Have to agree that you argue your case well, kudos to you. I guess we will never know though for sure.
The thing is that the Germans never had to mount an amphibious landing against a concerted defence and they probably couldn’t because they didn’t have the ships.
The British coastal defences may have been weak compared with the Atlantic Wall but then the British knew that what they had to sink was large, slow barges, barely supported by Capital ships because the RN would slaughter them. The Atlantic Wall on the other hand, was designed to repel capital ships but wasn’t prepared to be swarmed by smaller, faster landing craft.
A word about German Parachutists, they only really worked reliably when they had surprise on their side and were rapidly supported, there would have been no surprise in 1940 in England - the place was paranoid.
Was there a German plan? If so we can use this as a basis for our hypothesis.
Oh and was there a British plan too?
A couple of points:
The figure of 3 million tons for shipping sunk is for the whole of 1940 from ALL means. We lost 7 MILLION TONS in 1942 & survived.
The German Fallschirmjager were decimated in the Crete landings & only prevailed due to serious tactical errors by the defence. They were never again used tactically.
IMO, Sealion was never a serious option & was more likely an ateempt by Hitler to make us sue for peace, in order for his troops to be freed up for Barbarossa.
Hitler was so stange in that his personal meddling in things certainly helped the Allies. Attempting to make the Me 262 a bomber when it was the best interceptor in the world. Stifling masssive production of the STG 44 which could have made the Wehrmacht the best armed in the conflict. Rolling up to Britain’s door and not going in and many other quirks where his will screwed things up for Germany and helped the Allies, thank goodness.
If he had wanted to invade England in 1940-41 before and commitment to the Eastern front occured he would have found a way. It’s as simple as that. When he had his fingers in things subordinates were forced to do his bidding no matter how outlandish something was. If he’d have demanded a flying tank they would have done their damnest to make one.
It’s all just a fanciful “what-if” that we can concoct over any other event in the war that could have played out differently. If we stretch this further, let’s say the Germans attempted a landing and had massive losses due to the fact thet Hitler demanded success or death of all involved. If German forces were hugely decimated perhaps the war and Hitler’s strategy would have been greatly altered. Perhaps HE would have sued for peace and never messed with the Russians. He’d been assassinated and that was that. Myriad alternatives. 
Err… have you ever been to any of these “ports”? In 1940 Dover was the only one of these with anything resembling port facilities, and even then was limited to a small number of passenger/rail ferries. It’s a small area of flat land at the base of some cliffs, with the port being an area of sea sheltered behind a (postwar) manmade breakwater. Brighton (very near where I live) has a steep, pebbly beach and at one end has a small (postwar) breakwater built for yachts. Both it and Hastings may have had some form of harbour for fishing boats however, although I think this is unlikely as most of the boats would have been small enough to run up the beach.
Incidentally, if you’re not taking London or Southampton, you’re limited to river barges for your sea transport. They’re pretty much incapable of crossing the Channel from September-October until about March due to the sea conditions. If you don’t have a proper port by then, your army will starve.
To put the problem in perspective it would be useful to look at a map.
The problems of the harbours on the south coast are well explained in this wikipedia entry for Cinque ports.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinque_Ports
Dover probably the biggest is very difficult to get out of due to the cliffs which are a fortress. Other port had the attention of Palmerston, when the French looked like coming across for a visit in 1950 ish.
You should also take into consideration that a lot of the small harbours are covered by the Goodwin sands, a grave yard of many a ship.
To anyone who entertains the briefest notion that Sealion was in any way viable, I suggest you dig out your copy of Conway’s All the World’s Fighting Ships and check the numbers of destroyers in the Royal Navy and Kriegsmarine. Notice how the British entries tend to be half a column long, whereas the German ones are each usually an inch or so (for a laugh, look at the US section - the Fletcher Class takes up two entire pages, written in text the size of an ant’s winky). Then notice how half of the German ones sort of ceased to exist one afternoon in April that year, when they got into an arguement with the Warpite.
I don’t think the heavy forces would have been commited (though “Death Ride of the Queen Elizabeth” would have been a great movie) even after a landing - there were plenty of DDs and cruisers of all flavours to do the job. Crikey, a few coastal patrol vessels or armed trawlers could have probably done the job welll enough.
I don’t believe Sea Lion AS IT WAS cobbled up is worthy of jack either. The point stands that if a serious desire was in Hitler’s soul there would have been a completely different real plan developed. I’m not alluding to any expert knowledge of some stategy other than the fact that without American assistance ringed by 250 subs Britain was in dire straights and a concerted invasion without the distraction of Russia would have ultimately proved successful. If Britain was Hitler’s only priority a serious, not half-baked plan would have been conceived.
We have the advantage of looking back 65 years hence and knowing the outcome. In 1940 no one was certain of ANYTHING.
ANY thought of invasion was scuppered when the Luftwaffe failed in its attempt to destroy the RAF (a condition set in stone by the Kriegsmarine).
Without the removal of the RAF, the German naval losses would have been tremendous.
Wrong. The Germans simply didn’t have any alternative airlift or sealift assets, so whether they really did want to invade or not is irrelevant - the plan they formulated was the best they could do with the assets and knowledge available. It would also rapidly have turned into a bloody shambles.
I suppose any counterfactual needs to find the “point of departure”. My belief is that you’d have to go back to around 1937 to give the German forces time to develop the equipment and methods for large scale amphibious operations. If that happened then it’s also likely that the strategy of appeasement would have been called into question (nobody could fool themselves that Hilter was just sorting out his “back door” and that the Empire could tootle along regardeless).
