The German airforce at the time was geared to the tactical side, their fighters had a short range and could only loiter on station for roughly about ten minutes before bingo. While the Germans knew about radar, its not clear exactly what weight they placed on its effectiveness.
Its my opinion that the BoB started out as a political operation rather than a strictly military one. The only problem was that Churchill was not supposed to be the PM, so now instead of a political solution that would force England out of the war, Germany is forced to go on the offensive , probably in the hope that they could eak out a military win.
It should be pointed out what the OP is suggesting is not far from what actually happened, only a Third of the RAF Fighter Command was committed at any given time and Dowding was hammered for that.
Mainly, many of the posts drastically overestimate the effect the RAF had. They reduced the number of bomber sorties by forcing them to have strong fighter escorts (and the number of escort sorties was the limiting factor) and reduced the effectiveness of the day bombing somewhat by disrupting formations and on rare occasions forcing bombing raids to turn back.
These were moral victories, but they did little to protect England or destroy Luftwaffe capabilities.
Morale - I’ll buy that the battle had a significant effect on morale. There was a lot of propaganda concerning the battle, and it would have been hard to generate if the battle didn’t happen. On the other hand, I’m not convinced about any flow-on effects from poor morale. There was no way England was going to surrender without invasion, and a “truce” would only have hastened German invasion of Russia.
Sea Lion - temporary air superiority wasn’t enough. With fighter and bomber commands as intact and active threats, sea lion was never going to happen.
Airborne invasion - I didn’t think of this, and its interesting to speculate. There were voices in the Luftwaffe suggesting para-drops, and the lack of bomber casualties combined with lack of results may have resulted in a complete change in strategy. The paratroops would have needed to take a port and hold it - which I concede was possible - but the Germans would still have had to hold the channel completely open for resupply and follow-through against an intact RAF and Royal Navy.
This was probably the key factor in the battle. The Germans didn’t realize how important the radar stations were. They allowed the British to focus the right amount of airplanes at the point of maximum effectiveness.
Keep in mind that if the Germans had been able to land troops in Britain, the British were in very poor shape for a battle. On the ground, their situation was a lot worse than France’s had been - they had fewer troops, much less heavy equipment, much less mobility, less territory, and vulnerable targets that were closer to the invasion site. And France fell in six weeks of fighting.
Yes, but as had been mentioned the Germans have extremely limited sea lift capabilities. The German plan if used would have had no armor and no artillery because they had no viable way of getting it across the channel and even if they did they had no way of unloading it. So the heaviest weapon the Germans would have would be man portable mortars. While the British were low on heavy weapons of all types including armor and artillery they would still have a huge advantage in such over the Germans.
Bartman, this is exactly what I was thinking. No matter how little heavy equipment the Brits had, the Germans would have less. And almost zero supply as well. Any invasion force would be doomed unless they could force a political surrender almost immediately. There is no way they could force a military one.
They also were able to (barely) maintain operational capabilities. The Luftwaffe nearly destroyed the RAF wholesale, and ahd that finally happened, Britain might well have been forced to concede peace. No Britain, no America. No North Africa, no Italy, no D-Day, no Lend-lease, no massive aid to Russia. No Germans keeping large bodies of troops in western Europe.
Under those conditions, German begins to have a very good chance of winning the war by simply overrunnning Russia entirely, even if we assume they make all the same mistakes they actually did in Russia.
Goering undermined the Luftwaffe by pulling a thousand or so of its best out as his personal guard wasting their time around his castle. The British Home Guard originally was trained in guerilla tactics to take the British government out should it decide under Lord Halifax not to go to war. What is surprising is that Germany did not try a paratroop invasion to secure strategic regions and tie the British up fighting while they could ship heavy equipment by sea. That was where the core Home Guard was expected to be most useful after war had been declared. They had various weapons stashes and hide-aways around the country so that regular forces would not be tied up fighting lightly-armed shock troops. The idea of aerial invasion was something that had been frightening the English ever since Zeppelin raids showed them that ruling the waves was no longer enough, so they were half expecting it and ready to fight a dirty war on home turf if necessary.
I think you’re overestimating the problem. As I wrote above, it would have been difficult but not impossible. The Germans were able to keep their troops in North Africa supplied across the Mediterranean for over two years. You think they couldn’t have maintained a supply line across the English Channel for a month?
