D-Day - behind the scenes
Discussion
While the human cost of D-Day is mentioned frequently, there don't seem to be any estimates of the financial cost. Rather than thinking there was a cover up by the Allied governments to conceal the cost, I wonder if it was just too complicated to calculate.
Near where I live there was an unsuccessful railway; the Didcot, Newbury and Southampton Railway. It opened in 1882 and, without requiring any effort from Dr Beeching, closed in 1964.
The DN&SR was built as single track but, for D-Day, the track was doubled for eighteen miles from Didcot to just south of Newbury with extended passing loops further south. To make it from single to double track, embankments had to be enlarged and bridges had to be widened.
Eighteen miles of railway including bridges for one military operation.
And it wasn't a lash-up. This was a proper job to ease the transport of equipment North to South for D-Day.
There were a lot of bridges that had to be altered. Presumably the modifications were brick built because metal was required for weapons and vehicles.
And this was just one tiny part of the preparations which were happening all over the UK.
Mind boggling.
Near where I live there was an unsuccessful railway; the Didcot, Newbury and Southampton Railway. It opened in 1882 and, without requiring any effort from Dr Beeching, closed in 1964.
The DN&SR was built as single track but, for D-Day, the track was doubled for eighteen miles from Didcot to just south of Newbury with extended passing loops further south. To make it from single to double track, embankments had to be enlarged and bridges had to be widened.
Eighteen miles of railway including bridges for one military operation.
And it wasn't a lash-up. This was a proper job to ease the transport of equipment North to South for D-Day.
There were a lot of bridges that had to be altered. Presumably the modifications were brick built because metal was required for weapons and vehicles.
And this was just one tiny part of the preparations which were happening all over the UK.
Mind boggling.
It's what can happen when everyone pulls in the same direction. The reason nothing gets done now is everyone has their own idea and can't see big pictures and get over their own self importance. Committees debate stuff to death because no one really wants to be responsible for mistakes or has a clear idea of where we need to end up.
People bring personal and political feelings in to decisions that affect the whole country. If one of the parties came up with an idea so clearly fantastic any right thinking person would go wow that's great, you can guarantee the opposition would pick fault with it till it gets dropped then bring it back a few years later as their own plan where the same happens again and again.
It's people, till we have one clear enemy to rail against (pardon the pun) we are completely s
t. Then as soon as the enemy is gone we have a brief period of camaraderie patching up the cracks then go back to our usual back biting pathetic selves.
People bring personal and political feelings in to decisions that affect the whole country. If one of the parties came up with an idea so clearly fantastic any right thinking person would go wow that's great, you can guarantee the opposition would pick fault with it till it gets dropped then bring it back a few years later as their own plan where the same happens again and again.
It's people, till we have one clear enemy to rail against (pardon the pun) we are completely s
t. Then as soon as the enemy is gone we have a brief period of camaraderie patching up the cracks then go back to our usual back biting pathetic selves.DickyC said:
There were a lot of bridges that had to be altered. Presumably the modifications were brick built because metal was required for weapons and vehicles.
And this was just one tiny part of the preparations which were happening all over the UK.
I believe the WW2-era addition is the iron deck, not the blue engineering brick arch (which would be the original). And this was just one tiny part of the preparations which were happening all over the UK.
The Northern Section (Didcot-Newbury) of the DN&SR was built with earthworks, overbridges bridge and underbridge abutments to double-track width, but initially laid with just a single track and single-width underbridges, with a view to expanding to double track later - as I'm sure you know the aim of the DN&SR was to be a main freight route from the Midlands to the south coast, so the company was expecting/gambling on a lot of traffic in the future.
The Southern Section (Newbury-somewhere in a field outside Winchester but certainly not Southampton) was built when the company was running out of funds and so the permanent way was cost-cut down to single-width throughout (excepting passing loops at stations).
Come WW2 the Northern Section was therefore relatively easily upgraded to double track for the full distance to Newbury, while the Southern Section had to make do with extended passing loops and some key bridges being doubled (usually using concrete) near Winchester.
The mismatch between the red brick abutments and the blue engineering brick arch is, I believe, because once the DN&SR became part of the GWR in the 1920s the Western carried out some upgrade work to run heavier trains, finding that the cash-strapped DN&SR had been rather stingy with the specification of some of the occupation bridges.
