Cuchulainn | 11 May 2014 5:57 a.m. PST |
Take the four surviving 'R' Class battleships, replace half their main armament with wooden dummies, double the width of their defensive bulges, and reinforce their armoured decks. Churchill had been dangerously fixated on sending the RN into the Baltic since WW1. Here's the madness raising its head again in WW2: link |
John the OFM | 11 May 2014 6:10 a.m. PST |
Sounds like a good example of a foot dragging bureaucracy halting whimsy and folly on its tracks. Churchill had a lot of whimsy and folly. |
David Manley | 11 May 2014 6:18 a.m. PST |
Played this out a few times, often with "interesting" results. Lots of useful spinoffs for the RN in terms of mods made to some of the ships slated for this, stood them in good stead later in the war. |
Cuchulainn | 11 May 2014 6:42 a.m. PST |
"Churchill had a lot of whimsy and folly." Very true John, and unfortunately some of it wasn't stopped by the bureaucracy dragging its feet. The results were usually calamitous. |
John the OFM | 11 May 2014 7:22 a.m. PST |
How many naval careers are made by stopping the PM from doing what he wants?
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Rapier Miniatures | 11 May 2014 9:38 a.m. PST |
Actually, if there had been a safe harbour, it would have been disastrous for Germany in both world wars. |
Tom Bryant | 11 May 2014 3:34 p.m. PST |
Well said John. Winston did have a rather nasty habit of both coming up with some rather daft proposals from time to time and fixating on them. Well done for the RN in keeping him sidetracked. Fortunately the German High Command was not so lucky with Hitler. |
CampyF | 12 May 2014 7:47 p.m. PST |
Churchill's name is attached to a long string of disasters and poorly executed operations. Yet he never seemed to get the idea he wasn't a military genius. The Dodecanese campaign was classic "haven't we tried this before and it didn't work?". |
ScottWashburn | 16 May 2014 8:22 a.m. PST |
Well, in Churchill's defense, one thing that is often overlooked in the wake of the disaster in France in 1940 is that if that disaster HAD NOT happened, the best result the British and Franch expected was to be another stalemate along the Western Front. In that case the British intended to adopt a 'peripheral strategy' to nibble around the edges. "Operation Catherine" would have been the northern counterpart to the Mediterranean strategy that ultimately was adopted. |
Murvihill | 19 May 2014 11:10 a.m. PST |
Rather than modifying the R Class, why didn't he just propose putting the guns back on the Courageous, Glorious and Furious? I bet they were still around somewhere. |
Cuchulainn | 20 May 2014 4:46 a.m. PST |
All three of the Courageous class had been converted to aircraft carriers Murvihill. The first two were lost early in the war, Courageous on September 17 1939 and Glorious on June 8 1040. |
Murvihill | 20 May 2014 12:08 p.m. PST |
I meant the guns were around somewhere. Glorious and Furious were still extent when he cooked up this cockamamie scheme. One of the things Alanbrooke gets credit for is keeping Churchill from jumping the shark. |