Zephyr Net

Well...

Considering that they did indeed deploy and were indeed used against US forces in Normandy and trapped and destroyed by those forces at Faliase...

You have to understand the impact of airpower on the deployment capabilities of those troops. US and British aircraft decimated them on their march to Normandy so deeply that some units arrived at the front with only 20% to 30% of what they started with, and no resupply was possible. So they fought with what they had and were destroyed in place when their attacks to sever the US spearheads breaking out into Brittany and sweeping around on their flanks. Couple with this their losses of battle hardened troops and tanks against the British in the north spelled the end for the 15th Panzer Army...

I knew that they were massacred at the Falaise pocket what I was getting at is if they were deployed on the edge of the beachhead then they would have wiped out the invasion force.

I doubt that, our air cover most likely would have picked them all off.

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Random... If they were indeed deployed operationally to those areas then what would have prevent the allies from landing in Pa de Calais?

Only the strong Atlantic Wall defenses coupled with those heavy tank forces in the area forced Eisenhower to concentrate on Normandy in the first place. If the Germans had redeployed to Normandy they would have likely lost alot of vehicles and troops to airstrikes, plus opened the Pa de Calais to invasion and allowed the allies to completely cut off all of their forces in Frace from the beginning by having their forces already along the border betweeen France, Belgium, and Germany...

You can not ignore the strategic impact of the allies opening the second from so far to the west nearly into Germany itself in June 1944 instead of September 1944 after they fought the hard summer battles to get to that location. All that combat power would ahve been available at the border with no losses!

As brillant as D-Day was, I still have to go with the Six Day War. The Israelis beat a superior enemy on a scattered front in Six Days leveling the Egyptian, Jordanian, Syrian, and Iraqi airforces before those nations could even invade.

IMO- that war set the standard for our modern swift, decisive, and overwhelming strategy.

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Superior Enemy? When have the rag heads ever won a war with anyone of any skill?

The 67 war was not as big as you make it out... The Arab forces lacked any kind of cohesion or command and control and their own pride and lack of courage and integrity lead to false reporting to superior officers and to Nasser in Cairo of losses which lead to their forces not retiring in good order and their subsquent cutting off and anailation...

They actually never had a chance....

Yeah, but they had superior numbers in aircraft. And it was many nations vs 1 nation which had an airforce of 200 planes.

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Doesnt matter how hard a Camel Jokey cracks his riding stick on a MiG... They never seem to realize it wont make em go any faster!

Superior aircraft? Superior numbers of Aircraft? The MiGs were not front line equipment in the USSR, they were the cast offs..The Egyptians had the most modern force with MiG-21Fs and MiG-19s and 17s... The Jordanian Airforce flew Hunters and F-104s... THe Iraqis flew MiG-17s and 19s..
The Mirages and Mysteries of the IAF were of a higher technical order at that time. The French were on the front line of aircraft development.

The difference was in the training. The IAF trained for war, the Arabs trained to shoot off their mouths...

I never said the arabs were well trained, they just had greater numbers of aircraft (more than the Israelis).

And I don't care who you are, you gotta admit that first wave of airstrikes (b4 the arabs even attacked) was genius.

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Why was it genius? It was a standard battle plan. Hit the opposing forces once you have ascertained that it was enevitable they would attack you. Why wait for the assault? Their real tactics were quite simple and straight forward(which is why they worked)...

The Egyptians flew early morning jet patrols along their borders and CAPs over their airbases, but being the absolute idiots all SMEGMAHEADS(politically corrected name from ragheads to satisify the board moderator) are, they landed to go to breakfast without first waiting ot be relieved by fresh flights. This was SOP for the EAF...

So the Israelis knew this from their own radar tracking and simply planned their attack to hit the Egyptians first(which had 60 % of the aircraft arrayed against them) after the morning flights had landed before the next flights took off...

That isnt genius, that is logical. Again its good sound strategy to use your enemies stupidity against them...

Just as the Japanese did against us at Pearl Harbor early one Sunday morning...

If it's standard battle plan then why did the British and French keep appeasing Hitler until he attacked?

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You answered the question yourself in the way you phrased it Big... The French were running the 'show'(the British and French command structure was under overall French command) and the French never make 'battle plans' only 'surrender plans'!

Well we didn't use pre-emption ourselves during WW2, we did supply the allied war effort, but we never went ahead and attacked before Pearl Harbor in a sense (except for our volunteer squadrons we had). We waited until Pearl Harbor to bring out the big guns.

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Hold on just a second there Da Big. You see in World War II it was quite different. We did NOT expect the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor. We expected them to attack the Phillipeans. It was also a different world back then. Us attacking the Japanese pre-emptively would not have solved anything or even saved anything. They had an unbelievably strong military and their navy was top notch. We could have never sunk the Japanese fleet that was on its way to Pearl Harbor if we tried, it was just too strong for us at the time. But we learned and we built bigger, better, more powerful stuff that brought them to their knees.

Israel however, pre-emptively striking the airbases of their soon-to-be attackers was feasible. They had the training, they had the equipment, and they had the ability. They too a very big risk but it paid off and worked. It's like the girl in Summer Catch says: "To get big rewards you have to take big risks."

Yes personally I think we should have attacked the Japanese fleet if we knew where it was and such but it would have been a Pyhrric (sp?) victory if we even succeeded. The Germans and the Japanese were the last great enemies we faced.

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Centurian

You got a point there, but WW2 isn't the only time we waited for an attack.

In the Korean war, when we were near the Yalu and we had military advisers and intel guys warning that the Chinese would enter the conflict. We waited, and the Chinese came in and pushed us all the way back to Seoul.

We should have struck first by bombing bridges on the Yalu ahead of time, bombing the Chinese mainland and by bombing massed Chinese troops.

MacArthur IIRC even wanted to nuke them.

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