I dunno, I think you’re underestimating the logistical difficulties posed by the English Channel. Take a look at the post-D-Day logistical efforts of the Allies and try to figure out how the Germans could have pulled of anything even remotely comparable. The only hope would have been to grab London very quickly and hope Churchill caved at that point. Any drawn out affair leads to disastrous defeat for the Wehrmacht.
If the Battle of Britain had not been joined, there would have been significantly larger numbers of aircraft and aircrew available for the German invasion of Russia. Would that have made a difference? I don’t know.
Coming in late here but there is one issue I think nobody has mentioned, namely that radar was key to the way British Fighter Command operated and the High and Low radar screens were all along the south-coast.
They were attacked but the losses to the stukas was so heavy they were pulled out. If the RAF did not operate against the stukas and other flighter bombers then the radar screen would have been destroyed. Then despite operating against bombers beyond Bf-109 range the RAF would have had great difficulty if finding their targets efficiently even defending the line you suggest.
Points which are under stressed maybe include:
Capturing landing grounds to enable transports to fly in crack mountain and paras might have paved the way for a landing. Whilst still a difficult operating it is not a scenario that Churchill could have risked.
Yielding air control over the south coast and channel would have also given up all our major naval ports (Plymouth and Portsmouth) thus making intercepting any invasion force from secure bases further north even more difficult.
What I have read suggests that the Germans could not have won air superiority over England unless the RAF main some serious blunders. But the British Government could not be sure of that and so the decision to give up the Channel but fight to keep our airspace defended was the rationale one - and the correct one tactically and strategically.
There is a website, the Axis Forums, that specialize in “What ifs” and they are an excellent source of WWII history. They also cover world history at all time frames
Germany never really had the capacity to launch a sea assult on Britian. If they tried it would’ve only been through luck they got through. The result of the failure of the RAF would’ve been more demoralizing than anything else. But in reality, we have learned bombing almost never brings surrender.
The British losses would’ve been much worse, but the British would’ve located their factories elsewhere, and hid them underground. This would’ve taken time so the destructin would’ve been much more severe.
But eventually the British would’ve adapted.
The RAF also played an important psychological role by being able to hit target in Germany. None of these early hits did any real damage to Germany but they played a very important role with Germans, who now felt vulnerable too.
Hitler had a minor obsession about hitting NYC or Washington. He never thought he could do any damage but he knew the pyschology of it would get to the Americans (Notice how that played out years later on 9/11/01 by someone totally different 
The RN had committed to destroy any German invasion force at any cost, including the loss of the bulk of the RN. There is a value in preserving a fleet, but there has to be a nation and a goal to preserve it for.
In the OP’s scenario the RAF pull back from bf109 range of Europe and let the Luftwaffe have superiority over the channel and SE England. Again, the reason they do this is to preserve the RAF so as to have something in the air to oppose the invasion with. So the Germans do not get uncontested air superiority during any putative invasion, and the RN decisively smashes the puny fleet of river barges and a few MTBs and DDs that the German navy has left over from the Norway debacle. End of invasion, plus a large proportion of the most experienced troops in the German Army.
No they didn’t, not even close. The RAF ended the battle with more planes than they started with, the Luftwaffe fewer. It’s as close to a decisive victory in the air as was possible in the circumstances.
No they don’t. The Russians just take a little longer to beat them, that’s all.
To add to this, had Germany invaded England this would have committed resources which would most likely have been lost, every scenario I have come across finishes up with Axis getting a bloody nose - with a worst case scenario of up to 400k losses, though other more realistic figures put this at around 150k.
However this would have been elite troops, much of the air Luftwaffe and a large chunk of the submarine fleet, and still the UK would not been taken. It might well have put Britain out of the war as it may well have forced a stand off - even that is speculation though as it is certain that there would have been a British military build up, and even at this early stage of the war UK production was matching Germanys, and would soon go on to outstrip it.
All that is moot however, because it would have delayed the attack on Russia by at least one year, Barbarossa was always close to the limit in terms of timing, or rather it was beyond the limit.
With a depleted Luftwaffe this operation would not only have taken place the following year, it would have had less air cover, and the Russians themselves would have been far better equipped and most importanly, reorganised and led, Barbarossa was fortunate in its timing in that the Russian military was in the process of rebuilding and this attack took place before this had transformed them.
I have read all of these points expressed in Derek Robinson’s Battle of Britain novel Piece of Cake. Could you have read this, perhaps? IIRC, it was the swift tides up and down the Channel that would have swept the barges up and down and caused the long passage across.
He also makes the point that the Royal Navy had something like sixty destroyers attached to the Home Fleet at the time, and that they would have been able to create havoc in the Channel making high speed dashes at night, capsizing the barges or swamping them as you stated. He goes into more detail on the whole topic of how an invasion was unlikeky to occur, or to succeed if it took place, in his later factual book Invasion 1940.
Yes, it was summed up well in Piece of Cake, which is a work of historical fiction, by the way. That information was culled from other sources, which I’ve come across here and there. Some similar points may have also appeared in Len Deighton’s non-fiction.
Ah Piece of Cake, how I love thee, let me count the ways… great novel.
