Originally Posted by LeEnfield

HMS Glorious, now there was a well known dispute between the Captain of the ship and the Flight Commander of the aircraft. It would appear that the flight commander argued with the captain and wanted some of his aircraft armed and flying. The captain of the carrier who had only operated Battleships before this command thought it was all a waste time and that he had been demoted by having to captain the Carrier. The argument was that heated that the Flight Commander was put under arrest and was facing a Court Martial, then shortly afterwards the Carrier came under attack from surface ships and as all the aircraft were below decks there is little they could do.

One problem even if they had planes on deck was the Battleships were approaching from upwind, would have reduced the distance even faster. Should have had scouts & CAP up.

A lot of things were not done that could have saved the carrier:
1) Send a battleships and two heavy cruisers to escort it and finish off the German ships in the neighborhood. That was the point of having expensive 16" guns on battleships, which prevented smaller cruisers from approaching them, Heavy cruisers had 14" or 12 " guns that could have sunk the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. That is in the traditional British aggressive tactics, you protect your assets at the same time that you finish off your enemy.
2) The Deck was crowded with Gladiators, Hurricanes, etc, that should have been jettisoned in order to allow the carrier's planes to fly reconnaissance, strafing, torpedo and bombing missions.
3) By flying adequate reconnaissance missions with float planes from the very many battleships, cruisers, etc, the navy should have known the location of all German ships so they could attack them or at least avoid them.
4) Britain had plenty of submarines at this time and they should have been deployed so as to protect British ships and sink as many German ships as possible and this was absolutely not done.

Originally Posted by samneanderthal

A lot of things were not done that could have saved the carrier:
1) Send a battleships and two heavy cruisers to escort it and finish off the German ships in the neighborhood. That was the point of having expensive 16" guns on battleships, which prevented smaller cruisers from approaching them, Heavy cruisers had 14" or 12 " guns that could have sunk the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. That is in the traditional British aggressive tactics, you protect your assets at the same time that you finish off your enemy.
2) The Deck was crowded with Gladiators, Hurricanes, etc, that should have been jettisoned in order to allow the ships planes to fly reconnaissance, strafing and bombing missions.
3) By flying adequate reconnaissance missions with float planes from the very many battleships, cruisers, etc, the navy shoudl have known the location of all German ships so they could attack them or at least avoid them.
4) Britain had plenty of submarines at this time and they shudld have been deployed so as to protect British ships and sink as many German ships as possible and this absolutely not done.

Heavy cruisers have 8" guns. Cruisers did sink the Scharnhorst in '43 when they cought the Germans by surprise, the same way the Germans cought the Carrier. The RAF planes were on board to help defend the Home Islands, something you've been hammering on in other threads.

Sorry I meant battlecruiser, like Scharnhorst, for example Repulse or Renown had 15" guns and old armored cruisers had 12" to 14".

How do you catch by surprise a carrier of the huge navy of the country that invented radar? They detected the Germans ships, one of the two destroyers was sent to investigate, but the captain did not increase speed or send a wave of planes to attack.
Strangely, the Germans sank Glorious, despite the smoke screen layed by the destroyer, using Radar to guide their shells!
As I understand, the court marshal was for the flight commander refusing to carry out a ground attack in Norway, before sailing back to Scapa.
Actually, the captain was in a hurry to carry out the court marshal and asked permission to detach his carrier and proceed independently, AND IT WAS GRANTED! weird priorities.

Is it better to dump the Gladiators and Hurricanes and save the pilots and carrier to fight in France (8 June, 1940 not in Britain) or to lose everything (only 35 survivors and the British learnt about the sinking through German radio)?

Originally Posted by samneanderthal

If you find my arguments absurd, childish, boring, unfounded or farfetched why waste time in this thread? Start a thread praising Churchill, Dowding, Mountbatten, Ritchie, Motgomery, Auchinleck, Wavell and all the great British leaders of WW II that you revere. Just remember that in spite of 5 million Indians and a greater number of Brits, Canadians, Australians, New Zelanders, South Africans, Free French, Poles, etc, The third largest industry in the world and 31 billion dollars in aid they could not kick Germany out of Africa nor Japan out of Burma without American troops, pilots, etc, and while Germany was fighting the Soviets and Japan the Chinese and Americans.

