Great input guys –

I’ve also found some issues with the German use of airborne troops in the Seelöwe plan. Actually, even larger issues than the state of the ground (telephone wires) or the state of 7th Flieger Division. As in, there seem to be whole divisions simply missing.

Famously, 7th Flieger was supposed to land along the eastern flank of the proposed invasion corridor. I won’t spoil exactly where these landing were supposed to happen, besides you guys probably already know.

For the westernmost landings however, (in the version of the plan we’re using), we have another airborne drop. Who? 7th Flieger, Luftlande-Sturm-Regiment 1, 22nd Flieger Division, these were all allocated (according to sources I’ve found so far) on the eastern assault. The OKW directive issued 30 August says that these additional airborne operations will be conducted to support, facilitate,and screen the western wing of the invasion, followed by: “additional airborne forces will be arranged.”

Additional airborne forces will be arranged? S-Day is on September 15. So in two weeks, are the Germans going to bend over and s**t themselves a new airborne division?

Other famous German airborne formations aren’t founded until later in the war to my knowledge, and so far I haven’t run across any mention of precisely what forces were supposed to execute these western operations.

I can’t even imagine they’d pull the typical WW2 German tactic of taking an existing unit (in this case 7th Flieger), dividing it in half, and then filling out both forces with new troops. This is because all existing sub-units of 7th Flieger have specific, pin-point targets in the Seelöwe plans I’m looking at. So unless they were going to subdivide all these regiments and battalions as well . . .

I’m honestly not sure about factors like telephone wires. I certainly won’t go up against a Major-General, but this almost sounds like a case of a battle, war, and nation being lost because of the horseshoe nail (I’m sure you guys have heard that parable). I’m not doubting they would be a factor. I just don’t know if they would have caused the whole airborne assault to fail, much less the whole whole invasion in total.

Historical precedent shows this. Narvik went badly wrong in a number of ways, but Norway still fell. In Torch, a huge part of the airborne assault (i.e., at least one whole American division) landed in the wrong place, they didn’t find their way to the battle until after the invasion had succeeded without them. All kinds of things went wrong at Normandy (to the point where the Americans never again in WW2 dropped paratroopers at night), and still it succeeded. For a plan to fail, quite a few things have to go wrong.

To reverse the example, the airborne forces at Market-Garden succeeded in almost all their objectives (despite all the infamous problems and delays) and still the overall operation failed. Invasions succeed even when airborne operations fail badly, and when airborne operations succeed, the invasions sometimes fail.

But yes, we are taking such factors into account, if only in an abstraction. One the games used to simulate larger-scale airborne operations (both parachute and glider) is Para Leader, the Avalon Hill supplement to Panzer Leader. This game takes into account all kinds of things, wind speed and direction, landing obstacles, platoons breaking up into sticks, glider hard-crashes, etc. Any airborne unit that lands on an urban hex is considered automatically destroyed (i.e., combat ineffective), if memory serves.

Now remember this is a regiment/brigade-level game, where every one of your dozens or even hundreds of pieces represents a platoon of forty-sixty men. So when a fallschirmjäger stick (in this game, roughly a squad) drifts onto an urban hex and is is eliminated from the game, it’s not every man impaled on a church steeple or strung up on a telephone wire. It’s just enough men killed or injured (or at the very least, lost their equipment) to render that unit a non-issue in the immediate engagement at hand (90-120 minutes).

So yes, in Para Leader, I have lost many American, British, and definitely German paratroopers and gliders to these obstacles.

In another way that is less of an abstraction:

Using 1940s aerial photographs of the planned drop points as a basis for Photoshop custom maps for some of these games, I’m finding that the planned drop / glider points were pretty built-up even in 1940. Applying the rule for airborne units landing on urban hexes, along with the rules for wind strength, wind direction, and drift, picking LZs for these airborne forces on the actual game table has been pretty tough. And yes, these airborne forces have taken a lot of damage just landing and, in the case of paratroopers, trying to get their sticks re-merged into a full-strength platoons (usually half the game right there).

But as we saw at Maleme Airfield on Crete, German paratroopers could take tremendous losses in the face of tough resistance and still carry the day.