Sledgehammer 1942

Britain was concerned that the Germans might invade neutral Eire from 1939 onwards as it was virtually defenceless, capture Northern Ireland, and thus surround the UK mainland on all sides allowing possible invasion, U Boat ports eg Cork and Luftwaffe bases. Wales,West Midlands and the NW of England (Western Command) and W Scotland (Scottish Command) were extremely poorly defended in comparison with the S. and E coast of UK. Britain was withdrawing virtually all the RAF units and many army units from NI following the Japanese attacks on the Empire in early 1942. US 1AD and US 34 ID were there as part replacements to deter any idea the Germans may have had. While in hindsight this appears very cautious in the extreme, given the realities on the ground in Europe with the Germans already stretched out, it was the situation.

 

For context only: Stranger than fiction: The US planned to invade the Republic of Ireland?

 

Well for Britain with an Empire spanning the whole world and dependent upon trade with all those various parts it has to fight to protect them, because in so many ways they are so interconnected. The IO has until relatively recently been paid little attention and yet it was absolutely vital to Britain's ability to continue the fight in both the Far East theatre and the Middle East and to the ability of the US to supply Lend Lease aid to Russia via the Persian Gulf and to China via India & "The Hump" especially while the Med was closed to shipping (it didn't reopen to through traffic until May/June 1943). Much of the oil for the ME was transported from oilfields in Iraq by pipeline to refineries in Palestine & Syria. So do you not fight in Syria & Lebanon in 1941 when they are threatened? Oil for the FE, after the loss of the Burmese and DEI fields came from Iran in ships travelling the IO. Do we not occupy Iran with the Soviets in late 1941 to protect those supplies from a potential Soviet collapse, which was considered a real possibility in late 1941?

You want to reinforce the ME? The convoys have to go through the IO. You want to reinforce India? The convoys have to go through the IO. An Italian occupied East Africa threatens the route through the IO and Red Sea to the Suez Canal. Do you not have an East Africa campaign? More aircraft for either theatre? You need the route across the Atlantic to West Africa and then on across Africa to Egypt and then on across the ME to India, or if thay are boxed up its those IO convoys again.

So just which bits do you not defend? As for" multiple layers of redundancy", I'm not seeing that in the IO area inSept 1942.

What land based aircraft?

The RAF heavy bomber force in the IO area in Sept 1942 was a single Wellington squadron with another in the process of reassembling. Other than that 4 squadrons of Blenheims, a Beaufort TB squadron & a newly arrived unit organising itself on Hudsons. The recently formed USAAF 10th AF was still in the process of reorganising its various bombing assets after escaping Java earlier in the year.

Reconnaissance for the entire IO area was 4 squadrons of Catalinas based out of India / Ceylon & one in East Africa with detachments spread along the island chains in between. And not all of these were at full strength. It is 5,000 miles from Capetown to Ceylon & another 1,000 miles across the Bay of Bengal to the northern tip of Sumatra. Those assets were stretched very thin.

As for Madagascar, only the northern part was taken in Operation Ironclad in May 1942. The campaign there went on at a low level until the Vichy French surrendered on 6 Nov (they held out longer than metropolitan France in 1940). Pressure to do something about it came from many sides including Smuts in South Africa and the US Chiefs of Staff. Only hindsight tells us that the Japanese never had any intention of taking it. But in late 1941 / early 1942 the threat that Vichy might co-operate with one or both those Axis powers to allow the use of bases there leading to a full occupation was real.

As for the RN position in the IO, it probably reached its peak strength about May 1942 for Ironclad. But the planning went back to mid-1941 in conjunction with the USN taking over responsibility for convoy escorts in the western Atlantic to free assets for the IO with the first movements around Oct 1941. It is only in 1942 that the emphasis starts to move away from the battleship to the aircraft carrier. And by Sept 1942 the Eastern Fleet is already losing its assets to other theatres leaving mostly old battleships & cruisers to defend against the enemy threats, a reappearance of the Japanese fleet in the IO and the existence of German & Japanese raiders. Each of the WS troop convoys was given such protection. And as such it remained a fleet in being to dissuade any Japanese appearance in the IO.

As for the carriers, Indomitable was withdrawn in July for Operation Pedestal where she was damaged, Formidable in August for a quick refit ahead of becoming a replacement for Indom in the western Med and then being used in Operation Torch and finally Illustrious for refit in Jan 1943, having been offered to, and accepted by, the USN in Nov/Dec 1942 to beef up the Pacific Fleet after the losses in the Solomons (the Admiralty eventually decided to send Victorious). The more modern cruisers had gone to the Med to support Malta convoys with some being lost or damaged. Or are you in the camp of letting Malta be occupied?

So because everything was so interlinked and because they didn't have the knowledge we have today about the other side's intentions (Ultra and Purple only gave glimpses at this time), I'm not sure that Britain had much option than to spread itself thin and fight on so many fronts. As for the Americans well they had signed up to the "Germany First" policy seeing them as the greater threat. But it simply couldn't ignore what had happened in the Pacific.

 

Thanks for your reply. I am actually glad to have the opportunity to examine Torch and the air war there as I think it exemplifies what I was talking about in my last post about the consequences of Anglo-American strategy.

One thing you have to keep in mind is that by the end of October weather conditions have deteriorated greatly around Stalingrad, greatly hindering air operations. When Luftflotte 4 sent most of 3 bomber Gruppe to the Med it was no great loss therefore. In early October such was not the case. The actual climactic battle for Stalingrad came in mid-October and the GAF played a major role in that. There may have been reluctance to send as many west in early Oct. You also have to consider that Hitler is already on record at the end of September as saying the GAF suffers from "absolute air inferiority" in the West. He does not have to worry about that in reinforcing the Med. to counter Torch. How these factors would have influenced air movements is hard to say, but I have always reckoned on transfers that are at least as great as what they sent to the Med.

