AHC/WI: Britain Adopts EMF Post-Dunkirk

[MattII]

The discussion on the Matilda II thread got me thinking, what would be needed to get the British, post-Dunkirk to realise the errors of their previous doctrine and to pull a lot of ideas from the Experimental Mechanised Force, and what would happen afterwards if they did?

 

[Deleted member 1487]

The discussion on the Matilda II thread got me thinking, what would be needed to get the British, post-Dunkirk to realise the errors of their previous doctrine and to pull a lot of ideas from the Experimental Mechanised Force, and what would happen afterwards if they did?

How would that provide the catalyst though? The reason things fell apart in France wasn't an exposed flaw in doctrine, rather the Germans outflanking and rolling up the French. The British largely had to pull back without much major offensive combat, mostly rearguard/defensive actions, which doesn't really yield the necessarily experience to really get the Brits to figure out their flaws. You'd need the BoF to go differently to expose that, but that opens up a bunch of butterflies.

Also the EMF was 10 years out of date, I doubt the British army would be willing to go that far back to get lessons, they needed to learn the hard way.

 

[Carl Schwamberger]

Indeed, the core lessons of the EMF was that a complex combination of tank models might not work; that more artillery and infantry were needed, and they needed to be closely coordinated with the tanks. It took the Brits two years of desert battle to grasp the fine points of combined arms combat. They went through the entire war with out using the 'Capitol Tank' concept.