Quote:
Originally Posted by T. A. Gardner
Allied naval gunfire was unstoppable. The Germans also discovered that ships are not easy things to sink, especially when most of your aircraft are unsuited for the job. On the whole, the Allies would get ashore. Once ashore they, like every time they landed somewhere, would be difficult or impossible to dislodge.
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Let's throw in a couple of more players in this scenario: the Tirpitz and the Scharnhorst.
What if the germans had sent out these warships to raid the supply convoys?
In co-operation with the U-boats they could have wrecked havoc on the convoys, draining the supplies to the landing operation in a critical phase so long that the Wehrmacht go the upper hand on land.
Concerning the allied naval gunfire, they could have countered this with railroad guns like they did in Italy.
Out of range for the naval guns, they could have pounded the landing zone at night.
One poster said that the U-boat would be a minor threat to the invasion.
On the contrary, the U-boats were still a fighting force to take into account by November 1942.
The climax in the U-boat war came six months later, in the spring of 1943, culminating with the so-called Black May.
According to Dönitz' war diary Germany had 100 operational U-boats in November 1942. (From December 1942 to February 1943 there were 102 boats and March-May 115 boats.)
There were 56 boats in the Atlantic, 23 in the Mediterranean, 6 stationed west of Gibraltar, 4 in the North Sea and the rest dispersed elsewhere.
If you think 30 of these were transferred to attack the convoys in the Atlantic in co-operation with Tirpitz and Scharnhorst, the number will be a total of 86, and the loss of supply ships could have been so large that the landing operation would grind to a halt.
With the German capital ships dashing in from the north and most of the allied battleships occupied in protecting the landing forces, the outcome may have turned out to be a disaster to the allies.
Regards
RAM