Of course, the 850 a/c figure includes all types of aircraft including reconnaissance and transport, and I do believe it includes 150 in the Eastern Med (the balance of the 1,220 was supporting Rommel and in one source says that the initial impetus for the transfers in Oct. and early Nov. was in part to help out Rommel being pummeled at El Alamein). Numerically I think transports made up the largest component of the transfers. One source shows the overall increase in the Med. from Oct 1 to mid-December at around 500 a/c of which 400 came from the East (incl. 150 from Norway).

Just glancing at one version of the Sledgehammer plan they anticipated an increase after the first few weeks, just counting bombers and SE fighters of 390, so that seems compatible with the 500 increase of all types. The addition of those 390 would bring the total to 840 bombers and fighters, so substantially more than what the GAF had available on Dec. 31 1942 in the Torch area (from The Rise and Fall of the German Air Force, 1933-1945, p. 152):

Sicily/Sardinia - 240 L.R. bombers, 10 dive bombers, 35 bomber recon., 50 S.E. fighters, 50 T.E. fighters (385 total)
Tunisia - 20 Dive Bombers, 5 Ground Attack, 105 S.E. fighters, 20 T.E. fighters, 5 Army Co-operation (155 total)

It doesn't look like the Sledgehammer planners were going to be surprised by the GAF buildup, except maybe on the downside.

By Sept./Oct. the GAF in Russia had yielded air superiority in the north and central fronts in order to concentrate in the south. But by the end of October

at Stalingrad and in the Don Bend the Air Force was hampered by dislocation of communications, fuel shortage and bad flying weather...After the withdrawal of some 400 aircraft to the Mediterranean it became clear that the German Air Force was unable to meet all its commitments on the Russian front, and activity in the Caucasus area began to decrease.
The Rise and Fall of the German Air Force, p. 182​

We already know that Rommel was in a situation of acute air inferiority. I think there are about 100 SE fighters over the Reich at this time. There just was not this big pool of available aircraft to draw on to counter Sledgehammer over and above what they did in the Med. for Torch, though, of course, they could draw from the Med itself (more on why they might not below).

Well, I never reckoned on a demoralized GAF at the time. I imagine leaving behind a frozen wasteland for the Med. or France was likely to take care of that in the short term. The passage you quote leaves the impression that the evaluation that the GAF was "without depth and in need of a period for re-equipment" was erroneous since its "fighting quality" during the Tunisian campaign "was of a high order". That is highly misleading at best.

No doubt they performed well but they didn't have that much opposition at first. From what I have figured out (open to correction on this and any other factual representations I make) of the first 13 RAF fighter squadrons for Torch (4 of which were obsolescent Hurricanes; none of the Spits are the latest Mk IX) only 3 are based in Tunisia (at Souk al Arba). The Americans I think bring over 4 fighter groups (roughly 300 a/c) but again most are for a long time based in Morocco or around Oran and its only, I think, mid-December or so when a full squadron is based in Tunisia. Worse, the Germans have the only two all-weather airfields in Tunisia and they are far closer to the front lines than most Allied airfields. Most Allied airfields turn to mud when it rains and are much farther away. They also suffer from all kinds of shortages with supply and maintenance personnel. So despite the Allied dominance in a/c production and all the shipping devoted to move air resources thousands of miles they still cannot achieve numerical superiority in the battle area for months even though during that whole time they are only facing a pitifully small group of German fighters.



There is also a shortage of AA weapons both at the ports and with the ground troops. Once that is rectified German bombers that have had some success attacking Allied ports have to switch to less-effective night raids. Despite the slowness in developing the air defenses and the dispersed basing of fighter a/c the GAF:

by the end of December, despite the arrival of two further bomber units in the central Mediterranean, actual strength was barely maintained at the level existing at the beginning of November...serviceability was little more than 50 per cent...and the intensive effort of November fell off rapidly; despite the acutely critical situation during December, only a relatively low scale of operations could be sustained by a force of nevertheless considerable numerical size.
The North African Campaign, RAF Narrative, p. 152​

EDIT: So, that does sound indeed like "a force without depth and in need of a period for re-equipment" although perhaps not to the extent the pre-Torch assessment hoped it would be. That assessment also may not have correctly gauged the difficulty the Allies would have in deploying air power to Tunisia. The North African Campaign adds, and this relates the the anti-shipping a/c transferred from Norway and GAF anti-shipping capability generally, that "the main German weapon for attacking allied convoys, the torpedo bomber, failed totally in its allotted task." (More comments on torpedo bombers below)

From what I understand it is not until sometime in March, some 4 months in to the campaign, that the Allies can really fix up their airfields in Tunisia and otherwise have the logistics to finally win air superiority.

The situation would be totally different in the English Channel area in October. The Sledgehammer plan calls for 73 fighter squadrons in support, few of which are Hurricanes and at least several of which will be Mk IX Spitfires. They are based on modern airfields with functioning support infrastructure, etc. so they can go into action on day 1. Plus, they are planning on a reserve force of fighters equal to 100% of the operational a/c. By late 1941 Fighter Command in southern England is and will remain the most powerful concentration of fighters anywhere in the world (until eclipsed by the even larger fighter force of their US ally), yet it does essentially nothing to further the war effort from the end of the Battle of Britain until the spring of 1944. Why does that change in 1944? Because the strategy changes and now there is going to be a cross-Channel invasion. Of course, the Allies cannot have anywhere near the level of air superiority they will have in 1944, but that is not the standard. The standard is what is sufficient to make the operation a success and by any measure they have enough to do that and also to send the GAF into a tailspin it might not recover from.

The alternative taken was to go to Tunisia where on the first day you meet the Germans they have 100 fighters operating from hard surfaced runways while you have maybe half that operating from dirt strips supporting you. It's the flawed strategy that keeps the Western Allies from more fully leveraging their resources on land, sea and air that is making the Germans look better than they are.

