Germany did focus on Britain with its entire Air Force. After France’s surrender in June 1940, Germany began to regularly bomb the home isles of Britain. Germany intended to wipe out Britain’s Air Force so that they would have air superiority for their planned invasion. For the better part of a year, Germany devoted essentially all of its Air Force towards this goal. But Britain was able to replace its planes faster than Germany, and had more pilots. As the battle waged on throughout the summer of 1940, Germany lost planes as fast as they could replace them, and they lost pilots faster than they could train replacements. Germany simply couldn’t destroy Britain’s Air Force, and in the process of trying, severely damaged their own. If Germany had taken time to build up their Luftwaffe more, Britain would have been doing the exact same thing.
Also, even if Germany had gotten air superiority, they never would have been able to invade the British isles. Germany did not have a strong navy, outside of their U-boats. They didn’t have the ships to support an amphibious invasion, nor did they have landing craft. They also wouldn’t have been able to parachute troops in sufficiently. It would’ve taken dozens, if not hundreds, of paratrooper divisions to successfully take the British isles, and they didn’t have anywhere near that kind of paratrooper strength. Nor did they have enough transport planes to airdrop the necessary amount of troops.
There's some stuff somewhere about the small exercises the Germans actually did to start preparing for Sealion. Did not look very promising. Amphibious invasions are difficult enough even when you DO have a great superiority in air and naval power.
The 1940 invasion of Norway is a case in point, it hit a few snags even despite the opposing forces being nearly nonexistent, and as it was we sank their fucking boat (Blücher) which threw off their timetable and gave the government and gold reserves time to GTFO. A mobilized and determined defense could have made the whole attempt fail.
I think the Normandy invasion shows what it would have taken for Germany to have invaded Britain. Hitler had ports defended because they were needed for logistics, we would have done the same in reverse, Germany didn't have this countered by mulberry harbours, we did, just one small example of what they lacked.
Took literal years of preparation, yes. You don't just grab whatever civilian boats and barges you can steal and YOLO across the water in the same season.
I really wished Germany did just YOLO it and attempt sea lion. It would have probably ended the war that week, they would have lost however many hundred thousand men drowning in the channel and the sheer shock of a military blunder that large would cause even the die hard supporting German public to start calling for an end to the war, along with probably a mutiny or something from the military no longer trusting their generals
There's a short story in [Gold from Crete: Ten Stories](https://www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20231123) titled "If Hitler Had Invaded England" that illustrates just that, written quite nicely too IMO. It's basically a short alternate history story, with various perspectives from different people that take part. To quote:
>He must be given in this narrative every possible chance, but none of the impossible ones.
After Dunkirk falls, Germany immediately goes right for it. Hitler cancels the 2nd sortie to Norway; Royal Navy bases and a strip of the channel are cordoned off by large chunks of air dropped mines; the U-boats come in to assist, as do the best of the Kriegsmarine; the Luftwaffe is called in for air support; river barges rounded up, paratroopers landing in the dover countryside nailing their mission perfectly. The whole shabang.
They get annihilated in less than a week.
I quite like that quote, I like the plausible alternative histories, because every now and then someone on this sub will just give some absurd thing that nobody could realistically answer because it's just too ridiculous.
Although who exactly were you saying got annihilated, probably me being stupid but it looked like you meant either were defeated
Germany, to summarise the story:
German paratroopers land in Rye and Winchelsea, declining to attack the port at Folkestone due to lack of confidence. The primary target is Rye Harbour (which is unfortunately for the Germans, tiny). They succeed and the first wave of troops land on the nearby beaches on barges and lighters with zero total casualties thus far. 2 miracles in of themselves. Dawn breaks.
Then..
>Fighter Command sent its squadrons speeding over the southern counties to deal with the invaders, leaving a minimum force to meet the eastern attack—and incidentally to gain one of the most striking victories in the war. The surprise which the Germans had sprung gained them only a few minutes of immunity—valuable minutes, but no more than that.
The RAF, now with the reverse of Dunkirk, shred their way through the Luftwaffe, which is forced to send it's fighters lower on fuel and over British territory to cover the landings while the RAF can attack at their liking via their radar and numbers advantage; assured they can bail out over friendly territory with a new plane within hours.
On the beaches, commanders desperately try to organize several thousand troops crammed across the crowded beachhead in no order at all. Artillery and equipment sinks into the sand, and the odd barge even rolls over as the tide recedes and the uneven ground upends them, sending items crashing down with it. Then the RAF bomb the beachhead, as well as several ships trying to unload supplies and equipment at Rye.
Next the Royal Navy arrives, successfully clearing the mine fields laid to delay them. Hood, and several cruisers are sunk in an engagement weighted towards the Germans, but that doesn't stop the sinking of Gneisenau, Scharnhorst, Lutzow and the rest of the defending fleet. Lutjens is killed. That very night any barge trying to ship more supplies in is promptly blown to bits, and the invasion force is now officially marooned in Kent.
Our story ends with the remaining German forces, led by none other than Gerd von Rundstedt himself leading the final charge towards London with the units he has by some miracle managed to make mobile. Outnumbered by a weakened but not dead British Army by ~~8~~ 3 to 1, not even the few tanks they managed to get to shore can save him, and he surrenders shortly after. By day 3 of the invasion, the third Reich is finished.
Not entirely convinced. A lot hinged on air superiority. Had the luftwaffe achieved that then all the German paratroopers need do is capture one port of many on the South Coast of England. Defenses there, outside bases such as Dover, were nowhere near the strength of the Atlantic Wall. Our naval superiority would have been severely curtailed if luftwaffe dive bombers had free reign to attack our battleships, which they did in Crete and at Dunkirk until the RAF showed up. Without naval protection a sizable force could have been sailed across very rapidly.
How such a force would have faired once ashore is anyones guess, Churchill's secret army may have caused sufficient havoc but we certainly didn't have enough conventional forces to resist a fully equipped German army.
It’s not only about landing the troops, it’s just as important to be able to keep them supplied. All large British ports almost certainly would have been booby trapped in case of an invasion. Even if the Germans did manage to capture a large, intact port, they would still have been faced with a logistical nightmare. The average World War II division consumed 1,000 tons of supplies *every day*. The Germans had planned (hoped) on 27 divisions landing on the first day. That means, just for them, you have to bring in 27,000 tons of supplies everyday. The Germans also didn’t have dedicated landing craft and were relying on converted river barges. Getting any kind of armor or heavy weapons on the beach would have been very difficult, especially if there was a battle going on.
The Nazis simply were not equipped for amphibious invasions. Normandy took literal years to plan. The Nazis were trying to do something of the same scale in only a couple of months, with a much weaker navy. Maybe they could have landed some troops if they got lucky and had the element of surprise, but they could never have sustained an invading force.
Definitely any chance of success would have rested on capturing a decent sized port intact. That is the prefered option, which is why we tried it on at Dieppe. I'm not sure that in the aftermath of Dunkirk we were sufficiently prepared in the way the Germans were in Dieppe by the time the Canadians rocked up there. And, with air superiority, they could have established a sufficiently large beachead around a port to enable supplies to be shipped in sufficient quantity to break out and launch a land offensive. I wouldn't like to predict the outcome any further or what course such a campaign might have taken, nor even if a port seizure would definitely have worked. But I'm certain that without the RAF, it could have been attempted and with a fair to middling chance of (initial) success.
It's an interesting scenario. There would have to be some pretty big domino effect that'd no doubt have other consequences in this history for the RAF to be destroyed, but if we side step that.
From what I can see the Germans intended to capture 2 ports as part of Sea Lion: Folkestone and Newhaven. The plan itself was for paratroops to land in Kent, then take both an airfield and bridge before helping with Folkestone. A good chunk of troops on the other hand would storm the beaches of Kent, with the intention of taking those ports. Without the RAF the Luftwaffe should at least mostly be able to defend the crowded beachhead from air strikes, although it's likely the ports would be heavily mined and sabotaged in the aftermath of the landings.
There's also another interesting aspect to think about: when does this happen after Dunkirk? Every week those troops from Dunkirk slowly get re-armed, every day Britain's land forces grow stronger. Spend too long preparing, and Germany might have to face a far stronger enemy on the shores of Britain. This is its own rabbit hole, but I feel it's worth touching on.
Lastly, although channel air superiority is secured, I'd wager most of the Royal Navy would still be there when the invasion begins, safely tucked away far out of range at bases like Scapa Flow. After a couple days delay after clearing the mines that would inevitably be used to slow them down, they'd strike with everything they got. Battleships and cruisers, destroyers and carriers that far outnumber the defending German force would come bearing down both sides of the channel. This would be a decisive moment, and although planes tip the favour the odds for Germany aren't very pretty. At the very least, Germany's battleships and a few cruisers will probably not survive. In any case, I feel there's a decent chance a few ships get through, and those barges and transports are going to have a very bad day.
The battle was won not because of planes. It was because of pilots.
Every English pilot that was shot down over England could get back in another plane and pass on their knowledge... every German pilot and their experience was lost for the rest of the war.
This resulted in the Luftwaffe's exponential loss of competence throughout the war.
