kalpazanin wrote:
The loading of the equipment will take days. The loadinng of the troops will take hours.
Knowing something's 'up' gives them nothing. They must know what and when.
Firstly I would dispute that 200,000 men can embark on a fleet of 100 merchant ships in mere hours.
Secondly, as you've already admitted, the equipment loading would take days so presumably the troops would be part of that, therefore the embarkation of the troops takes DAYS also.
Thirdly, the loading of tanks and troops onto ships tells the British "what", it also tells them "when" as you can't keep troops bottled up on ships for too long. What the British need to know is "where".
The British go on to full invasion alert which reduces reaction time and removes the element of surprise.
Excuse me?
A Liberty ship could carry 440 tanks.
I'am talking of ships with comparable tonnage (1/3) carrying only 10 tanks. Where exactly is the problem??
Where are the troops are supposed to be once boarded. On deck? In the hold?
It's not a weight issue, have you any idea how much space 2,000 fully equipped troops take?
If you bother to read my posts you should notice that the controlled explosion is supposed to happen after the troops leave the ship.
Actually that wasn't clear but OK...
Problem now is two-fold:
1. How to get 2,000 men & their personal equipment/weapons off the merchant ship - in darkness. Not something I'd want to do - do you envisage scrambler nets to the beach/water?
2. Even if the ships is evacuated of men (which would take many, many hours), I find the idea of exploding charges inside the ship to allow the removal of tanks, trucks, artillery etc something of a fantasy.
Have you got any real life example to base this on?
Of course if the dis-embarkation of the 2,000 troops takes so many hours (it would take longer to get off than to get on without the aid of port facilities) - the tide would be back in.
Lastly, merchant ships aren't built like ferries, their holds are broken into compartments. So blowing off the bow doesn't help the rear holds. Now you could cut holes into the bulkheads but I'm not sure how that would affect the ship's sea-worthiness.
That may be true if the merchant hits a reef by chance.
When doing it in a planned manner the ship will be placed in carefully studied beaches with the right slope.
The effect would be not much different than placing the ship in dry dock.
Again have you got any real-life examples to base this idea on? I have tried to think of a way you could do this and can't. A 15,000 ton merchant man would require a hell of a lot of support to remain upright on a beach. IMO it would roll on to its side before you had a chance to stabilize it (even if you could figure out a way to install a system powerful enough to stabilize it on an uneven beach).
Beaching a ship is not an exact science and a lot can go wrong. At night (even with a full moon - that's not guaranteed by the way) I would say there's no way at all you can hit a precise spot.
Steering into a dry dock and beaching a ship is not the same thing.
If you disagree with my basic idea completely without providing any logical argument then there is nothing much I can discuss with you...
Actually I love the creative nature of you idea...it's the kind of sceme that Hitler might have suggested to his horrified generals.
I just don't think it's workable though - your ships wouldn'tbe easily unloadable and the men they unloaded would be in no condition to fight.
Furthermore, they would not be able to be supplied in the manner you suggest.
An "escalade" isn't actually a bad idea in itself.
I've head it suggested that the Germans could've engineered a "Dunkirk" in reverse. Send over as many men as possible in small boats immediately after the Dunkirk battle.
Couple this with a massive para drop to flood the area around the SE England ports in the hope of taking one or two by surprise and hold it while reinforcemetns arrive by sea into the ports.