In the wake of Torch the GAF moved some 250 a/c to the south of France to protect against a possible operation in that area (The Rise and Fall of the German Air Force, p. 147). At the same time Hitler also reinforced ground forces in Crete, giving it equal transportation priority to Tunisia. I am not aware of any Allied deception operation that fostered either of these scenarios so that speaks to what I said multiple times before about the Germans being able to fully deceive themselves about follow on invasions. I believe they were going to think twice about redeploying a/c from the Med. to counter Sledgehammer (though, again, I don't know how that would play out). Also, anti-shipping a/c operating in the Channel are going to encounter lots of enemy fighters which is going to diminish their effectiveness and lead to probably high losses whereas in the south of France they could operate much more effectively in the absence of ground based enemy fighters, so that would probably enter into their calculus. They might think that it would be better to preserve them to counter a perceived vulnerability in the south than to expend them on a futile effort that is best dealt with by ground forces (Churchill's reasoning in paragraph 3 of the Imperator doc you posted a while back).

Well, here is the advantage of having the relevant German docs. In his weekly report on Oct 5 Rundstedt states that aerial recon was "very much impaired" by rain and fog. His previous week's report is similar. I know as well that on Oct 4 the coastline in southern England is blanketed with fog. It all depends on how soon before the invasion shipping is accumulated in the south. I imagine there will be last minute training exercises in Scotland just like for Torch so possibly a significant number of vessels will, from time constraints alone, come last-minute. There are already a number of LSIs stationed in the south, so there might not be that big of an observable change even if several more deploy there earlier. All (educated?) guesses I admit.

One thing I don't have to speculate about, however, is that the aerial recon alarm bell for a possible invasion already rang back in June when aerial PR disclosed that the number of landing craft in southern English ports had risen from 1,146 on 3 June to 2,802 on 23 June. Most of these were undoubtedly the Thames River barges the British were converting for Sledgehammer. Rundstedt thought that the recon photos revealed only an obvious attempt at deception since nothing had been done in the way of concealment. But there had also been an increase in cable and railway sabotage and on 22 June, twelve leaders of a Resistance organization were arrested as they were in the act of preparing for a general sabotage operation. Hitler was not so sure this was deception and ordered the 1st and 2nd SS Divisions to France from the USSR. This is also when he promised to come west to take over command in case of an invasion. In Dieppe Revisited (a really well-researched work drawing on German as well as Allied documents) author John Campbell concludes based on that and other evidence that an increase in shipping in the Channel ports at that time would not have affected the appreciation of Hitler, who was already suspicious of a major landing in the West, or Liss (head of Foreign Armies West) who already had his mind made up against it.

Is an increase in shipping in southern English ports a sign of immanent invasion or just deception to get the Germans to weaken their anti-shipping bomber force in Norway? Again, the time of year may play a role. In early October in those northern latitudes you still have a fair amount of the daylight bombers need to operate effectively, but 5 weeks later it is much less, plus you have not had a convoy since PQ 18 in September so little to nothing lost by moving your a/c from there. In this case I feel a little more sure (but not 100%) that they will hesitate to make the move especially since I understand the movement of torpedoes (most of the a/c moved from Norway in Nov. were torpedo bombers) is a more involved task than bombs (which are probably already there wherever you relocate anyways).

I believe the "vulnerability" you are talking about derives from a false picture of GAF anti-shipping capability. It is not going to be like, for instance, Crete where there was little or no fighter cover. Even there Tedder claims in his memoirs that no ship convoy that had fighter escort suffered significant damage, so just like fighters escorting bombers, a little is a lot better than none. But for Sledgehammer the Allies are going to have a lot more than a little in terms of available fighters.

Some more comments on more contemporaneous GAF anti-shipping operations:

- Dieppe - as one of the original posters said in this thread the bomber units that participated took heavy losses. One source has KG 2, which had somewhere in the mid-40's at the beginning of the day, with only about 12 combat ready crews at the end of the day. Note also that it is nearly 5 hours after the first landings before the first GAF attack and Dieppe is significantly closer to the bomber bases and more than half of the GAF fighters than the Cotentin.

- PG 18 - the first mission with GAF massed torpedo bombers was a big success but it was a fluke: a group of merchant ships zigged when they should have zagged and were left without AA protection and 8 got sunk in short order. The other problem was the the escort carrier commander kept his fighters (12 Hurricane Is) back to protect his ship. He realized his mistake and had his fighters go after the torpedo bombers during later attacks and afterwards only two more of the convoy were lost to them while they themselves suffered devastating losses and more than one source says that the GAF torpedo bomber force never again achieved great success. They didn't sink that many countering Torch when they had a much less challenging environment than they would have for Sledgehammer.

- Husky - if we look at the American half of the operation, which is roughly equivalent in size to Sledgehammer, the average fighter coverage was just 30 over their beaches (10 over each of the 3 beaches) and there were several occasions when one or two had no fighter coverage and once when none of the three had coverage. There were also some geographic features on Sicily that allowed the attacking planes to avoid radar detection that would not come into play for Sledgehammer. Sledgehammer, however, called for an average of 50 fighters over the beaches in the first days, but the planners have not taken into account the loiter capability of the AAF P-38s so if those are used for beach protection the average could easily be double that. I suppose if Portal had not suppressed the production of 90 gal drop tanks in June (or, at least that is what it looks like to me) while telling Churchill he was increasing production (he was, but it was of the less-useful 30 gal type, which he does not mention to Churchill), that would have helped a lot too.

