[Graham Boak]

Tcolvin: Please read at least one book on the RN's ship building policy, particularly battleships, between the wars before blaming everything you see as wrong with British war preparedness on the strategic bombing policy. The newer British battleships were designed within the constraints of international treaties, in the context of a shipbuilding industry (and national economy) in deep depression, in a reluctance to invest in new gun and armour foundries, with the constraint of the lack of large drydocks in and outside the UK, and even a fear of torpedo boats. There were enough funds between the wars to build some new battleships: their size was chosen for doctrinal and industrial reasons rather than because of specific funding limits caused by the handful of heavy bombers. I rather doubt that the entire RAF Strategic Bomber force in 1935 cost as much as one battleship.

Perhaps you could also quote the real ratios of funds given to the Army, navy and AirForce in the 1930s?

You seem to have lost contact with reality. No one can just take an aircraft in use for target towing, strap a bomb on it, find some convenient airmen and send them out against an inconvenient bunker! You want a dive bomber force (in itself an perfectly arguable option) then you start preparing for it two years in advance to select the aircraft (which the RAF had, as a back-up policy), then select and train your crews. Could you perhaps tell us the thickness of this bunker, and then let us judge whether the bombs from any divebomber could have made any impression at all? If the firepower from the massed ranks of warships could not have been brough to bear because of the loss of the ground control, how was this nebulous force of divebombers with non-existing concrete-busting weapons to be brought to bear?