Anyway, as Damfino pointed out Robinson has since written about the same points in a non-fiction book, Invasion 1940. Caused quite a stir among the Amazon reviewers, to say the least. 
Ok, people: this is not specifically directed at Askance, and for all I know maybe I wasn’t clear, but I get the weird feeling that people don’t actually read my posts and simply skim over them. I’m not going to try and nail down every tiny detail, ebcause I assume people have some idea what they’re talking about. But when they ginore hugely improtant historical shifts or changews, or how things change voer the course of a long-term event, I get really curious as to what they’re talking about, or what they think they’re talking about.
They did so in our history. However, the Luftwaffe nearly won the BoB and destroyed the RAF. They got back ebcause Germany switched to bombing London. if the RAF left the fight, Britain probably would not have been able to maintain a credible war effort. Yes, the RAF could have eventually recovered as it did in our timeline, but it’s unclear that Britain could have officially stayed in the war. If Germany forces, for all intents and purposes I think Britain would have been out with a de facto peace.
:rolleyes: , although it’s not so much at you but at the idea that Russia was inevitably going to win. The Sovs very nearly fell apart, and the history of WW2 is so interesting because every major action and campaign could easily have gone the other way with just a slightly different set of circumstances. Just a little extra bit of german resources beign devoted to the eastern assault might well have broken the Red Army in the first year of fighting, or stabilized the situation so that the Reds never could recover. Nothing is certain, even in hindsight, about WW2.
No, they didn’t. They nearly destroyed 11 Group. But 10, 12 and 13 Groups were all in good shape. At best the Luftwaffe may have been able to drive 11 Group out of SE England, but they were nowhere near destroying Fighter Command let alone the entire RAF. Let’s look here at the situation report for September 6th. This is the last day of focused attacks on RAF facilities. On September 7th the Germans switched to city bombing and the “Blitz” began.
There were three major raids, all in 11 Group’s area, with ~550 German aircraft. There were a small number of raids in all other areas, accounting for a few dozen aircraft. In all fighting the RAF destroyed 44 aircraft with another 37 damaged. In return they lost 20 aircraft and 7 pilots. So that there doesn’t sound too bad. And it is a fairly typical daily report for the pre-blitz period.
And at 9am the morning of the 6th they had 700 serviceable aircraft. At 9am on the 7th they had 694 aircraft including:
Blenheim - 44
Spitfire - 223
Hurricane - 398
Defiant - 20
Gladiator - 9
For comparison they had 717 serviceable aircraft on August 6th including:
Blenheim - 67
Spitfire - 257
Hurricane - 370
Defiant - 23
So in a month of tremendous fighting the Germans had reduced Fighter Command’s strength by 3%. While at the same time the Germans were losing two to three times as many aircraft and even a higher percentage of pilots and crews.
The attacks on SE England were brutal and 11 Group was near collapse. But I think it is a huge overstatement to say that the RAF was nearly destroyed.
Thank you Bartman for posting the figures I was too short of opportunity here at work to find and post. At no point in the BoB, before or after the switch to terror bombing, was the RAF close to collapse or nearly destroyed. As I stated, the most the Germans could have achieved was to drive them out of bf109 range of the continent, meaning the RAF husbands the majority of its strength to oppose the actual landing, which therefore does not proceed with uncontested air superiority. The RAF is still far closer to its bases than the Luftwaffe, has radar, is fighting over home soil, and is out-producing the German aircraft industry.
And WTF with that? Exiled on an island with few resources, yet out-producing the Germans?
Overy suggests that it was because the Germans kept with their pre-war manufacturing processes, including tight tolerances and fancy finishing, well past the point where “Good Enough is Good Enough.” Which, in every Quality class I have taken, is anathema, but they never had to fight a war.
Hijack:
I’m a survivor of the Quality Wars of the 1990s and I know that the Sten was designed to GEiGE principles, but how did they expand it to include the Spit, with an engine by Rolls-Royce and an airframe that was unfamiliar to most groundcrew?
Out-producing the Germans in fighter aircraft, by concentrating on that. The Germans were also making buckets of tanks, artillery, small arms, transport, rail, ammo, and other material of war they would use in the greatest land campaign of all time a year later. I think the Germans could have out-produced the Brits in fighters if they’d really put their efforts into that at the cost of so much else. The British were making fighters because their lives depended on fighter cover, and they warped their war production quotas to focus on that.
The later concentration on 4-engine bombers to take the air war to Germany meant that, over the course of the war, British production was more heavily invested in aircraft, proportionally, than most other countries.
That’s fair enough: I should have said that the “RAF available and intended for defense”.
Why the distinction was made I’m not sure. I would assume they had some structural differences between the groups, but I never looked into it.
Aircraft weren’t the problem it was pilots I thought, especially pilots with experience in the relevant aircraft (never mind combat experience)?
I don’t know if it’s mentioned elsewhere but I’m sure I’ve read part of the ‘at any price’ plan was to use the destroyers to effectively set the Channel ablaze. No question it was going to be proper last ditch stuff.
There was also a series of pipes set along prospective landing beaches.
These pipes would pump petrol/oil onto the water, it would then be set alight