Your general point about the scale of civil engineering done for D-Day is absolutely right and it often doesn't go appreciated. Just sticking with railways in the Hampshire/south coast region - one unintended benefit of the Victorian mania for superfluous railway routes, and equally superfluous lines built by other companies to block them, was that there was a lot of duplicate and under-used track mileage that came into its own in war.
The DN&SR was one such route - a complete backwater for the entire 80 years of its existence apart from for a couple of years in the 1940s. Same for the Meon Valley Route through Hampshire (where Churchill, Eisenhower and De Gaulle met on the royal train). There was the Midland & South Western Junction Railway wandering from Cheltenham to Southampton via Andover which saw a huge amount of military traffic with the Army camps around Tidworth and Salisbury Plain. The L&SWR had built a short section of very high-quality double-track main line between Whitchurch and the Test Valley to try and tempt the D&NSR to connect there rather than go all the way to Southampton - that didn't work and so rendered this expensive bit of railway entirely pointless but it was perfect for diverting military traffic down in the runup to D-Day.
From a railway perspective WW2 and D-Day shifted the entire 'axis' (for want of a better word...) of the network because suddenly the south of England and the south coast saw a huge amount of heavy freight traffic heading north/south which in peacetime more generally went east/west across the Midlands and the north. So there was a lot of work to put in paths and facilities to enable this traffic and to provide redundancy from damage or over-capacity. For 60 years the DN&SR and the South Western Main Line had crossed just north of Winchester but stayed apart, the former run by the GWR and the latter by the Southern Railway. In wartime a spur line was built allowing cross-traffic to move from one to the other, ironically providing the DN&SR access to Southampton Docks that its Victorian prospectors had so vainly sought in the 1880s.
The GWR built an entire new marshalling yard at Hinksey, south of Oxford, to sort traffic heading between the south coast and the Midlands, and also virtually doubled the size of the existing yard at Banbury.
It wasn't just D-Day and south coast railways, either. Not far from where I now live in Cambridgeshire the LNER built a mid-size yard of sidings in the middle of the Fens off the East Coast Main Line which served two purposes - as a back-up to the sidings in Peterborough if they were bombed and as a destination for trains carrying rubble from bombed buildings in London, which was tipped out and levelled.
I grew up in Hampshire near the aforementioned Meon Valley railway (or its remains) and in the Forest of Bere there are still clearly visible concrete hard-standings for tanks (mostly Canadian, I believe) that were dispersed there in the build-up. Go down to the southern fringes of the New Forest and there are still loads of suspiciously-wide roads winding through empty downland and forest and surprisingly sturdy-looking bridges - they were all put in by military engineering teams in the weeks before D-Day. At Lepe Beach (where the Mulberry Harbour production line was and where LSTs and LCTs were loaded before heading to Normandy) you can trace the concrete foundations of buildings and the route of roads that allowed tanks and trucks to reach the foreshore.
Anyone here familiar with the A37 road between Weymouth and Yeovil? You know how for most of its route it wanders through the Frome valley, twisting and turning through all the villages, apart from one bit where it suddenly spears in a straight line over the top of the hills before dropping back down and
going all bucolic again? It's because that six-mile section was bulldozed out by the US Army Corp of Engineers in a weekend so military traffic heading to embark in Weymouth didn't get snarled up going through Cattistock and Maiden Newton on the old road.
Growing up in Hampshire you can't get far away from D-Day echoes. The clubhouse of the sailing club where I learnt to sail was an unprepossessing concrete box (serving as the changing room and loos) with a 1960s glass 'penthouse' on top (which was the lounge/bar). The concrete bit was built as a communications and control room for managing landing craft traffic in the Solent. The second sailing club I joined had - still has - a boat park and slipway formed out of 'Chocolate Block' concrete sections that allowed Sherman tanks and Sexton SPGs to roll onto LSTs.
It's interesting to compare operation Sealion, the proposed invasion of the UK by Germany in 1940 with Overlord and its execution.
Sealion would've been a disaster for the Germans, the only question is just how big a disaster. There was little or no effort expended trying to cut rail links which would've been used to transport British reinforcements to any invasion site.
