No, of course not. In 1941 Churchill and the British were doing their level best to warn Stalin that Hitler was about to invade. Funny way of being at war with someone…
Churchill was loathed Bolshevism but as he said:
It was pointed out to Hitler that cobbling together the shipping for a 1940 invasion would have wrecked the German economy, because they would have had to commandeer all the Reich’s internal shipping.
Probably a misinterpretation of British and French plans to intervene in the Winter War, or Operation Pike, a proposed bombing campaign against the Soviets by the UK/France as a result of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Neither meant that we were at war with Stalin, but he wasn’t exactly on the Christmas card list either.
“Etoniaaaaaaannnnsss!”
We have to scrap SeaLion, Mein Fuhrer. It just ain’t going to work.
Ok, so here’s the new plan. We wait until 1994 when Operation ChunneLion becomes possible. Then we take this beach at Folkestone, and to guard the flanks, we take this one, at Dover on the right, and this one, at Hythe on the left. All the rest in the area look like this, too steep and chalky. We only have those three available.
After taking those beaches, and securing the area, our forces converge on this tunnel outlet railhead. At that point, we will embark our forces on trains that had been gathered at all railyards in the vicinity of this tunnel inlet railhead in Coquelles, France.
We will have the capacity to put approximately 500 infantry divisions per year, in manpower terms, and 3 million tons of supplies, in that same time period.
Operation ChunneLion will be invincible.
Heil Hitler!
I did not say they will not come, My Lords. I said they will not come by sea.
Or this decade. Or the next. Or the one after that…
Should some dumb ass build a tunnel, My Lords, we are screwed.
Blame the French*!
[sub]*some cut-and-paste in the lyrics may be required.[/sub]
We shall sink several of Lord Cochrane’s exploding fireships above the tunnel, My Lords, and blow it to Hell and Gone.
Well, it’s kind of hard to get the damn things* into *the tunnel, we are after all the navy.
Hitler did make (admittedly half-hearted) peace overtures in mid-1940.
Bumped.
Just learned of this 1974 joint German-British wargame of Sealion at the Sandhurst military academy (TLDR: the judges unanimously concluded that the invasion would fail after six days): Operation Sea Lion (wargame) - Wikipedia
Cool.
Thanks!
As well as a successful conquest of Britain being impossible for Germany to do in 1940, there’s another very relevant factor - it would have been a bad idea for them to do it even if they could have done it.
The importance of oil is often overlooked in the history of WW2. It wasn’t at the time because it couldn’t be, but it very often is today.
Oil was essential for everything by that time but far more so during a war. It was needed for manufacturing many things and it was needed for many things that had become essential for having any chance of winning a war - boats, planes, tanks, movement of soldiers, supplies, etc.
In the late 1930s/early 1940s there were only 3 major oil producing countries - USA, USSR, Venuezuela. Not Germany and not the UK. Germany had some oil production from Romania and some oil production from converting coal to oil (slow and expensive and only done out of desperation) but it was nowhere near enough. Hitler knew that. His senior advisors knew that. Several of them told him, clearly and explicitly, that if Germany didn’t secure a major source of oil by mid-late 1941 it had no chance of winning the war even with the harshest possible rationing. So the only possible option was to go for the USSR’s oil production facilities as soon as possible and as a matter of life and death, no retreat no surrender. Spending oil and time to invade Britain would have been an extremely bad idea when they were desperately short on both (even if they could have done it, which they couldn’t have).
If you factor in the importance of oil, many of Hitler’s apparently stupid military decisions make far more sense. They were often very bad tactics, but they were essential strategy because of the absolute need for oil. Why invade Russia? Oil. Why not allow retreat when it was a good tactic to do so? Need oil now. Why not make more tanks, more planes, more everything? Not enough oil to run them. Ever wondered how Germany’s tank divisions could have been overwhelmed by larger numbers of inferior tanks when that’s exactly what Germany did to France just a few years earlier? How could they not have learned from their own actions a few years earlier? Seems very stupid…until you factor in the lack of oil and realise that they were well aware of the problem but couldn’t do anything about it. There’s no point having 10,000 tanks when you only have fuel for 1,000 tanks. By 1941, the German army was reduced to using horses more than motorised vehicles because they didn’t have enough fuel to run the vehicles.
