How the heck is Hitler supposed to “finish off” the UK? An amphibous invasion? In the teeth of the Royal Navy?
If Germany had managed to achieve total air supremacy over Britain, and was able to bomb them with impunity over and over, then perhaps Britain would have decided to ask for an armistice. But that didn’t happen. But even so, what’s the problem with just ignoring Britain? Even though it would be insanely risky for Germany to try an invasion of the UK, it was flat out impossible for the British to invade the continent.
And so leaving Britain alone means some bombing raids and blockade of the Atlantic. So what? You don’t need Atlantic trade.
The threat from Britain and America only materialized years later, once the Germans were already retreating from Russia. No defeat of Germany in the East, and there is no prospect of D-Day in the west.
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How the heck is Hitler supposed to “finish off” the UK? An amphibous invasion? In the teeth of the Royal Navy?
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Well, ‘finish off’ was probably a bit stronger than I intended. ‘Force to negotiate some sort of ceasefire’ was more what I was thinking of.
They couldn’t just ignore them, since the Brits were quite capable of bombing targets in Germany and western Europe (which, in fact they did). My thought is that had Germany simply sucked it up and soaked up the casualties (and, perhaps not been such idiots as to switch their targets from military and logistics to civilian), they could have worn down the RAF, which was pretty well strapped with no real hope of significant reinforcement (pilots take time to train, planes take time and materials to build, etc)…and by doing so they might have forced the Brits to the negotiating table before the US joined the fight (after all, they didn’t KNOW we were going to join, and WC was pretty frantic about getting us to join and pretty despondent that we weren’t…and in this alternative time line Russia wouldn’t be fighting Germany either, so the Brits would have felt completely cut off and alone in their fight).
Yet in our universe the Brits continued to hurt the Germans during and after their invasion of Russia, inflicting repeated blows on their their industry and logistics. Plus, with the Brits staying in the war the Germans had to honor the fact that the Brits COULD invade Western Europe, so Germany had to divert forces and resources from the Eastern Front to defend against air raids and potential invasions or ground raids.
I think part of it might have been a misguided hope that Britain would join a war against the USSR as a face-saving means of making peace with Germany.
This is simply not suppoted by the fact that Germany’s attempt to do exactly this failed.
In fact, the RAF was never short of aircraft; they built them as fast as the Germans could shoot them down, and they could have scrounged up enough skilled pilots. Even at the height of the Battle of Britain, the RAF was holding fighter forces in reserve.
Why would you imagine an invasion in 1939 would be any more successful than it was in 1941? It’s actually got a lot of things making the very thin odds Germany had even thinner.
[ul]
[li]The infrastructure of western Poland wouldn’t have had time to be repaired or stockpiles of materials built up, so the supply line problems would have been that much worse.[/li]
[li]They would be attacking the USSR in October. Even if lucky with the weather, they would have one month to defeat the USSR before the rasputitsa (the season of bad roads) set in, followed by winter. They weren’t going to make it to Moscow in a month.[/li]
[li]They would have 100 or so French and British divisions at their back. Historically the only thing France did was the tepid Saar offensive before Poland fell and the German army moved to the west. Germany would be ripe for an attack once embroiled in a war with the USSR with the industrial heart of Germany in the Ruhr not very distant from the French border.[/li][/ul]The first two could be avoided by waiting until summer 1940, but the third couldn’t. Additionally, Germany was very reliant on the USSR for raw materials; once they attack the USSR and the supplies stop they have to conquer a good part of the USSR to gain access to them or they’re pretty screwed. Also the front would be a lot narrower as Romania wouldn’t be available to them as a staging area as it was in 1941, and the oil from Ploesti would be somewhat threatened by the possibility of a Soviet invasion of Romania to deny it to Germany. Romania on its own would have a hard time stopping the Soviets; the performance of Romanian troops in 1941 was abysmal.
I agree totally and assumed that things could/would have commenced in around April 1940.
Again, less of an issue with a delay until Spring 1940
Not nearly so much of an issue, if at all, by starting in April (or early May)
This is the key point. Still, I think it is not at all impossible, and not even unlikely, that France would have desisted - was Poland worth another ‘Verdun’, etc.? And, we saw upthread why Britain was not really a worry in the strategic sense
The RAF’s best friend was MI6. If Germany had any idea how effective their air raids were, they would have kept them up. As it is, Britain had a clearly superior spy and propaganda operation, and the Germans bought that the damage to London was minimal.
