That a simple piece of wraped sheet metal formed as a droptank could have totally changed the world's history ?
Could one trace the decisive point of ww2 down to this simple and cheap mechanical feature ?
I am of course thinking of the 109's fuel handicap over England during the battle.

It would certainly have made a big difference. Quite a few 109s ended up on the French beaches and fighting while worrying about fuel is not a good idea either. And of course often bombers would go unescorted because the escort had to turn home. And of course even flying fortresses fared badly if unescorted if there is basically any oposition.

OTOH the Germans would still have have made mistakes due to Hitler and due to bad intelligence, the British would still be able to bail over their territory (with about half the shot down pilots rescued that is a huge factor) etc. And the British might still have been able to save their airforce with some desperate measure like moving it north. And if they had lost their airforce, an invasion might well still have been unsucessful.

But indeed sometimes very simple things are the most important, like for example the R4M missile that was very low tech and had no design feature people could not have done 10 or 20 years before but still was an extremely potent weapon, would definitely have changed things (but not the outcome of the war of course) had it been there earlier and after the war was copied by the Americans and IMHO influenced technology by accelarating the introduction of rockets/missiles, which of course soon afterwards were hightech controlled or self controlling ones.

I think they had droptanks, but were of a paper, resin type material, that leaked, and was not very popular with the pilots Orders to stay with the bombers hurt them as well. As mentioned, bad intelligence, both on the Western, and Eastern fronts during the war hurt them also. For the first time the unprotected Stukas met tough opposition, and the Bf-110`s failure in a heavy fighter vs fighter role did`nt help matters.

Many other factors were involved, the letup of pressure on Fighter Commands airfields, the inability to knock out vital aircraft production, and engine manufacturing. Not being able to destroy the Home radar networks, and the U-Boats failure to completely stop the ammount of supplies coming into the British Isles. I`m sure there are many other mistakes made that cost them dearly.

It was a factor, but I dont think it would have changed history. I dont know all that much about BOB but have read that when the germans stopped bombing airfields and started to bomb cities it was a huge error.
It was worth a try, The UK was unable to being any heavy equipment back with them from France. I will have to try to get a book on this subject from the German perspective.

THE definitive book on the Battle of Britain:

The Most Dangerous Enemy by Stephen Bungay.

Bottom line, as I got it from the book, was that all the German's plans were predicated on ALL their pilots achieving a kill/loss ratio similar to the best in the Polish campaign. It simply never happened, of course, and very probably could never have happened. As far as I understand it, there was never a day in the BoB when the Germans were knocking down more pilots or planes than the British were capable of producing.

Was it still a heroic effort by the pilots (on both sides)? Of course. Many, many brave men fought and died on both sides, but Germany was defeated in the BoB by the same thing that eventually defeated it in the overall war-an imbalance of war related production.

British pilots got to be in very short supply. If it wasen't for the switch to London....
FWIW,
Good Hunting!

I saw a interwiev with an Battle of britain veteran that claimed that alltough the RAF was racking up kill's and shooting down german planes left and right, they where themself beeing grinded down in the process. On the point where Hitler shifted his attention to the civilian targets, the RAF was down to 2 weeks supply of men and material with the current attrition rate.

Could a drop-tank extended combat time have increased the attrition rate before Hitler messed it up ?
We will never know, but it's interesting to speculate.

And if I may do just that.
With an defeated RAF and an broken army after Dunkirk, the blitzkrieg wermacht, once ashore, would have rolled up England pretty fast.
The british well developed road and infrastructure would suit the blitzkrieg tactic fine. Also, with the words of author Max Hastings when refering to the Lenningrad battle, "Londoners would have surrendered before eating each other".

To take it even further.
A defeated England would close the western front, releasing large amount of Planes, troop's, antiaircraft guns and military production capacity to operation barbarossa. This would certainly trigger the assault on Russia on an earlier date.
The german panzers would have entered the red square before the winter and Moscow would fall.
United States, alltough disgusted with the third reich, would not be able to attack Germany without an british platform.

