Without wanting to get into an argument I seem to be, so please bear with me.
The battleships sunk at Pearl Harbor were raised and repaired- often a few years later- due to pride amongst other things. Could that effort not have been put into building newer and faster battle wagons?
Battleships saw service into the 90’s mainly because they were available. They wouldn’t have been built for that purpose- especially against a major power when water can be let in pretty easily underwater.
Anyway, I’m off to bed. Continue discussion tomorrow and I’m afraid I have led you away from he OP.
Dunno about WWI, but King’s defenders use that argument. However, his Anglophobia made him reluctant to accept British escorts until many ships were lost in his alternate anti-submarine patrol system, which U-boat captains loved since they knew when and where the patrols would be. You can also arm merchantmen so that even if the convoy has no escort they are less an attractive target.
Off the top of my head, I think it was easier to repair the Pearl Harbor battleships. I think six of the eight were back in action within a year. Building one from scratch would probably take 3 years and cost more.
Italy overall was a good strategic campaign. It knocked Italy out of the war. It diverted German troops from elsewhere. In particular, it lead directly to Hitler cutting short Operation Citadel (Kursk) in order to send troops to Italy.
The problem with Italy was it was poorly fought. Anzio in particular was a double screwup. Not enough armor landed on day one and what was there was held back.
Better planning and more aggressive commanders would have majorly changed that campaign.
One significant side effect was that it produced a lot of battle tested soldiers and commanders and led to rethinking about the invasion of France.
Landing on Okinawa was not a bad idea. Good spot for airfields for bombing Japan. Harbors. Etc. They quickly gained control of most of the island, including the useful areas. The stupid part was taking the whole island. If they let the Japanese hold the south and west, US casualties would have been far, far less and the strategic goals would have been accomplished. (And any Japanese counterattacks would be good for the US. Really easy to take care of. The Japanese actually tried that once.)
My biggest complaint about the US strategy in Europe was Eisenhower’s “broad front” strategy. Time and again he had great chances to envelop major German groups and skipped on them. Even after the Falaise Pocket showed how it could be (partially) done. The only time he “went deep” later was Market Garden and what the ??? kind of strategy was that? You’re creating a pocket of your own troops. That’s the opposite of a good idea.
The convoy system had a magic effect on reducing allied losses. But also the German Naval Code was broken, allowing identification of German submarine locations. And that was a total secret, and only revealed after most of the navel histories had been written.
Anybody like to comment? Any good books been written?
It’s a myth that Eisenhower “allowed” the Soviets to have Berlin. Berlin was never Eisenhower’s to give away. The Soviets were closer to Berlin and they had more troops. If there had been a race to Berlin, the Soviets would have easily won it.
And, no, the Germans were not planning on just stepping aside and letting us drive to Berlin while they fought the Russians on the other side.
BuOrd in general seems to have been nigh-criminally inefficient (and very reluctant to admit whenever it fucked up, which was often and thoroughly).
But to be fair, everybody but the Japanese had trouble with their torpedoes during WW2. American ones wouldn’t detonate when fired at “correct” angles, German ones wouldn’t when fired at anything *but *a perfect 90 angle. And magnetic detonators were just laughably worthless across the board.
I bring up Hughes and Costello because they make the assertion that Admiral Ernest King was initially opposed to the convoy system, despite its success in WW1. I do not recall whether they make the claim, or whether I read it elsewhere, but a reason I’ve read for navies’ reluctance to use the convoy system was that naval leaders preferred to actively search for enemy ships, rather than tie up destroyers and patrol craft on convoy duty. Unless you are using aircraft to search (and it might be wrong even then, depending on your aircraft numbers, distances, and other variables that go into the operations research calculation) : actively sweeping the ocean for subs as King was purported to advocate, is the wrong way to go about it. It’s still wrong even if convoys ultimately sink fewer subs than sweeps would have. Because the goal is not to sink enemy warships; it is to maximize the amount of supplies that make it to their destination. Simply, minimize merchant losses. That’s not the same thing as killing subs.
For WW2 diesel-electric subs, the way to minimize their attacks was to make sure surfaced submarines could not approach within about 5 to 10 thousand yds or so from a convoy, and by clearing submerged submarines from a few miles in front of the convoy’s path. It doesn’t matter if the U-boats are freely allowed to roam over the other 99 percent of the North Atlantic so long as you can achieve the above.
How was that done? By forcing surfaced subs to submerge. Submerged submarines at that time had very little mobility. Once they were submerged, if they weren’t already in firing position or if the convoy wasn’t going to travel into firing position (as would be the case for a submarine submerged ahead of the convoy’s path) they weren’t going to be able to harm the convoy. Radar, when it was available, was used to find surfaced subs. Starshells and eyeballs until that point. Should the sub use radio to communicate, and Donitz’s system relied on a ton of radio communication between sub and shore, HF/DF was used to find a line of bearing to the sub, and then an escort was sent down the bearing at high speed. The sub probably wouldn’t be killed by the escort, but it would have to submerge.
Also, it’s somewhat counter-intuitive, but convoy escort needs don’t scale up at the same rate of convoy growth. Most escorts patrolled the perimeter of the convoy, while merchants occupied the area within the perimeter. Well, modelling the convoy as a circle (it’s not, but bear with me), a circle’s circumference goes up as the radius goes up. A circle’s area goes up as the square of the radius. By this model, by increasing the convoy size nine times, only three times the escorts are needed. As for making the German’s detection task tougher by splitting up merchant ships into a bunch of smaller groups or single ships, IMHO Condors could cover too much ground, and there weren’t that many paths that merchants could take to get to the U.K for a single merchant ship to have a decent chance of avoiding detection.
Codebreaking is great, if there are spare assets (usually aircraft) available to quickly prosecute the contact derived from the signals intercepts. Or if the intercepts highlight a dangerous area and allow the convoy to change course away from that area. But direction-finding allowed the Allies to do the same thing: determine the location of a transmitting submarine. Personally, I think ULTRA’s impact in the early Battle of the Atlantic has been overstated.
For the acceptance trials of the Mk 14, which took place in the very early 30’s I think, only 2 were fired. One failed to detonate and one detonated. The icing on the cake of the problem with the Mk 14s is that the LTs and LtCdrs who were the project officers on the Mk 14 in the 30’s were the Captains and Admirals of the BuOrd and Sub Forces in the early 40’s. And when it’s a case where either Captains and Admirals were wrong or the LtCdrs out on patrols commanding subs were screwing up, you know which way the shit’s going to roll.
I think that the decision to go along with Winston Churchill’s theory that Italy was the “soft underbelly of Europe”, and the subsequent fighting in Sicily and Italy in 1943-1945.
Italy didn’t contribute significant men or material to the Axis war effort, and Italy is generally hilly and mountainous, which favors the defender.
Probably second was Eisenhower’s broad-front advance; this all but guaranteed that the Allies would slowly and steadily crush the Germans, but also ensured that the war would be won by sheer attrition, not by clever generalship or maneuver.
Yes. The most significant was * B-Dienst * breaking the Allied merchant shipping code, which gave them an edge in the convoy battle for some time. They also broke an outdated Royal Navy book code.