It is relevant because the British and French armies combined were
about 2/3 the size of Germany’s, and it would have been reckless of
Hitler to assume they would not have compelled him to fight them
at a time when most of the German army was committed deep in the
USSR. Also, the British and French Air Forces combined were about
50% the size of Germany’s, and the German AF would consequently
have had to be split between two fronts.
It is questionable that even 100% of the 1939 German Army could have
defeated the USSR so thoroughly as to ever be able to withdraw enough
of its forces from the East to obtain parity in the West.
April or early May are totally out, late May is iffy; there’s the spring rasputitsa to deal with. It’s a common myth that Barbarossa was delayed to June 22 from its planned May 15 starting date because of the Balkans campaign. The reality was that the Bug River was at high flood in May, making Barbarossa totally undoable in May.
The UK was a serious strategic worry. As long as the British didn’t feel like surrendering there was nothing Hitler could do about it. Sea Lion was a complete impossibility and even winning the Battle of Britain is pretty implausible. The French are going to attack once Germany starts stumbling in Russia if not before then; it’s not going to be another Verdun. It’s easy to overlook how expensive Barbarossa was for the Germans due to the size of the victories, but by Nov 1941 German casualties on the Eastern front were 20% of the entire force committed by that point.
Hitler if nothing else knew history…he knew Napoleaon failed miserably when he invaded Russia because of the severe Russian winter…So Hitler wanted to have everything else sewn up before he went for the big enchilada, which could fail, and did
In support of this, the RAF were brilliantly organised. Their command and control, use of radar, aircraft recovery, repair and construction were all superior to Germany. Plus they had the benefit of easy recovery of many downed pilots and planes, something that harmed the Germans immensely. Fighting behind our lines reduced their loiter time and meant that anything they lost, stayed lost.
The German tactics for combat were superior but even that was irrelevant once the number of experienced pilots was reduced and the culture of the German “ace” set in.
It would’ve taken the whole effort of the war machine just to attempt a reversal of this air superiority and to what end? Hitler didn’t want to actually fight us in the first place. And you can imagine the insurgency nightmare for his troops had they actually invaded?
The mistake Hitler made was in northern France. Had he pressed his advantage and captured the british army then we probably would have made a deal. The war was lost at that point as he was forever doomed to a multi-front conflict or a descent into attrition and eventual stalemate.
Hitler’s plan was to invade the USSR. Bt he could not do it in 1940-his armored forces were not yet strong enough. In addition, he could not risk a French-British attack from the west.
Actually, Hitler would have been well advised to avoid launching Barbarossa until 1942-bt that would be risking a better armed and better led Russian Army.
Attacking Russia in mid 1941 was his best course-but it was froght with risk. He basically had till the end of 1941 to defeat Russia-and he didn’t.
The Japanese dragged the Americans into the fight in Dec 1941; until then, Hitler might have left the stalemate at the channel with minimal troop support and gone after Russia whole-hog. But onece the USA was involved, he was fighting a western front that had the industrial capacity to churn out 1000-bomber squadrons and drop a shit-load of bombs in the heart of industrial Germany every night.
Maybe his biggest mistake was a formal treaty with Japan, knowing that was the direction the Pacific was headed.
Sounds like you might be confusing the timelines a bit. The RAF was indeed stretched pretty thin in late summer/fall of 1940, but the shift of Luftwaffe air assets occurred after Hitler called off Sea Lion and accepted stalemate in the battle of Britain – the winter of 1940/spring of 1941.
That’s a very accurate summary of what I’ve read.
Agree in general, but with one nitpick: there was one day in the Battle of Britain when Churchill asked “where are the reserves?” and was famously told “there are none,” they were all committed.
Agree – RAF Fighter Command’s system was world-class for the times. Perhaps the key difference was Fighter Command was employed rationally, not emotionally. The UK radar and observer system gave the fighter pilots enough warning to get to altitude (and usually attack from above) without wasting time and fuel patrolling to look for German raiders. The whole search phase of the battle was more or less “outsourced” to ground installations, leaving the fighters to focus on shooting bad guys. Other aspects (camouflaging the airfields, aircraft dispersal, pilot training, map rooms, and so on) were also organized for efficiency. The British had very little margin for error and maximized their assets coldly and logically.
In contrast, Goering and his team fumbled around changing between ill-thought-out objectives, and engaged in a lot of chest-thumping emotional rhetoric about brave pilots and superior races, and squandered the advantages they did have.