- Salerno - I believe they do eventually produce more 90 gal tanks and that is what Spits use the next year at Salerno when the airbases are nearly twice as far away from the landing zone as for Sledgehammer. The other two types used are P-38s and Mustangs (really the dive bomber version of the Mustang used in the fighter role, but they are less performant in that role than the hundreds of Mustang Is they are not using in the UK in the autumn of 1942, though, unfortunately, I don't see anyone necessarily using them for Sledgehammer anyways).​

For a cross-Channel operation the troop transports are more than fast enough to sail at dusk, unload their men and be most of the way back across the Channel by daylight, which was the Sledgehammer plan and you also see for Jubilee (when the day is much longer, btw). The coasters are too slow for that but they are also very small targets, however, so hard to hit even during the day, will be doing their discharge at least under cover of darkness, and are probably hard to distinguish from the hundreds of a/s and m/s trawlers that are part of the Sledgehammer naval force. The AA fire by supporting vessels and onshore is likely to be beyond what any German pilot has ever encountered previously. For torpedo bombers that have to fly low, slow and straight this would prove especially dangerous, but even fighter bombers are going to take significant AA hits and obviously lots of tracer fire targeting you throws off your aim regardless.

For Sledgehammer you will also have from day 1 hundreds of heavy and medium bombers that can, with fighter escort, attack GAF airfields and keep on attacking them as long as necessary. For Torch at first you had only a small number of B-17s. There are some RAF Bisleys as well but they took such heavy losses when they try unescorted bombing of German airbases (presumably because escorts are not available) they quickly switch to nighttime missions.

While it might seem like I earlier was trying to cast doubt on how fast and to what extent the GAF would react to a potential cross-Channel invasion because that would favor Sledgehammer's success I actually think it is a win-win situation for the Allies. If they don't react vigorously at first, or, more likely, react swiftly and fully at first and then back off after taking heavy losses then that does bode well for Sledgehammer's success. Or, in the less likely scenario where the GAF keeps fighting all out for an extended period of time, they are going to take very heavy, unsustainable losses, which would also be good for the Allies. Again, I do not doubt the GAF could get some hard blows in and perhaps cause some anxious moments for the Allies, but they don't have the depth to carry out a toe to toe fight with the full force of the RAF, with increasing AAF help, in that area of the world. Really it might be best for the Allies if the GAF brought as many a/c as they reasonably could to France and then tried as hard as they could for as long as they could because the most likely outcome would be devastating losses. As I already have indicated, even without most of the RAF's airpower being brought into play against the GAF they still hit a low point in early 1943 so significant incremental losses with continued large scale air operations on the Continent held the prospect for systemic defeat.

Historian Williamson Murray states that "by the end of October [1942], in terms of its operational ready rate, its force structure, and its attrition thus far in the year, the Luftwaffe was dangerously overextended." In another article regarding the GAF in 1942 he concludes that "the Germans escaped the full consequences of their difficulties because the Anglo-American air forces found it difficult to come to grips with the Luftwaffe except in peripheral theaters." Sledgehammer, however, offered a solution to that.

 

Some more comments on the air war...

I just noticed that between these two quotes Hinsley, citing Playfair, Mediterranean and the Middle East, v. IV, p. 116 states that "actual strength of the GAF...in the theatre on the eve of the landings" was 395, but if you go that page in Playfair you see that the 395 is indeed an estimate and that the true figure is nearly 100 less (298).

Another reason I did not mention the GAF got the jump on the Allies in Tunisia is that they just surged additional long range bombers that transferred into the theater into existing air bases in Sicily as they had done before. The GAF also had lots of experience of moving smaller a/c, fighters and dive bombers, into forward airfields so that undoubtedly helped them as well.

To be totally fair, from what I have read, the GAF units in Tunisia also had less than ideal logistics, so that definitely hampered them in a way they probably wouldn't have been in NW Europe. An even BIGGER difference in favor of the GAF when comparing Sledgehammer to Torch is that their bombers would have fighter escort over the ports and beaches of the Cotentin for daylight operations. That is not going to help the torpedo bombers as much, however, because they are so vulnerable to AA (just read a comment by a GAF crewman who when he joined a torpedo bomber unit in early 1943 said it was known as a "suicide squad"). I have never thought that the GAF could not get some serious licks in, especially in the first days. If you look at Husky, however, you see multiple ships hit by GAF a/c, including an ammunition ship that blows up spectacularly. It is always possible that the Allies lose their nerve even if they are on the way to winning an attritional air battle just based on large losses they take in the opening days of Sledgehammer, which I feel, there will be.

It just occurred to me that some of the additional GAF a/c in theater in October had come because they made another effort at neutralizing Malta through intensive bombing - an effort that failed utterly even though they had fighter escort and only faced some 100 Spitfires. Sledgehammer is more or less the same scenario, scaled up.

I do think that the odds were stacked in favor of the Allies because they had more a/c available, more in reserve - 100% of fighters while the GAF had 0 - but most especially because of the pilot situation with the Allies having many in reserve and the GAF with a training pipeline almost dry.

 

Sorry for the tardy reply to your post. Yes, that is a good counter-example. It is one I have tended, perhaps too readily, to discount because of the fact that Tobruk held out so long the previous year. There is also the factor that the Germans around Tobruk in 1942 had complete control of the air locally, knew the ground intimately, and were also more than familiar with fighting on the terrain generally in that area, factors that would not be in play for a German force counterattacking Sledgehammer.

I have not maintained, however, that Sledgehammer was a sure thing. My assessment has been that if, like you suggest, the Allies are not able to secure the neck of the peninsula by maybe D+1 that a window of vulnerability to a similar coup de main would exist. Factors working against such a German success, however, are many, including the terrain they would face after a breakthrough and the ability for the Allies to use their firepower, including naval, to defeat a breakthrough as at, for instance, Salerno.

Once the front line has congealed, however, I do not think there is a reasonable chance that the Germans grind out a methodical victory. That is more the Allies game.