All this because of an wrapped piece of sheet metal on the BF 109 E.


Light speculation on a quiet sunday.

Sorry, when re-reading my post it may look like I'm degrading the british fighting spirit with the Max Hastings quote.
It is not my intention to do that, I'm just thinking in cold military terms. Certainly the British civilian population suffered immensly during the Blitz but came out standing tall. Luckily for all of us.

Read the book.

JAAR,

You made some good points but you're forgeting a few things about an eventual landing by the Germans in Britain:
- The German have very, very limited landing capability in terms of boats. The Germans only had a few hundreds of small landing barges which means that only a very few Germans tanks or armored vehicles would probably land in Britain. Without many tanks and armored vehicles on the field there wouldn't be any effective blitzkrieg (the tanks and armored vehicles were the basis of the blitzkrieg).
An eventual landing on Britain according to the Sealion plan would count with 200.000 Soldiers which is in my oppinion a very short number even if facing an army that lost most of it's equipment in Dunkirk (In Dunkirk around 300.000 allied soldiers were sucessfully evacuated and to this would be added many other soldiers that already existed in Britain and/or were recruited in order to face a possible invasion).
Also the British had quite impressive plans in order to face a possible invasion which included an oil pipeline which crossed Britain's south coast and in case of invasion the oil would the spilled from that pipeline and set on fire in which it would set an authentic "Firewall" around Britain's south coast (where the Germans would land).
Finally, the British Bomber command was able to destroy more than 200 German landing barges during the Battle of Britain which would make things even harder for the Germans.

Finally I won't say that the Germans wouldn't be able to invade England if the British lost the Battle of Britain but an eventual invasion sucess by the Germans would be very far from being garanteed.

Well, my 2 cents

The Russians faced and beat the best two-thirds of the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front. Germany would still have to spend enourmous recources on controlling a conquored England. I find the suggestion that a succesful Sealion operation would also spell doom for the Soviet Union very doubtful.

Brit destroyers would have carved the landing up.

I am just reading Adolph Gallands "First and Last" at the moment and he seems to think that even if they had been able to land forces into the UK they didnt have the fighter range for air superiority deep enough into England to keep the troops supplied and protected,and they also started preparations too late in the year.

The Royal Navy would have sortied out of its Northern ports and decimated any landing-an oft forgotten fact from this period.

As Churchill said (Oct 40): "We are waiting for the long promised invasion. So are the fishes."

The Royal Navy would have caused devastating losses to an invasion fleet providing the RAF was around to protect the ships of course.

Because of Barbarossa, we'll never know what would have happened in BoB Round 2 (1941).

apparently they worked out that just running past the barges at high speed would have sunk them from the wash ...

Actually, a really good read regarding this latter issue is Derek Robinson's latest: Invasion 1940. He's a great writer (A Good Clean Fight and Piece of Cake were amongst his previous works) and this time he takes a historical look at a different side of the Battle. He argues, and very convincingly indeed, that it was the Navy that defended Britain in 1940. An invasion was never a serious threat.

But of course it has taken 65 years for such things to be argued cogently. At the time, and in the minds of men, the RAF Hurricanes and Spitfires saved the world from Nazi tryanny. Such is the way that history is written - with an element of myth.

Part of Robinson's opinion was based on the idea that warships are too difficult to hit from aeroplanes, if I remember correctly. He argues this as far back as Piece of Cake, where he makes it clear that he thinks that the Luftwaffe would be nearly helpless in stopping the RN. How, in light of the fate of all of the ships sunk by warplanes in WW2, he can make this claim is beyond my understanding.

It's not as simple as counting ships sunk by planes.

