On Tue, 2005-09-27 at 16:33 -0700, Harry Pollard wrote: > Hi! > > Very interesting. > > I am of course a veteran Corporal of the Home Guard. I was > 16 and on a London roof with a 50 year old Ross rifle > waiting for the thousands of 6'6" unbelievably fit blue-eyed > Aryans to arrive armed with every lethal weapon known to > civilized man.
What on earth was a Ross rifle? Stuff which the Americans sent over, like those 50 clapped out coal burning Destroyers? There seems to be quite a bit of stuff coming out about the Home Guard in recent times, like how scared the Establishment became of them when they realised just what the Spanish CW veterans were training them to do. Very interesting radio program (which I missed, must get one of those hard-disk TV and radio recorders...) which made it quite clear that a number of Tory appeaser politicians were for the high jump (assasination) by HG and other military elements if they opened talk with Herr Adolf. There were of course the small units of countrymen with their hideaways who were being highly trained in guerrilla tactics, who probably would have caused mayhem out of proportion to their numbers behind the invader's lines. Quite what the majority of HG were supposed to do as a "formal army" against experienced Wehrmacht troops is indeed questionable. But a long article I read a few years back made it clear that a successful invasion of the UK in 40 would have been nigh on impossible unless there was the utmost incompetence - or treason - by the high command. The Royal Navy would have done for most of the invasion fleet even if it lost 50%-75% or more of its surface vessels in the process, even with Luftwaffe air superiority, which couldn't be guaranteed (the RAF may have been pushed out of the southern airfields but the ones north of London were pretty well immune, and there was no way that the still formidable RAF would be kept clear of the beaches and immediate seaways. The barges they were using would have been well mangled by even fighter aircraft - they weren't armoured or significantly armed and the German Navy simply didn't have the mass of ships for their defence that the RN could suicidally throw at the wallowing mass in the Channel. The Germans wouldn't have been able to replace the losses from this butchery and have enough to force the issue militarily in Sussex and Kent. Britain wasn't Norway, it had a magnitudes larger population, a dense network of built up areas, excellent communications (which would have been decisevely denied to the invader - one of the jobs of the stay behinds if scorched earth didn't get it first) through a quite difficult terrain (lots of sharp hills in the Wealden, hell for armour and very defensible) significant logistics capability and an ability to replace material which the luftwaffe would have taken ages to dent. And a lot of pretty pissed off people. Unless there had been a French-style collapse of the populace, with even a Dunkirk-gone-bad depleted army, they couldn't have probably forced the issue. And it has been emerging that an effort to sell out would have been pretty swiftly fatal - just which units of the military would be reliable in securing the safety of Eden and others if they had made moves with intent in that direction? Given the nature of quite a few of the people involved, the King might have lost his head (literally) for such a move. >From what I gather, the mood of the British people was pretty bloody mindedly defiant at the time. Certainly everyone 20 or more years older than me (born '55, father was in the Canadian army, later in intelligence, mother in Wrens and intelligence too) seems to say so. Also seems to have been a consensus by later summer '40 that an invasion wasn't going to work that year amongst the intelligence and strategy community. But I don't expect they would have said that to many people at the time! Now, just what would have happened if Herr H. had put off Barbarossa and gone for a full invasion buildup for 1941 - it would have been a logistics race between Britain on its own and the German military industrial complex.... Somehow I doubt it would have worked. Look at the effort required to build Overlord, with the weight of the US industrial complex behind it. And that seems to have been a much closer run thing than historians in the 60s and 70s made out! Britain wasn't Poland, France or even Russia (in 1941). Much tougher nut. But we digress. And I'm a bit of a history nut (order of amateurii) so must constrain myself... _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] http://fes.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