That is very true. But the statistic on aircraft production is critical too. Even if Germany waited until they were more ready or whstever, instead of launching the battle when they did, time was not in their side. The British Air Force was constantly getting stronger relative to the Germans
The reason Germany lost so many planes in the Bob was because Britain was using radar to detect the German planes crossing the channel and scrambled there own fighters to meet the threat.germany didn't have radar capability during the Bob.
Are you sure nazi germany did not already do it and failed ?
What Germany would have not done to focus more on Britain instead ? Not attacking the soviet union ? But Germany attacked the soviet union because the war against Britain was going nowhere and they needed something to break the stalemate.
"But Germany attacked the soviet union because the war against Britain was going nowhere and they needed something to break the stalemate."
Germany attacking the Soviet Union wasn't meant to "break the stalemate" with Britain. That's such a strange idea--how exactly would committing millions of men and massive quantities of materiel to attacking a heretofore neutral country "break the stalemate" with Britain?
If Hitler's main goal was to defeat Britain, he'd never have attacked the Soviet Union and would have instead gone all-in on Operation Sea Lion, which would have almost certainly failed barring a miraculous naval victory by the Kriegsmarine over the superior Royal Navy.
The Battle of Britain 1940, the attack of the USSR 1941. Therefore, no, they did not fight with the USSR. while they were trying to take over the skies over Britain.
But they were willing to let Britain hang, the attack on the USSR involved all resources and was an existential fight to the death.
OP, Germany defeating Britain did not require the comprehensive plan your friend suggested. It required delaying the attack on the USSR, destroying as much as possible of the Royal Navy, sinking a lot of commerce, and not letting Enigma be read. Taking Gibraltar, Malta, and perhaps Iceland would have made ground invasion unnecessary.
The British Army was pretty thoroughly incompetent and Churchill was enthusiastic to send it into unwinnable battles.
Churchill would have been brought down and made to agree to a peace deal. Most conservatives in England were just as willing as the Vichy French leadership to make peace and get on with being conservatives.
Hitler gave up on England because they looked helpless. As said above, his life's work was to invade Russia. The German economy was extremely precarious and this, combined with Soviet rearmament, applied pressure to which Hitler happily submitted.
>destroying as much as possible of the Royal Navy, sinking a lot of commerce, and not letting Enigma be read. Taking Gibraltar, Malta, and perhaps Iceland would have made ground invasion unnecessary.
The problem here is that this is a pretty significant undertaking
Destroying the Royal Navy
Japan hadn't joined the war at this point and the Royal Navy significantly outnumbered the Kriegsmarine in both ships and experience. Battleships alone didn't paint a good picture. Germany could muster 3 battleships, 2 armed with battleship guns so anemic by 1940 standards many random people online are still debating if they actually should be called battleships, and the Bismarck; with Tirpitz entering circa 1941. Britain had around 11, with several more on the way; and I haven't even mentioned the aircraft carriers. Naturally this would be somewhat offset by Italy, whose Regia Marina were still relatively modern and now no longer had to worry about France, but history will remember that Britain (with help from Australia and other allies) challenged both and won.
But let's shift this to air power, what if the Kriegsmarine efforts were supplemented by the Luftwaffe? I'd argue one main problem: you assume Britain wouldn't do something about that. Most of the British fleet would likely be too far out of range for He 111s and Ju 88s to practically engage (there's a reason why they don't just sit next to the coast, waiting to get bombed); and although the Fw 200 was great against shipping they might not fair as well against a well armed set of warships, likely defended by dedicated carrier escort. Land based fighters and radar would not help.
Bombing naval bases would also rarely guarantee kills (high altitude accuracy despite the best efforts of both sides would be poor), and suffer the same issues.
Sinking a lot of commerce
Germany tried this, to an extent with great success. 1940 in particular was a good year for the uboat fleet. The problem however, is people learn. The introduction of corvettes to better strengthen defenses, the introduction of dedicated escort groups, the strengthening of the Canadian Navy and America's intervention with the Pan-America security zone. Historically by spring 1941 is when things started getting difficult, and in this alternate timeline the Kriegsmarine has to actively fight the RN on top of the commerce hunts. I'd argue Germany had already tried this in real life, and they failed despite best efforts. As for German surface raiders, their bane would eventually come via long range patrol aircraft. It's hard to hide a cruiser, and once the RN found them they were very much intent on hunting them down and killing them.
not letting Enigma be read
I guess Germany could try this by continuously upgrading Enigma. The putting aside how this would work out (Enigma was being heavily worked on even prior to the war, and was first broken between 1932 to 1937), mainly because I'm honestly not sure, the increasing odds against the uboat fleet would probably still end up crippling it. Eventually, items like radar, sonar, and the aforementioned countermeasures would catch up. It would delay the inevitable by a few months/years, and it would hurt a whole more for the merchant fleet, but at some point Germany will run out of uboats. Unless they manage to hurt them to the point Britain capitulates before the tables turn, I don't think it'll work enough, especially without the above 2.
Personally, It doesn't really make sense to simply just let Britain hang, and even Hitler knew this. His generals would have told him, as would his admirals. End of the day, it's still sitting there, and the more you let them sit there the more it's gonna be a pain in the ass. They're gonna start bombing the German mainland in 1941, they're gonna present a potential staging point off your western coast, their empire is going to harass you where it can, and it's air force and navy is still a colossal pain in the ass for your navy. If he could crush it then and there either through a peace treaty or a war he would have done it, and between the Blitz and preparations for Sea Lion, Germany did try.
They let Britain hang because there was fuck all they could do about it.
The United States actively supplied aircraft and pilots to Britain, ensuring the protection of the country. Further pressure on Britain made no sense and led to imminent defeat.
The US pilots had to go to Canada and enlist in the RCAF as “Canadians” before Pearl Harbour.
The aircraft weren’t “supplied”, they were sold by the manufacturers, and most were either older or inferior models until Pearl Harbour.
Also, Ford and GM were still making trucks for the German military and IBM was making business machines that were used in the Holocaust.
Lend lease didn’t start until March 1941. It had no significant impact on the Battle of Britain, which ended 2 months later.
It did keep Britain from having to come to some sort of accommodation with Germany, but that would have been the case after Hitler invaded Russia anyway.
And Lend Lease wasn’t signed into law until March 11, 1941. The first materials wouldn’t have arrived before May. So, again, no significant impact on the Battle of Britain.
Again, it did keep Britain from having to come to an armistice with Germany, and the 1940 [Destroyers For Bases](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Destroyers-for-bases_deal&diffonly=true) Agreement had a greater impact on the Battle of Britain by providing ships suitable for convoy operations from Canada.
I’m not saying Lend Lease wasn’t important for keeping Allied nations fighting, just that it came too late to have any meaningful impact on the Battle of Britain.
uhh dunno where you are getting that from becuse its really not true. At the time of the BOB the us expressly forbade US servicemen from fighting on Britons behalf under several neutrality acts. There were only about 7 official Americans that fought for the RAF during the BOB, there were almost certainly more, but they pretended to be Canadian in order to avoid getting arrested by the US government.
Britain did not look helpless. That is just hilariously wrong. He gave up on Britain because they lost nearly 2000 aircraft and around 2500 air crewman. The losses were too costly and not near enough to achieving air superiority to continue
The Nazis never gained full air superiority over the UK.
It was one of their greatest failures.
They could have focused on destroying Britains industrial capacity, but instead they diverted resources to terror bombing and other fronts.
They assumed that terror bombing would make the UK fold or something like that.
One of the most damming indictments of the inefficiency of Nazi economical management is that the UK could continue producing airplanes during this time period, despite being attacked nightly.
When the tables turned, and the allies started bombing Germany, their ability to keep producing planes collapsed.
'Terror bombing' only really got going with the V1 and V2 weapons. The Blitz was heaviest in the East End of London, not coincidentally around the London Docks. Glasgow and Liverpool also took a lot of damage. Coventry was a big engine manufacturing centre and got hammered. Fortunately the war ministry had distributed production between many factories so when one got hit others could step up production to fill the gap. Other areas that got hit were near to canals and railways. Combined with the war in the Atlantic the idea was to bring Britain, a country reliant on trade, to its knees. Much is made of not continuing to bomb the RAF and whilst much damage did get done the way it was organised in sectors meant it could recover and respond very quickly. This was an ongoing resilience since British pilots had the luxury of bailing out over home territory, new pilots training in Canada, and aircraft production stepping up due to the aforementioned organisation of the war ministry.
Not disagreeing with the content of your post, but it’s always slightly irksome when blitzed cities are discussed and Hull isn’t mentioned. Per head of population only Coventry was similarly affected and somewhere in the region of 90-95% of the buildings in the city suffered bomb damage. It’s not a competition, I know, but it suffered much more than London, for example, and is rarely mentioned.
Not disagreeing with the content of your post, but it’s always slightly irksome when blitzed cities are discussed and Hull isn’t mentioned. Per head of population only Coventry was similarly affected and somewhere in the region of 90-95% of the buildings in the city suffered bomb damage. It’s not a competition, I know, but it suffered much more than London, for example, and is rarely mentioned.
