Hop said:
Is Britain the same as the Channel Coast? The RAF had fighter squadrons in Northern Ireland, the north of Scotland, Wales, the north of England etc that didn't participate at all in the fighting.
But the British target was the bombers. As Bungay points out, the German fighters achieved about a 1.2 to 1 victory rate, whereas the British fighters achieved 1.8 to 1. They had different tasks.
The problem is with your figures, that the British admitted the loss of 1140 of their fighters, whereas the LW curiously only knows about 1385 of it's combat aircraft
of all types (even coastal aircraft and such counted) being lost to enemy action during the Battle of Britiain, no small number to ship and land AAA, balloons and not fighters.
As for the LW fighters record, they lost something like 502 s-e, and 224 t-e fighters to enemy action of all kinds, vs. the said 1140 British fighters lost (not counting damaged).
Either your math is very poor or you're selling poo here again - btw, did you manage to find out the name of those 3 Italian phantom BBs you claimed the RN sent to Davy Jones locker..? About 6th time I ask, is it?
Then this regular trash-talk about Stukas, you seem to be very fond of spreading the same old myth over and over again?
It was 69 on operations, and another 18 not on operations.
Read : The LW was loosing 59 Stukas during the whole BoB due to enemy action, the rest is just pumping the numbers up.
Other than that, the truth is the RAF could did bloody nothing against the Stukas that happily sinking British coastal sinking en-masse during July and August. Ju87 units were active over both Channel convoys and southeast England from July. Losses suffered over the two month period were:
July 14 - 1;
July 20 - 2;
July 25 - 1;
July 27 - 1;
July 29 - 4;
August 11 - 1;
August 12 - 5;
August 14 - 4;
August 15 - 7;
August 16 - 9;
August 18 - 14.
In that two month period the Ju87s
sank 1 ainti-aircraft ship - the Foylebank
sank 1 destroyer - the Brazen
damaged five destroyers - Beagle, Boadicea, Bulldog, Boreas, Brilliant
forced the Dover Destroyers to be withdrawn
sank 4 small warships - Warrior II, Kingston Galena, Roding, Gulzar
sank 14 merchant ships
damaged 29 merchant ships
forced Channel convoys to be halted during daylight
damaged 7 airfields - Detling, Hawkinge, Lympne, Tangmere, Lee-On-Solent, Ford, Thorney Island
destroyed 49 aircraft on the ground - 22 at Detling, 15 at Tangmere, 12 at Lee-On-Solent
damaged three radar stations (putting them off air for a short period) - Ventnor, Poling, Dover.
And how many sorties did they fly?
Overall during the two month period the Ju87's suffered a 7.9% loss rate - hardly the massive losses the British claimed. And achieved an remarkable amount in that period.
If you look at the final nail in their coffin in the BoB, the raid that convinced Goering to stop using them in the main attack, 109 Stukas escorted by 150+ Bf 109s.
He must have meant August 18, which British mythology had declared as the day after Stukas were withdrawn due ot mounting losses. It has no basis, it's part of the BoB-folklore.
The Ju 87 was not withdrawn from the so-called Battle of Britain. When the targets changed from coastal targets to inner-Britain targets, the Ju 87 groups were redirected to attack the coastal merchant ships, since they lacked speed and range. Kesselring's urging due to the fact that the Battle was entering a period where level bombers would be the main thrust, not dive bombers. He believed the Ju87 units should be held in reserve for when air supremacy was gained and could be used to stike at the RN when Operation Sealion was implemented. The Sturzkampfgeschwader were retained at their bases in northern France and Belgium after August 1940, but they were no longer assigned daylight targets
in the coastal counties of southern England. They continued to effectively suppress any trade with coastal naval vessels on the British SE and S coasts. They continued to do so till spring 1941, longer than the level bomber campaign lasted. The Achte Fliegerkorps, to which most of the Sturzkampfgeschwader belonged, was to play a key role in supporting Seelöwe until the operation was indefinitely postponed and von Richthofen's Fliegerkorps ordered from France to Romania in January 1941. From September to December, the Sturzkampfgeschwader flew some dawn and dusk attacks on coastal shipping in the Thames Estuary and along the southeast English coast, but mostly they trained and waited for Seelöwe and then their next assignment. The unit histories for St.G. 2 and St.G. 77 bear this out, as does a careful examination of the daily loss reports for all four Geschwader along with scattered ULTRA intercepts and occasional references in the surviving Heer AOK records for northern France and Belgium for fall 1940. The Ju 87 groups were withdrawn from the frontline in spring 1941 for refreshment, as preparation for the attack on Russia.
This is supported by the fact that up to 18 August, 33 Stukas had been lost; however, some 51 were lost on operations in total up to the end of August, and 2 more on operations in September etc.
8 109s were lost, 17 Stukas, with another 7 Stukas damaged.
Compared to that, the RAF reported 37 Stukas destroyed, 2 probably destroyed, 2 damaged.
RAF records tell of 22 for that day.
That's a loss rate of about 15% for the Stukas. Sustainable losses would have been on the order of 2 or 3%.
That's the loss rate of one mission, where they had considerable losses as opposed to the avarage of next to zil losses for week after week - a mere 12 Stukas being lost to enemy losses in the whole July, for example. Speaks a lot of the RAF's capability to stop anti-shipping strikes, isn't it..?
It's curious though that now you pick the atypical losses of a single day, and try to apply that to the whole picture, when just recently you were arguing that the LW would not be able to amount a large number of sorties on avarage, and 'it doesn't matter' if they occasionaly did. Now it's a different song, the single worst sortie of the Stukas is representative of their whole operations.
I'd say it's a curious attitude, but since I know you for such a long time, I say it's just the same old old tricks.
I somehow missed this when reading through all the posts, but Civettone, look at a map please. France is in Western Europe....
