My desires to reach the Post2K status seem to have shrunken considerably at learning that Olga has gotten wind (where's that gasmask when you need it) of the upcoming occasion. The words doo and bang leave me in a mental state where I am hardly able to construct decent sentences let alone considering intellignet replies to your brilliant posts, nevertheless.... that has never constrained me and so it shall remain even if there's this funny smell in the air.
For an army and airforce - so true the observation that the Kriegsmarine never found its footing and that the Germans always feared the loss of it to the extent that they'd rather let most of their ships rust in harbour than letting them out to the high seas, excepting the u-boats -led by megalomaniacs and short people with an affinity for the coulour brown and torture, the Nazis did quite well when fighting a war confined to one continent.
Playing the amateur armchair historian; Blietzkrieg works in a continental war theatre because it is a strategy that integrates forces on land and in the air, but when the operations span two or more continents the distances grow too large;, the tactical scenario is totally different involving different kinds of logistics, supplies, means of waging war effectively through only one arm; i.e. the air force. Blietzkrieg is no longer the best strategy.
First let us assume that the British Isles are a continent seperate from Europe. I suspect many U.K. citizens will have no trouble at all grasping this concept!
With increased distances because of the Channel, Luftwaffe could not not quite succeed in bombing England to defeat or surrender - but we know today that they came periliously very close to achieving their goal. Had thay had a long range, high altitude, large capacity bomber things might have been very different, just as a long-range bomber would have been a fearful supplement to the campaign in Russia during winter in roles of harassing the enemy, keeping a constant pressure on his supply lines, factories, troop movements etc. They would have been able to take off from airfields at a safe distance from the front.
The main point is like many other countries in the thirties, Germany refused to consider the bomber force as a force at all and would not consider the idea of Strategic Air Power as proposed by people like Curtis LeMay in the United States. This reluctance to embrace the bomber force carried well into the war itself. Arthur Harris I believe wasn't a very popular choice when he took over Bomber Command, and I should not be surprised if I were to learn that he'd been considered a bit of a nuisance before he was even close to be considered as Air Vice Marshall.
But we must also use some real world economic sense here as generally no one can have it all but must prioritize; based on what seems to be the most likely scenario, and from the previous war Germany had learned that Blietzkrieg worked better than trench warfare. And within the context of a war in continental Europe, they weren't too far off the ball.
According to a documentary on the Lancaster which I watched yesterday the expectations before the war were indeed for a war close to home, making the need for large-range heavies less obvious. The Nazis invaded Poland and suddenly the necessity of carrying large bombloads long distances became abundantly clear, according to the narrartive of the documentary. The exsisting bombers (Whitley, Hampden, Fairey Battle, Blenheim) were slow, quaint, old fasioned, obsolete in a shooting war; low ceiling, small bombloads, inadequately protected, flimsy.
The Wellington being the workhorse until the arrival of newer aircraft.
Looking up the details in my aircraft related appendices to the Great HWH guide; the Air Ministry issued a specification called p.13/36 (36 designating the year 1936) for an aircraft to carry a bombload of 12.000 Ibs. Avro thought that they could do it with two engines but the engines weren't as powerful and reliable as hoped and from the failure of the Manchester, the Lancaster was born.
En-passant I caught a reference of a Wing Cdr. A.C.T. Harris who in 1924 was tinkering with heavy bombers (at least for 1924 they were heavy.)
The Short Stirling's bomb-bay was limited by a main-spar taking up lots of valuable space where one wanted to mount bombs. Either it was the Stirling, or perhaps the Halifax, but one of these had a wing-span limited to a hundred feet so they would fit in a standard RAF Hangar!
