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.