Hi Isaac Newton,
Relatively speaking those you cite were relatively cheap for what they accomplished, but there was so much waste in so many other areas.
I'm referring to the pitiful strategic planning, industrial mobilization, etc [what there was of it], which is why the Brits did so badly the first half of the war; such as the alphabet aircraft production schemes that spent so much time and money building obsolete biplanes and other near suicidal aircraft, you may recall the Avro Anson was considered an ultra modern aircraft, even a secret one in the movies, when it was pathetic by European or American standards.
Since the bureaucrats and politicians didn't want to fight another war in Europe, or really anywhere else, they didn't prepare and were then forced to improvise on an pitiful ad hoc basis the last couple years of the peace that were beyond Churchill's ability to change or improve as Britain barely managed to survive; wasting time and vast fortunes ordering junk 'off the drawing board' on such lousy bombers like the Battle, Blenheim, and Botha, to name just three, because they were cheap and easy to build so the politicians could tout them in Parliament and the newspapers, when the Germans knew they were no serious military threat with their pitiful bomb loads, poor defenses and general design flaws; they were in reality flying coffins for some of England's best young men, wasted even more easily and uselessly than the 'Pals' battalions at the Somme.
RDF or Radio Direction Finding, as the British then styled RADAR [acronym courtesy of the USN], was a very close run thing; the German radars of the same period were technically rather superior, NTM begun earlier with a far better understanding of the engineering and physics involved, but it was the pre-existing British air raid organization especially its command and control from WWI, when the RAF was created, that added RDF essentially as another observation post or sensor input that saved England.
The Mosquito didn't fly until November 25, 1940, less than a year after it was finally ordered and the concept was considered so unlikely that only 50 were ordered, despite de Havilland spending years trying to explain it to Whitehall, then despite strong support from Freeman, getting it into mass production took years of further argument, and according to production records less than a thousand bomber versions were actually completed in England.
Regarding the Spitfire, it was the Whitehall idiots who delayed its delivery almost too long by insisting companies who'd never made airplanes or metal wings be the major subcontractors, when Vickers-Supermarine hadn't yet got it ready for mass production, so all the production "unk-unks" were still unknown but made infinitely worse by Whitehall, who then made Vickers the scapegoat for their stupidity, when Vickers built its own wings shop to try to meet the delivery schedule the Whitehall idiots and politicians had made impossible, of course the Spitfire took twice as many construction man-hours as the Me-109.
Indeed, because the British Aircraft industry was so backward, the first 300 Spitfires all had their cockpit instruments made in America, while all the machine tools including for the Merlin engine were also made in America, because Whitehall preferred ordering 'little penny packets' from all the small surviving aircraft firms in amounts too little to invest in any modern technology rather than consolidating them as they finally did after the war.
The Hurricane was a transitional fighter that kept it fabric covered rear fuselage throughout its production life and forever inferior to the Me 109 which flew more than five month's before [the wings etc weren't metal until 1940] into late 1944 when Spitfire production finally caught up with demand.
The handful of people who created and pushed the fighters that were soon to be critical were vastly outnumbered by the hundreds if not thousands who didn't know what they were doing,
Like those who sabotaged the Fleet Air Arm [especially those in the RAF], damning it with the Swordfish, Roc, Skua and even the Fulmar.
Its amazing the FAA accomplished so much despite the lousy material it was stuck with thanks to the RAF and Whitehall.
Another example would be the Valentine tank, the first reliable British tank, that was offered in February 1938, which the Whitehall bureaucrats kept in limbo until ordering it 'off the drawing board' in July 1939, wasting 17 month's worrying about its narrow turret, but never contacting Vickers, who could have changed it much faster much sooner if only they'd been told.
If the Valentine had been put into production in the Spring of 1938, the war might have been very different, since the British army would have had a reliable tank in the hundreds to practice with before the war started, and the counter attack at Arras, for example might have been successful; stabilizing the front and preventing Dunkirk, and possibly even ending Rommel's career a bit early.
Then there's all the destroyers that were built without the range to escort convoys across the Atlantic, trying to mimic the claimed performance of Italian or French DD's, when the experience of England almost starving in WWI was relatively fresh in a lot of people's minds, of course the RN frigates in the Falklands suffered from the same limitation needing much of their nominal fuel load kept unused for stability etc.
Britain managed to 'blunder through' WW2, but much of the post war economic pain also derived from those poorly thought out ad hoc improvised decisions, when things could have gone much better with more rational leadership.
L
isaac_newton wrote:lyonheart wrote:Hi Duckk,
Then there's the IJN in WW2 who's staff war-games always restored all IJN losses to battle order ready for the next stage of the war while making all allied losses cumulative, so that even with some IJN ships sunk several times they were able to eventually outnumber the allies and their vastly superior building rates to win the 'war'.
Bureaucrats have their own view of reality.
I remember my brother telling me that it was the mandarins who invented the phrase "This too shall pass", to comfort the emperor despite all the foreign invasions and bad news, that their society would go on as before.
Not that it did, of course; but the bureaucrats were taking a rather long view...
Consider how far off the beam most socialist governments and their pet economists often veer before reality breaks in.
Then there's Whitehall's inept pre-war planning, kowtowing to the ignorant if not incompetent politicians, that almost cost England world war Two.
SNIP
Not sure that's entirely correct. Some parts of the planning were pretty good - I name a few items like Radar, Spitfire, Mosquito, Hurricane. These are all planned, built and supported well before the war started [admitedly the Mossy did not come into service till 1941 I believe]. None of those, and the associated support infrastructure come cheap!
