition any more than it would in WW2. As the soldiers were told before D-day *‘If you see a plane overhead it’ll be ours’ *.
Wikipedia says the guns on an Iowa-class ship have a rate of fire of 2 rounds a minute. That means the ship should be able to lay down about a thousand rounds in an hour. (And some 5-inch fire as well.) That’s stupendous. Each 16-inch round should be about equivalent to a 2,000 pound bomb. How many bombs does a carrier-based plane carry on a mission? I’m guessing either 2, or 4 at the most. That means the Iowa’s bombardment would be equivalent to either 250 or 500 carrier strike sorties in an hour, well above the capabilities of a carrier.
Am I wrong in my calculations? The planes can carry smart bombs, which may be a force multiplier depending on how the enemy forces are distributed. Still, the Iowas can lay down much more explosives. Is there anything beside maybe the strategic bomber fleet that can match the firepower of the Iowas?
But that’s the point. The firepower doesn’t matter. You needed a fleet bombardment to plaster the target because they werent accurate. It may takes 10,000 shells to smash up the concrete pillboxs. With modern weapons, you drop one bunker-buster through the roof or fire a laser-guided missile right through the gunport. The enemy sending an armoured column to drive you back into the sea? Great, at last a chance to test those new cluster bombs with the homing self-forging warheads. You don’t need an artilery barrage to kill a target if a sniper can just put 1 bullet through his heart.
Well, for one, you can’t keep maximum rate of fire for very long. Heat, barrel erosion and so on. Also, ammo supply is only hundred-something shells per barrel and part of that is anti-ship ammo, with little or no high explosives. Also, even high-explosive shells have smaller charge than aerial bombs of similar weight, so they are not exactly equivalent to 2000 pound bomb.
Take into account, as DeptfordX noted - that bombs can be delivered with very high accuracy. What that means, is that you need only one bomb that hit target exactly instead of five or ten shells that fall close. So I guess it’s more like hour bombardment from Iowa is equivalent to 20-40 fighter-bomber sorties. Powerful, but not overwhelmingly powerful.
Battleships can shoot for extended periods of time. If you cannot secure your beachhead by then well…you have real problems.
Battleships are also stunningly accurate. Far better than I think you suspect and even with 1950’s technology:
While I agree that the battleship’s day has come and gone, you’re placing far too much faith in technology with everything placed precisely on target with precision guidance. You’re assuming that there is 100% accurate intelligence on 100% of all enemy positions. There is never anything close to that. For that matter, precession guidance doesn’t always work, and what happens when you try to drop a laser guided bomb through fog or rain or overcast? Just because a plane is all-weather capable doesn’t mean the guided ordinance it might carry is. Most of the bombs dropped by US aircraft even today are the old dumb variety. How much of the shelling of Fallujah was done with guided artillery shells?
There’s nothing stopping all of the Iowa’s shells all being fitted with laser or GPS or whatever form of guidance for that matter. There’s an old military dictum that quantity has a quality all of its own. Some of the time - or well most of the time - you have to just bomb or shell a suspected enemy position or whatever map grid the grunts have called for artillery support on. The effect on morale of sustained artillery bombardment or bombing isn’t something to be overlooked either. To quote E. B. Sledge on Peleliu:
Not surprisingly, psychological studies have been done that have found the most damaging and stressful thing to do when under stress is nothing because of the impotence of doing anything. All you can do is pray and hug the ground while being shelled.
Question: are there any comparisons between the Japanese YAMATO’s 18" guns vs the US IOWA Class BB’s 16" guns?
Were the japanese shells only marginally better? I suspect they were reaching the limits of gun technology with the 18" shells-of course, Dr. Gerald Bull had other ideas.
Just as an aside with reference to the previous poster’s point about Yamato - I recall reading in a book, about Hitler’s plans for ships far bigger than Bismarck and Tirpitz.
Having Googled, I came across this photoshopped impression of what the provisionally named H44 would have looked like …
The smaller vessel is Tirpitz - by no means a small ship itself.
Tirpitz
52.600 tons
251 m
8 x 38 cm
163.000 shp
30.8 kn
H44
141.500 tons
345,1 m
8 x 50,8 cm
165.000 shp
30,1 kn
More here on ‘H’ Class ships …
And here :
Bear in mind that Nimitz Class Carriers are around 98,000 tons.