The kriegsmarine had very little in the way of destroyers or cruisers to keep the Royal Navy at bay and lacked any capital ships at the time. A U-boat in the narrow confines of the English Channel would've been an easy target on the surface and lacked the power to fight the fast and very powerful tides when submerged.
And finally there was Churchill telling the civilian population that they 'could always take one with you' so any German paratrooper was likely to get a very warm welcome and not in a good way.
Sealion would've been a disaster for the Germans, the only question is just how big a disaster. There was little or no effort expended trying to cut rail links which would've been used to transport British reinforcements to any invasion site.
The kriegsmarine had very little in the way of destroyers or cruisers to keep the Royal Navy at bay and lacked any capital ships at the time. A U-boat in the narrow confines of the English Channel would've been an easy target on the surface and lacked the power to fight the fast and very powerful tides when submerged.
And finally there was Churchill telling the civilian population that they 'could always take one with you' so any German paratrooper was likely to get a very warm welcome and not in a good way.
steveo3002 said:
all of the efforts behind the war are amazing , imagine how they built dozens of airfields so fast with the equipment they had , they how did they source and transport all the materials
would still be standing around with a clip board these days
Over 300 airfields I think.would still be standing around with a clip board these days
And Irish labour was a huge part of it.
Tango13 said:
It's interesting to compare operation Sealion, the proposed invasion of the UK by Germany in 1940 with Overlord and its execution.
Sealion would've been a disaster for the Germans, the only question is just how big a disaster. There was little or no effort expended trying to cut rail links which would've been used to transport British reinforcements to any invasion site.
The kriegsmarine had very little in the way of destroyers or cruisers to keep the Royal Navy at bay and lacked any capital ships at the time. A U-boat in the narrow confines of the English Channel would've been an easy target on the surface and lacked the power to fight the fast and very powerful tides when submerged.
And finally there was Churchill telling the civilian population that they 'could always take one with you' so any German paratrooper was likely to get a very warm welcome and not in a good way.
Not to mention the complete lack of transport/landing craft. Just river barges, many of which were unpowered (and so would be towed by tugs) and those that were powered were only intended for gently chugging along inland waterways, not fighting the tides and waves of the Channel. The Kriegsmarine gathered something like 2500 barges, of which about a quarter had their own engines. Sealion would've been a disaster for the Germans, the only question is just how big a disaster. There was little or no effort expended trying to cut rail links which would've been used to transport British reinforcements to any invasion site.
The kriegsmarine had very little in the way of destroyers or cruisers to keep the Royal Navy at bay and lacked any capital ships at the time. A U-boat in the narrow confines of the English Channel would've been an easy target on the surface and lacked the power to fight the fast and very powerful tides when submerged.
And finally there was Churchill telling the civilian population that they 'could always take one with you' so any German paratrooper was likely to get a very warm welcome and not in a good way.
There were only enough tugs for two barges to be towed by each tug - a combination that would make 5 knots in flat calm, more like 3 knots in any sort of open sea. The shortest stretch of the Channel across to Dover did not lead to a viable landing ground - the cliffs make a landing impossible and Dover itself and the other ports were blocked, mined, defended and would be destroyed at the first sign of a massing invasion.
The Thames Estuary or, in the other direction, the coast at Dungeness were better landing grounds but both ringed by treacherous sandbanks and awkward tides, and were much further from any practical embarkation point. The invasion fleet - of river barges being towed by tugs or put-putted by slow-revving single-cylinder hot-bulb engines, remember - would be travelling cross-tide, being swept sideways across their course on one tide and then back in the other direction on the other, thus probably doubling the number of 'sea miles' they travelled (at 3 knots - at best!) in relation to their distance made good. You're looking at crossing times worse than a modern sailing yacht in decent weather - something like 15 hours for the first wave of your invasion to cross the Channel.
If the Germans were to arrive on the British coast at dawn, they'd have to leave France in the early afternoon of the day before (in full daylight) and then make the majority of the crossing, including approaching the unfamiliar and hostile coast, in darkness. 2500 barges, under tow, in the dark, with no lights, fighting the tides and worrying about their navigation. Cross during the day and the British would have a grand view of a huge flotilla of barges slowly creeping towards them (when not being pushed sideways by the tides), and then you get to land at night against a forewarned and prepared enemy. And the tidal peaks move up and down the Channel, so you can't land all your forces on a broad front at the same state of the tide.
