On Mar 20, 8:21*am, Bill Kambic wrote:
On Fri, 19 Mar 2010 19:46:13 -0000, "Keith Willshaw"
wrote:
"Dean" wrote in message
....
On Mar 19, 1:28 pm, Bill Kambic wrote:
On Fri, 19 Mar 2010 05:53:42 -0700 (PDT), Jack Linthicum
wrote:
Look up "Mulberry"
I know what a "Mulberry" was. *I also know that they were part of a
solution. *What was the rest of it?
Capturing Cherbourg.
That was part of it but until a port was captured and repaired the
allies relied on a combination of Mulberry harbours and landing supplies
on the beach. The allies used large numbers of specialist *landing craft and
landing ships along with the DUKW amphibious trucks.
The Germans had none of these methods available in 1940.
Thank you, thank you, thank you. *:-)
There's the crux of the matter. *The Allies in '44 had THOUSANDS of
small, specfifically designed ships that could support land forces by
delivering supplies acrross a beach. *Or at a quay. *They could make
multiple trips. *They had (at least at the LST level) limited self
defense capability. *And until Antwep was captured and put back into
service they were the lifeline for the Allied armies.
Excatly how many LSTs were in the KM order of battle? *Or any other
ship of similar capability? *How many Mulberries did the KM have? *How
many miles of undersea petrolium piping could they lay to deliver fuel
to their forces?
If the Germans had invaded they would have had about 48 hours to win
or they would have had to either withdraw of die slowly of starvation.
The "logistics tail" to support any sort of extended campaign did not
exist.
It was just a little wider river crossing, no need for special ships.
Peter Fleming mentions the use of railroad ferries to bring the tanks,
other methods like "Dr. Feder-type concrete barges" and Krupp's
"Lendkreuzer".
"Another unlikely project was a proposal by Gottfried Feder, a Nazi
official who was a civil engineer by training, to create what he
called a "war crocodile" for use in the anticipated invasion of
England. Feder's brainchild, as described in Ronald Wheatley's 1958
book Operation Sea Lion: German Plans for the Invasion of England,
1939-1942, was a an immense amphibious blockhouse of ungainly
proportions - 90 feet long, 20 feet wide, and 12 feet high-made of
concrete, which could move across the water under its own power and
then crawl ashore on caterpillar tracks to disgorge either 200
soldiers or tanks and artillery. The German Naval Ordinance Office had
serious doubts about whether the crocodile's slender concrete body
would withstand the vibration of an engine powerful enough to move it,
but nevertheless, according to William Shirer's 1960 book The Rise and
Fall of the Third Reich, the crocodile actually was discussed at
length by Hitler himself before being discarded.
German arms maker Krupp dreamed up another immense vehicle, the
Landkreuzer P. 1500 Monster, by placing an 800 mm Dora artillery
cannon-the sort normally towed on a railway car-atop a giant tank
chassis powered by two to four U-Boat engines. The Monster, as
described in My Tank is Fight! Zack Parsons', Mike Doscher's, and Josh
Hass' 2006 book on improbable World War II weapons, would have weighed
in at 2,500 metric tons, served by a crew of 100, and plodded along
the battlefield at six to nine miles an hour-making it a pathetically
easy target for Allied aircraft. Albert Speer, the Nazi minister for
armaments and war production, worried that the Monster's sheer size
would appeal to Hitler, and reportedly forbade Krupp to build a
prototype."
http://naziscienceliveson.devhub.com/blog/2009/06/