The scary thing is that the Axis was sitting on a huge oil reserve - but didn’t know it was there. Italy had occupied Libya back in 1911. So Italy and its German ally had access to Libya’s large oil supply. But the oil fields in Libya weren’t discovered until the 1950’s.
Think what a huge change it would have been in the direction of the war if some Italian geologist had discovered those oil fields around 1930.
They pretty solidly nerfed the Germans for that wargame.
Just in the link:
- They made a reasonable assumption about shipping for what was known at the time. It unfortunately, wasn’t accurate when compared with the plans later discovered about actual assets planned for the critical amphibious portion of the operation.
- German capital ships were assumed to not be available. Despite the Home Fleet and First Sea Lord historical opinion that they would not commit capital ships into the channel unless German capital ships were present, the wargame allowed that commitment. It’s basically the worst case for German naval power trying to defend the second wave.
- The assumption about amphibious capability cost the German first wave 25% of their ships due to unseaworthiness. Tonnages lost would be a better measure of how much ground combat power and how many tons of supply was lost since I assume the smaller ships may have been lost at a higher rate in the rough seas. Still the Germans took what were probably unrealistic losses just getting to the beach.
- The map basically invalidated German deception operations by only covering SE England. The map even removed what the historical British high command thought was the most likely German invasion site. The bad weather in the first two days also gave the UK time to reinforce the 9 ground divisions with 4 additional for the invasion they knew was coming. Given infantry division strengths in UK of a touch shy of 14k at full strength that’s around 55k extra troops added to oppose the initial wave of 88k Germans (80k seaborne and 8k Fallshirmjager.) The advantage the initiative gives to the attacker, knowing where and when they are attacking, was completely taken away from Germany. Moving the reserve into position to counterattack was essentially begun two days before the Germans were even able to leave port.
- A 31% increase in ground combat power in the area of the invasion (coupled with losses to the invasion force caused by wrong assumptions about shipping) significantly altered the force ratios. That’s got potentially huge effects on the ground piece of the operation. The German odds of seizing and retaining an undamaged port in advance of the second wave were reduced by that shift of combat power.
- Hitler did dumb stuff. Now that’s plausible since he did in reality, especially later in the war. Still refusing to divert bombing forces from London to support of the strategic priority didn’t help.
The Paddy Griffith book that is the major cite for the Wikipedia article potentially made my reading list. It’s not the first of his works I’ve read and likely not the last. Still, from the wiki article this feels a lot more like a GIGO result.
The three German judges didn’t seem to mind.
What were they going to say? “You’re being unfair to the Nazis”?
The assumption about German amphibious capability was common and widely accepted. There wouldn’t have been a reason to contest that piece at the time. Given plans later discovered, that assumption was also wrong.
The map piece was an issue for Paddy Griffith, the Grand High Umpire, who had an important role in developing the exercise. Just because they muddled on doesn’t mean it didn’t have effects on the results. From the wiki cite:
I think this video is very relevant:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnPo7V03nbY
Military History Visualised is a channel about, unsurprisingly, military history. It mainly focuses on Germany in WW2, presumably because that’s what the presenter has studied most. They do a good job of going to primary sources and providing references. I think they’re a good source for information. The above is their video on the feasibility of Operation Sealion, the sort-of-planned German invasion of Britain in 1940.
Quick summary: They assume an ahistorical best case scenario for Germany in which it had air superiority over Britain and the channel and the RAF was greatly reduced and in which Germany had enough oil. Despite that huge ahistorical weighting in favour of Germany, they conclude that it was still impossible unless Britain surrendered.
I recommend watching the video. It’s only 15 minutes and it contains evidence and reasoning to support the conclusion.