Is Irelands neutrality stance in WW2 unfairly criticized? (see Mod note 217)

Kathleen was never taken seriously by the Germans and the Abwehr considered it to be full of holes. It was never more than pie in the sky. They also thought Stephen Hayes was a bit of a chancer, as it were. They were probably correct about Hayes and absolutely correct about Kathleen being a non-starter. Supposedly it involved landing German troops at Derry, but how this was to be achieved when the Royal Navy was in total control was never elaborated on. Hermann Görtz and the Germans rightly dismissed the idea as an impossibility.

But there were many hundreds of plans looked into and drawn up by OKW before and during the war and many of them were merely feasibility studies. They were what if scenarios that were used to smoke test an idea. That's the job of military planners. The majority of them got shelved as unworkable, at least for the time being. That was the fate of every single one of the German invasion plans (peaceful or otherwise) for Ireland, including Fall Grün.

Of course once the summer of 1941 came around, any silly ideas of invading Ireland, or indeed Britain, were completely dropped and OKW were put to more serious matters.

Anyway, that's enough from me. I'll go back to ignoring this ridiculous thread.

Good luck to you all schooling Francis, but I feel you'll be wasting your time. 😁

Thats not the question and well you know it. There was no sea plane base in NI to fly out of in 1939/40. So again what planes would have flown out via the Donegal Corridor had it been requested in 1939/40.

The lake was there in 1939 as it was in 1940. You do not understand how much work the Allies done in WW2. They built 2 to 3 major airfields every week. A sea plane base would have required much less work. The UK government alone built over 720 operational airfields during the war, of which over 500 were heavily paved Class A bomber standard. That was just the British. Some specialized units like the USAAF IX Engineer Command could build an operational airfield in 48 hours.

U boat crew loses were 75%. highest of any service afaik.

I disagree that Irish bases and ports would not have been useful before the Atlantic Gap was closed. They used the Donegal Corridor to shorten the range to the patrol areas and there were significant southern convoys. But there were significant political, cultural and historical reasons for denying their use. We can't ignore that.

Bomber command simply had more power to influence than coastal command. The later got the dregs and rejects from Bomber Command. That doesn't mean it was a good strategy just because thats what happened.

Bomber Command sucked up lots of resources that many argued did not get results the should have and those resources might been better used elsewhere. But that is with the benefits of hindsight since the poor accuracy was only realized relatively later in the war. But that's a another discussion.

The liberator and PBY were better suited for the work anyway, longer range etc more efficient. Lancaster was a better bomber. That Coastal Command used the B24, B17, then and after the war the Lancaster and Shackleton tells us those resources would have been very important for the Battle of the Atlantic. Look at the P3 Orion or the Tu95. Props still patrolling the Atlantic.

But I agree that once they had liberators and PBY and radar and mother weapons the Gap was closed. No need for the ports or airfields then. It was a short window that closed quickly.

They would have built it ( not much building required as the lake was already there) much sooner had they had access over Donegal in 1939 / 1940. You have offered no proof "We met their request for access via Donegal straight away" given they would have wanted it when war broke out, and used it when the Battle of the Atlantic started in 1939. More importantly, they would have overflown Donegal in 1940 from other NI and British airports, to get to parts of the Atlantic, but they could not because of our neutrality. Dev took neutrality very seriously in the early part of the war year, interning Allied aircrew who crashed etc. Dev only finally gave permission for the Donegal corridor, with lots of conditions attached, in 1941.

Because it was so secretive, you would wonder why all the secrecy? Did he hope to keep it secret from Hempel, the way Hempel would probably keep news of the Nazi Slave labour and Extermination camps secret from Dev, at least for a while?

Incompetence on both sides - blame Ireland.

Ireland is not blamed for incompetence on either side in WW2. There were both very successful operations and large blunders on all sides. Nobody was infallible or had a monopoly on competence.

Plenty of things Ireland can be blamed on but not incompetence on either side. Its not as if we were known for competence in doing things ourselves: we even imported all our oil and coal from Britain during the war, and its not as if we done an awful lot in return.

Uboats were very successful. Almost brought Britain to it's knees at a fraction of the cost of a surface fleet or naval aviation. That's the whole point.

So much so that a large part of the cold war was a submarine arms race.

Dev, First Lord Of The Admiralty? 😁

The impact of day to day events must have been huge. France being over run must have sent major shockwaves right through society.
Also the invasion, and reason given by Germany (They were helping the Allies.) of Norway and Denmark must have consolidated our determination to remain neutral.

On paper the French army was vastly superior to the German army. No one was expecting what happened or planned for it.

Trying to blame Britain for not planning for it is ridiculous. The entire world didn't plan for it. US didn't plan for Japan actions either. It was a seismic shift in how wars are fought.

Its equally as ridiculous as all the Walter Mitty stuff about Ireland.

This thread long descended into farce.

In 1939 the US army was woefully small : it only had around 189,000 active-duty soldiers, placing it behind smaller European nations like Romania, Yugoslavia, and Poland. I took a year or two to build it up, to design and build arms, aircraft and ships it would need etc.