A far more successful strategy would have been massive investment in U-boats to strangle the British Isles, forcing them to come to terms. If Germany had been careful not to upset the US too much this might have worked, but then you have the Japanese spoiling it all, so the end result is likely the same.
I get the impression that most people view the Commonwealth forces of 1940 as pretty hopeless, but it just isn’t true. We Brits have never really been that fond of our Army (it mutinied, after all) so they’ve always got the smelly end of the stick. Even so, fighting on home soil, with decent medium artillery and a handy light AT gun and heavy machine gun, it’s difficult to see them being rolled over. The RAF’s Fighter Command was one of the most professional and well-run military oraginisations in Europe, far less weighed down with the ego and hubris of the Luftwaffe, and with the RADAR network as the ace in the hole. The Royal Navy was a little more mixed, with a slightly ossified top layer, but the one thing we could always rely on were aggressive and skilful destroyer captains - handy in an invasion n’est-ce pas?
Ossified maybe, but the Admiralty were still better than everyone else bar possibly the US Navy (who were not themselves a whole lot better - see for instance their delaying the implementation of convoys and refusing to learn from RN experience to date).
I think even most people in the UK would think that the British Army was not very good in 1940.
I’m not sure I disagree with them either, 1940-41 was not a very good time for the British army at all.
But fighting on home soil would have been a diffrent prospect, as there was nowhere else to run I suppose.
They would also be fighting to their strengths for a change - continuous lines, good logistics and a nearby industrial base. The Germans would also most likely be unable to fight to their strengths due to very poor logistics and lack of armour.
Agreed pdf, it’s all relative I suppose. I suspect most people have no concept of quite how big the gap between the navies was. I reckon the Kreigsmarine had 14 destroyers in May 1940, of which 10 or 11 were operational (they’d already lost half that number while they were “winning”). The RN had what, fifty destroyers in home waters? And our hopelessly under-funded Fleet Air Arm still managed to be the first naval air force to sink a major surface warship.
Monty- exactly what I meant. If in the mid-1930s Germany had the foresight to comprehensively develop equipment and tactics for an invasion there is no telling what would have happened. I never was assessing what else the Jerrys could have done in late 1940-early 1941 with what they actually had. The whole point of “what if” scenarios is to contemplate what it would have taken for a certain event to be altered enough for a different outcome. Their 250 U-boats would have made a vast difference in RN surface plans. With that many subs concentrated in the area I would imaging more than a few RN surface ships might have gone down.
Look it simply boils down to “could the Germans have done it with what they had?” Of course not. “Could they have done it with on an alternate course of circumstances?”
Great, if everyone wants to ignore alternate courses of history fine. Then there’s nothing much to talk about. “December 7th. Pearl Harbor attack. Yep, it happened.” Why not “what might have happened if…?” The whole idea is WHAT would it have taken to for this or that to have happened in history. Saying something “that could never happen” is just the kind of thing that kept guys like Hitler up nights figuring ways to make those things happen.
The problem with peering backwards into the past is that we know the answers and it prejudices our perceptions. How could it not? We know what’s going to happen when we read history! After the BoB NOBODY on the Isle knew what the hell was coming next and the susequent cost of bolstering defenses and diverting manpower, not knowing where to expect the next attack subtracted from Britain’s dwindling strength.
When the tide had turned and Rommel tried to upgrade Hitler’s defenses of Fortress Europe it was the same story in reverse. If anyone in September 1940 sat in England and said, “don’t worry about the Germans. They can’t invade,” they’d have been branded as looney.
I absolutely agree with that last paragraph. People back then were genuinely worried about an invasion. There is hardly a beach in the UK that didnt have some sort of defence put on it. Even as far North as Nairn. Also after Dunkirk the Army was seriously weakened and demoralised.
I dont mind the what ifs at all. The Germans best bet to get the Brits to sue for peace was at Dunkirk. What if the Army hadnt gotten away. I think there would have been serious considerations about reaching terms then.
Well, that cuts both ways. The U-boats and amphibious shipping would have come at some cost, almost certainly to the surface fleet (and note that the U-boats were the most severely restricted of all the Kriegsmarine by treaty - early rearmament would have most likely brought a much more severe response from France and the UK, one Germany could not at the time have resisted). If there is no surface fleet, the escort requirements for the convoys are greatly reduced and hence the forces available to attack the invasion are greatly increased. However, the presence of amphibious shipping makes a proper assault possible - something that was never true with Sea Lion.
The second area is the Marines/Paratroopers. These require the best and most motivated available troops to succeed - the very troops that went to the Panzers in @. Strip out the Panzer equipment partially to equip the marines (and probably to some extent the landing craft too - at least some components will need the same industrial base, for example diesel engines) and you have a further problem. It’s an open question how much further you can strip them out without failing in the Battle of France - and so the invasion becoming moot anyway.
Finally, the Luftwaffe. In @ it was constructed almost purely as a tactical air force, to give close support and air interdiction for the Heer. Given funding and industrial capabilities, the size is pretty much fixed and the aircraft size/payload and even to an extent type is fixed. Hence, to provide longer ranged aircraft, a lot of transports and anti shipping strike you’re going to have to strip out the tactical arm of the Luftwaffe. Again, this will weaken the striking power of the Panzer arm - I have no idea if this would be enough to prevent success in the Battle of France, but that is the risk you’re taking.
I’m sorry guys if I stirred you all up. :oops: If nobody cares to look at any alternate realities other than “the allies win” I won’t bring it up any more.