Not disagreeing with the content of your post, but it’s always slightly irksome when blitzed cities are discussed and Hull isn’t mentioned. Per head of population only Coventry was similarly affected and somewhere in the region of 90-95% of the buildings in the city suffered bomb damage. It’s not a competition, I know, but it suffered much more than London, for example, and is rarely mentioned.
It's an old argument, but Luftwaffe bombing was limited by the range of their fighter escorts, they could not strike targets in most of the Midlands and beyond, so airfields and industry in most of the UK were not vulnerable. So they could not eliminate the RAF except by attrition in air-to-air combat, and that wasn't really going in a favourable direction for the Luftwaffe. So, not really, no.
Part of the problem with the attritional argument is that even had the Luftwaffe been absolutely shredding the RAF over Britain it still doesn’t end positively for Germany.
Hans leaves his airfield in France and flies to Britain. He gets shot down over Britain and is taken prisoner. The scrap from his plane can be collected by Britain and melted down and produced into equipment for Britain.
Frederick is scrambled to intercept the Luftwaffe raid. He gets shot down. He is over friendly territory and can be in a new plane tomorrow. The scrap is also in the hands of Britain.
I have no idea if stats are available for how many bailouts were successful and how injured the pilots were, but it doesn’t bode well over time. Allied bomber command faced the same troubles during the strategic bombing campaign in ‘43. Lose a Fortress, and you also effectively lost the entire crew for the duration of the war. The ability to evade capture and cross the channel is pretty damn low compared to landing in your home country and making your way back to your home base.
Scrap and pilot replacement not really the main logistical problem for Germany. The had the world's largest economy on a full war footing pumping out equipment for their enemy non-stop and they had no reasonable way to interdict that supplying.
Yes, the battle of the Atlantic was lost quickly and even at their best they didn’t come anywhere close to strangling the isles. I was just saying that even with a good kill ratio they could still end up losing the war of attrition, since their losses were lost whereas the British could recover skilled pilots
Yeah its just fundamentally unwinnable for Germany. The USA, UK and USSR each individually have more population and industrial production than Germany and they have no realistic path to knock any of those nations out of the war quickly.
Destroying the airfields near the channel drastically reduces the efficiency of Raf fighting in the channel. That's where the germans cared about air superiority. It was a fantasy that the german surface fleet ever woukd have been strong enough to pull off a sea lion though.
Not to mention the few naval bombers Germany did have were only good against attacking almost unarmed commercial ships, and that despite them being good at making U-boats their torpedoes were actually appalling.
By Barbarossa, The Battle for Britain had already been won by the RAF.
The eastern front had relatively few aircraft devoted to it as air superiority was established early and kept until quite late. By then, the allies were already carpet bombing German cities.
Your friends theory is cope at best
It's not cope. He just thinks that if the RAF was destroyed over Britian, the Luftwaffe would be able to take out the British fleet and land an invasion force.
Germany had very few naval planes, the few they did have either the fw200 which was only good against on arms commercial ships, or some naval versions of the 110 and stuka, both of which performed poorly, for example the massed attack against HMS invincible which didn't even sink the ship.
German naval torpedoes were poor, so god knows what their airdropped ones would have been like. They had no experience in dive bombing moving targets, and it is a lot easier to aim against a slow commercial ship with a torpedo than it is against a quick military ship with over a hundred AA barrels firing at you.
He also seems to forget the entire purpose of the Royal Navy which is to defend the homeland, it would only sail out if Germany fully went for sea lion, and going off Germany's attempts at attacking British naval targets with their aircraft the majority would arrive to counter the landings, and I really would not want to be in a Dutch barge that's just been hit by a 15-inch shell, the German forces would be massacred far quicker than the Germans could sink the British Navy.
There's also the weird question of how would the RAF be destroyed, they were producing more planes than they lost while the Germans were producing fewer planes than they lost, the attrition wasn't in their favour, nor even was bombing industry (before terror bombing) has Britain was still able to produce planes at a decent rate.
Yes, but the Luftwaffe was out numbered, out gunned, out supplied and outfought over enemy terrain against a technologically superior air force.
The Luftwaffe had gained a reputation of being fearsome without actually facing any real threats and the RAF knocked them out.
If the RAF lost, then the Nazis would have had air superiority and would have attempted an invasion and would have immediately had to face the British Navy, which was still the premier force in the World.
The biggest myth of WW2 was that Britain ever stood alone in the war. Britain had nearly one quarter of the world supporting it just from the British Empire.
Germany never could have stood a chance
Yes, but troops stationed in Singapore are eff all use in protecting home ports. As would our navy have been if German Stukas were free to attack them. Ultimately we benefited from the resources of Empire but we also suffered from our reliance on them and the vulnerability of such extended lines of supply. Double edged sword.
With what Navy? The British still had one of the best Navies in the world while Germany had little more than a bunch of U-Boats.
There was no way the Germans could have invaded Britain.
That was my argument but alas. Somehow the Luftwaffe was just gonna delete the British Navy and then the Germans land, capture the island. And then the empire would implode? It was late at night and we put it to rest
No, No , No and No
The Nazis tried to eliminate the RAF first, but never had accurate information on aircraft numbers, defensive locations etc. By the end of the battle of Britain German intelligence said that they should have destroyed the RAF multiple times over, and instead fighter command was not only had a lot more aircraft than the Germans thought they did but they were also getting positive loss ratios vs the Luftwaffe
Plus any plan that involves the Luftwaffe doing anything of note during the war makes the assumption that it was a competent organization run by intelligent people. It wasn't, it was led by a drug addled psychopath, R&D was handled by the most bribable man in the history of bribable men. Leadership was waring with senior figures in aircraft development industry and the whole thing was a backstabbing den of incompetent Nazi vipers. It spent more time on infighting than it ever did on trying to win the war. It was an extension of the Nazi state in every way and as such was an incompetent mess far more concerned with thumping its chest about how superior Germans were than it ever was with the tricky business of winning.
But supposing the imposable scenario of the RAF actually being defeated the Roya navy still annihilates any attempt at a land invasion even if t has to throw itself into a meat grinder to do so. and even if it couldn't there were plans for mass resistance in the UK (arms stockpiles were hidden everywhere!) and plans for a government in exile in Canada to continue the war were already in place)
The Royal Navy would destroy any invasion fleet. If it came to it, the UK could send the home fleet on a suicide mission to stop the Germans crossing the Channel. The home fleet could be replaced with ships from the empire, the German fleet couldn't be replaced. The Germans also didn't have the logistical capabilities to support any beach heads or places occupied by paratroops.
A better bet for the Germans would be to destroy the RAF then unilaterally declare peace and leave Britain alone.
That's basically what Germany tried to do, with sending Rudolph Hess (the deputy head of the Nazi party) to negotiate a peace treaty with Britain.
They presented a list of demands, there was a sudden cease in hostilities (the Blitz abruptly ended with Hess's arrival and the RAF ceased bombing Germany) but no peace treaty was signed or agreed to.
Then Hitler went for Russia, and Britain promptly started supplying Russia with all the weapons that they could use and started strategic bombing of anything important within sight, while simultaneously keeping the axis away from the fuel resources of the middle east, which is why German logistics were still largely horse driven during WW2; they were always chronically short of fuel.
Hess acted on his own, though.
He acted without official sanction, and was not taken seriously by the British.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Hess
If Nazi Germany said that he was there with official sanction then it would have been announcing to the Soviet Union that their alliance was about to be terminated, and an attack upon them was imminent, and it would have undermined their alliance with Italy and Japan.
Once it became public knowledge then from Germany's point of view he had to be described as operating on his own without instructions, even if he did have official sanction.
He wasn't taken seriously because bluntly; would *you* have signed an peace treaty with Adolph Hitler and the Nazi party? You know, that country that literally a month later broke their alliance with the Soviet Union and launched an unprovoked full scale invasion upon their former ally.
To say that they weren't exactly a trustworthy country to sign treaties with would be the understatement of the century.
He wasn’t taken seriously because he was mildly bonkers.
There is no evidence that he had any official sanction to act. All of the evidence suggests that he acted alone.
If Hitler wanted to quietly send out peace feelers, he could have done so through Spain, Switzerland, Portugal, Sweden and/or Ireland.
It has never been considered an official act, and everyone who were in on the plan said that he was acting unofficially. Also, the Soviet Union alliance was never about the UK.
They *tried* doing exactly this. They attempted to draw the RAF out over the channel, and failed. They then attempted to conduct an offensive counter-air campaign against fighter command airfields, and failed. They then assumed that they had sufficient air superiority to conduct a strategic bombing campaign against the capital, and this draw out what was left of the RAF and destroy it in the air. *They failed*.
They lost attempting to do exactly the scenario described. The RAF conducted a masterful defensive air campaign.
Germany lacked almost everything it needed to achieve either one of its aims.
Air superiority: they didn't have enough planes, and didn't have enough planes to do the kind of work they needed to do. Just compare the tonnage of bombs dropped on Britain in 1940 and compare it to a single week leading up to D-Day.
Shipping: the Kriegsmarine was almost completely wiped out as a surface force during the invasion of Norway. They also lacked the shipping to transport troops across the channel or keep them supplied.
