WW1 Paved the Way for the Battle of Britain.

[winny]

Originally Posted by Kurfürst

The two statements seem to be at odds with each other. On hand - a logical fallacy often repeated in British BoB literature - it claims the Germans didn't even know about radar, so poor was their intelligence - another favourite British theme - yet they somehow kept bombing them still.

Now either Göring should have played lottery instead of beim RM of the LW, for being so lucky picking targets he supposedly did not even know of, OR the Beppo Schmidt report was hardly the only German intelligence material, nor the only considered in mission planning, and British historians (who often state a ridiculus amount of wishful commentary regarding the 'truth' vs this report) simply - probably also out of complete ignorance of German intel during WW2 - simply set up a strawman arguement to illustrate how ingenious the British, and in contrast how stupid the Germans were.

IMHO Beppo's report was mostly correct, he made one cardinal serious mistake, when he underestimated current fighter production - though his numbers would be quite correct a few months before, as British production was just about ramped up in mid-1940 from its modest levels, also inspired by the state of the Army after Dunkerque.

OTOH the British also seem to have very faint idea what was happening on the other side of the channel, they had no clear idea how many planes the Germans had, how many were they producing, and where they were located in France, nor did they had any idea on German radar (and for about a year or two, knew next to nothing about it) or German radio navigation and blind bombing systems. So on what ground do they criticize German intel in 1940, I do not know.

I'll tell you why I can criticise German intelligence..

Of course they knew what Radar was, they already had Freya..
However, in '39 they sent a zepplin over (General Wolfgang Milch) to see what the giant masts were. They were expecting to hear some kind of response from the masts, but they had discounted using HF radio for radar (because they were using VHF and UHF) it simply did not occur to them that what they were looking at was radar because it was so primative.

They sent another zepplin over because they thought that there must be a defect with thier own radio equipment and by massive coincidence on that day the station they were looking at was switched off for repairs. This further confused them, and they stopped investigating them.

Once the battle had started

They also continually bombed costal and bomber command airfields whilst trying to destroy fighter comand, thay had no knowledge of the civillian repair network, no idea about british aircraft production and they believed thier own 'kill' count (in this aspect they were different from RAF who were more concerned with how many of thier own planes thay had lost)

In September Scmhid reported to Goering that the RAF had 177 aircraft left (they had 659)
At no point during the battle did the LW have a clear picture of Fighter Commands structure, they failed to exploit the strengths they had, the use of the fighter arm was, well, incompetent. They did not look after thier men, they swictched tactics and suffered from mission creep. All because Schmid (as Galland pointed out 'Trimmed his salis to the wind' in order to please his superiors, not give them the truth)

Problem is if you say anything negative about the LW on here you get a load of 'no they weren't' posts. Can we at least have some realism here?
To use the 'well the RAF didn't know what was going on either' argument is juvenille, they didn't need to at that point they just needed to know what was coming and try and stop it.