British Empire and Commonwealth in WW2.

What? The Royal Navy kicked the living (*)(*)(*)(*) out of both the Germans and the Italians.

Battle of Norway. Cape Matapan.

 

Wow we beat the Italians, what a great victory that was. Hahaha.

The battle of Norway was a defeat and we lost a carriers, the Germans didn't lost any capital ships. It was like the Dardenelles, a bad plan and poorly executed. That's is Churchill as first lord to the admirality, a total failure and stuipd idea's.

 

The British could afford to lose a few of their ships. The Kriegsmarine could not and was terrified of any future encounters with the RN.

 

Still they won the battle and took Norway. The Germans just let their U-boats do the hard world, didn't really use their surface fleet outside the Baltic. But I would say they were terrified, the British were always worried about the German battleships breaking out, they thought they could sink all our battleships.

 

Mostly how the UK won and Germany lost was in strategy and tactics.

When it came to Capitol ships, the UK tended to mass them and other ships together. All to often, Germany tried to make their operate alone, and that was the undoing of ships like the Biz.

Then you have the opposite, where the subs used the "Wolfpack", for over a year after the Allies found tactics to counteract this tactic.

If I have to classify German tactics and strategy as one thing, it would be "Teutonic". Very efficient, well engineered and thought out. But it did not leave much room for improvisation, and that is probably what gave them the most fits when facing Allied nations (especially the US). And when the Germans were caught off-guard, they all to often just continued with the exact same strategy even though to most it seemed like it was failing (Stalingrad).

I think most Allied nations would have tried to cut it off from the backside, and leave a blocking force to keep the defenders locked inside. Either that or just turn away and let their air forces pound away at them as they moved towards another target. Not try a long siege that they could not afford and destroyed them.

 

I believe what he is suggesting is the US played a balance between quality and detail vs quantity. It took the US 2 years to build a battle ship. In the same time they produced 26 escort carriers. In a battle sprayed across the Pacific, it means some air support can be in 26 places, yet the battleship can only be in one

- - - Updated - - -

I am not sure I agree with you entirely. If I had to point to one specific thing that gave the allies the edge, it is logistics

 

It may have been big enough had the government, including Winston Churchill, not spent most of the 1930s shrinking our armed forces because they thought there was no threat posed to Britain and her Empire for the forseeable future. How wrong they turned out to be.

Our current government, which is again shrinking our armed forces, obviously does not heed the lessons of the past.

 

Rearmament started in 1935, so for the later half over the 30's our military budget and capabilities were increased. It was the 20's that killed us, Lloyd George and Labour being in power, plus the Washington and London naval treaties. Also through in the interwar period we were fight small colonial war in places like Iraq, which used up resources. Also Churchill was the one that set out the 10 year rule, which stated the British empire wouldn't be in another major war for 10 years. Part of this makes me think Churchill was an American spy used by his mother to destroy the British Empire because of how useless he was in WW1 and the massives change in the mid 30's to become the greatest of men that he was. Also Attlee used that same 10 year rule to gutt the Royal Navy after WW2, cancelling the Malta class carriers and jet programs.

I really see no point having a large army with loads of cost MBT's sitting in Germany for no reason. NimRod dispite being a great aircraft far more capable than what the Americans are offering, but it wasn't worth the money, when we can use drones for maritime patrols. The main threat I see to the UK is Norway increasing defence budget and interests that can get in the way of our interests, war is a very real possibility. This is a war I am not sure we could win currently and if Denmark and Iceland support Norway, the UK has no chance in the battle for the North Sea. I can also see very real trade problems with Ireland caused by the UK leave the EU, this could cause another war, but very unlikely, unless the UK and Ireland claim the same oil and gas rich part of the North Sea and fishing rights their, which could cause a war. Then it would a small nation backed by the US and EU against the UK, only one winner their. For all the talk of Argentina, North Korea and Iran, I think the British military should be looking closer to home for possible foes in the future.

 

The British Empire was not a military behemoth and it imposed indirect rule upon its colonies by allying itself with local elites who became colonial administrators on the British's behalf and British colonial rule was based on mutual consent not coercion backed by military power. It's no wonder that Britain's Asian colonies crumbled very quickly when Imperial Japan took over Singapore, Malaya and Hong Kong and there were only two warships available to defend the entire Asian theatre, which were sunk on the same day killing 700 sailors on board. The only way to keep those colonial possessions in Asia was renewing the Anglo-Japanese Alliance with Japan which was terminated in 1920 and it was a political blunder resulted in the demise of the British Empire.

 

One thing to remember is that British Commonwealth was fighting the Germans right from the get go. They had to learn all the lessons.

When the US arrived on the scene over 2 years later they had had plenty of time to study those lessons and implement changes. However, they didn't and when the US arrived they too got their arses handed to them by the Germans. Everyone had to learn their lessons the hard way.

 

It was in WW1, but the military cuts done by the Liberal and Labour parties destroyed it's military power and capabilities. Just look at the dates of the Washington treaty, London treaty and post WW2 navy cuts, all done by Labour and the Liberal's. However before WW1 the Liberal's were just as pro military as the Conservatives, but after WW1 the British people were tired of war and the massive loss of life in WW1. WW1 destroyed my country and it's will to fight wars and spend the money needed on defence. We could have defeated Germany if we had the military capabilities to do so and had planned for the war. It was because most of the fleet was in Europe why Japan had such an easy time taking Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaya. The India Ocean raid was also a disaster where one of the carriers didn't have any aircraft. If we had been able to put the British Pacific fleet to sea that was involved in the Pacific post the defeat of Germany, I very much doubt Japan would have had the same success.

 

True. However, for the most part the Battleship only had to be at one place generally at any one time. Meanwhile Carriers could be used across the entire battlefield.

With the shift in US Navy doctrine away from major surface ships like Battleships and Heavy Cruisers and towards Carriers and Air Power as the major striking arm, the role of the Battleship was greatly diminished, but not eliminated. At that point it moved from the role of attacking ships to attacking shorelines. The Battleships bombarded every shoreline from Tarawa and Saipan to Iwo Jima and Okinawa. They did so again at Inchon and Beirut, and were so effective in distracting Saddam that he was sure the Marines were going to storm ashore in 1991 so had a large force prepared to resist them.

And yes, logistics played a major role in the loss of the Axis powers. Mostly in that the Axis simply did not have enough of almost everything.

 

Escort carriers were built on Liberty ship hulls. Essentially glorified break-bulk freighters with a flight deck on top. Not much subdivision below the water line and no armor to speak of. They sank with minimal damage but they were good enough seaboats they could do carrier ops in the North Atlantic.

 

The Royal Navy got quite a few of them in the war because they were cheaper than real carriers. I doubt one of them could have taken a Kamikaze attack like HMS Formidable.

 

Actually, it depends on the ship.

The Casablanca class (the most numerous single class) was indeed built on Liberty Ship hulls. But the ships were actually built on a large variety of different hulls. The USS Long Island was converted from a Pre-war merchant hull, while others like the USS Suwanee was built upon a converted oiler.

And they were not always quite as helpless as you may think. My grandfather was on the USS Suwanee, and she was hit twice by kamikaze aircraft as party of Taffy 1, and was still able to return to Hawaii under her own power, and returned in time to participate in the Battle of Okinawa.

While granted they were not as durable as the "real carriers", they could still take quite a bit of damage, because the crews were among the very best in damage control operations. Over and over in the war the US was able to save and return these and other ships into combat. Which made the Japanese think we had many more then they thought, because some they reported lost 2 and 3 times, only to reappear again at another battle.