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  • Could Germany Have Successfully Invaded Britain, 1940? June 13, 2015

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary , trackback

    dad's army

    The greatest month in German history (militarily speaking) began 10 May 1940 with the attack in the west and ended 14 June when the Wehrmacht entered Paris. Yet that month was clouded by Britain’s survival. Hitler had two ways to pacify Britain: first, he could break Britain militarily (invasion); second, he could convince Britain to withdraw (negotiation). Once Churchill was in power and once the cigar-chomper had stamped his will on the war cabinet the first was never going to happen. There remained, then, the option of invasion: the much vaunted Operation Sea Lion. Sea Lion never went ahead for a number of reasons. Military historians point to the fact that the RAF retained (just) air superiority over the Home Counties, there was the escape of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk and other British smaller successes. However, the truth is that Britain wasn’t invaded for one far more important reason: Hitler simply wasn’t keen on the idea. He liked the British? He admired the British? The invasion didn’t feel right in his bones? It made sense to keep the Empire going? Whatever the reason the invasion was, to use a phrase of one historian of 1940, contemplated but not planned.

    In the summer of that dreadful year the British were not aware of this, of course, and acted, sensibly, as if the invasion would take place.  Beach’s question is a simple one: had the Germans decided to invade could they have pulled it off?  Drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com Britain’s war cabinet was convinced that, while Britain retained air superiority, an invasion was unlikely to succeed: in fact, the war cabinet was so convinced of this that it was believed that an an invasion would be a good thing, because it would fail so calamitously. On the German side, there were similar opinions. The German navy, especially, did not look forward to ‘dying bravely’ at the hands of the Home Fleet: the German army was (understandably) confident that it could finish off the mauled British army, but was worried about getting to Blighty with its feet dry. One man, however, believed to the end of his days that it would have been possible: smiling Albert Kesselring, perhaps Germany’s most capable WW2 general. Kesselring in his postwar memoirs pooh-poohed the impossibility of an invasion. His requirements for the success of a hammer-blow invasion were as follows.

    Diversionary bombing

    Soften up fighter command in the chosen area.

    Neutralise British infrastructure (radars, shore guns etc) with paratroopers and gliders

    Bring all German naval power to bear on a narrow corridor in which the Home Fleet would not easily operate.

    Kesselring was certainly right about one thing. The RAF did not have the power to destroy or even seriously damage an invasion fleet from the air. Everything would have depended on how quickly the Home Fleet would have rallied out and how well it could have interdicted German supply lines. Beach can see how a German army could have got a convincing foothold and how that German army could have defeated every British force at hand. But what he can’t see, pace Kesselring, is how the German army could have continually supplied that force. If fighter command had been defeated, perhaps a continual run of air supplies could have made a difference, but fighter command had not been defeated.

    Beach sometimes idly wonders whether the Nazis’ best chance was actually in late May while the British army was being rolled up in northern France. At that point the Home Fleet was thinly stretched as it began the Dunkirk operation. British morale was much lower than a fortnight later, after the ‘miracle’. German glider attacks and parachute attacks on Britain itself would have met fairly limited resistance; or at least it would have taken time to get the very few crack British and Dominion units on hand to the relevant part of the island. The invasion would have distracted from attempts to rescue the BEF and would have been a powerful tool in the hands of the ‘appeasers’ who wanted to negotiate their way out.  But would even the Wehrmacht have been capable of carrying that kind of an operation out on the back of Operation Fall Gelb?

    And a British poem from WW2 dedicated to Hitler:

    Napoleon tried it. The Dutch were on the way.
    A Norman did it — and a Dane or two.
    Some sailor King may follow one fine day;
    But not, I think, a low land-rat like you.
    14 June 2015: Stephen D writes in: See http://mr-home.staff.shef.ac.uk/hobbies/seelowe.txt for an account of the celebrated Sandhurst war-game at which they tried to simulate Seelowe. Disastrous. I believe that in subsequent games they had to put in artificial restrictions (no RAF/RN activity until 24 hours after the first landings) to get results which the German side could regard as successful: defined as, >50% of the invaders return. Some commentators have looked at the German plans in detail and concluded that no RAF/RN intervention was necessary. For example, plan was for invasion craft to sortie from various ports in line astern, turn in the Channel so as to pass parallel to the invasion beaches in line astern, each to turn 90 degrees so as to reach the beaches in line abreast. All this to be done with vessels slower than Caesar’s invasion fleet, with many of the barge crews conscripted Dutch, Belgian or French, in darkness, without rehearsal, without lights, and with instructions to open fire on any unidentified vessel coming into range. Not to mention that the RN didn’t actually have to shoot at the barges. Just steaming parallel to them at full speed would sink them. I do have a plan by which the Germans could have won in 1940: depends on Dev doing ’16 again. Details if you’re interested
    Leif wrote: ‘The greatest month in German history began 10 May 1940…’ One suspects your readers will be all over you for this line. [They were] The assumption is that greatness is defined in terms of military victory– a questionable assumption at best– [This line has now been ‘qualified’, the hidden and perhaps unpleasant prejudice is that German history is military] and that the 1940 invasion of France had a greater impact that Teutoberg Wald, Sedan, or any of Fredrick the Great’s victories. Germany invaded Norway in April 1940, and lost a few ships in the process. In Norway, the view is that the losses were great enough to make the Germans blink. There is, perhaps, some truth to this view.
    Keir writes in: My thoughts re. Hitler’s chances of a successful invasion of the UK: I feel that the German high command faced too many problems in planning
    the invasion.
    i) The Army would never trust the Luftwaffe to protect its troops from the RAF. The result was that it planned to disperse its invasion force along a 200-mile coastal front in England.
    ii) The German Navy would never have been able to ferry the invasion force across the channel and protect it from the Royal Navy. What landing craft did they have? What landing craft did anyone have before D-Day to accommodate the required numbers?
    ii) In any event, the invasion depended on the Luftwaffe, but its aircraft was tactical and not equipped for sustained strategic bombing.KMH writes: If Hitler had included the invasion of Britain very early as part of his ideology, he would have succeeded; but his real interest was in gaining territories in the East. Even then, the best strategy would have only been a lightning strike at Russia followed by a quick withdrawal back to a gigantic defensive line from Finland down through Romania, created using slave labor from the conquered areas. The line might even have lasted until the age of nuclear-tipped missiles (somewhat like the “iron curtain”). Without his ideology, Hitler had no coherent way of thinking about Britain. Example – his hesitation at Dunkirk. You don’t find much in Hitler’s writings about Britain compared to other countries. The invasion would have required an extensive network of collaborators (traitors to England) which would have needed years to put in place. But there was no hope for negotiations under Churchill and potential traitors were few and far between. Since England had broken the enigma code Germany could not have pulled any surprise punches during a military invasion. Any German technological superiority at the beginning wore off month by month, except for the V-1 and V-2. So, the answer is no, since the rationale for the invasion didn’t exist when it was needed. Whatever Hitler gained from bombing Britain was lost even more with the bombing raids on German cities. (Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.) He would have been better off if he had not initiated any military activity against Britain, only responding to any of Britain’s offensives. Nothing like hindsight…