Stas Bush wrote:The USAF has several thousand fighters in service (around two, I reckon); destroying the AFBs with everything still left on them is likely to increase the necessary mission range for remaining fighters, as there is nowhere to land.
True, but they can't get far enough to make this a serious problem for the US Air Force, because most of the Air Force planes have a longer combat radius than that, especially if "combat" means "fly out, dump munitions from comfortably out of range of enemy action, fly back."
Destroying fighters means there is less fighters and bombers left after the initial wave, which is also good for the Germans. It also means fighters and bombers have to cover a greater range to attack the German horde. The most natural thing to do will be to bomb whatever'snearby.
Well, they can't inflict meaningful attrition on the USAF because only a small percentage of it is within striking range of their bases. Compared to the 90%+ attrition
they will suffer in the first 24 hours due to the complications of landing their own planes (and stuff getting blown up on the runway by air-launched cruise missiles and so on)... yeah.
Simon_Jester wrote:Most of those Wehrmacht soldiers are, realistically, going to have to walk. Just as they did in Russia- which is a major reason why the Wehrmacht never actually advanced its main front lines by more than about twenty or thirty kilometers a day. Sure, isolated formations could sprint ahead to create encirclements, but the great bulk of the army had to walk.
During the initial attacks in Barbarossa, German armoured formations advanced 60-75 km per day, which isn't a bad result by all means and now they have way, way more of them; some are also well-trained in urban combat and recapturing urban zones from them is going to be
very hard. The tech disparity on the ground is not nearly as big as it is in the air. So while the entire 20 million will not be able to advance more than 20-30 km per day, we are still looking at millions in armored units rolling up to 150 km away in a couple of days. Road quality is not that important, these are realistic advance tempos not over modern highways but over dirt roads prevalent in 1940's Russia. It is also unlikely that within the first day there'll be a lot of resistance, the surprise factor is much, much worse than even during Barbarossa.
True. The deployment situation after the first day will probably look like an octopus, with 'tentacles' of German panzer units having advanced with minimal opposition out to distances up to 200-300 km from their starting points.
Meanwhile, the bulk of the Wehrmacht will still be concentrated within a big blob about fifty to (at most) 100 kilometers in diameter centered on their starting area.
The main issue, though, is that the US is quite capable of blowing up the roads behind those panzer formations, physically airdropping (or helicopter-dropping) troops behind them, and dumping swarms of air-launched antitank missiles on their spearheads. All of which will cause disruption... even as all those highways are cluttered with
immense numbers of civilian automobiles, in quantities that the Germans have never seen or even imagined before.
Simon_Jester wrote:The Germans would probably like to stop US ground forces from deploying against them
They have the spare firepower to obliterate a lot within 200-300 km; as to US forces farther away, those are hard to hit. The US does not have millions permanently mobilized in ground forces like the DPRK, and hitting army bases is not that useful unless there is armor or trucks there.
It may not actually
take that many troops deployed to stop one of these Wehrmacht armored columns, because a Humvee with a TOW launcher can effortlessly snipe Tiger tanks as long as the ammunition holds out, from a range at which even Tigers with their gunnery optics would be brutally hard-pressed to reply at.
So, deploy a company with long range antitank weapons, fire a salvo, withdraw, repeat. There will be enough drone and satellite assets in the air to prevent the units on the ground fighting this delaying action from being easily outflanked.
This works hilariously better if you have actual Abrams tanks.
Although doing this along major roads will be hard because the Americans have the same problems the Germans do- masses of cars cluttering the roads.
Mr Bean wrote:So the thoughts are so far that Day 1 in the first six hours millions die to a concentrated bomber attack local defense forces are decimated and only rambo attacks and scattered partisan forces do anything to slow the German down before they have a nice 100 mile radius zone. At this point the German airforce life expectancy is measured in days with five days being the longest I'm guessing anyone will give them.
They may well not actually control everything within that 100-mile radius, because they can't get soldiers into all those places, without severely dispersing their advancing armored columns. Only a small percentage of their overall force can
move that fast... even on unclogged roads.
[They will likely try commandeering civilian transport, but that will run into some interesting obstacles and cause delay and disruption]
Also, I suspect "millions die" in the initial bombing attacks is an overstatement, if only because it takes an awful lot of bombs dropped on a city to kill a hundred thousand people. Remember that the
total quantity being dropped here is on par with one of several entirely separate bombing offensives launched during WWII, and not the biggest of them... and that much of the total bombload has to be dropped on military targets if the Germans want to get any benefit out of it.
What about a day by day?
Day 1 12 million Germans arrive (That 20 million figure counts Italy and foreign fighters I'm guessing because otherwise the figure I find is 12 million) lots of deaths and lets say 60% of the Luftwaffe is destroyed/crashes/taken out of the fight. The German army advances across good American roads and handy American track which they can capture and re purpose. Soldiers start scavenging and digging as they turn Atalanta into a seriously defended city. They (The Germans) can literally afford to assign 1 soldier for every 1 civilian and still have 11.5 million soldiers free to advance. Something tells me Atlanta gets a 50,000-100,000 man occupation forces while some civilians are press ganged into digging trenches or moving things while the occupation force get's a crash course in things like cell phones, modern technology and the like.
Hard to learn how to operate cell phones while serving as armed guards for a populace much of which may be carrying pistols.
Also, cell phone infrastructure may well be disabled remotely by people who don't want the Germans to have infinity walkie-talkies.
Also, look out for all the enormous civilian vehicle streams fleeing them in all directions, which become an entangling obstacle that has to be forcibly cleared off the road with considerable difficulty.