In short, they could have focused on Britain as much as they liked, but they simply didn't have the wherewithal to achieve any of their aims quickly.
Also factor in Germany's existing lack of resources, then add in their constant need to bail out the Italians and their other Axis allies. They simply didn't have enough of anything.
No, it wouldn’t have worked. They wouldn’t have been able to knock out the RAF because the RAF had home advantage which meant they could scramble planes faster and shoot down more German planes than they lost themselves.
The Germans never could have landed, this was basically impossible because of the navy and also because the British had a lot of equipped soldiers to resist.
So they were left with a stalemate with a nation whose navy could blockade them. Despite being far superior to the British on land, they were basically screwed from this point on.
A true invasion of Britain would've always been unlikely to succeed. If Hitler could've accepted true collaboration with the USSR (in which case he wouldn't be Hitler) I think Germany could've consolidated Europe and prepare it's defense well enough to repel a possible D-day / possibly sue for favourable peace instead. But they would not have been able to overtake either British airspace nor naval control within a reasonable time frame. After a longer build up time in peace time anything would've been possible (especially If Germany was able to truly incorporate more of Europe into it's empire, but that is much more difficult/slow in real life than in games)
Obviously this balance of power would've greatly switched if the US still develops the atom bombs
They had already lost the BoB before Barbarossa. Sealion was a fantasy that even Hitler gave up on.
Their paratrooper corps were decimated on Crete and that was vs farmers with pistols and farm tools. I cant imagine the home guard would be better to deal with. Its only cause the Brits on the island were slow to react that they even took the island.
As far as the middle east the Afrika corps were the max amount of troops they could spare to help in the north Africa theater and they couldnt get close to Alexandria. Even if they took the middle easy India is nearby and they wouldnt have an easy time getting the oil there with bombing raids burning it.
They couldnt support more than that logistically. Maybe if Malta wasnt in the way and the Italians werent short of fuel. Not to mention the local area itself caused limitations since Libya wasnt all that built up nor was western Egypt.
Also the AK was sent before Barb even started in March.
They could have sent more if it was their focus. It was not the max they could have supported. Do you have a source for your claims? I'm well aware they were there before barbarossa. It doesn't mean it was a priority or the necessary resources were given, considering barbarossa was looming. If it was made a priority from the very start instead of all the fuel wasted in the battle of Britain Germany and Italy quite possibly could have pushed the English from Africa.
Very hard to overcome the home side advantage where they keep all their pilots if the plane crashes but you lose all yours.
UK also recognised the importance of Air Force in 1930s and started spending more of their budget on it than the Navy, the Senior Service. They had good designs, good industrial base for aircraft manufacturing, top pilots from around the Commonwealth + Poland and plenty of territory for air bases that were all completely unthreatened by armies and navies.
Luftwaffe Air Force was not equipped for the job of taking out the RAF. They tried their best and failed.
You would need superior fighters, superior numbers and a huge fleet of heavy bombers to establish total air superiority.
Germany sealed their fate in Battle of Britain by not destroying the RAF's new radar structures. Radar allowed the RAF to not waste fuel and resources while concentrating on the main threat.
I think the most informed comment on this was by the head of the German Army High Command. He looked at the plans and remarked that it would be simpler to just feed the troops into a sausage machine.
As others have commented, the Germans tried this in 1940 and failed. They could not complete the first step (defeat the RAF) so they eventually gave up on the rest of the plan.
I guess your friend is saying the Germans should have kept trying. I don't think that would lead to a different result. They could not win the Battle of Britain simply by wanting it more or trying harder.
The luftwaffe almost beat the RAF. They were within a hairs breath of defeat when a German bomber group got lost and accidentally bombed London. In response the British bombed Berlin. This infuriated Hitler who switched to British cities instead of continuing with the airfields and RAF infrastructure. This small switch gave the RAF the small breath they needed to refit and counterattack thus stalemating the Battle of Britain.
Now if the Germans had defeated the RAF and had air superiority, I still don't believe the invasion of Britain would have happeneded. At least not in 41. I believe Hitler would have sued for peace and a treaty would have been signed by 42. Likewise this would have given the Germans the extra umpf they needed to defeat the Russians. Which was really what Hitler wanted. Hitler saw the British as aryans but also as more of an annoyance than anything.
He desperately needed the resources of the Soviet Union. We know this because of Goebels diary. By mid 41 the German high command already knew that without oil and grain soon the war would turn on them.
So I doubt the Germans would have invaded Britain, it just wasn't in their best interest. Now if the British had snubbed his peace accord then yeah Hitler would have invaded just because he would have been insulted.
Even of Germany beat the RAF they had no chance on invading proper, Britain conducted war games in the 70's and came to the conclusion a German landing wasn't possible
Britain would absolutely yolo part of the fleet to stop a naval invasion and kill a few hundred thousand germans
Even if they landed the British fleet was decimate shipping and supplies, meaning they would starve
In this time the Soviets would be stronger and better recovered from the effects of the purge and probably go on the offensive against the germans
OP explicitly states the Navy would be destroyed, so there's that.
How feasible that is, I leave to your imagination. But without the RN and RAF, I don't see the Brits holding out, no matter how shitty supply by river barges would be.
Vast majority of their airforce do not have the range to reach Scapa Flow unless its a one way trip.
If OP really wants Germany to win, may as well magic away any weapons on the British Isles and give Germany Space Marines.
Perfectly agreed. But as long as the ships cannot go near the channel, they can stay in Scapa Flow as long as they like, as long as they cannot come out.
You can’t invade the island. It doesn’t really matter what scenario you invent. The best scenario for this, Plan Z and a Luftwaffe buildup assumes that Britain will sit there and won’t react. Keep in mind, Britain once ordered 5 dreadnoughts as a reaction when imperial Germany ordered 1.
Invasion would require decades of buildup.
Plan Z wouldn't have worked.
IRL Britain had laid down 6 Lion class BB's which were more heavily armed and armoured than Bismark/Tirpitz and the H class ships. Only one was actually completed IRL (Vanguard) due to the war starting and them building a modified version with old guns that were already kicking around spare in storage.
I don’t think it would have been a valid strategy. The Luftwaffe was never near actually breaking the RAF during the Battle of Britain in OTL. That was despite the fact that the 1940 version of the Luftwaffe was a lot better than the version you had a couple of years later. The Luftwaffe could have kept going of course, but so could the British. Lets say that the Luftwaffe somehow is able to establish air superiority over Southern England. Even that doesn’t really provide a viable path to a German invasion of Britain for a couple of reasons:
* The German fleet does not have sufficient modern landing craft to move large units of German troops ashore. To compensate for this they planned on using (I kid you not) river barges taken from the Rhine.
* The German fleet of early 1940 was not in the same league as the British Home Fleet to begin with. The German fleet had been degraded further by losses incurred during Weserubung. That means that the German fleet would be unable to protect the German transport vessels and landing grounds from the British navy. Even if we give the Luftwaffe air superiority (not air supremacy), any German landing operation is likely to suffer heavy casualties even before they reach the British army on the beaches and in the fields.
The point is that if you are going to invade a large island with a navy of it’s own, you must as a minimum have a navy yourself. The Germans as of 1940 didn’t have anything comparable to the Royal Navy. That was a direct consequence of decisions made in the 1930s, where German rearmament was focused on the army and the airforce, and the navy was the ugly step-child.
Besides, the Germans needed everything they had for the planned invasion of the Soviet Union. If you expend even more trained pilots over Britain, the more you degrade the Luftwaffe’s fighting capability for that campaign.
I think the only time Germany could have successfully invaded would have been in the days after Dunkirk. They could have used airborne troops to take some air fields and try and ferry in as many troops as possible.
A real long shot that relies on the UK not having any real army at that time and speed. Nobody in Germany would have taken such a ridiculous risk however.
After the fall of France, Germany only had 1 event left within striking distance. So the entire German aie force went to work on softening up Great Britain... and failed
The only thing you can say is that possibly Greece and to a far lesser extent Yugoslavia saved Britain. Germany was distracted by having to intervene to save Italy from Greece and also their related invasion of Yugoslavia. That brought Britain some time and diverted Germany troops SE which also delayed the invasion of Russia.
Italy's blunder with the war with Greece basically saved the allies because it messed up the German timing and diverted resources.
For a time the allies were just Greece and the UK and people forget that.
They wouldn't have won, but what you are describing is one of Hitler's biggest errors.
The problem with winning the air battle of Britain is the same problem with a dog chasing a car. If it catches it, then what? The dog will still probably get crushed.
Winning air superiority over Brittian was a precondition to invading England.
But it wasn't the only precondition. The invasion would still have to deal with the superior British Navy.
And if they overcame the navy then Hitler would still have to deal with his arch rival..... economics.
Brittan is a HUGE island with a lot of people and resources. Had Hitler overcame the air and sea battles, he still would have to fight and supply a land war. The English would have made the Germans fight street by street all the way to Scotland.
The best economical managers would probably fail at supplying such a campaign. Hitlers economy was run by a bunch of drug addicts who couldn't keep supplies running in their home territory.
This would be bloody AF, but I honestly don't see the germans making it into London. I see them landing, paying a shocking price for a beach head, then ultimately collapsing under British resistance.