The LW didn't have much of an anti-ship capability in 1940 (in terms of trained crews, planes and weapons - bombs or torps). The Japanese sank PoW and Repulse but they were probablly the best anti-ship force in the world at that point. Swordfish hitting static Italian battleships in Taranto is not a good comparison either. The Med in '41 is a different matter. Even there the RN managed fairly well to stop German seaborne reinforcements during the Crete operation, despite LW air superioriry and some losses to it. I realise that in Feb 1940 a single He111 of KG26 managed to sink one and possibly two destroyers in the dark, but those destroyers were German ones (Leberecht Maas and Max Schultz, IIRC, caught on a minelaying op). But KG26, the vulnerable Stukas, and the even more vulnerable He115s were it.

The proposition that the RN "fleet in being" was what really prevented Germany from invading in 1940 was best expounded by Wing Cdr HR "Dizzy" Allen in his book "Who won the Battle of Britain?", published in 1974. Even if one does not agree with his every argument, he is not only an intelligent professional airman, he flew Spits in the Battle. He argues fairly convincingly that the RN would have mounted whatever effort it took to smash the invasion and would have done so, regardless of the worst the LW, KM, mines etc could have done. He's probably correct.

Had the LW felt it was doing well enough, Allen quotes one german admiral as saying that Hitler would probably have launched Sealion, but that it would in all probability have been smashed.

As regards the Battle's place in history, 1940 was a turning point; but the decisive act was not the air fighting, but before that, Churchill persuading Britain not to make peace when it was arguably in Britian's selfish national interest to do just that.

It was decisive, historically, because if Britian had made peace, Western Europe up to the Atlantic coast would have ended up in the hands of either the Nazis, or the Soviets 9epending on the outcome of Barbarosa, always Hitler's ultimate goal) both outcomes which would have been disasterous.

Britain's naval supermacy was sufficient to make the odds of her surviving such a decision rather good. The Battle of Britian helped further in making that decision stick. But the decision not to make peace - and Hitler was offering pretty good terms, considering the scale of his victory - was the real turning point. Bungay makes this point quite eloquently in "The Most Dangerous Enemy".

He also takes the view that drop tanks and longer range would not have significantly altered the course of the Battle, nor did the switch to London. He thinks the LW would have done better to maintain the attacks on radar stations and to equip and use the whole Me110 force as fighter-bombers hitting the radar and the airfields, like ErpGr210 did with some success, but even then the odds were still heavily stacked against LW victory. Bombing radars and airfields is one thing, doing it heavily enough and often enough to neutralise them is another matter.

In 1940 the LW fought a badly-directed effort to attain objectives that were ill-defined, regularly-changing, and possibly unattainable anyway, against the most effective air defence system in the world, better-directed and fighting almost exactly the battle it was designed for, backed up by a supply of both planes and pilots that would have outlasted its opponent unless the LW achieved kill-loss ratios that were quite beyond its ability to achieve and sustain. Almost nothing the LW could have done would have produced any other result. Yes RAF Fighter Command was being ground down, but the LW was being ground down at least as fast, probably faster. And it didn't have the reserves the British did, the LW lacking depth as a force, just as the German war economy as a whole lacked depth until Speer took over.

To win, the Germans would have had to be exceptionally good and exceptionally lucky, and the British the reverse. None of that happened. It was never likely to. That's not to lessen the achievements, bravery and relisience of the individuals involved. But that's the sober assessment of most historians.

Yes, that's as I recall the Bungay position. And he argues it very well indeed.


I do agree on the point about hitting ships from the air. It takes a specialist force to have any hope. And any barge invasion force would have been very vulnerable to British destroyers as it drifted slowly across the channel. Such was the number of vessels that the Navy had, even if many had been lost, there would have been more..

Robinson, from "Invasion 1940":-
Consider:
five battleships
six aircraft carriers
19 cruisers
52 flotilla leaders and destroyers.

These were only the warships that the Admiralty was *building* in September 1939. The size of the true fleet -of operational ships- was massive. Today it strains the imagination.


12 battleships
three battlecruisers
six aircraft carriers
23 heavy cruisers
29 light cruisers
six anti-aircraft cruisers
69 submarines
51 escort vessels
165 destroyers
and hundreds of smaller vessels.


So how many of these could the Luftwaffe have sunk, after the strain of a battle over England?