At the time of the BoB, British ground forces were not only weak, they were largely without any heavy equipment. Churchill himself used the phrase “an almost entirely unarmed people” to describe his nation at that time.
Certainly we know more about the German capabilities than Churchill or Dowding – specifically, we know that the Germans can be beaten, which had not yet been established in 1940, and we have the advantage of decades of careful analysis of the available force projection for Seelöwe. What if the Germans had suddenly coughed up a stash of motor launches they’d been hiding in the Baltic? What if they’d commandeered the entire shipping capacity of the Scandinavian countries, at the risk of alienating Sweden?
I think that with the information available at the time, Britain had to fight, and had to assume an invasion might be coming unless they prevailed sufficiently in the air to forestall it.
I also disagree that the Royal Navy would have pulled out of the channel after heavy casualties and permitted the invasion to proceed. There comes a time when there’s no further point in preserving a “fleet in being” to serve the interests of a state that is about to cease to exist. It would have been literally a “use it or lose it,” even a “use it AND lose it” moment, and I cannot believe there wouldn’t be someone of a Nelsonian stamp left in the Royal Navy. Many, many people and military units from almost every country in World War II sold their lives in hopeless battles to buy time or a small chance of escape for others, the history books cannot contain all the stories. Why couldn’t the Royal Navy go out in one last flaming Gotterdammerung? I am certain they would have.
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Of course the RAF had planned for their situation being rendered untenable. All squadrons would have been withdrawn out of fighter range, ceding the air to the enemy over southern England while they rebuilt their strength in the North.
However when Sealion was launched, the bulk of fighter command would immediately redeploy back to auxillary bases that had been prepared in the meantime and challenge the Luftwaffe in the air. Denying them the air superiority they needed.
A point about the river barges. Apparently their freeboard was so low when loaded, a destroyer's wake could sink it merely by a close passage never mind having to actually shoot at it.
I also agree with **Sailboat** a Royal Navy attack would have been a *damn the torpedos* approach.
It's also worth pointing out in all this talk of the Luftwaffe smashing the RN is belied by the fact that they didn't have much to smash the navy with. Straight forward high altitude bombing against a maneuvering target is a dubious business at best. The only really effective methods of attack are dive bombing and torpedo drops. The Stuka proved horribly vulnerable to any enemy air cover and they only had a tiny number of He-115 torpedo planes, which if anything were even more defenseless against fighters then the Stuka. Nb I'm not saying they wouldn't have sunk ships, but let's not think they had anything like the antiship capabilites we saw in the Pacific Theatre.
The British Army was a little short on Panzer Divisions, well equiped and organised regular troops in late 1940 - for me, any comparison with D-Day is ridiculous.
Had they landed with air superiority, it wouldn’t have been a bridgehead because the Germans would walk over most opposition - perhaps the Australian Divisions and the Kiwi Div excluded.
Surely the question was how many troops (landed and supplied) would it require to take sufficient air fields so the Luftwaffe could operate from the south of England. Resupply mostly comes from the air, as would the troops.
The English Channel is a pretty bad stretch of water. I once saw a summary (if I can find it, I’ll cite it) that gave the following obstacles for Operation Sealion:
Crossing the Channel with the barges Germany had at the time (many of them not powered and therefore under tow) would take something like 15 hours.
That time frame means you lose any element of surprise unless you conduct a night crossing.
A night crossing of the English Channel with towed barges was pretty much suicide.
If you did make it across, there were very few beaches suitable for landing, unless you felt like scaling the Cliffs of Dover.
As previously mentioned in this thread, those barges could be sunk by a destroyer’s wake. No shooting needed.
The German navy was not a factor due to losses in the Norwegian campaign. U-Boats would not be usable in the Channel.
Even if the Germans had air superiority, airplanes against moving boats is a tricky business.
So again, I’m pretty well convinced Sealion wasn’t going to happen without some major changes to the ballgame.
This was sort of my thought. Given the Luftwaffe side of the Battle of Britain and Chuirchill in office, what you’d end up with is not th RAF “sitting it out” but the RAF fighting it after 24-48 hours, plus a number of cashiered ex-Air Marshalls.
Yes, but they had a number of advantages in Libya they wouldn’t have in England.