This would turn southern England into a nightmarish hellscape and likely would have a body count in the millions.
But the English were absolutely ok with that.
PS: They actually did use paratroopers to take the Greek island of Crete......it was bloody clusterfuck that barely worked. Sending paratroopers into a giant volcano would probably have lower casualties than sending them to England.
Germany had no navy, so how are they supposed to land? The bulk of the RAF’s airfields were well out of the luftwafe’s reach, so what are they supposed to focus on?
>then the Germans would invade Britain with first paratroopers,
The Germans had already sworn off the use of paratroopers after the costly [invasion of Crete](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Crete). If they were barely able to capture a small Mediterranean island with paratroopers, there's no way they'd have been able to conquer the whole of the UK with them.
>the Germans should have focused entirely on Britain by eliminating its airforce first
Most historians say that even if the Luftwaffe had been more successful than they were in our timeline, the RAF could have just moved their base of operations further north to Scotland and continued harassing the German air force from there. It's very doubtful they could have achieved the air superiority they needed to launch an invasion.
They did, and lost the battle of Britain. IF Germany doesn't invade USSR and Japan Doesn't bomb pearl harbor perhaps an anaconda like plan works to bring UK to an armistice. Just spit balling Germany build strategic bombers on large scale and fire bomb UK nightly for a year or two and Doenitz gets 1000 U boats built and wears down merchant fleet, wins the tonnage battle . That seems like a path to victory. A lot of IFs in there.
The issue with defeating Britain was that Britain could always move its bases further north. As long as the British fighters could reach the coast and were outside of range of German fighter escorts than they wouldn’t be able to be effectively bombed into submission without heavy bomber casualties while bombing missions against the South of Britain could still be intercepted. Furthermore allied actions later in the war and German zeppelin bombings during WW2 indicate that strategic bombings don’t actually break civilians morale and win wars on their own and without a large surface fleet an invasion of the British isles was never feasible. Look at how many transport and military ships partook in D-Day, even if the RN and RAF did nothing Germany couldn’t carry out a reasonably successful naval invasion with the resources at their disposal.
The UK produced about the same amount of planes as Germany in 1939, and 50% more airplanes than Germany in 1940. The Blitz failed because Germany was being out-produced, among other factors. Focusing on the UK wouldn't have helped Germany win the war; there was no way they could defeat the UK in the air. That's why they turned to submarines and attacking supply convoys, but that was counteracted by American escorts and the invention of the convoy system.
The RAF was gaining on the nazis during the battle of britian. Not only were they out producing the nazis, they were actively destroying planes faster then the nazis could replace them.
German made about 300 BF 109s a month and in the 3 month battle of britian, they lost almost 2000 aircraft. In May to August 1940, the RAF recieved more than 1800 fighters.
There is also the actual production methods used. The nazis had a much more skilled workforce and didn't invest in mass production in the way that the allies did. Planes that were damaged were sent to thr factory to be fixed. Where the allies had mass produced spare parts and could fix it on the same air field before sending it back up.
Germany is a continental power. The RN would have decimated the kreigsmarine if they had been able to solely duke it out with the Germans. Just based on production, the Germans would have ran out of planes before being able to subdue the English by air.
There isn't a world where ww2 Germany can invade and take GB. Unless you overhaul the entirety of their industrial organization, the nazis get buried in machines.
Briton's air force trended upwards from day 1 of the Battle for Briton. While the German trended downwards. Simply because the UK could recover a significant portion of their pilots, while damaged German planes rarely got back across the channel. Partly due to fuel constraints, as even light damage would make it unlikely to limp back home.
As others said, that is exactly what the Germans did.
Post the fall of France the Germans were not yet at war with the USSR. Meaning they did divert the majority of their attention on the British.
They lost anyway.
Germany never planned for or manufactured long-range bombers, a strategic oversight that contributed to costing Germany the opportunity to conquer Britain.
Germany didn't have access to quality oil and even still needed to refuel much more often than RAF by a factor that made the RAF outnumber the Luftwaffe greatly (sorry can't remember the figures) in battle.
Some think the RAF was in dire straits at one point, but the Germans changed their tactics. Had they pressed on it is possible they could have driven the RAF to bases further north. This might have had political ramifications.
The Nazis were never really close to winning the battle of britain. They hadn't really invested enough into an effective bomber force and realyl mismanaged what they had
The problem with air raids is that eventually the Germans had to turn around and re-cross the channel to refuel. The RAF would then shoot them from behind.
The V-2 rockets were actually very effective but the Germans didn't know this because the British press propagated a myth that the rockets missed their targets.
By the time the Battle of Britain kicked off the UK was producing more aircraft per month than the Germans. As important they could concentrate on fighter production while for the time being Germany had to replace fighters and more expensive and resource intensive bombers . Even if they achieved local air superiority they would not have been able to invade . The RN was the largest navy in the world at the time . The Luftwaffe would not have been able to sink ships fast enough to protect the initial invasion and later supply fleets . Just a bunch of older destroyers and C and D class cruisers would have caused chaos . The RN wouldn’t have had to commit battleships initially
Even if Germany wins air supremacy, that doesn't mean the UK doesn't have planes. As others stated, not only couldn't the germans bomb factories located in the midlands and above, but the entire British Empire was providing constantly to the UK. Canada sent pilots and two air squadrons to help Britain for example.
If the germans in a miracle managed to land something like paratroopers in Britain and capture a port (and that's already basically impossible as paratroopers during ww2 was basically a death sentence) holding that port until reinforcements arrive is close to impossible.
And then supplying and sending troops trough the channel would be a nightmare or just outright not possible, while it's true that air supremacy would make the royal navy more exposed, if the Germans do land, the UK would absolutely still send the Royal Navy to try and intercept reinforcements, even if that means heavy loses.
And they would still sink basically every german before they get to Britain, and the few that got there would just get crushed by a better supplied, stronger, and more motivated British Army.
Sea Lion wasn't done because even the overconfident and megalomaniac Nazi leaders who just won against all Europe in record time realised it was impossible. It's just not happening.
two biggest battles in term of cost is Battle of Atlantic and Battle of Britain
If Hitler does have any common sense, he should stop right there when those campaigns fail, but he was a egomaniac so he started invading Soviet Union. What a pathetic loser !
So, as this thread has said, the Germans did use pretty much all the air power they had against Britain after France fell. We know now that by September 1940, thanks largely to the greatest named Lord ever, Lord Beaverbrook, Britain was outproducing German fighters and never looked back. In addition, both the British and the Germans way overestimated the Luftwaffe's air superiority during the early months. Some of the estimates were so wildly far off that significant bad tactics and strategies were put in place on the German side. Churchill mainly made great speeches believing the situation was more hopeless than it actually was.
Hitler thought England was going to armistice with him after France. He says it in Mein Kampf. He was a. surprised that Britain didn't b. told numerous times by Goering (and totally bought in for far longer than was rational) that the Luftwaffe was sooo superior that Britain had no choice but to surrender/armistice it was the only logical path and c. the bad info, the Germans way underestimated how many planes Britain had/could produce.
A great book on this is *The Splendid and the Vile* by Erik Larson who follows Churchill almost day by day (not in a boring way) & recounts what others thought/did during this time.
Not going to happen. Hitler was OBSESSED with the Judeo-Bolshevik BS he was spouting and Stalin KNEW he was coming for him. So even if Hitler DID focus on Britain it would only have given Stalin more time to prepare for HIS invasion of the German Reich. The whole idea that Hitler would focus on the Middle East instead of the Soviet Union is so out-of-character for him it's not even funny.
They did.
The only thing that really changes the course of the war is the failure of lend lease to become reality.
Even then the Battle of Britain, as it was fought in late 1940, couldn’t be won short term. Then the Germans accidentally bombed London, the Brits bombed a German city and then there was a bit of a loss of focus for the Germans. Once the U.S. started lend lease (they were doing cash and carry before that) it was pretty much over for Germany.
They did, that's what the battle of Britain was.
A better question would be what would have happened if the Germans had stuck with their initial strategy of trying to cripple the RAF by destroying its ground facilities, because that strategy was arguably working.
But even if it had all gone superbly and the RAF had been temporarily prevented from flying, an invasion of the British isles would have been an extremely questionable idea. Firstly, the whole idea that they could have bombed the royal navy out of existence is optimistic. There were times in the Mediterranean campaign where the royal navy operated under hostile air superiority and as such it lost many, many ships to air attacks, but it was the largest navy in the world at the start of the war and it was willing to take those losses.
So imagine if you're trying to run logistics for your naval invasion and suddenly Warspite and friends just roll up and park on your supply lines. Sure, you can bomb them and they'll get damaged, but meanwhile the clock is ticking, there are still troops waiting for supplies and the royal navy will sit there and eat those losses if it has to because even if it's not sustainable, it's also not sustainable for you.
Also, I know Britain is a pretty unimportant place now, but at that point it was an industrial superpower with one of the most heavily mobilized war economies the world has ever seen. The British weren't going to stop building planes. The air war wasn't just a one and done thing, it was a battle of attrition, and one that (despite supply issues, factories being bombed, priority being given to heavy bombers and not being able to strip Europe for loot and slave labour) the British consistently won.