Day 2, the Germans push further as American starts scrapping together every single intel asset to begin setting up a nighttime attack plan finding concentrations and key points for every single Tomahalk in the Atlantic fleet's depot. Germans learn exactly how nasty air war has gotten and more territory is captured.
Day 3 As day 2, but more concentrated attacks either staying nighttime only or going 24/7. Germans advance far enough to threaten places like Augusta and Montgomery.
Day 4 ground forces begin fighting German ground forces and then everything is up in the air.
By day 4 there has been time to summon soldiers back to the new front, arm and equip them as well as lay down plans...
I think your timeline is a bit... oversimplified. Not paying enough attention to what the US will do, and how the civilians in the threatened area will react. Sort of like you're modeling everything as a passive medium the Germans have to push through, rather than active hostility on the part of people trying to screw with them.
Prannon wrote:You know, I've been reading through these replies and it appears to me that no one is really giving much consideration to the German Air commander's ability to shift in tactics once the disparity in the air is clear.
They won't have the capability to do so and organize the required air attacks efficiently. In all seriousness, I'm pretty sure that by the end of the
first 24 hours, the only formed units of Luftwaffe aircraft in any condition to sortie are going to be squadron-sized formations that all happened to set down at the same little grass airstrip in the middle of nowhere and were somehow overlooked in the B-52s' hurry to cluster-bomb all those inviting concentrations of hundreds of tightly packed planes parked on the runways at various Atlanta area airports.
Just figuring out how much they've lost and how to react will take a lot of time... and every several hours, another wave of crushing airstrikes will be hitting them over the head and causing further damage. So basically, there will not be the opportunity to perform major air raids under WWII doctrine. They can't manage it with the major runways and aircraft concentrations taken out. That would entail launching hundreds of bombers, forming them up in the air (yummy targets for flights of Air Force jets dumping missiles down into them!), and sending them off to hit a point target that will see them coming an hour or more away.
The best attack order you can give would be something like "any airplanes that can still fly, navigate to the following targets and, uh, bomb them." Not a recipe for wreaking destruction on the target.
Who's to say that once they realize that they have no way to defeat the US Air Force in the air, that they won't shift overwhelming firepower to trying to hit the fighters on the ground, the costs be damned? It's not like the US has much of a strategic reserve (as far as I'm aware) that can be spooled up quickly in this sort of emergency, and in my mind a Zerg Rush sort of strategy might just give the Luftwaffe enough of an edge to seriously cripple the US Air Force long enough for a ground campaign to make serious gains. At least until carrier based aircraft arrive. I doubt the Germans will have much that can touch that.
The Germans can't launch enough planes to make this strategy work. By the second or third day, in terms of
organized bomber sorties with a realistic chance of destroying a significant target, they may not be able to sortie more than 2000-3000 aircraft... and it takes hundreds of planes to wipe out each airfield. And they'll see you coming and have interceptors in the air to slaughter your planes in large numbers on the way in.
And, for that matter, just be able to order grounded aircraft to take off and fly away to a more remote base until the danger is gone.
Also, I get the feeling that folks are glossing over just how MANY people 20 million soldiers are. All crammed into Georgia and armed to the teeth with (old) military grade weaponry. Texas has a population of 26.4 million people, as a comparison...
This actually presents a major problem: what are all those German soldiers going to eat? Nobody's going to be willingly selling them food, and the food stockpiles in the area can't possibly be large enough to feed such a huge population of physically active soldiers for more than a few weeks.
You don't
have to kill them all, you just have to stop them from advancing until their supply situation becomes untenable.
This isn't a cake-walk for the US military and I don't think that victory is assured within a few days.
Overcoming the Wehrmacht main body is gonna take
weeks at best; the US simply doesn't have enough rifle infantry to defeat them all in open battle. Major offensives can be stopped cold due to the US superiority in artillery, air support, and heavy weapons, but going in and taking over garrisoned cities? A nightmare. They'll realistically have to be penned up and starved out.
Block wrote:Out of curiosity, are any of these German vehicles protected against EMP? I mean, I know they're not computerized, but EMP can overload circuits in general no?
If there aren't any transistors or other electronics IN those circuits, no, because there's nothing for the electromagnetic pulse to 'fry.' As a practical matter, a Tiger tank or an Opel truck is going to be about as EMP-proof as a box of rocks.
Stas Bush wrote:That is only true for the range of the German bombers. Something to consider is that without external fuel tanks...
No reason not to use the external fuel tanks; the F-22 can
still fly too high and fast for any German fighter to intercept it, even if it would show up on German radar, which even with the external tanks it might not for all I know. Radar of that era wasn't all that sensitive.
...the F-22's combat radius is ~760 km, but there's one detail: the German-controlled area, even if it's 300-400 km in radius, can be flown through, in which case the F-22 can take off from one airfield and land on another crossing the whole area.
The main problem is that there aren't really any airbases to speak of south or east of the German positions- at least, none that are comfortably out of the range of "Luftwaffe will blow the hell out of this." So basically, the aircraft will still be taking off from the mid-Atlantic, the Midwest, and the Mississippi river valley, and hitting targets around Atlanta, then flying back to the same bases.
So the F-22s and other fighters could do missions at ~1500 km total flight path. However, the US will have to consider whether to fit the craft they have with ATG or AA munitions.
[/quote]Air to ground, mostly, I'd say- with a handful of planes, mostly F-15s, that you load up with AMRAAMs and send in to break up any large formations of German bombers that make it airborne.
The German fighters really aren't much of a threat, it's not worth
trying to shoot them down as long as they can't bomb anything, and it's far easier to kill them on the ground with cluster munitions, because they're going to be stupidly overcrowded at the limited number of available airstrips.