First - Ports. In Libya the Axis already owned the ports and for most of the war in North Africa they were beyond the range of convenient attack. Not to say that there were no raids, there were. But on the average day in Tripoli the longshoremen could load and unload in relative peace and safety.
In England any ports they captured would have been sabotaged to hell and back. As captured they couldn’t be used. A lot of work would first have to take place. While this was happening they could count on daily raids and may never be out of the reach of British artillery which would no doubt make working in Folkestone or Dover ports a whole lot of fun. And for all of this they wouldn’t have the benefit of civilian professional longshoremen. They would have to make do soldiers who had previous work as such or with hastily trained conscripts. And any of those would thus be unavailable for fighting.
Tripoli through most of the war received 100,000 tons of war material a month. And it is not the only Libyan port. I don’t think Dover or Folkestone could have done that for the Germans. Dover could handle up to 150,000 or so, in ideal conditions. And as stated conditions would be far from ideal.
Second - The Italian merchant marine. In Libya the Germans could take advantage of a large Italian merchant marine. There is no equivalent in the North Sea and the Channel. Already the Germans were taking the barges off the Rhine to carry the initial invasion. This is also the fleet that has to re-supply them once ashore. The Kriegsmarine made their estimates and flatly told the Wehrmacht that supply would be unavailable for 8-10 days. As that is how long, in the pre-container ship days, it would take to sail back to France, load, return to England and unload the cargo (all of this making the unlikely assumption that Dover would be captured intact). All of this also assumes zero losses to German shipping.
Third - The Italian navy. In Libya the Germans were allied with the world’s 4th or 5th largest navy (depending on how you measure). While it was no match for the British in open battle it was a huge factor in keeping the sea lanes to Libya open. The British largely didn’t challenge the North African shipping with surface ships. The potential cost was too high. In the channel the Germans would be running supplies into the teeth of the worlds preeminent naval power.
Interestingly, that’s probably the last year in history that you could legitimately make that claim. By the end of 1941, the United States and probably Japan had passed Britain in that regard, permanently in the first case, through a combination of British losses and the rise of naval airpower (an arm with which the other two powers would excel). This strategic “sea change” was most visible in the Royal Navy’s inability to fight back on any large scale in the Pacific.
Regarding the OP, there’s another point I’d like to make. I think that Sealion was technically more possible than we realize, but did not happen partly because Germany (and Hitler specifically) lacked the will. The Germans were achieving incredible things militarily in this period, in part by ignoring long-held axioms about the limits of military power.
[ul]
[li] The panzers pushed on after the Sedan breakthrough, without waiting to consolidate and bring up infantry, even in defiance of more conservative commanders, going all-out to split France.[/li]
[li] Glider troops deliberately crashed onto the roof of Fort Eben Emael and used newly-developed weapons (shaped charges) to break open the enormously strong position with unheard-of speed, at terrible risk.[/li]
[li] At Crete, paratroopers parachuted directly onto defended positions, taking shocking losses for their aggressiveness; glider troops recklessly crash-landed onto the runways of the airport under fire to support them, and the invasion was successful against superior dug-in forces, without initial naval support, a model for what might have been possible in England (had the German paratrooper arm been rebuilt in time; they’d been wrecked at Crete).[/li]
[li] In the desert, Rommel was showing the world that traditional secure lines of supply were not necessary for lightning advances, and that desert terrain wasn’t the barrier it was believed to be.[/li]
[li] The Wermacht would, within a year, split the Soviet frontier like an axe splitting a rotten melon, capturing millions of soldiers from the world’s largest army.[/li][/ul]
The Germans were well-armed and organized, but they were achieving these extreme feats of arms more through dynamism, imagination, and an almost suicidal dedication to succeed at any cost. Had they put their mind to it, an invasion of England *might *have been possible despite the mitigating factors listed above. No doubt those factors loomed large in the minds of Hitler and the General Staff, but they had surmounted or bypassed many obstacles already in their campaigns and would do so many more times in the near future. IMHO what made the problems of Sealion ultimately insurmountable was Hitler’s famous lack of interest in actually crushing England. His ambitions lay in the other direction, and he and his generals chose not to commit all-out to Sealion. Consciously or not, they allowed the difficulties to deter them from such a harrowing test.