Re: Retrograde skirmishers

> >> See the Pacific campaign, starring US subs vs Japanese shipping.
> >> Even in N Atlantic, it's not that "raiders can't destroy
> >> you"--the lesson was that convoys with air support can work.

> >Ooooooo, mommy mommy, I just caught myself a REALLY BIG FISH!  :>

> >Okay, here's the difference between the Atlantic and the Pacific, in
simple
> >terms.

> >The German U-Boat scare, while formidable in the early stages of the
war, was
> >all but useless by the end phases.  Why?  Because they had no other
recourse
> >other than the U-Boats... which meant that once the Allies figured
out how
> >to sink them effectively, they were horribly ineffective.
 
> What did the Allies sink them with--battleships? I'd say that
> DD's, and even more so land-based air, would qualify as
> skirmishers.

Land-based aircraft qualify as skirmishers?  Uhhhh... let's see.  The
Luftwaffe's role in sitting right beside the Wehrmacht in cutting
through
just about every army in Europe until Hitler squandered away the main
assault force in southern Russia comes to mind.  Land-based aircraft,
acting
completely on their own, sunk the battleships Tirpitz, Prince of Wales,
and
the battlecruiser Repulse, and pretty much sent civilization in both
Germany
and Japan right back to the stone age.	90% of Tokyo was on fire one
night
out of every three, and I won't even go into Hiroshima.

No... I don't think aircraft of any sort would qualify as skirmishers in
the
sense I'm thinking, i.e. where you don't confront much of anything head
on
and just hit and flee.	Fighters of whatever sort (whether in real life
or
in FT) are very head-on war materials.

> Even had it been BB's, though, the Allies didn't win just by
> figuring out how to sink them, they won by committing the
> resource required.  Resources that would otherwise have gone to
> the ground war.

No... it pretty much _was_ by just figuring out how to sink them. 
Destroyer
escorts were so cheap that, even before entering the war, the United
States
gave away a hundred of the suckers to Britain basically for free.  The
Soviets
had the ground war pretty much completely under control from the moment
Hitler
personally blundered away the main German assault force at Stalingrad,
even
though the U-boat threat would not come under real control for another
year
and a half and all we were doing to help the Soviets fight the Germans
was
to send supplies.

In 1942, the German submarine menace was all over the Atlantic, and was
really,
really nasty right off the eastern seaboard.  When the United States
finally
began going through U-boats like popcorn, it was because we simply
started
listening to the British in how to deal with them.  We started blacking
out
the cities on the east coast so that U-boat commanders wouldn't have
these
beautiful silhouettes of merchant ships against well-lit backdrops to
shoot at
like they were ducks in a circus game.	We started convoying ships
together to
make it easier for destroyers to protect them.	We started communicating
better
when U-boats were sighted.  The one major construction change we made
was in
the merchant marine, with the "Liberty ship" design, the only real claim
to
fame of which was that we could build the things in about three days to
quickly
replace shipping sunk by submarines.  And somewhere in the midst of
this, we
somehow found the resources left aside while we were sending three out
of every
four German U-boat sailors to the bottom of the Atlantic to ALSO build
the army
that brought the war in Europe to a close within a year of landing it,
the
navy that pushed the Japanese clear back to the coast of China, AND the
air
force that reduced every major German and Japanese city to so much
rubble.
-- 
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 The Stilt Man		      stiltman@teleport.com
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