Frankly, a good portion of those barges would have sunk themselves in collisions, groundings or just by being overwhelmed by a bit of chop, probably drowning 200 German soldiers each time. As has been frequently pointed out in the years since, a single destroyer travelling at flank speed would send enough of a wash across the invasion fleet to wipe out dozens of barges at a time, as would the waves kicked up by a single 8-inch shell landing nearby, let alone a 15-inch shell or a moderately-sized bomb.
The Germans had no practicable way of carrying heavy armour or artillery, or resupplying any forces they put ashore. The expectation was that the barges that had landed the first wave would return (another 12-15 hour trip!) and then carry a second wave or supplies back to the landing site (another 12-15 hrs), so any resupply would not land for at least 24, possibly 30, hours. The assembled force consisted of light infantry, field artillery and draught horses.
And this isn't even getting into the disparity in naval forces, the shortcomings in air cover or the expectations and tactics to be used once the landings had been made.
Sea Lion would have been an utter disaster. Tragic for the half-a-million or so German soldiers involved in it, many of whom would have suffered unpleasant and ignoble deaths as their river barge was swamped by a British destroyer passing a few hundred yards away without firing a shot, but almost comical for bystanding military powers.
In many ways it's intriguing to ponder what would have happened if Sea Lion had been attempted - the 'invincible' Third Reich would have fallen so hard on its face, suffered such a farcically crushing defeat and so demonstrably proven that it was not a direct territorial threat to the British Isles, that the entire tenor of the war would have changed.
The thing is, the Allies (the British, for 1940...) were in no better place to conduct a cross-Channel invasion in 1940 than the Germans were. Almost everything that was applied to D-Day - the strategy, the tactics, the doctrine, the ships, the landing craft, the vehicles - didn't exist in the summer of 1940 and was conceived, tested, improved and honed in the next four years. We had our own pratfalls like Norway and the Dieppe Raid, and fed those into later successes like Operations Torch, Husky and Avalanche. Which culminated in Overlord, which was the exact opposite of Sea Lion in almost every possible way.
2xChevrons said:
I believe the WW2-era addition is the iron deck, not the blue engineering brick arch (which would be the original).
The Northern Section (Didcot-Newbury) of the DN&SR was built with earthworks, overbridges bridge and underbridge abutments to double-track width, but initially laid with just a single track and single-width underbridges, with a view to expanding to double track later - as I'm sure you know the aim of the DN&SR was to be a main freight route from the Midlands to the south coast, so the company was expecting/gambling on a lot of traffic in the future.
The Southern Section (Newbury-somewhere in a field outside Winchester but certainly not Southampton) was built when the company was running out of funds and so the permanent way was cost-cut down to single-width throughout (excepting passing loops at stations).
Come WW2 the Northern Section was therefore relatively easily upgraded to double track for the full distance to Newbury, while the Southern Section had to make do with extended passing loops and some key bridges being doubled (usually using concrete) near Winchester.
The mismatch between the red brick abutments and the blue engineering brick arch is, I believe, because once the DN&SR became part of the GWR in the 1920s the Western carried out some upgrade work to run heavier trains, finding that the cash-strapped DN&SR had been rather stingy with the specification of some of the occupation bridges.
Your general point about the scale of civil engineering done for D-Day is absolutely right and it often doesn't go appreciated. Just sticking with railways in the Hampshire/south coast region - one unintended benefit of the Victorian mania for superfluous railway routes, and equally superfluous lines built by other companies to block them, was that there was a lot of duplicate and under-used track mileage that came into its own in war.
The DN&SR was one such route - a complete backwater for the entire 80 years of its existence apart from for a couple of years in the 1940s. Same for the Meon Valley Route through Hampshire (where Churchill, Eisenhower and De Gaulle met on the royal train). There was the Midland & South Western Junction Railway wandering from Cheltenham to Southampton via Andover which saw a huge amount of military traffic with the Army camps around Tidworth and Salisbury Plain. The L&SWR had built a short section of very high-quality double-track main line between Whitchurch and the Test Valley to try and tempt the D&NSR to connect there rather than go all the way to Southampton - that didn't work and so rendered this expensive bit of railway entirely pointless but it was perfect for diverting military traffic down in the runup to D-Day.