 

I did not really address this part of this post in my earlier reply to the rest of it. I think when Barr said "poorly supported" may have meant there were no other infantry units. That is not necessarily how I understood it, so thank you for correcting me and providing me the references to the supporting documentation which have already gone into my list to check out the next time I am at Kew (hopefully this coming September or October). My main point had to do with training, however. Of course more and better training is highly preferable, but it is not the case that troops whose training is lacking in some respects are necessarily going to get rolled over by the Germans.

I just noticed recently that Brooke also remarks on how well the Americans individual training in during his visit to the US in June 1942, so that agrees with the report I referenced earlier. He also notes in his diary (June 24), however, that he has doubts about their "higher" training and then in his postwar comments he emphasizes that his doubts in that regard are more than confirmed. I actually agree with that broadly speaking. It is not that I maintain that the Americans were so much better in 1942 in every respect than what the narrative says, it is more that they have not improved much prior to June 1944. Their individual training is excellent, their tactical training, with the exception of artillery, is not. I am speaking generally about American ground units, and more specifically about most all of the units that fight in Normandy (I do not exclude that particular units may have improved beforehand).

 

Oh, I never thought that the context was an invasion of Eire, though now that you say that I am kind of embarrassed that I didn't. Ok, that turns something that was totally incomprehensible (a German invasion force steaming up the Irish Sea?) into something just extremely unlikely.

Funny thing, a few days after I saw your post, as I was going through some documents I got maybe 15 years ago (which I have been doing a lot recently due to this thread) I ran across one that I remembered about but never really had studied that thoroughly - a British study ("Invasion, 1942: Form and Scale of Attack", CAB 80/60) from December of 1941, originating from a request by the COS the previous month, of a possible German invasion. Sure enough, one of the threatened areas it listed, in addition to various possibilities in southern England, was Eire, so that substantiates what you said. The Chairman of the group that developed the report is a Maj. Gen. R. H. Dewing, whom I have never heard of, and the other two signatories are Air Vice Marshal Slessor, and a Capt. R. R. Stewart, R.N.

Here is an appendix (one of many) from the study that runs more than 60 typeset pages that summarizes the main German invasion "on or about" April 1, 1942 (as you all probably know or can guess T.L.C.s are tank landing craft, later to be re-dubbed LCTs):



Though the landing craft listed are not purpose built, their total number exceeds the total the Allies employ for Neptune/Overlord and the number of personnel landed on the first day is one-third more. In one part of the plan it mentions a separate force preparing in the Bay of Biscay for an invasion of Eire which will follow on a successful landing in the UK.

I have no knowledge regarding what the COS thought of this report. Since it is filed in the Cabinet Papers I presume it was reviewed by members of the War Cabinet, but I don't know that either.

 

Posted by system glitch

 

Post removed see below - messed up my quote from Sledgehammer, see below for my reply

 

Sledgehammer Hi Gary,

I have found this thread and the video presentations recently, which led me to discuss the topic of Sledgehammer on another forum. I was mostly relying on your paper from 2009 to discuss the subject (1 © 2009 Gary Michael Giumarra D-Day 1942 - DocsLib), but I do not know if you have written an updated version since then.

In any case people have been rather skeptical and I wanted to know if you had information to answer these points or if you could just react to them. One poster has been particularly skeptical and noted what he perceived as errors or oversights in your paper from 2009. I have put the main topics in spoilers for easier reading, each a couple "short" paragraphs long. My remarks are bolded.

1)

Spoiler: Fire support landing ships

"On p11 it admits that Sledgehammer's landing support craft would have been armed with just two Vickers and a mortar. The paper says that these would not have had the problem that the LCT(R)s had on D Day in that they were "one shot" craft, but that's very odd because it implies that on D Day the LCT(R)s were the only landing craft providing support. That is very untrue; for example Juno Beach alone had;

• 4 Landing Craft Assault (Obstacle Clearance)
• 18 Landing Craft Assault (Hedgerow)
• 8 Landing Craft Support (Medium)
• 7 Landing Craft Flak
• 7 Landing Craft Gun (Large)
• 7 Landing Craft Tank (Armoured)
• 8 Landing Craft Tank (High Explosive)
• 9 Landing Craft Tank (Rocket)
• 36 Landing Craft Personnel (Large) Smoke Layer
• 4 Landing Barge Flak
• 4 Landing Craft Support (Large) Mark I
• 3 Landing Craft Support (Large) Mark II

That's a total of about 80 support landing craft that the author just ignores, on just one beach."

Now, my personal take on it is that it wouldn't really matter anwyway given the limited defenses on Madeleine Beach in 1942.

2)

Spoiler: Barge and coaster quality, number of LSTs

"The author seems to ignore with amazing ease the fact that Sledgehammer would only have had three LSTs, which turned out to be extremely important. He says that the British had the solution in using Thames Barges instead - but they seem to be no better than the German canal barges that the legendary sea mammal is so notorious for relying on. The author notes that coasters could have dried out (as they did) but ignores the fact that without ramps they could not have delivered the same sort of loads, nor does he even consider the other issues involved (including structural problems from repeated beaching, weather issues, etc)."

Did you study the design of the barges and coasters, and whether it would have been problematic for bringing supplies and men ashore given their relative importance in a Sledgehammer scenario compared to later landings?

3)

Spoiler: Fighter cover and numerical disadvantage

"The author says that Spits operating at a similar range provided "most of the fighter cover" at Salerno and uses that to claim that fighters from Britain could easily have dominated over the landing sites for Sledgehammer. That ignores the fact that this distance was a major problem at Salerno (as the Twelve US Air Force history notes); "the distance from Salerno to Sicily severely limited aircraft time on station over the Avalanche landing beaches and convoys." (my italics) One solution at Salerno was five RN carriers with 110 Seafires specialising in fighter cover just off the beaches and two fleet carriers covering the convoys, but none of these would have been available for Sledgehammer. The Allies were not morons, they put those ships there because they were needed.

