Originally Posted by
biscuit74
the RAF coud provide air cover for the fleet locally. This of course ignored the point that in any sort of shooting war in Europe the RAF would have been be more than busy enough trying to defend BAOR, let alone the sea areas.
Not quite. The RAF was assigned to support both SACLANT and SACEUR. You can be quite sure that SACLANT would have screamed blue murder if his forward offensive screen had been diverted to SACEUR, which is not to say that that might have happened if the need in ACLANT was negligible.
You could argue of course that splitting what small forces we had between 2 MNC was contrary to 'concentration of force'.