The window for an possible invasion of England was immediately after the fall of France, in May and June of 1940. How long the window lasted is an open question.
German parachute forces were still intact, as the Crete invasion wasn’t until the summer of 1941. The invasion of Russia was at about the same time. And by the time of these two events, the Battle of Britain was already over and Operation Sea Lion had already been cancelled.
I agree that Sea Lion was more a political than military exercise. Nevertheless preparations for it did proceed. IMHO, it was doomed by one of Hitler’s earliest disastrous military decisions – stopping the German tanks at the outskirts of Dunkirk and allowing the bulk of the BEF (some 350,000 men, IRCC) to escape across the English Channel.
Had the British Army been destroyed in France – which was well within the capability of the Germans – I believe that Sea Lion could have succeeded had it been launched.
But this is absolutely the wrong forum to discuss this, as I don’t believe it can be answered on a factual basis.
A couple of things that haven’t been mentioned yet.
1.) The British had a number of “houses” on the coast, which were really pumping stations. The idea being that if the Nazi’s did show up they’d spray oil into the channel and then set it ablaze, thus causing the world’s largest beach party and long pig BBQ.
2.) The reason the British had been able to pull their forces from Dunkirk was that Goering had convinced Hitler that he could wipe them out with airpower, and had the weather cooperated that might have happened. This made Hitler distrust Goering considerably.
3.) And while I don’t know the amount of firearms available to the general population of England, I do know that the British government had a number of guerilla warfare manuals printed up (these may have been distributed to the general public, I don’t remember), so any Germans who landed could have expected a lot of resistance from the general population (just look at how British soccer fans react when one of their teams lose a match ).
4.) Churchill was a charismatic leader, who could have instilled hope in the British once their nation had been invaded.
5.) Hitler didn’t really understand the whole concept of naval power and excepting the Bismark (and one other ship, IIRC), the surface navy of Germany really wasn’t up to par with the British navy, so even if they had managed to make it ashore, they’d be subjected to a tremendous bombardment when the rest of the fleet showed up.
6.) German military production wasn’t up to what the Allies could crank out, so even if he had decided to sit tight while they built up the necessary military gear, the Allies could have easily surpassed German material numbers in a very short time.
One German general has made the claim that the German military staff told Hilter he needed to wait at least two years before starting a war in order to ensure that they’d worked the kinks out of the gear and gotten equipment levels up to the point where they’d be unstoppable. Hitler didn’t listen, of course.
To be honest I am not really up on the dunkirk thing , but keeping with this being a political feint to neutralize the british govt, could this not have been a sweetner ?
Nope. Hitler was all set to wipe out the BEF with his ground forces, but Goering argued that the Luftwaffe could do it, without risking valuable forces on the ground. Hitler agreed, and then the weather turned nasty, preventing the Luftwaffe from taking to the air to finish the job.
I don’t see how we can have a factual answer to this question without violating the Temporal Prime Directive. Please don’t violate the Temporal Prime Directive.
That is one interpretation that has been given for Hitler’s action. But AFAIK there is no documentary evidence that Hitler made a conscious choice to allow the British to escape. As Tuckerfan notes, Goering convinced him the Luftwaffe could do the job, and they were both wrong.
The Germans failed to realize how good the British radar system was. The British were able to watch the Luftwaffe flights approaching and concentrate their own fighters where they would have the maximum advantage.
If the Germans had wanted to, they could have targeted the British radar installations and probably kept a significant portion of British air control out of service. This would have required the RAF to dilute its available forces in maintaining patrols, responding to false sightings, and overreacting to German attacks.
Actually, the Germans did bomb the British radar installations, and found that it didn’t do them a heck of a lot of good. The damage inflicted to the sites was minimal and was easily repaired in a short period of time, so eventually, the Germans gave up, perferring to expend their ordinance on targets which took a longer time to repair.
The German attack on the British radar stations was indicative of their poor strategic planning. If it didn’t work within a few days, they gave up and went on to other targets. They started attaclking shipping in the Channel, then coastal port facilities, then radar, then airfields, then cities. I may have the sequence in incorrect order, and somewhere in there was also a brief flurry of attacks against aircraft factories. They didn’t sustain any of these attacks long enough to do any really serious damage.