The Allied at Salerno had 528 fighters and 160 fighter bombers, but even with a strong representation of P-38s and P-51s they could only average 36 aircraft over Salerno. The Twelfth Air Force stated that far from Spits providing "most of the fighter cover", in fact it was P-38s that provided the bulk of it. As far as I know, if Sledgehammer had gone ahead there'd be no Merlin Mustangs and few P-38s available so the burden of fighter defence would fall on the short-ranged Spitfires. It seems that would put the Allies at a numerical disadvantage much of the time, which was far from the case at Normandy and could have been disastrous."


Now, in one of your posts in this thread you mentionned that Salerno was actually at twice the distance as Sledgehammer, so maybe range wouldn't be as problematic? Moreover it is plainly obvious that Sledgehammer would have involved far more planes than the poster mentions for Salerno and the intended average cover was 50 aircrafts at least, so I guess his numerical disadvantage argument is dubious.

4)

Spoiler: Landing crafts

"The author deals with the major problem of the lack of landing craft by claiming that the British "probably" had more landing ships available (although he does not analyse this claim at all). More remarkably, he claims that the 12 ships that were listed on 8 May as "taken up for conversion" into LSIs and the 18 that were "earmarked" for conversion on the same day would have been available for a summer 1942 landing, although he provides NO evidence that the conversions could have been completed in time.

The author, in his usual insulting and arrogant tone, accusses the Brits of basically hiding these supposedly available LSIs to discourage the US from launching Sledgehammer and then using the 22 such ships for Torch in October. He insults the US historian (because anyone who disagrees with him MUST be worth an insult....) and claims that the Torch shipping had been there all along. He provides no evidence for his claim, but that doesn't stop him insulting people."

Have you been able to confirm when the conversions were actually finished and the number of landing crafts? I am including his rather harsh comments for context, but from reading your paper and watching your presentations I am under the impression that you were more nuanced than the poster claims.

The poster then expands further regarding the Luftwaffe situation, in what may be best described as "fear of the FW-190":

Spoiler: The air war in 1942

"How do you "exterminate the meagre Luftwaffe squadrons" when those squadrons are actually exterminating you? At the time Sledgehammer planning must have started, and through much of the time it should have been underway, the Germans had air superiority over France. The FW190 was achieving a 3:1 kill ratio over Spit Vs at this time according to Internet sources; as Johnny Johnstone says, the Fw190 forced the RAF "back to the coast" and stopped most inland missions. The Fw190 was so superior to the Spit V that the RAF instructed pilots to fly at full power whenever in the combat zone, reducing the Spit's range even further (and although I haven't checked, possibly stopping it from defending the Sledgehammer landing area at all).

As late as July 1942 there were only 14 Spitfire IXs in the area (Price. "Focke Wulf 190 at War" p 42) compared to a couple of hundred Fw 190s plus of course 109s. As late as August, IXs made up only 10% of the Spits for the fighting over Dieppe.

Over Dieppe - which is much closer to England than the Sledgehammer beaches and therefore where the Spit's range is less of a problem - the RAF suffered significant losses despite using 68 fighter squadrons against a far smaller LW force. The Brits lost about twice as many aircraft to the Luftwaffe as they scored. Again, there seems to be no evidence that the Brits would "exterminate" the Luftwaffe.

There may have been "thousands of aircraft sent to the Med" eventually, but the forces that were sent to Torch were only 1244 from the US Twelfth AF and 454 from the RAF. For comparison, the British had about 800 Spits at Dieppe and yet suffered twice as many aircraft lost as the Germans, so even the additional 400 so fighters that may have been available if Torch was not launched don't seem likely to have "exterminated" the Luftwaffe.

They did a significant amount to draw down Luftwaffe forces there, which were more vulnerable than those in France because the Germans had to try to defend transport aircraft. The Germans also lost over 100,000 troops who surrendered in Tunisia because their supply and retreat were cut off; there was no way to have such a (comparatively) easy victory on mainland Europe where the Germans had the advantage of overland supply and space to retreat."

Speaking of Tunisia, someone else asked if you had looked into what could happen to it in the event of Sledgehammer happening instead of Torch, like reinforcements and Allied shipping in the Med?

The rest of the comments were generally about the narrative that "2 years improved training even for green troops" which I find dubious anyway given the examples you brought up about green Allied units in Normandy in 1944.

 

I have done further research and have made further discoveries that I feel bolster the case for Sledgehammer even more, but while I could certainly make useful revisions to what I wrote in 2009 (including some errors, some of which actually would strengthen my argument if corrected) just re-reading some of it in order to compose this response makes me feel like it still holds up pretty well.

Yes, Bougnas, that is what I think as well, it shouldn't really matter for that very reason.

Also, there would be at least 5 x LCF(L) (Landing Craft Flak) as well as 16 x LCS (M) and 3 x LCS (L) available, as well as the shallow draft gunboat Locust whose 4" gun is inadequate for the German positions dug in in tucked-away areas on the cliffs. There is nothing similar at Madeleine where the terrain is not nearly so favorable to the defender as, say, Omaha or Dieppe. You're going to have a 20:1 advantage in manpower with the first wave (in my 2009 article I put it at "5 to 1 – and probably better than 10 to 1" but afterwards I realized I hadn't analyzed it correctly - it is 2 battalions of about 550 men each vs. 1 platoon of about 55 men) against some inexperienced, less than elite troops in open field works on terrain unfavorable for the defender. I think the chances of quick success are fairly overwhelming regardless of the number of support craft.

Honestly the critic did not read my paper very well because I admit in it that the Thames River barges were "far from ideal" and never in any way suggest they are a primary replacement for LSTs. I've only think of the Thames River barges as a way to surge some extra vehicles at the beginning (like 1-3 weeks maybe) and then at some point they go to Cherbourg and lighter cargo from merchantmen anchored there.