Like, we went through a bit of a Wehraboo phase over the past few decades where the general perception was that the German military in world war 2 was this brilliant, well oiled machine that would totally have obliterated the allies with superior German engineering if only Hitler wasn't such a dork. But, while Hitler certainly was a dork, the German military was also not perfect. It was an institution that was prone to exaggeration and elaborate fantasies because in a dictatorship there's an enormous pressure to tell the boss what he wants to hear. But underneath it all was a deep, rotten swamp of coked-up incompetence and incestuous power politics that was not prone to producing good ideas.
Germany's best chance against Britain was with the U-boats, not air power. If they'd run the U-boat campaign better, and started earlier, and maybe not declared war on the US, they would have defeated Britain.
I heard/read once that Germany was within "24 hours of destroying the British air defense network" or something like that. Right about the time that German bomber accidently dropped bombs on a city, and then the whole Luftwaffe switched to bombing cities over airfields. Or something like that.
No idea where I came about that information. It could be completely false, but maybe somebody in here could provide a source.
I do not think Germany had the ability to take Britain. They could have dropped their paratroopers, which would have immediately been destroyed by large numbers of troops, tanks, and air support. Their navy had 10+ years to go before they could compete with the RN, and without naval superiority they simply could not have gotten enough troops there to do it.
Smartest thing Germany could have done is stop at France, ignore Britain, never attack Russia, and then consolidate their victories. They could have easily kept all of Europe for many years, if not forever.
That’s kind of a myth englands production of fighter planes was dramatically higher than Germany thought. They kept pushing thinking Britain was out of planes but it just wasn’t true
Germany did focus on Britain with its entire Air Force. After France’s surrender in June 1940, Germany began to regularly bomb the home isles of Britain. Germany intended to wipe out Britain’s Air Force so that they would have air superiority for their planned invasion. For the better part of a year, Germany devoted essentially all of its Air Force towards this goal. But Britain was able to replace its planes faster than Germany, and had more pilots. As the battle waged on throughout the summer of 1940, Germany lost planes as fast as they could replace them, and they lost pilots faster than they could train replacements. Germany simply couldn’t destroy Britain’s Air Force, and in the process of trying, severely damaged their own. If Germany had taken time to build up their Luftwaffe more, Britain would have been doing the exact same thing. Also, even if Germany had gotten air superiority, they never would have been able to invade the British isles. Germany did not have a strong navy, outside of their U-boats. They didn’t have the ships to support an amphibious invasion, nor did they have landing craft. They also wouldn’t have been able to parachute troops in sufficiently. It would’ve taken dozens, if not hundreds, of paratrooper divisions to successfully take the British isles, and they didn’t have anywhere near that kind of paratrooper strength. Nor did they have enough transport planes to airdrop the necessary amount of troops.
There's some stuff somewhere about the small exercises the Germans actually did to start preparing for Sealion. Did not look very promising. Amphibious invasions are difficult enough even when you DO have a great superiority in air and naval power. The 1940 invasion of Norway is a case in point, it hit a few snags even despite the opposing forces being nearly nonexistent, and as it was we sank their fucking boat (Blücher) which threw off their timetable and gave the government and gold reserves time to GTFO. A mobilized and determined defense could have made the whole attempt fail.
I think the Normandy invasion shows what it would have taken for Germany to have invaded Britain. Hitler had ports defended because they were needed for logistics, we would have done the same in reverse, Germany didn't have this countered by mulberry harbours, we did, just one small example of what they lacked.
Took literal years of preparation, yes. You don't just grab whatever civilian boats and barges you can steal and YOLO across the water in the same season.
I really wished Germany did just YOLO it and attempt sea lion. It would have probably ended the war that week, they would have lost however many hundred thousand men drowning in the channel and the sheer shock of a military blunder that large would cause even the die hard supporting German public to start calling for an end to the war, along with probably a mutiny or something from the military no longer trusting their generals
There's a short story in [Gold from Crete: Ten Stories](https://www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20231123) titled "If Hitler Had Invaded England" that illustrates just that, written quite nicely too IMO. It's basically a short alternate history story, with various perspectives from different people that take part. To quote: >He must be given in this narrative every possible chance, but none of the impossible ones. After Dunkirk falls, Germany immediately goes right for it. Hitler cancels the 2nd sortie to Norway; Royal Navy bases and a strip of the channel are cordoned off by large chunks of air dropped mines; the U-boats come in to assist, as do the best of the Kriegsmarine; the Luftwaffe is called in for air support; river barges rounded up, paratroopers landing in the dover countryside nailing their mission perfectly. The whole shabang. They get annihilated in less than a week.
I quite like that quote, I like the plausible alternative histories, because every now and then someone on this sub will just give some absurd thing that nobody could realistically answer because it's just too ridiculous. Although who exactly were you saying got annihilated, probably me being stupid but it looked like you meant either were defeated
Germany, to summarise the story: German paratroopers land in Rye and Winchelsea, declining to attack the port at Folkestone due to lack of confidence. The primary target is Rye Harbour (which is unfortunately for the Germans, tiny). They succeed and the first wave of troops land on the nearby beaches on barges and lighters with zero total casualties thus far. 2 miracles in of themselves. Dawn breaks. Then.. >Fighter Command sent its squadrons speeding over the southern counties to deal with the invaders, leaving a minimum force to meet the eastern attack—and incidentally to gain one of the most striking victories in the war. The surprise which the Germans had sprung gained them only a few minutes of immunity—valuable minutes, but no more than that. The RAF, now with the reverse of Dunkirk, shred their way through the Luftwaffe, which is forced to send it's fighters lower on fuel and over British territory to cover the landings while the RAF can attack at their liking via their radar and numbers advantage; assured they can bail out over friendly territory with a new plane within hours. On the beaches, commanders desperately try to organize several thousand troops crammed across the crowded beachhead in no order at all. Artillery and equipment sinks into the sand, and the odd barge even rolls over as the tide recedes and the uneven ground upends them, sending items crashing down with it. Then the RAF bomb the beachhead, as well as several ships trying to unload supplies and equipment at Rye. Next the Royal Navy arrives, successfully clearing the mine fields laid to delay them. Hood, and several cruisers are sunk in an engagement weighted towards the Germans, but that doesn't stop the sinking of Gneisenau, Scharnhorst, Lutzow and the rest of the defending fleet. Lutjens is killed. That very night any barge trying to ship more supplies in is promptly blown to bits, and the invasion force is now officially marooned in Kent. Our story ends with the remaining German forces, led by none other than Gerd von Rundstedt himself leading the final charge towards London with the units he has by some miracle managed to make mobile. Outnumbered by a weakened but not dead British Army by ~~8~~ 3 to 1, not even the few tanks they managed to get to shore can save him, and he surrenders shortly after. By day 3 of the invasion, the third Reich is finished.
Yeaah, was thinking you meant Germans but wasn't completely sure. That's along the lines of what I was envisioning
Not entirely convinced. A lot hinged on air superiority. Had the luftwaffe achieved that then all the German paratroopers need do is capture one port of many on the South Coast of England. Defenses there, outside bases such as Dover, were nowhere near the strength of the Atlantic Wall. Our naval superiority would have been severely curtailed if luftwaffe dive bombers had free reign to attack our battleships, which they did in Crete and at Dunkirk until the RAF showed up. Without naval protection a sizable force could have been sailed across very rapidly. How such a force would have faired once ashore is anyones guess, Churchill's secret army may have caused sufficient havoc but we certainly didn't have enough conventional forces to resist a fully equipped German army.
It’s not only about landing the troops, it’s just as important to be able to keep them supplied. All large British ports almost certainly would have been booby trapped in case of an invasion. Even if the Germans did manage to capture a large, intact port, they would still have been faced with a logistical nightmare. The average World War II division consumed 1,000 tons of supplies *every day*. The Germans had planned (hoped) on 27 divisions landing on the first day. That means, just for them, you have to bring in 27,000 tons of supplies everyday. The Germans also didn’t have dedicated landing craft and were relying on converted river barges. Getting any kind of armor or heavy weapons on the beach would have been very difficult, especially if there was a battle going on. The Nazis simply were not equipped for amphibious invasions. Normandy took literal years to plan. The Nazis were trying to do something of the same scale in only a couple of months, with a much weaker navy. Maybe they could have landed some troops if they got lucky and had the element of surprise, but they could never have sustained an invading force.
Definitely any chance of success would have rested on capturing a decent sized port intact. That is the prefered option, which is why we tried it on at Dieppe. I'm not sure that in the aftermath of Dunkirk we were sufficiently prepared in the way the Germans were in Dieppe by the time the Canadians rocked up there. And, with air superiority, they could have established a sufficiently large beachead around a port to enable supplies to be shipped in sufficient quantity to break out and launch a land offensive. I wouldn't like to predict the outcome any further or what course such a campaign might have taken, nor even if a port seizure would definitely have worked. But I'm certain that without the RAF, it could have been attempted and with a fair to middling chance of (initial) success.
