It seems the Soviets only gave the Germans trouble after Operation Barbarossa. So suppose the Germans didn’t open up another front- they concentrated on the west. Could they have successfully invaded Great Britan? I know they had their eye on it for a while, but it kind of fell through. I guess part of this was the Luftwaffe’s failure to establish air superiority. Some sources have said if the Luftwaffe had concentrated on british airfields they might have suceeded.
A question I am sure must have been asked by many historians. IMHO the answer must be yes. If the Russians kept neutral, if America was persuaded not to enter the war, if the Luftwaffe had focussed on military targets instead of British cities, if their nuclear programme had suceeded… some combination of these would surely have led to Gestapo boots in Buckingham Palace.
Fat chance. Mein Kampf is clear that Hitler thought: 1) All German speaking people should be united under a greater Germany. The only German speakers of any note in the west were in Alsace which Hitler had already occupied. 2) Germany needed living room for its people. The only place were such was available was in the east where the Slavs, one of the “disposable” groups predominated. Russia is in the east and has lots of “living room.”
I don’t think any invasion would even have been tried. Hitler had no interest in invading Britain, which I think he considered as having been maginalized. His main interest was in the east. He attacked first in the east and as soon as he considered the west as secured he again turned east against Russia.
OK, fair point, but the question was hypothetical and the answer “yes” was in that context. Hypothetically the Nazis could have been a very tolerant and liberal bunch if they did not insist on invading countries and comitting genocide.
whether they could have pulled it off in 1940 is very questionable. To do it in the other direction four years later required a mass of specialised landing craft which just didn’t exist in 1940. The Royal Navy would have had to intervene even at crippling cost.
If they had gained a secure lodgement (a big if) then the race would have started to build up their supplies before the defending armies could concentrate and throw them into the sea - same as in 1944, but thanks to command of the air and the sabotage of communications by the FFI the Germans lost that race.
They’ve wargamed several times at the Staff College and it always fails.
I once participated in a wargame that just that scenario. The German forces were using a bunch of canal barges they’d gathered together to move the troops. I was part of a blocking force whose task it was to keep the Royal Navy’s main fleet coming down from Scapa Flow out of the fray. We succeeded at ruinous cost but the landing forces were driven off of the beaches. Had the lodgement lasted longer, the RN would not have broken off when it did and could have easily pushed past what was left of the blocking force (My destroyer squadron was completely gone, sacrificed protecting one of the BBs). It would have put paid to any reenforcement/supply efforts. All this was predicated that the RAF was out of the picture as IRL that was a requirement for Sea Lion in the first place.
DD
And that is a problem I always have with hypotheticals. Usually the conditions are set in such a way that the answer is reasonably clear and don’t allow for the flow of events to change the original assumptions.
However, given the hypothetical, I don’t think they could have succeeded because they didn’t have the logistical base established for the job. Probably by the time they did Britain could have recovered enough armed strength to survive.
The US got into the war in 1942. It took about a year to get our production of material up to speed, say Sept. of 1943. From then until the 6th of June, 1944 we stuffed the British Isles with mountains of supplies and troops in preparation for an invasion. The British used hundreds or maybe thousands of tethered balloons over cities and defense against dive and low flying bombers. The joke was that the balloons were there the keep the island from sinking into the sea from the weight of war material that was piled up.
And the same think continued after 6 June.
I don’t think that Germany would have had any such logitical base for an invasion.
Unfortunately, it’s also a real fixer-upper, in a bad neighborhood, heavily mortgaged, and the roof leaks in the rain.
That’s OK, there were lot’s of Slavs for labor, as long as they lasted, to fix things up once Hitler took over.
There was a great GD thread on this earlier this year, which I am unable to find at the moment.
IIRC the consensus was that Operation Sea Lion was a joke. The operation was hastily planned, the German had no specialized landing craft, [they were going to use shallow draft Rhine River barges as troop transports] and Winston Churchill would have given the order to use chemical weapons, if necessary.
Operation Barbarossa (opening of war with Russia) had little to do with Sea Lion, as the decisive Battle of Britain was effectively over before Hitler embarked on what-he-was-going-to-embark-on (Barbarossa, as pointed out by a poster above). While war gamers love to manipulate the variables - I’m not a war gamer - is that not what war gaming is? - the fact of the matter is that Nazi Germany’s military efforts, ignoring what might have been with regard to supplies, certain weapons systems and the like, were always subject to both the strategic incompetence of Hermann Goering and the complementary tendencies towards micromanagement and mistrust of the military high command on the part of Adolph Hitler.
And the Nazi Party would not have been what it was without those two, and Germany would not have been what it became in the '30s and '40s without them. So, I guess what I’m saying to the war gamers is that the fly in the ointment for any scenario gaming an invasion of England based on the world at the time of the surrender of France must take in to account the leadership.