How strange that the vast majority of experts (I don't count myself among them) consider Dowding and Keith Parks absolutely correct in their handling of the Battle of Britain, yet according to you everyone else is wrong and you are right. Churchill, again, was regarded by the majority of experts to be the right man at the right time.

Originally Posted by samneanderthal

As you can tell my military experience is below nihil.

Says it all, yet considers yourself to be expert in all things military, forever spouting what could have been done and what should have been done. All of us are wiser after the event, you wasn't the man on the spot when all hell was breaking lose around him. It is fine for those who was there, to be wrong, but you, who were not there, must be correct?

You are definitely a legend in your own mind.

“Even when the experts all agree, they may well all be mistaken” Bertrand Russell.
"An expert can tell you exactly what is going to happen and after it doesn´t happen, can tell you exactly why it didn´t” Winston Churchill.
“Experts should be on tap but never on top” Winston Churchill.
“The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are sometimes right” Winston Churchill.
“ A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on”. Winston Churchill.

“Don't be buffaloed by experts and elites. Experts often possess more data than judgment. Elites can become so inbred that they produce hemophiliacs who bleed to death as soon as they are nicked by the real world” Collin Powell.

It is unfortunate that the British, French, Polish and Belgian pilots who had to face the LW on may 10, 1940 flying the worst planes cannot voice their opinion of Dowding's decision to keep the Spitfires, best Hurricanes and many pilots in Britain.
It is unfortunate that the hundreds of thousands of allied soldiers who had to face the densest and most prolonged ground support by the Luftwaffe cannot voice their opinion about the British planes in reserve while they were blown to smitherines.
It is unfortunate that the hundreds of thousands of Belgians, Frenchmen, Dutch, etc, who had to live under German rule for years cannot voice their opinion about Dowding's decision.
It is fortunate that an ignorant bastard like me can can voice his opinion:
Dowding was beaten in France and would have been beaten in Britain, had it not been by the few foreign pilots who didn't give up, despite Dowding's incompetence. He wasted his most valuable resource, the pilots in order to save his planes and could not have known that these foreign pilots would save him, but he knew that hundreds of French pilots would be out of the war if France capitulated. So he lost a few hundred British pilots, several hundred French pilots, a thousand mediocre planes and the huge French army and navy and a hundred of his precious modern fighters to evacuate from France in order to save a few hundred Hurricanes and even fewer Spitfires.
I don't care if a million experts and a billion people who were educated to admire Dowding, Churchill, Monty, etc, praise them, to me they were lousy leaders.

Originally Posted by samneanderthal

“Even when the experts all agree, they may well all be mistaken” Bertrand Russell.
"An expert can tell you exactly what is going to happen and after it doesn´t happen, can tell you exactly why it didn´t” Winston Churchill.
“Experts should be on tap but never on top” Winston Churchill.
“The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are sometimes right” Winston Churchill.
“ A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on”. Winston Churchill.

“Don't be buffaloed by experts and elites. Experts often possess more data than judgment. Elites can become so inbred that they produce hemophiliacs who bleed to death as soon as they are nicked by the real world” Collin Powell.

Men cease to think when they think they know it all.
Horace.

Like I said if you think that I am an endless source of nonsense, why waste your time?
I think that deep inside you know these leaders were idiots but that everything you learnt could not be false so you're trying to sort out this inconsistency. I have some Russian acquaintances who experience the same feeling when discussing Stalin.

Isn't great to read from all those experts who wrote books long after the war had finished saying what every should have done and how they could have done every thing better. War is all a matter of luck and if you ride your luck and win then lucky you, but while the war was going on it is all a guessing game and that fickle finger of fate comes into play.
Now just how many of these authors had any thing to with war or wrote ant articles stating what our leaders were doing wrong during the war, and I will lay you odds the answer is none, but afterwards they know just about every thing that every one else did wrong.