From a railway perspective WW2 and D-Day shifted the entire 'axis' (for want of a better word...) of the network because suddenly the south of England and the south coast saw a huge amount of heavy freight traffic heading north/south which in peacetime more generally went east/west across the Midlands and the north. So there was a lot of work to put in paths and facilities to enable this traffic and to provide redundancy from damage or over-capacity. For 60 years the DN&SR and the South Western Main Line had crossed just north of Winchester but stayed apart, the former run by the GWR and the latter by the Southern Railway. In wartime a spur line was built allowing cross-traffic to move from one to the other, ironically providing the DN&SR access to Southampton Docks that its Victorian prospectors had so vainly sought in the 1880s.
The GWR built an entire new marshalling yard at Hinksey, south of Oxford, to sort traffic heading between the south coast and the Midlands, and also virtually doubled the size of the existing yard at Banbury.
It wasn't just D-Day and south coast railways, either. Not far from where I now live in Cambridgeshire the LNER built a mid-size yard of sidings in the middle of the Fens off the East Coast Main Line which served two purposes - as a back-up to the sidings in Peterborough if they were bombed and as a destination for trains carrying rubble from bombed buildings in London, which was tipped out and levelled.
I grew up in Hampshire near the aforementioned Meon Valley railway (or its remains) and in the Forest of Bere there are still clearly visible concrete hard-standings for tanks (mostly Canadian, I believe) that were dispersed there in the build-up. Go down to the southern fringes of the New Forest and there are still loads of suspiciously-wide roads winding through empty downland and forest and surprisingly sturdy-looking bridges - they were all put in by military engineering teams in the weeks before D-Day. At Lepe Beach (where the Mulberry Harbour production line was and where LSTs and LCTs were loaded before heading to Normandy) you can trace the concrete foundations of buildings and the route of roads that allowed tanks and trucks to reach the foreshore.
Anyone here familiar with the A37 road between Weymouth and Yeovil? You know how for most of its route it wanders through the Frome valley, twisting and turning through all the villages, apart from one bit where it suddenly spears in a straight line over the top of the hills before dropping back down and
going all bucolic again? It's because that six-mile section was bulldozed out by the US Army Corp of Engineers in a weekend so military traffic heading to embark in Weymouth didn't get snarled up going through Cattistock and Maiden Newton on the old road.
Growing up in Hampshire you can't get far away from D-Day echoes. The clubhouse of the sailing club where I learnt to sail was an unprepossessing concrete box (serving as the changing room and loos) with a 1960s glass 'penthouse' on top (which was the lounge/bar). The concrete bit was built as a communications and control room for managing landing craft traffic in the Solent. The second sailing club I joined had - still has - a boat park and slipway formed out of 'Chocolate Block' concrete sections that allowed Sherman tanks and Sexton SPGs to roll onto LSTs.
My local beach, Stokes Bay was the embarkation point for a lot of the Canadian troops, the remains of chocolate box slipways can still be seen at low tide. The sailing club is built around an embarkation control tower, so has invasion stripes on the side. The Northern Section (Didcot-Newbury) of the DN&SR was built with earthworks, overbridges bridge and underbridge abutments to double-track width, but initially laid with just a single track and single-width underbridges, with a view to expanding to double track later - as I'm sure you know the aim of the DN&SR was to be a main freight route from the Midlands to the south coast, so the company was expecting/gambling on a lot of traffic in the future.
The Southern Section (Newbury-somewhere in a field outside Winchester but certainly not Southampton) was built when the company was running out of funds and so the permanent way was cost-cut down to single-width throughout (excepting passing loops at stations).
Come WW2 the Northern Section was therefore relatively easily upgraded to double track for the full distance to Newbury, while the Southern Section had to make do with extended passing loops and some key bridges being doubled (usually using concrete) near Winchester.