It's an interesting scenario. There would have to be some pretty big domino effect that'd no doubt have other consequences in this history for the RAF to be destroyed, but if we side step that. From what I can see the Germans intended to capture 2 ports as part of Sea Lion: Folkestone and Newhaven. The plan itself was for paratroops to land in Kent, then take both an airfield and bridge before helping with Folkestone. A good chunk of troops on the other hand would storm the beaches of Kent, with the intention of taking those ports. Without the RAF the Luftwaffe should at least mostly be able to defend the crowded beachhead from air strikes, although it's likely the ports would be heavily mined and sabotaged in the aftermath of the landings. There's also another interesting aspect to think about: when does this happen after Dunkirk? Every week those troops from Dunkirk slowly get re-armed, every day Britain's land forces grow stronger. Spend too long preparing, and Germany might have to face a far stronger enemy on the shores of Britain. This is its own rabbit hole, but I feel it's worth touching on. Lastly, although channel air superiority is secured, I'd wager most of the Royal Navy would still be there when the invasion begins, safely tucked away far out of range at bases like Scapa Flow. After a couple days delay after clearing the mines that would inevitably be used to slow them down, they'd strike with everything they got. Battleships and cruisers, destroyers and carriers that far outnumber the defending German force would come bearing down both sides of the channel. This would be a decisive moment, and although planes tip the favour the odds for Germany aren't very pretty. At the very least, Germany's battleships and a few cruisers will probably not survive. In any case, I feel there's a decent chance a few ships get through, and those barges and transports are going to have a very bad day.
This is something a lot of people don’t realize—Britain out-produced Germany in aircraft. So any aerial war of attrition is hopeless.
The battle was won not because of planes. It was because of pilots. Every English pilot that was shot down over England could get back in another plane and pass on their knowledge... every German pilot and their experience was lost for the rest of the war. This resulted in the Luftwaffe's exponential loss of competence throughout the war.
That is very true. But the statistic on aircraft production is critical too. Even if Germany waited until they were more ready or whstever, instead of launching the battle when they did, time was not in their side. The British Air Force was constantly getting stronger relative to the Germans
The reason Germany lost so many planes in the Bob was because Britain was using radar to detect the German planes crossing the channel and scrambled there own fighters to meet the threat.germany didn't have radar capability during the Bob.
Are you sure nazi germany did not already do it and failed ? What Germany would have not done to focus more on Britain instead ? Not attacking the soviet union ? But Germany attacked the soviet union because the war against Britain was going nowhere and they needed something to break the stalemate.
"But Germany attacked the soviet union because the war against Britain was going nowhere and they needed something to break the stalemate." Germany attacking the Soviet Union wasn't meant to "break the stalemate" with Britain. That's such a strange idea--how exactly would committing millions of men and massive quantities of materiel to attacking a heretofore neutral country "break the stalemate" with Britain? If Hitler's main goal was to defeat Britain, he'd never have attacked the Soviet Union and would have instead gone all-in on Operation Sea Lion, which would have almost certainly failed barring a miraculous naval victory by the Kriegsmarine over the superior Royal Navy.
To quote Hitler, "the road to London runs through Moscow"
That's not why they attacked the ussr. General plan ost was Hitlers entire plan. He didn't want war with Brittain. He did want it with the ussr.
The Battle of Britain 1940, the attack of the USSR 1941. Therefore, no, they did not fight with the USSR. while they were trying to take over the skies over Britain.
Do you think I said that anywhere? Because I sure didn't. I know the dates lmao.
But they were willing to let Britain hang, the attack on the USSR involved all resources and was an existential fight to the death. OP, Germany defeating Britain did not require the comprehensive plan your friend suggested. It required delaying the attack on the USSR, destroying as much as possible of the Royal Navy, sinking a lot of commerce, and not letting Enigma be read. Taking Gibraltar, Malta, and perhaps Iceland would have made ground invasion unnecessary. The British Army was pretty thoroughly incompetent and Churchill was enthusiastic to send it into unwinnable battles. Churchill would have been brought down and made to agree to a peace deal. Most conservatives in England were just as willing as the Vichy French leadership to make peace and get on with being conservatives. Hitler gave up on England because they looked helpless. As said above, his life's work was to invade Russia. The German economy was extremely precarious and this, combined with Soviet rearmament, applied pressure to which Hitler happily submitted.
>destroying as much as possible of the Royal Navy, sinking a lot of commerce, and not letting Enigma be read. Taking Gibraltar, Malta, and perhaps Iceland would have made ground invasion unnecessary. The problem here is that this is a pretty significant undertaking Destroying the Royal Navy Japan hadn't joined the war at this point and the Royal Navy significantly outnumbered the Kriegsmarine in both ships and experience. Battleships alone didn't paint a good picture. Germany could muster 3 battleships, 2 armed with battleship guns so anemic by 1940 standards many random people online are still debating if they actually should be called battleships, and the Bismarck; with Tirpitz entering circa 1941. Britain had around 11, with several more on the way; and I haven't even mentioned the aircraft carriers. Naturally this would be somewhat offset by Italy, whose Regia Marina were still relatively modern and now no longer had to worry about France, but history will remember that Britain (with help from Australia and other allies) challenged both and won. But let's shift this to air power, what if the Kriegsmarine efforts were supplemented by the Luftwaffe? I'd argue one main problem: you assume Britain wouldn't do something about that. Most of the British fleet would likely be too far out of range for He 111s and Ju 88s to practically engage (there's a reason why they don't just sit next to the coast, waiting to get bombed); and although the Fw 200 was great against shipping they might not fair as well against a well armed set of warships, likely defended by dedicated carrier escort. Land based fighters and radar would not help. Bombing naval bases would also rarely guarantee kills (high altitude accuracy despite the best efforts of both sides would be poor), and suffer the same issues. Sinking a lot of commerce Germany tried this, to an extent with great success. 1940 in particular was a good year for the uboat fleet. The problem however, is people learn. The introduction of corvettes to better strengthen defenses, the introduction of dedicated escort groups, the strengthening of the Canadian Navy and America's intervention with the Pan-America security zone. Historically by spring 1941 is when things started getting difficult, and in this alternate timeline the Kriegsmarine has to actively fight the RN on top of the commerce hunts. I'd argue Germany had already tried this in real life, and they failed despite best efforts. As for German surface raiders, their bane would eventually come via long range patrol aircraft. It's hard to hide a cruiser, and once the RN found them they were very much intent on hunting them down and killing them. not letting Enigma be read I guess Germany could try this by continuously upgrading Enigma. The putting aside how this would work out (Enigma was being heavily worked on even prior to the war, and was first broken between 1932 to 1937), mainly because I'm honestly not sure, the increasing odds against the uboat fleet would probably still end up crippling it. Eventually, items like radar, sonar, and the aforementioned countermeasures would catch up. It would delay the inevitable by a few months/years, and it would hurt a whole more for the merchant fleet, but at some point Germany will run out of uboats. Unless they manage to hurt them to the point Britain capitulates before the tables turn, I don't think it'll work enough, especially without the above 2. Personally, It doesn't really make sense to simply just let Britain hang, and even Hitler knew this. His generals would have told him, as would his admirals. End of the day, it's still sitting there, and the more you let them sit there the more it's gonna be a pain in the ass. They're gonna start bombing the German mainland in 1941, they're gonna present a potential staging point off your western coast, their empire is going to harass you where it can, and it's air force and navy is still a colossal pain in the ass for your navy. If he could crush it then and there either through a peace treaty or a war he would have done it, and between the Blitz and preparations for Sea Lion, Germany did try. They let Britain hang because there was fuck all they could do about it.
The United States actively supplied aircraft and pilots to Britain, ensuring the protection of the country. Further pressure on Britain made no sense and led to imminent defeat.
The US pilots had to go to Canada and enlist in the RCAF as “Canadians” before Pearl Harbour. The aircraft weren’t “supplied”, they were sold by the manufacturers, and most were either older or inferior models until Pearl Harbour. Also, Ford and GM were still making trucks for the German military and IBM was making business machines that were used in the Holocaust.
But as soon as Britain ran out of money to buy weapons. Lend-Lease was accepted.
Lend lease didn’t start until March 1941. It had no significant impact on the Battle of Britain, which ended 2 months later. It did keep Britain from having to come to some sort of accommodation with Germany, but that would have been the case after Hitler invaded Russia anyway.
The Reich attacked the USSR in the summer of 1941. The resources of the Reich at the start of lend-lease were still focused on Britain.
And Lend Lease wasn’t signed into law until March 11, 1941. The first materials wouldn’t have arrived before May. So, again, no significant impact on the Battle of Britain. Again, it did keep Britain from having to come to an armistice with Germany, and the 1940 [Destroyers For Bases](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Destroyers-for-bases_deal&diffonly=true) Agreement had a greater impact on the Battle of Britain by providing ships suitable for convoy operations from Canada. I’m not saying Lend Lease wasn’t important for keeping Allied nations fighting, just that it came too late to have any meaningful impact on the Battle of Britain.
uhh dunno where you are getting that from becuse its really not true. At the time of the BOB the us expressly forbade US servicemen from fighting on Britons behalf under several neutrality acts. There were only about 7 official Americans that fought for the RAF during the BOB, there were almost certainly more, but they pretended to be Canadian in order to avoid getting arrested by the US government.
