Quote:
Originally Posted by ColonelSandersLite
I had to come out of lurking for this one. Honestly, RR doesn't know what he's talking about.
Here's part of the reason why:
http://www.navy.mil/navydata/cno/n87...campaigns.html
The Battle of the Atlantic resulted in western allied forces being scaled down pretty damn significantly.
The idea that British people would have accepted peace without a fight after Dunkirk is laughable. It's just as laughable as saying the Texans would have accepted peace after the Alamo, or that the US would have accepted peace after pearl harbor.
The logic that Uboats guaranteed US entry into the war in the form of us lending destroyers to the British is also laughable, since we where also quite happy to provide every other form of arms and equipment to both the British and the soviets before we entered the war anyways. If it wasn't destroyers, it would have been even more tanks, rifles, and aircraft.
His assertion that there was no plan to knock Brittan out of the war is blatantly false. The plan was:
1: Attrit the RAF's fighters to the point that they could not put up an effective defense. Until they tried and failed, German command believed that this would take four days.
2: The bombers would then have free reign to operate unescorted, thus being able to strike deeper targets more effectively. (Despite his assertion to the contrary, if bomber operations weren't limited by the range of their escort fighters, the he-111 and ju-88 have a range that covers the whole of the British isles.) They would then spend the next four weeks dismantling the British military production. Notably, *every* British naval base was within bomber range. This would force the British navy to leave the home islands or be sunk. This may possibly force a military surrender.
3: The German navy could then blockade at will quite effectively. Also possibly resulting in a surrender.
4: Terror bombing may force a surrender.
5: If not, an invasion of a starving terrorized England at some later date TBD (never really seriously considered).
Obviously, they failed at point 1, but that doesn't mean they didn't have a plan.
I think that's enough. I could go on, but I won't. The one thing I do agree with him on though is that opening the war with 300 u-boats was probably an unrealistic desire. If the Germans had listened to Donitz better from the outset, maybe they could have had a hundred though and that would have *really* helped. |
Finally, a reasoned rejoinder, although characterizing my opinions as "laughable" and "blatantly false" does nothing to build credibility. If you are correct you don't need to call someone "ridiculous" you just trot out the facts.
It's an interesting paper you cite. It makes many logical errors. First of all, in comparing the proportional costs of the U-Boat war, it fails to consider the fact that ALL portions of the war expenditures were disproportional. That is how victory was accomplished, by the disproportionate application of power on a country foolish enough to think it could fight alone against the world. Yes, I know about the Italians, the anchor around the neck of Germany. So they were at a handicap.
On land, disproportionate use of power was policy. No attack was made unless we had a 3 to 1 advantage in manpower and materiel. At that ratio planners considered that we were evenly matched, so they sought to exceed that. So establishing a 10-1 expenditure ratio for the Battle of the Atlantic is only showing that the Allies treated that theater like all others. They sought to win by total application of all economic, production and manpower resources.
Certainly the cost in dead submarine crews representing the most committed, experienced and trained personnel in the German military machine was a cost far higher than any the Allies paid. It is not the raw amount of expenditure that is important at all. It is whether that expenditure can be afforded. The Allies could afford to lose the men, shipping and materiel they did. The Germans could not afford to lose the lesser amount that they lost. Therefore adding up dollars and reichmarks is meaningless unless you're out to write a college thesis and need an idea that will pass muster.
Let's dissect your allegation that "The Battle of the Atlantic resulted in western allied forces being scaled down pretty damn significantly." That's true. War is always a balancing and rebalancing of strength, weakness, opportunity and threat. You always have a finite ability to produce and where you produce is always going to be modulated even without any opposition. "To do this they had to cut back on that" is just a fact of life that you and I do every day and we're not fighting a submarine war outside of our computers. It certainly is no way to analyze whether the U-boat war was sensible or not.
Because, guess what! Without the U-Boat there would have been no Battle of the Atlantic. There would have been no lend-lease of destroyers. The US, with a huge number of German immigrants and active Nazi organizations including an island in New York advertised as a Nazi retreat--"Live with people who think as YOU do!" would have been very neutral. Roosevelt knew well that if he were caught doing his chummy act with Churchill, which included setting up a potential government in exile in New York City directly contrary to the US constitution, Roosevelt would have been immediately impeached and removed from office. But the U-boats sinking American ships turned the tide of public opinion away from deeply entrenched isolationism to enmity against Germany.
Without considering the historical context: whether the U-boats were necessary at all, adding up the dollars, resources and cost is (note that I don't say you are "laughable") irrelevant. The fact is, without the U-Boats directly attacking Britain and the US, the Battle of the Atlantic would not have happened at all and none of those compared expenses would have taken place at all. To further emphasize the streigth of my point of view, money saved In the US would have been spent on cars, movies, eating and drinking. British money saved would have been spent non-militarily if they could have been kept out of the war, but German money saved would reichmark for riechmark have gone into locking down Fortress Europe.
So logical errors are ignoring the capacity and affordability of the cost. Just comparing cost numbers is a fatal error of diagnosis. If I sue Donald Trump and it costs me my house, bank account, retirement savings and Trump spends 100x more than that to defend himself that's not a victory on my part. I lose everything I have and Trump doesn't notice the difference. The analysis that you quote would say that my suit was worth it because I forced him to spend 100x my cost. But my cost was 100% of my assets and I lost the case. He lost a tiny fraction of 1% of his assets. Comparing costs in the way that paper did is entirely meaningless.
Now let's scrutinize your comparison of the Alamo with Dunkirk. At the Alamo, that was a fort on Texan ground. They were defending their own turf, their own homeland. British presence on the continent was in treaty obligation to other nations. There's just no equivalency there. And the British were not seeking conflict at all.
They ELECTED Neville Chamberlain, you know, and he was in Munich doing exactly what the British people wanted him to do: buy peace at any terms. (seems somehow depressingly familiar) When they entered the war defending Poland, they did it reluctantly, not with the do or die enthusiasm of the defenders of the Alamo. Without threat of U-boats, with the easy escape from the continent, the Germans could well have said "You have done your duty and that duty is discharged. We have no animosity with your people, etc" And a society gutted twenty years previously by a war whose tragedy we Americans cannot even imagine would have grasped onto that straw for all they were worth. Churchill was setting his government in exile in New York City in 1939 you know. He did it because there was a real danger that his government would throw in with the Nazis. He and a small cadre of like-thinking individuals weren't going to participate in that. It's telling that FDR was willing to risk his presidency to help Churchill set up foreign government on US soil. an action directly prohibited by the Constitution.
Comparing costs without comparing ability to pay, ignoring that those costs need not have happened at all and letting others do the thinking are fatal errors which do nothing to support your claim that my positions are "laughable."