The mismatch between the red brick abutments and the blue engineering brick arch is, I believe, because once the DN&SR became part of the GWR in the 1920s the Western carried out some upgrade work to run heavier trains, finding that the cash-strapped DN&SR had been rather stingy with the specification of some of the occupation bridges.
Your general point about the scale of civil engineering done for D-Day is absolutely right and it often doesn't go appreciated. Just sticking with railways in the Hampshire/south coast region - one unintended benefit of the Victorian mania for superfluous railway routes, and equally superfluous lines built by other companies to block them, was that there was a lot of duplicate and under-used track mileage that came into its own in war.
The DN&SR was one such route - a complete backwater for the entire 80 years of its existence apart from for a couple of years in the 1940s. Same for the Meon Valley Route through Hampshire (where Churchill, Eisenhower and De Gaulle met on the royal train). There was the Midland & South Western Junction Railway wandering from Cheltenham to Southampton via Andover which saw a huge amount of military traffic with the Army camps around Tidworth and Salisbury Plain. The L&SWR had built a short section of very high-quality double-track main line between Whitchurch and the Test Valley to try and tempt the D&NSR to connect there rather than go all the way to Southampton - that didn't work and so rendered this expensive bit of railway entirely pointless but it was perfect for diverting military traffic down in the runup to D-Day.
From a railway perspective WW2 and D-Day shifted the entire 'axis' (for want of a better word...) of the network because suddenly the south of England and the south coast saw a huge amount of heavy freight traffic heading north/south which in peacetime more generally went east/west across the Midlands and the north. So there was a lot of work to put in paths and facilities to enable this traffic and to provide redundancy from damage or over-capacity. For 60 years the DN&SR and the South Western Main Line had crossed just north of Winchester but stayed apart, the former run by the GWR and the latter by the Southern Railway. In wartime a spur line was built allowing cross-traffic to move from one to the other, ironically providing the DN&SR access to Southampton Docks that its Victorian prospectors had so vainly sought in the 1880s.
The GWR built an entire new marshalling yard at Hinksey, south of Oxford, to sort traffic heading between the south coast and the Midlands, and also virtually doubled the size of the existing yard at Banbury.
It wasn't just D-Day and south coast railways, either. Not far from where I now live in Cambridgeshire the LNER built a mid-size yard of sidings in the middle of the Fens off the East Coast Main Line which served two purposes - as a back-up to the sidings in Peterborough if they were bombed and as a destination for trains carrying rubble from bombed buildings in London, which was tipped out and levelled.
I grew up in Hampshire near the aforementioned Meon Valley railway (or its remains) and in the Forest of Bere there are still clearly visible concrete hard-standings for tanks (mostly Canadian, I believe) that were dispersed there in the build-up. Go down to the southern fringes of the New Forest and there are still loads of suspiciously-wide roads winding through empty downland and forest and surprisingly sturdy-looking bridges - they were all put in by military engineering teams in the weeks before D-Day. At Lepe Beach (where the Mulberry Harbour production line was and where LSTs and LCTs were loaded before heading to Normandy) you can trace the concrete foundations of buildings and the route of roads that allowed tanks and trucks to reach the foreshore.
Anyone here familiar with the A37 road between Weymouth and Yeovil? You know how for most of its route it wanders through the Frome valley, twisting and turning through all the villages, apart from one bit where it suddenly spears in a straight line over the top of the hills before dropping back down and
going all bucolic again? It's because that six-mile section was bulldozed out by the US Army Corp of Engineers in a weekend so military traffic heading to embark in Weymouth didn't get snarled up going through Cattistock and Maiden Newton on the old road.
Growing up in Hampshire you can't get far away from D-Day echoes. The clubhouse of the sailing club where I learnt to sail was an unprepossessing concrete box (serving as the changing room and loos) with a 1960s glass 'penthouse' on top (which was the lounge/bar). The concrete bit was built as a communications and control room for managing landing craft traffic in the Solent. The second sailing club I joined had - still has - a boat park and slipway formed out of 'Chocolate Block' concrete sections that allowed Sherman tanks and Sexton SPGs to roll onto LSTs.
Local history site https://www.friendsofstokesbay.co.uk/d-day-embarka...
Prior to that some of the mulberry harbour was constructed just behind the beach. Interestingly the west end was used for evaluation and testing of early Duplex Drive tanks based on the Valentine.
