Per Ardua Ad Astra: can the RAF prevent the conquest of France in 1940?

[Icykurt]

Great job! I had no idea the airforce could be so valuable. I tend to neglect it in favor of land forces. Do you think it would have been as successful if you weren't Britain - a nation completely surrounded by water?

That's a good question.

On the one hand this strategy does seem uniquely applicable to the UK because of a combination of:

• Island with strong navy
• UK starts with decent air techs and 3 heavy bombers
• Favourable geography with capability - ie the North Sea to Metz line can be covered from early 1940 onwards with your early war air force. As the maginot line gets overrun you should have more heavies coming out of the factories so that your air fleet grows as the number of provinces you need to bomb grows.
• Your initial ploy is defensive - you want to stop an invader and wear him out - this can't really be used as support for a fast moving attack, your own troops would cross the bomb line too quickly.

As we saw, eventually the fleet was large enough I could build a bomb line across Russia - but it takes many years to get a fleet of that size with the required range - so I'm not sure if the Soviet Union could try this as part of Barbarossa in '41, but it might be worth giving it a go. You have heaps of space to trade and plenty of IC - if you ditched building tanks and built planes you might be able to make it work - but not being pushed out of your airfields could be the problem - you can't do that on an island like the UK. If maybe you could set up bases in Crimea and Finland and bomb the corridor, it would be easier to defend bases from here. You may not have the range to cover the Pripyet Marshes in the middle, but they have bugger all infrastructure and supply carrying capability anyway.

There is no doubt somebody has to provide some boots on the ground - in the German campaign when the bomb line was fully operational about of the third of the German troops could move and fight, so somebody has to provide enough troops to build a continuous line. France did so in this game.

There are a few places on the map where I think this might work well on a smaller scale - the Italian peninsula, Malaya, Philippines, Japan, Spain, Scandinavia - in these places you could mess up an attacking campaign by cutting supplies behind them with a handful of heavy bombers.

 

[Icykurt]

This is just all kinds of awesome! Congratulations on face stomping the bolsheviks!

Fantastic ending to the war! Congrats on your victory.

Bravo, bravo! This was an excellent LP.

Too bad, I discovered this interesting AAR when it has ended!

Thank you for this enjoyable romp of an alt-history

Long Live the RAF, Long Live Britannia

That was excellent, a cunning strategy I've not seen before and some well written narrative tying it all together.

All in all I enjoyed it immensely.

Thanks for the feedback - first AAR I've written so appreciate the comments.

 

[Matnjord]

Fascinating stuff really. Did you have any TAC or CAS? I'm particularly thinking about the Soviet campaign, as by 1946 if you have the radar guided bombs and missiles those units can tear apart combat division like it was HoI 2. Seeing that huge shattered stack in Moscow I'm inclined to think that you did

 

[Eurasia]

Could this be used by the Japanese for the invasion of China?

 

[Icykurt]

Fascinating stuff really. Did you have any TAC or CAS? I'm particularly thinking about the Soviet campaign, as by 1946 if you have the radar guided bombs and missiles those units can tear apart combat division like it was HoI 2. Seeing that huge shattered stack in Moscow I'm inclined to think that you did

The Air Force I went into Russia with pretty much was that outlined below - so a total of 18 TACS and CAS.

Yes one of the benefits of throttling logistics is units can't recover losses, hence the accumulation of shattered units in Moscow.

Sure.

The RAF presently consists of 96 air units, all of them upgraded to latest tech, consisting of:

21 Interceptors - Gloster Meteor Mk1
18 MR Fighters - Gloster Meteor F8
2 Rocket Interceptors - Hawker P1052
8 Close Air Support - Hawker Hunter
10 Tactical Bombers - de Havilland Venom
30 Strategic Bombers - Avro Vulcan
4 Naval Bombers - Avro Shackleton
3 Transports - Short Belfast

In addition there are 29 Carrier Air Groups deployed on 16 Large Carriers.

Groups
Strategic bombers: by themselves in groups of 2 or 3. I aim to establish air superiority in the provinces I'm going to send them into rather than group them with Fighters or Interceptors.
CAS -group 2 with an interceptor, the CAS define the range of this group (and a MR Fighters range would be wasted grouped with CAS).
Tactical bombers - group 2 with a MR Fighter, the MR Fighter sets the range of this group.
Naval bombers - if there is an air threat I group 2 with a MR FTR.
Remaining INT and FTR's - group 2 or 3 depending on the threat.
Transports - like STRAT bombers - only fly them into areas where I've got air superiority missions.

I've also upgraded a heap of airfields, radar stations, antiaircraft guns etc.

 

[Icykurt]

Could this be used by the Japanese for the invasion of China?

I think it works best if you need to hold against a large force initally, then you can starve it and successfully counterattack with a numerically inferior ground force. If you allowed the nationalists to attack you, then you starve and counterattack, you might find the remainder of the campaign a walkover. And certainly a large Japanese Air Force will help against the Americans.