Rather I called the coasters they planned to use and which proved their worth during Overlord - though they are often overlooked in histories - as "quasi-LSTs". I later felt like that wasn't the best label for them and stopped using that term, but it is not that far off either when you consider that LSTs were often dried out and unloaded before being refloated. The fact coasters didn't have ramps means more work while waiting for the tide to come in (although for coasters unloading vehicles it is probably all done with cranes, and my recent research has revealed that Adm. Hewitt in his post-Husky report states that LSTs, while excellent for vehicles, aren't really ideal for cargo), but the vessels are going to be stuck there just as long so in that sense there is no real difference. As far as structural issues, all I can say is that they were used successfully (beached and dried out) repeatedly during Overlord and particularly during periods of bad weather, right up through at least October and that worked, so it seems pretty clear they would have worked during what should have been a significantly shorter period for Sledgehammer.

The logistical needs are far smaller both in terms of fewer divisions and fewer tons needed per division since it is a grab and hold, not advance rapidly inland and drive the Germans back to Berlin, and the anticipation was that Cherbourg would be captured much earlier, as well it should have been given the overwhelming numerical superiority the Sledgehammer force should have enjoyed if the Allies had gone all in it and the weakness of the landward defense (normally unmanned defensive lines) it is not an unreasonable expectation.

Again, my critic did not read my paper very carefully. I specifically said the "Spitfires sporting external drop-tanks, and long range American P-38’s – provided most of the fighter cover" at Salerno, so I did not claim it was just Spitfires. The Seafires are a nice addition but their sortie rate at Salerno is very low so not as valuable as land-based Spits. There were also no Merlin Mustangs at any landing previous to Overlord so not having them for Sledgehammer is a weird criticism.

You are correct, Bougnas, but it's not just half the distance, but with twice as many fighters available. I discovered recently that RAF historian Greg Baughen made the same comparison with Salerno several years ago (but after my paper which I'm sure he was not aware of) and came to essentially the same conclusion I did.

More recently I have focused on doing an airpower comparison with Husky. I won't go into that now because I don't want this to be too long, but I feel the comparative example of Husky (now that I understand it better) is perhaps even stronger evidence than Avalanche (Salerno) that adequate fighter cover was available for Sledgehammer.

I mean the May Ministry of War Transport memo indicates the ships were already there at that time. That memo, and the follow-up one late the next month give no indication that there would be a problem making the conversions in time and that was for a Sledgehammer date far earlier than the one I talk about it my paper. Plus there is the fact that there were 22 (actually I think 24, so I was being cautious in my paper) such LSIs that were used in Torch, with a departure date just 3 weeks after Sledgehammer's. We are talking about ships, not landing craft, by the way. For a journey of maybe 8 hours across the Channel what sort of conversion do you need anyways? For Torch, where the personnel must live aboard ship for over a week you need berths, etc. For cross-Channel you only need davits to carry landing craft. The COHQ Green List of early August lists some 60 ships that could carry landing craft, none of which was made known to the planners. I would say that is all evidence so the claim I provide "no evidence" I don't think is warranted at all.

Here is the back page of COHQ's Green List for Aug 4, 1942:

The planners do not know about these vessels. Even if you exclude the last two groups, it comes to over 400 small landing craft that can be carried and that doesn't count the vessels the Sledgehammer planners include in their plan. Note that several of these ships - Duchess of Bedford, Marnix van St. Aldegonde, Orontes, Durban Castle, Ettrick, Monarch of Bermuda, Otranto, Reina del Pacifico, Strathallan, Strathnaver, Warwick Castle and Winchester Castle - actually participate in Torch from the very beginning. Why don't the Sledgehammer planners know about these? Maybe there is some benign explanation, but the simplest one is they were not told of them. I would also note that the plan states there will be no Horsa gliders available in October whereas I have multiple documents from British archives saying there will be 100 by the end of August (75 already by the end of July, plus 25 more in August).

As far as landing craft available I use the COHQ Green List from October 6, 1942. Those are actual numbers on hand and in the control of COHQ, so, for instance, it excluded US landing craft already in the UK, but still in transport. There are actually far more of the smaller landing craft than can possibly be transported across the Channel, and in any event when I run scenarios that get me to the 50,000 landed on D-Day I only count on 400 small landing craft being transported across the Channel in British vessels, substantially less than the theoretical maximum even as express in the Aug 4 doc (there are more vessels that appear on the back page in subsequent editions of the Green List that also participate in Torch).

I will pass over the comments about my tone. Good, bad or indifferent it does not bear on the validity of my arguments one way or the other and I plead guilty of sometimes adopting a tone better edited out. I would say my critic perhaps falls into the same trap.

Dieppe may have been closer to England if you measure directly across the Channel, but if you measure from Dieppe to where the RAF bases from which support for Jubilee actually came it is about the same from them to Madeleine Beach.

The fighter loss ratios at Dieppe are skewed due to the number of RAF fighters shot down by German AA (there was a lot at Dieppe, but none at Madeleine Beach). This has a negative snowball effect as well: a Sptifire shot down in the morning cannot shoot a Fw 190 off the tail of another Spit later on, who in turn cannot shoot another Fw 190 off the tail of another Spit later in the day.

You are right, the Spitfire V was substantially inferior to the Fw 190 (I would add the Me 109 F & G as well). The main reason the GAF achieved a superior kill ratio over France was more strategic than related to aircraft performance (and, btw, the phenomenon he mentions about crossing over into France at high speed was pretty much standard tactics for most if not all Allied fighters at the time, not just the Spit V). Since RAF sweeps over France absent an actual invasion presented no real threat to the Germans their fighters could avoid combat unless in a superior tactical position. This would be true, although probably somewhat less so, if the Germans were flying Spitfire Vs and the British Fw 190s, because if you see your enemy in time then even an inferior performing fighter can usually avoid combat. My critic notes that the much better Spitfire Mk IX only makes up a minority of Fighter Command Spitfires. That is true, but it is also true they were using them, even at Dieppe, but they send 0 to North Africa until the very end of January, 1943 and there aren't that many until March.

