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E70 giga/boosted  10d ago (x.com) 572 thread views #307159

There's only one Battle of Britain pilot left

https://x.com/OliverJia1014/status/1844403356661580144
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!historychads how strategically important was the Battle of Britain?

  • The air campaign was never close to bringing Britain to her knees. The much more effective U-boat campaign didn't even do that.

  • Britain is strongly motivated to play up the Dunkirk evacuation, the Battle of Britain, and the North Africa campaign because otherwise it'd look like they didn't do shit until Normandy

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It was an attempt to make Britain sue for peace by seeding terror among the populace, the basic idea was to take advantage of the Luftwaffe initial numerical superiority, the nazis thought the British public would have pressured the government to accept some peace proposal.

The Kriegsmarine stood no chance against the Royal Navy and "Operation Sea Lion" was a fantasy.

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>The Kriegsmarine stood no chance against the Royal Navy

You don't need full naval supremacy to interdict shipping.

I like a take I once heard that instead of fighting battle of England as they did Luftwaffe should have acted as a support in a naval commerce raiding campaign, focusing on scouting the Atlantic and bombing ships and harbors. This not only strikes Britain at its achilles heel, it also largely denies them home field advantage, you can't recover more pilots over ocean. I don't know if it would win the fight, but it would have been more equal at least.

It couldn't have happened for a number of reasons, for one nobody understood strategic bombing in 30s and many had really high expectations of it (not just material but psychological, expecting mental stress in bombed cities like in shelled trenches). But also Kriegsmarine had no naval arm, and Luftwaffe had little interest in any naval tasks. That's also why they couldn't do much during Dunkirk, pilots new shit about hitting ships. Some units would get better later in the war, but not in 1940.

And also, Goering was far too prideful to suffer being relegated to a support role.

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I don't think you can view the strategic significance of it purely in material terms. At that point the UK was the last man standing against Nazi Germany. Its populace and political leadership were wavering on the edge of coming to terms. Whether or not their situation was as dire as it felt at the time, the perception was the Nazi war machine was unstoppable and further resistance might be futile, or perhaps even purely self-destructive. Even if a German amphibious invasion was somewhere between wishful thinking and absurdist fantasy on the part of the Nazis, a successful German air campaign - or even simply a bloody stalemate - might have tipped the balance towards surrender. And then the Germans can go into the Soviets with a free hand.

If war was purely a question of numbers of men and machines France would not have fallen in the first place. You could call the Battle of Britain purely a moral victory, but at that point in time morale counted for a whole lot.

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Britain is strongly motivated to play up the Dunkirk evacuation, the Battle of Britain, and the North Africa campaign because otherwise it'd look like they didn't do shit until Normandy

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Well Germany's goal was to bring the British to terms. If we set the parameters of the battle as such, a German victory would have changed the war completely and entirely.

The historical outcome of Germany giving up counts as a British victory and allowed the US to use Great Britain itself as an unsinkable base for further operations in Europe.

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Well Germany's goal was to bring the British to terms.

Like I said, they weren't even close.

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Yeah cos they lost. If a question of, "How strategically important was the battle?" can include a scenario where we imagine the battle as a British defeat, their defeat there would have changed everything.

The strategic consequences of the battle as it actually was include Britain staying in the war, which was huge.

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Poms showed strength when they were alone and that helped get the yanks on board.

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that helped get the yanks on board

The yanks got on board because Hitler declared war on them.

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They wanted to help real bad by then.

Plus, it gave the poms the right to carpet bomb Nazis and burn their families. Suck shit

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They wanted to help real bad by then.

FDR and some others did, but the public did not

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And those that did had just seen the poms defy the blitz, lol.

Are you a Mick?

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