While my knowledge of Wehrmacht intracasies is largely limited to Tamiya kits of the 70s 80s, and thus sore limited. But, I have 24 years experience as a Naval Officer, and a third of that in Amphib, so, that’s a topic I have some depth within.
So, to that end I can offer some experience and insight.
For a head-bender, about the time the Germans were flailing about with Sea Lion, a fellow name of Higgins was having a notion that boats specially adapted for landing troops ashore might want a ramp to better offload the personnel.
From the perspective of the present, they idea of ramped landing craft is self-evident, but it wasn’t quite so obvious in 1940. Even the concept of landing in waves, so as to shuttle the boats back to motherships to offload even more troops was not yet a fully-formed idea.
The Germans had a bit of blind spot to their own interservice rivalries, and did nothing to prevent or molify them. Consider the goat rope that was to have been Graf Spee–an aircraft carrier meant to have Luftwaffe planes and pilots on a KM ship–but without working out the details, like who were the maintence people going to be, LW or KM, who was to be in charge of spares, and fuel. These are not casual items, naval aviation is a very specialized activity. So are amphibious operations.
The LWS was basicly the same concept as the LVT-1, but with a boat cabin in place of where the cargo compartment was placed on the LVT. But not developed much beyond the basic role, unlike the LVT family.
Capn, I’m not too familiar with Sea Lion myself. But what I have read is the the German Army was treating it as a river crossing operation on a much wider scale. They were planning to use various river barges towed across the Channel for much of the assault force. In conjunction with parachute and air landing operations. The German Navy was still recovering from losses sustained during the assault on Norway and had a better idea of the obstacles that lay ahead due to that campaign.
That is correct, it sounded like they had some craft that would have ramps but they were very crude in design. I read We March Agaisn’t England” over the summer and the reasons for failure and flailing was that no one really wanted to seriously do it. The navy had to many loses and the air force hadn’t gained superiority of the sky. The army wasn’t as enthused but you had the higher ups who had some good ideas In all the branches whcih ultimately gave them a future amphibious capability. I think the bigger Batges carrying the panzer III’s that had snorkels we’re going to be in ramped barges. Everything else sounds as if they’d use Pioneer boats with small motors to maneuver ashore. Some other ideas were letting the barges come ashore and beach themselves and when the high tide came back in they’d sail back to port.
The LWS was barely ever beyond the prototype stage from what I understand. Close to 20,000 LVTs were built. To me it would make sense to model it in demo or prototype situations.
No, it never really was. But then again, there never was the pressing need for a German Amtrac either. There was no amphibious war in the German army’s future, only river crossings, an apples to oranges comparison. As opposed to the US, which had the concept visualized and planned for as a drive across the Central Pacific against the Japanese Empire in the 1920s, War Plan Orange. The Japanese had developed a similar plan to fight against that, with a decisive naval battle to be fought against the US fleet in Imperial waters. The Central Pacific campaign battles of 1943-1945 were essentially those plans put into effect, becoming reality.
Going back to the LVT, it wasn’t until early 1944, that those appeared in real numbers on the battlefield for more than the lead assault wave. The LVT-1s were un armored cargo haulers barely used in the Solomons and North Africa. They were not intended as an assault craft. The LVT-2 began to arrive on scene in time for the Gilbert Island assaults in late November 1943 and had its numbers, as well as the available LVT-1s split between the Tarawa and Makin landings. The LVT-1s were modified with some armor and weapons for these landings. The first true ”assault” models of the LVT would not arrive until the spring/summer of 1944.
In summer 1940, the time of Sea Lion, the LVT program was very much on par with the LWS program.