Placing the Fairey Battle.

[tcolvin]

Originally Posted by Graham Boak

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

From 1933 to 1939; RN got £273.5 million; RAF got £260.9 million; and the Army got £162.8 million. Source: http://ibiblio.org/hyperwar/UN/UK/UK...duction-1.html

Originally Posted by Graham Boak

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?

You miss the point entirely. A British Army Air Corps would have used the Vengeances for CAS at no extra cost to Britain since they were being misused to tow targets on D-Day. The Army had the responsibility for taking Caen on D-Day, but it was denied the all-arms means enjoyed by the Wehrmacht and the Soviet Army.
The question is why?
Hillman sits to this day above Sword Beach. Worth a visit.

[Kutscha]

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?

Good question Graham. Would like to see an answer.

[Nick Beale]

Originally Posted by tcolvin

The Army had the responsibility for taking Caen on D-Day, but it was denied the all-arms means enjoyed by the Wehrmacht and the Soviet Army.

I know the plan fell through on the day but are you saying that gunfire from capital ships (which were designed to deliver plunging fire on to heavily armoured moving structures - viz. other capital ships - were they not?) wouldn't have been a suitable means of destroying a heavily armoured static structure like a bunker complex? Sounds pretty much ideal to me.

[tcolvin]

Originally Posted by Nick Beale

I know the plan fell through on the day but are you saying that gunfire from capital ships (which were designed to deliver plunging fire on to heavily armoured moving structures - viz. other capital ships - were they not?) wouldn't have been a suitable means of destroying a heavily armoured static structure like a bunker complex? Sounds pretty much ideal to me.

Of course naval guns were effective and therefore ideal.
But you don't plan to get to Berlin by relying on gunfire from battleships, monitors and cruisers, which are only good for the first 15 miles. And on this occasion they were unavailable.
The army needed CAS every step of the way to Berlin, including the first small step for mankind. You can't take enemy positions without it.

[Nick Beale]

Originally Posted by tcolvin

Of course naval guns were effective and therefore ideal.
But you don't plan to get to Berlin by relying on gunfire from battleships, monitors and cruisers, which are only good for the first 15 miles.

The first 15 miles is where the Atlantic wall ("Hillman" included) was and that's what I thought we were talking about. I don't recall there being any comparable fortifications between there and Berlin, the Westwall (Siegfried Line) having been stripped of men and weapons in favour of the Atlantic Wall.

The plan to use naval gunfire against coastal defences appears to me entirely rational.