I agree with the general sentiment. The Germans would have required at least a year of force build up, specialized training and equipment, and an attempt to completely neutralize the RAF, all this while the US was arming and troops were flowing into Britain and toward North Africa. Remember, the invasion of North Africa occured in November 1942, and that effort involved well over 100,000 British and American troops.
Had the Germans started a serious project for invading England, these resources and supplies would have been devoted to the British Isles, and the Germans would have been slaughtered.
If the Germans had gotten right to it, after the fall of France, the British may have had to give up North Africa, but the Germans would have had to withdraw their resources from North Africa, as well.
And, as has been stated, Nazi ideology make the plan a non starter. Hitler wanted to destroy Bolshevism and world Jewry, not the English. He was sure that when the Soviet Union collapsed and he murdered the Communists, Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, etc., etc., in that part of the world, he could get his hands on any British Bolsheviks and Jews in due time, once the British would surely capitulate.
Hitler’s capital mistake was, of course, declaring war on the US on 8Dec41. That was the very day the Soviets turned back the German attack on Moscow. In that one day, the fortunes of the Germans began to reverse.
The operation itself was a sham, it was never really intended to go off. It was more politcal maneuver than a military operation. 1940 France had fallen ,and the battle of britain was about to begin.
In concert with a pro axis british govt, plus the intended decimation of the Royal Air Force , it may have been politically expedient to accomodate Germanys desires.
What the luftwaffe should have done , was to play for all the marbles and gone for the radar stations, take the casualties and be done with it. Should those barges have actually sailed , one of the deterents , was to have run RN destroyers at high speed down the channel, which is supposed to have swamped the barges.
In the end , Sea lion was to have provided a credible threat to the British govt , enough to seek a separate peace and declare neutrality , paving the way for barbarossa.
Declan
I really don’t think this could have worked.
Sea Lion was essentially viewed as merely a large river crossing by the Germans.
Even if the radar had been destroyed, Britain had an observer service in place that could have relayed warnings of aircraft soon enough to organize at least some effective defence.
A few bombers, or even a pair of Royal Navy submarines could have done irrepairable damage to Sea Lion.
In fact, it was so ill-planned, & the barges so unsuitable, that one good storm during the invasion would have spelled total diaster for German forces.
A German invasion of England would have required much less force than the Allied D-Day invasion. The British Isles were not as heavily fortified as the French coast of 1944 and the British had little available for guns. Most of their tanks, artillery, and guns were left behind in Dunkirk when they were driven off of the continent. If the Germans could have avoided the Royal Navy then there would have been little organized force to stop them. Guerrilla warfare would have been their biggest threat after the invasion. The British government would have set up a government in exile in Canada and dispersed the Royal Navy to overseas bases. The Germans being able to HOLD England would be a different story, though.
You could be right, but I don’t think that the Germans had the logistic base built up in France that would have allowed them to immediately embark for Dover right after the French surrender and the British evacuated Dunkerque.
Assuming that you are right, I’m not at all sure that without the British Isles as a base of operations we could have conducted a successful war against Germany from across the Atlantic.
The conventional wisdom is that if Germany had been able to land significant numbers of troops along the southeast coast, they would have succeeded in taking out Britain – at least to the extent of capturing London and major manufacturing centers. It would have been toughly fought, but the Weald was supposed to be extremely difficult to defend against an aggressor force.
However, what was the problem was getting the troops there to land – the Royal Navy and R.A.F. had effective control of the Narrow Seas and the skies over them. Hitler no longer had experienced paratroopers – his one trained division had been decimated in Crete. The Luftwaffe could achieve only momentary superiority over the R.A.F., quickly reversed – and the R.N. with adequate air cover could take out any attempt to bring troops across. It was incumbent on Germany to remove the R.A.F. as a deterrent before attempting any such invasion – and the Luftwaffe failed in that effort. Would concentrating their efforts on airfields and aircraft factories have reversed this? The question is highly debatable.
Because the responses to this question appear to presume a particular cast upon the question, I think that responses should be clear as which of the following questions they answer:
-
Could Sealion have worked based upon the actual operational methodology and logistics the germans put into place in the real war; and
-
Assuming optimal preparation (e.g. actually developing landing craft and ships that would work, rather than pretending a large concentration of Rhine river barges would do the trick as happened in the real war), would the germans have had a chance based on the material, resources, and political situation as they were?
Apparently the Staff College at the Royal Military College Sandhurst did a wargame on this very topic in 1974.
Suffice to say, the Germans got their asses handed to them. Basically what happened is that the Germans got 90,000 troops landed, but couldn’t fight off the Royal Navy enough to keep supplies moving to the troops in southern England.
http://www.wargamesdirectory.com/html/articles/various/sealowe.asp
Right, it was mostly a bluff. Slim to no chance of it working. Hitler thought that he’d get the Brits to the table. It is thought that he was willing to “give back” all of (a disarmed) France if the Brits went for a peace treaty allowing Hitler to concentrate on Russia. But Churchill wouldn’t negotiate at all. If someone else had been PM, it is not impossible they would have accepted the deal. Chamerlain probably would have. :eek: