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Hysterical Fantasy

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Finally, Hitler was impatient. He had promised Grà ssadmiral Raeder, commander of the German Navy, that Raeder would have until 1944 to build up the navy so that it could challenge Britain's Royal Navy for supremacy in the Eastern Atlantic. The Plan Z naval buildup to four aircraft carriers, thirteen battleships and battle cruisers, and thirty-three heavy and light cruisers: all of them less than fifteen years old, against an aging Royal Navy, might well have accomplished that mission (Christopher Chant, Warfare and the Third Reich, p. 73). Not understanding naval warfare, or its essential place in a nation's modern war plans, cost Hitler more than we will ever know. (Shirer, op cit.)


"If Hitler wanted the world, why did he not build strategic bombers, instead of two-engine Dorniers and Heinkels that could not even reach Britain from Germany?

"Why did he let the British army go at Dunkirk?


In both cases the answer is the same: Hermann Goering.


In 1939 only two nations had operational four-engine bombers: the Soviet Union and the United States. Great Britain was still more than a year away from deploying the Halifax and Stirling four engine bombers, and two years from its Lancaster bomber. General Wener had been the primary voice for the four-engine strategic or "Ural bomber in a Luftwaffe dominated by fighter aces Goering and Ernst Udet. When General Wener died in an airplane accident in 1936, the ideas for the development of the strategic bomber were placed on a back burner, and the emphasis was concentrated on the Luftwaffe's tactical support role by Luftwaffe chief of development Udet, with Goering's blessing (Chant, op. cit., p.317).


Hitler did not feel he had to put the emphasis on strategic bombing to attack Great Britain's war making potential, especially with what he expected would be a short war (Chant, ibid,). The Germans knew that as an island nation "with limited natural resources "a blockade using their U-boats, would stop the British from acquiring the materiel needed to continue a war (as it almost had in World War I), better than the uncertain theoretical effect of bombing Great Britain's industrial capacity.


Against Germany "since it was a continental power "Great Britain had only one sure way to successfully inhibit Germany's war making potential: by air attack against its production and transportation facilities. So Great Britain put its emphasis into the as yet unproven idea of strategic bombing.


At Dunkirk, Goering told Hitler that he could use the Luftwaffe to cut off the British evacuation, and compel the surrender of 350,000+ British, French and allied troops without risking Germany's panzer divisions. Hitler gave Goering his blessing, over the objections of his Army generals.


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Richard Girard is a polymath and autodidact whose greatest desire in life is to be his generations' Thomas Paine. He is an FDR Democrat, which probably puts him with U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders in the current political spectrum. His answer to (more...)
 

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