Have we been reading 'Invasion 1940' by Derek Robinson by chance? 
The after effects of a failed German invasion is something that never seems to get discussed. I doubt operation Barbarossa could've taken place due to a lack of manpower so I suspect Russia without an invasion to give them the wake-up call they needed would've been slowly purged into oblivion by Stalin.
The after effects of a failed German invasion is something that never seems to get discussed. I doubt operation Barbarossa could've taken place due to a lack of manpower so I suspect Russia without an invasion to give them the wake-up call they needed would've been slowly purged into oblivion by Stalin.
2xChevrons said:
Sea Lion would have been an utter disaster. Tragic for the half-a-million or so German soldiers involved in it, many of whom would have suffered unpleasant and ignoble deaths as their river barge was swamped by a British destroyer passing a few hundred yards away without firing a shot, but almost comical for bystanding military powers.
There's a school of thought that even Hitler wasn't stupid enough to think Sealion would work, he was hoping the threat of it would make us sue for peace.On the other hand, the UK government were happy to use the threat to keep the populace on their toes, rather than getting complacent.
Some alt history forums won't entertain what-ifs concerning Sealion, as it's been done to death.
The Gauge said:
Would the UK be able to do something similar to the OP's post today?
Whilst we probably have the infrastructure I can imagine delays with awarding contracts, private company profiteering and availability of materials etc causing issues.
Would the UK have been able to do it in 1938? My guess is probably not. I suspect a few years in to a war government processes for such things get a lot quicker. The term "profiteering" was in use back in WW1 so that's not a new thing either.Whilst we probably have the infrastructure I can imagine delays with awarding contracts, private company profiteering and availability of materials etc causing issues.
Obviously we are into alt-history but......
The hovercraft has been described as a solution waiting for a problem but...... how would D Day have worked if Christopher Cockerell had 'invented' the ACV in (say) in 1942, rather than the 1950's? Landings could have taken place 'flying' over minefields / beach defences - no need for those oh so costly Normandy landings. Alt-history I know, but it makes you think.
The hovercraft has been described as a solution waiting for a problem but...... how would D Day have worked if Christopher Cockerell had 'invented' the ACV in (say) in 1942, rather than the 1950's? Landings could have taken place 'flying' over minefields / beach defences - no need for those oh so costly Normandy landings. Alt-history I know, but it makes you think.
alfaspecial said:
Obviously we are into alt-history but......
The hovercraft has been described as a solution waiting for a problem but...... how would D Day have worked if Christopher Cockerell had 'invented' the ACV in (say) in 1942, rather than the 1950's? Landings could have taken place 'flying' over minefields / beach defences - no need for those oh so costly Normandy landings. Alt-history I know, but it makes you think.
Wouldn't these have stopped them?The hovercraft has been described as a solution waiting for a problem but...... how would D Day have worked if Christopher Cockerell had 'invented' the ACV in (say) in 1942, rather than the 1950's? Landings could have taken place 'flying' over minefields / beach defences - no need for those oh so costly Normandy landings. Alt-history I know, but it makes you think.
The Gauge said:
alfaspecial said:
Obviously we are into alt-history but......
The hovercraft has been described as a solution waiting for a problem but...... how would D Day have worked if Christopher Cockerell had 'invented' the ACV in (say) in 1942, rather than the 1950's? Landings could have taken place 'flying' over minefields / beach defences - no need for those oh so costly Normandy landings. Alt-history I know, but it makes you think.
Wouldn't these have stopped them?The hovercraft has been described as a solution waiting for a problem but...... how would D Day have worked if Christopher Cockerell had 'invented' the ACV in (say) in 1942, rather than the 1950's? Landings could have taken place 'flying' over minefields / beach defences - no need for those oh so costly Normandy landings. Alt-history I know, but it makes you think.
Bill said:
I'm not convinced a hovercraft skirt would fare well against a machine gun.
A landing craft travelling at 5mph might fare even worse than a hovercraft at 50mph?The US Marines use LCACs today https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landing_Craft_Air_Cu...
Debacles such as Bluff Cove (Falklands) might not have happened had we had them. Possibly?
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