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I stuck around for the last one (and a bit) of these. One of the reasons I have an account. Grey, you are a gloriously insane bastard. Calling the DD Ayanami for my "lucky" ship. Maybe she'll do better than IRL and not get murdered by a battleship.
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Dec 7, 2015 23:43
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So I kind of want to talk about amphibious invasions in general, mostly because I wrote my dissertation on Overlord and the subject fascinates me a little. The main thing is: they're hard. Everyone knows the classic Omaha Beach "Saving Private Ryan" scene, but that's only a tiny amount of what's actually going on and what needs to get done. I'm going to talk about Normandy, but this applies to any amphibious assault that isn't taking a literal bar of sand in the middle of the Pacific. Including, dare I say it, Sealion.  incoming, but I'm sure this thread won't mind too much.One thing to keep in mind is that Overlord was the single largest operation of its type in history, so the numbers below would be scaled down for a normal invasion. The first thing that anyone did, before anything else, was set up a way to get supplies across. I've actually looked at the documents, written in early 1942, where they're talking about how to get enough oil across to supply an invasion (WO 107/75 at the National Archives in Kew, in case someone's enough to go looking). The planners established what needs to be moved across and what problems they could encounter a full two years (and change) before the invasion launches, and then immediately proceed to go into how to accomplish the task. Necessary stockpiles of jerry cans are already being accumulated by this point, as well. Keep in mind, this is just oil, and this is in March 1942 - three months after the Americans enter the war and Churchill decides Sealion definitely isn't happening. Things snowball from there - pretty much the next two years are spent planning for Normandy. Again with the oil (it was the first document I looked at and it's kind of stuck with me), you see not just one method of shifting stuff across and landing it, but more like three or four. There's the Mulberry harbours, of course, then underwater pipelines, then various types of barges and so on. The total estimate, in 1943, was 10,000 tons (imperial) per day of oil, just for the British Army forces. Not the Americans, or the Canadians, or even the Royal Air Force, just the British Army. I could go on and on, but it's nearly 2am here so I'll wrap this atrocious mess of a paragraph up. I'll talk more about it at some other time if people are really interested, but most of it's in the same vein.Hitler wanted to do something very similar, against a much heavier fortified target, with less amphibious experience and a MUCH weaker navy, in 1940/41. Literally just after defeating France, and with next to no preparation. No, converting barges does not count. The weather ALONE nearly scuppered Overlord several times, so I'm just going to tentatively say that Sealion wasn't going to succeed barring act of Wolfenstein. To tie this back into the thread itself (sorry, Grey!), this is the sort of thing those little squares on the map are doing when you set them to plan for an amphibious attack. Also, a lot of the experience the Americans had in the Pacific went into the planning for Overlord, so I'm sure Overlord in your Allies LP went a lot differently. Something something sending the cooks on before the line infantry something. On the family topic: I had one grandfather serve aboard the HMS Glory as the war was wrapping up, and the other I think may have worked in a factory in Birmingham (UK, not Alabama). He died before I thought to ask him  No real stories from the navy grandfather, either, aside from that he once saw a sailor walk into a spinning propeller. Nothing from the grandmothers, unfortunately, although one of the great-grandparents was a Home Guard volunteer? My family history is a little obscure.
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Jan 15, 2016 03:01
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Congratulations on finishing, Grey! I've been following along with these since about 2011/12ish, and it's been interesting watching them develop - especially this one, where a) we had the Battleship Supremacy timeline, and b) I got in early enough to claim a lucky ship - even if mine didn't show up at all past December 1941. Shame about the absolutely atrocious Allied AI; does anyone have any theories as to why the hell all the American carriers are in Seattle and San Francisco? Or where the nuclear squadron(s) are?
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Sep 4, 2019 01:53
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