Their real goal was to attack high value targets, forcing the British fighters into the air to defend them, where they could be destroyed by German fighters. They lost sight of this goal, sending their bombers to targets at the extreme (or outside the) range of their escorts, often putting the German fighter pilots in untenable situations.
As Boyo Jim wrote the Germans failed to pursue a strategy of sustained attacks. This was a characterisitic of the German military throughout the war; they were always looking for the knockout blow.
In terms of the aerial bombing campaign, the Germans spread the attacks around and did the equivalent of destroying about 10% of several different critical sectors of the British war effort. They’d have been better off focusing on one critical sector and destroying 90% of that.
I think your other points were very good, but this one is wildly off the mark. Germany could easily have outproduced Britain in 1940 (remember, no US involvement at the time, although lend lease certainly helped), especially considering thet the German industry didn’t convert 100% to wartime production until 1945! ( Hitler wanted to keep a semblance of “normal” life for the citizens of Germany). German industry was untouched, had they swiched to full military production they would have easily outproduced an English industral base that was under attack by the Luftwaffe.
That’s why I said that German prodution wsan’t up to what the Allies could crank out. Had Hitler put Germany onto fulltime military production before he invaded Poland, I don’t think that there would have been any chance for the British to retreat to Dunkirk. They’d have been slaughtered like cattle long before.
This is a common but largely incorrect simplification of the reasons for Germany’s economic failures. The “Germany didn’t go to full war production until 1945” bit just is not true; as early as 1941, Germany was going as far as holding scrap metal drives and curtailing civilian production. I don’t know exactly how you’d define full military production," but Germany was sure as hell TRYING to do so quite early in the war.
Germany failed to produce as much as it could because they simply did not organize or manage their economy as effectively as the Allies did. Germany, remember, did not have a real civilian cabinet. The high-level strategic planning that typified Allied and Soviet war economy planning had no German equivalent; German production was confused, failed to set priorities, and failed to keep pace with military needs. It became a mishmash of short-term policies and feudal bickering between the armed services and factions thereof.
It is quite telling that Germany at one point was using some 50 different kinds of motorcycles in its army. Germany built dozens of different types of tanks, whereas its enemies each stuck to two or three proven designs. Germany still built an impressive number of tanks, but failed to order or produce a sufficient number of spare engines (tanks blow their engines out a lot.) Insufficient emphasis was put on non-weapon equipment, like trucks, cars, rolling stock, or other tools of logistics. Far too much emphasis was placed on building wonder weapons, as opposed to perfecting and standardizing proven types.
It wasn’t a question of effort. It was a question of skill, and Hitler lacked it, and he lacked the intelligence or the personality to know enough to delegate these decisions to competent planners.
It could only have worked if both the RN and RAF had been taken out of the picture.
The RAF were prepared to withdraw north in the face of excessive losses on their airfields in the south (which didn’t happen due to Hitler’s ill-advised switch of the bombing from airfields to cities), so that they’d still be able to project force over the landing beaches in a last ditch effort.
The RN are on record as being willing to sacrifice themselves in the Channel to destroy the landing force. If there is one armed force in the world I could believe this of it would be the RN of WWII, given their heroics off Dunkirk and (later) Crete.
In the face of these two factors alone I believe the Germans had no real chance at all.
Other points made here are valid: Hitler had no real interest in doing it the hard way anyway; he and Goering bungled the whole Dunkirk thing (without which Churchill may well have been forced to go along with his colleagues who wanted to start peace talks with the Germans); at this time British production of planes was already outstripping the Germans anyway.
On the other hand those who cite the preparedness of the Home Guard for guerilla warfare forget that partisans have never freed a country of their own accord, that can only be done by an external force. Would the US have counter-invaded? In the absense of a German DoW, I seriously doubt it.
Those who mentioned the situation in Russia, the US declaring war, and the loss of the German paras in Crete have their chronologies seriously out of whack, they were all a year later or more.
).