In an all out air war over northern France (as opposed to the limited one actually taking place there) the Germans would be attritted into irrelevance even if they were able to maintain a 3:1 kill ratio. As my paper notes, the fuel shortage they were suffering at the time caused a 80% scaling back of training such that losses just can be fully made good. The GAF fighter force is at an exceptionally vulnerable moment at this time.

The RAF plan for Sledgehammer also called for 100% fighter reserves, so I think that's another advantage. The Allies can easily win a battle of attrition, if they could get German fighters to more fully engage, which was one of the original justifications for doing Sledgehammer to begin with.

A couple of times my critic puts the word "exterminate" in quotes but I cannot see that I used that word in my paper. I do use the word "meager" (American spelling) in connection with the size of the German SE fighter force, but what else would you say about a force of just over 1,000 that "had responsibilities from the Arctic Circle to North Africa and from the Caucasus to the Atlantic coast, in addition to its role in protecting the German homeland" (to quote from my paper)? I have since learned by January 1943 the number of SE German fighter pilots fully ready has dropped to just 885! They lost 14 in just a few hours over Dieppe, so take half that number over 50 days as the number of incremental losses Sledgehammer might have caused and you are barely over 500.

I applaud my critic for not using the inflated number of Axis personnel captured at "Tunisgrad" that typically included a lot of Italians. But in the 100,000 he does include there is a substantial component of Rommel's troops that are either captured at Tripoli in January, more or less, or continue fighting because is Torch doesn't happen maybe they are able to hold on in N Africa. Of the two possibilities, the latter is arguably preferable because it would keep British forces deployed overseas in action against the enemy and it requires the Germans to continue to divert scarce resources, especially fuel, to sustain Rommel.

There is no reason to send reinforcements to the Med beyond what has already been sent by July if you go forward with Sledgehammer. Supply shipments to Egypt are already cut back significantly due to Torch and that does not stop 2nd El Alamein from happening because there are huge quantities of supplies already there (like a 16-month supply of artillery ammo). Rommel was sent to N Africa in the spring of 1941 to keep the British tied down there. With Sledgehammer that mission has failed. Hitler probably keeps him there anyways, but even more under-resourced than ever. As I mention in the paper, but more fully appreciate today, is that Torch causes a huge drain in shipping, a deficit that is not made up before yet more operations put further demands on the Allied shipping pool.

There are so many examples of this. The "lessons learned" narrative is a comforting myth we tell ourselves to justify what otherwise looks like a very dubious strategy. I think the evidence shows that the Western Allies, especially the Americans, learn to fight the Germans on the big stage mainly in Normandy after D-Day.

I'm just going to say that this is another one of my overly long responses, so you will have to forgive me if it is not reviewed/proofed as well as it should be.

 

Yes. In any case I think that the skepticism from some people towards the air war at Sledgehammer is somewhat unwarranted given that historically, the Western Allies still spent many more months sending fighters against a similar opposition at the same or even greater distances in Corsica or at Salerno, and in worse logistical conditions. If we add in the fact that the bomber force would be used more safely over Normandy for a while to assist Sledgehammer instead of going over Germany with next to no escort, I'd say that the losses from high intensity air combat over the Cotentin would balance themselves out with the losses in the Med and over Germany historically.
And past a few weeks, aircrafts could operate directly from the Cotentin, eliminating the range problem and also allowing pilots shot down in the area to be retrieved, and the Allies could install AA. This largely reverses the historical situation with the fighter sweeps where pilots shot down in France were guaranteed to land in enemy territory and where the Allies faced AA opposition.

One thing I also realised is that historically, Torch only split existing Axis forces instead of tying up then unengaged formations, while Sledgehammer would keep several divisions busy as early as October 1942. Of course I assume the Axis probably sent some divisions to Sicily and Italy shortly after Torch, but the fact remains that Sledgehammer would be a net improvement over the historical situation all the way to July 43 in terms of tying up Axis forces. Of course MTO Allied units would remain busy in North Africa for some more time, but the writing was on the wall for the DAK at this point so it probably wouldn't take much longer and Sledgehammer and then Roundup would open up the possibility of doing a Dragoon in late 43, which is in my opinion more valuable than sending MTO forces to Sicily and Italy.

This brings up the question of whether the Axis as a whole would benefit from Italy staying safe for a while longer, but I think it is a categoric no if Sledgehammer+Roundup happens. France is arguably more valuable to the Axis war effort, Italy wouldn't necessarily use its own ressources and manpower better than Germany when it historically took over, and in fact there is a decent chance that Italy would simply surrender or switch sides without ever fighting the Allies seriously, assuming the latter focused on a drive towards Germany once they broke out in France.

This doesn't surprise me because I had already learnt that when it came to theater reports on equipment, you rarely had reports from one theater actually being shared with another. Usually they only came back to CONUS. In other instances CONUS didn't always inform the theaters well about developments at home. It wouldn't be surprising if this applied to training or planning.

I am used to making quite long posts myself. In any case this was enlightening, thanks.

 

With trained tug crews and glider pilots? I've been looking at the squadron ORBs for 295, 296, 297 and 298 Sqns (all available on line) and they seem to have been using mostly Hotspurs for training flights. The Horsas (edited to add: some at least - numbers unspecified] seem to have arrived in July and August at at least one base (as visiting senior officers are recorded "inspecting them") but I don't know how quick the conversion courses were for both RAF air crew, Army glider pilots and the units they would have been landing. None of which should have been insurmountable I guess. I don't know how far UK plans had got in terms of using Horsas or indeed Hotspurs on operations by that point though. Lots of good training flights going on, and even the occasional leaflet raid over occupied enemy territory I suspect to practice navigation under operational conditions (or just to provide some toilet paper to the French population!).

Regards

Tom