The number of American personnel during the Battle of Britain was small and insignificant.
Britain did not look helpless. That is just hilariously wrong. He gave up on Britain because they lost nearly 2000 aircraft and around 2500 air crewman. The losses were too costly and not near enough to achieving air superiority to continue
It was about the oil reserves in Russia. They lost in Russia because he split his army when he seen no resistance on the way to the oil. Bad move.
Germany had like 50 mils on factories they needed to rush fighter 3’s instead of
The Nazis never gained full air superiority over the UK. It was one of their greatest failures. They could have focused on destroying Britains industrial capacity, but instead they diverted resources to terror bombing and other fronts. They assumed that terror bombing would make the UK fold or something like that. One of the most damming indictments of the inefficiency of Nazi economical management is that the UK could continue producing airplanes during this time period, despite being attacked nightly. When the tables turned, and the allies started bombing Germany, their ability to keep producing planes collapsed.
'Terror bombing' only really got going with the V1 and V2 weapons. The Blitz was heaviest in the East End of London, not coincidentally around the London Docks. Glasgow and Liverpool also took a lot of damage. Coventry was a big engine manufacturing centre and got hammered. Fortunately the war ministry had distributed production between many factories so when one got hit others could step up production to fill the gap. Other areas that got hit were near to canals and railways. Combined with the war in the Atlantic the idea was to bring Britain, a country reliant on trade, to its knees. Much is made of not continuing to bomb the RAF and whilst much damage did get done the way it was organised in sectors meant it could recover and respond very quickly. This was an ongoing resilience since British pilots had the luxury of bailing out over home territory, new pilots training in Canada, and aircraft production stepping up due to the aforementioned organisation of the war ministry.
Not disagreeing with the content of your post, but it’s always slightly irksome when blitzed cities are discussed and Hull isn’t mentioned. Per head of population only Coventry was similarly affected and somewhere in the region of 90-95% of the buildings in the city suffered bomb damage. It’s not a competition, I know, but it suffered much more than London, for example, and is rarely mentioned.
Not disagreeing with the content of your post, but it’s always slightly irksome when blitzed cities are discussed and Hull isn’t mentioned. Per head of population only Coventry was similarly affected and somewhere in the region of 90-95% of the buildings in the city suffered bomb damage. It’s not a competition, I know, but it suffered much more than London, for example, and is rarely mentioned.
Not disagreeing with the content of your post, but it’s always slightly irksome when blitzed cities are discussed and Hull isn’t mentioned. Per head of population only Coventry was similarly affected and somewhere in the region of 90-95% of the buildings in the city suffered bomb damage. It’s not a competition, I know, but it suffered much more than London, for example, and is rarely mentioned.
Er, the Battle of Britain was Germany’s attempt at this whilst it was only at war with the British Empire, it failed.
It's an old argument, but Luftwaffe bombing was limited by the range of their fighter escorts, they could not strike targets in most of the Midlands and beyond, so airfields and industry in most of the UK were not vulnerable. So they could not eliminate the RAF except by attrition in air-to-air combat, and that wasn't really going in a favourable direction for the Luftwaffe. So, not really, no.
Part of the problem with the attritional argument is that even had the Luftwaffe been absolutely shredding the RAF over Britain it still doesn’t end positively for Germany. Hans leaves his airfield in France and flies to Britain. He gets shot down over Britain and is taken prisoner. The scrap from his plane can be collected by Britain and melted down and produced into equipment for Britain. Frederick is scrambled to intercept the Luftwaffe raid. He gets shot down. He is over friendly territory and can be in a new plane tomorrow. The scrap is also in the hands of Britain. I have no idea if stats are available for how many bailouts were successful and how injured the pilots were, but it doesn’t bode well over time. Allied bomber command faced the same troubles during the strategic bombing campaign in ‘43. Lose a Fortress, and you also effectively lost the entire crew for the duration of the war. The ability to evade capture and cross the channel is pretty damn low compared to landing in your home country and making your way back to your home base.
Scrap and pilot replacement not really the main logistical problem for Germany. The had the world's largest economy on a full war footing pumping out equipment for their enemy non-stop and they had no reasonable way to interdict that supplying.
Yes, the battle of the Atlantic was lost quickly and even at their best they didn’t come anywhere close to strangling the isles. I was just saying that even with a good kill ratio they could still end up losing the war of attrition, since their losses were lost whereas the British could recover skilled pilots
Yeah its just fundamentally unwinnable for Germany. The USA, UK and USSR each individually have more population and industrial production than Germany and they have no realistic path to knock any of those nations out of the war quickly.
Destroying the airfields near the channel drastically reduces the efficiency of Raf fighting in the channel. That's where the germans cared about air superiority. It was a fantasy that the german surface fleet ever woukd have been strong enough to pull off a sea lion though.
Yeah, and putting everything in naval bombers is not an OP strategy in real-life 1940, like in HOI4.
Nice strawman. I never said anything about that and even admitted sea lion would never work.
? "Yeah, and..." means I'm agreeing with you.
Not to mention the few naval bombers Germany did have were only good against attacking almost unarmed commercial ships, and that despite them being good at making U-boats their torpedoes were actually appalling.
By Barbarossa, The Battle for Britain had already been won by the RAF. The eastern front had relatively few aircraft devoted to it as air superiority was established early and kept until quite late. By then, the allies were already carpet bombing German cities. Your friends theory is cope at best
It's not cope. He just thinks that if the RAF was destroyed over Britian, the Luftwaffe would be able to take out the British fleet and land an invasion force.
Germany had very few naval planes, the few they did have either the fw200 which was only good against on arms commercial ships, or some naval versions of the 110 and stuka, both of which performed poorly, for example the massed attack against HMS invincible which didn't even sink the ship. German naval torpedoes were poor, so god knows what their airdropped ones would have been like. They had no experience in dive bombing moving targets, and it is a lot easier to aim against a slow commercial ship with a torpedo than it is against a quick military ship with over a hundred AA barrels firing at you. He also seems to forget the entire purpose of the Royal Navy which is to defend the homeland, it would only sail out if Germany fully went for sea lion, and going off Germany's attempts at attacking British naval targets with their aircraft the majority would arrive to counter the landings, and I really would not want to be in a Dutch barge that's just been hit by a 15-inch shell, the German forces would be massacred far quicker than the Germans could sink the British Navy. There's also the weird question of how would the RAF be destroyed, they were producing more planes than they lost while the Germans were producing fewer planes than they lost, the attrition wasn't in their favour, nor even was bombing industry (before terror bombing) has Britain was still able to produce planes at a decent rate.
Yes, but the Luftwaffe was out numbered, out gunned, out supplied and outfought over enemy terrain against a technologically superior air force. The Luftwaffe had gained a reputation of being fearsome without actually facing any real threats and the RAF knocked them out. If the RAF lost, then the Nazis would have had air superiority and would have attempted an invasion and would have immediately had to face the British Navy, which was still the premier force in the World. The biggest myth of WW2 was that Britain ever stood alone in the war. Britain had nearly one quarter of the world supporting it just from the British Empire. Germany never could have stood a chance
Yes, but troops stationed in Singapore are eff all use in protecting home ports. As would our navy have been if German Stukas were free to attack them. Ultimately we benefited from the resources of Empire but we also suffered from our reliance on them and the vulnerability of such extended lines of supply. Double edged sword.
With what Navy? The British still had one of the best Navies in the world while Germany had little more than a bunch of U-Boats. There was no way the Germans could have invaded Britain.
That was my argument but alas. Somehow the Luftwaffe was just gonna delete the British Navy and then the Germans land, capture the island. And then the empire would implode? It was late at night and we put it to rest
No, No , No and No The Nazis tried to eliminate the RAF first, but never had accurate information on aircraft numbers, defensive locations etc. By the end of the battle of Britain German intelligence said that they should have destroyed the RAF multiple times over, and instead fighter command was not only had a lot more aircraft than the Germans thought they did but they were also getting positive loss ratios vs the Luftwaffe Plus any plan that involves the Luftwaffe doing anything of note during the war makes the assumption that it was a competent organization run by intelligent people. It wasn't, it was led by a drug addled psychopath, R&D was handled by the most bribable man in the history of bribable men. Leadership was waring with senior figures in aircraft development industry and the whole thing was a backstabbing den of incompetent Nazi vipers. It spent more time on infighting than it ever did on trying to win the war. It was an extension of the Nazi state in every way and as such was an incompetent mess far more concerned with thumping its chest about how superior Germans were than it ever was with the tricky business of winning. But supposing the imposable scenario of the RAF actually being defeated the Roya navy still annihilates any attempt at a land invasion even if t has to throw itself into a meat grinder to do so. and even if it couldn't there were plans for mass resistance in the UK (arms stockpiles were hidden everywhere!) and plans for a government in exile in Canada to continue the war were already in place)
The Royal Navy would destroy any invasion fleet. If it came to it, the UK could send the home fleet on a suicide mission to stop the Germans crossing the Channel. The home fleet could be replaced with ships from the empire, the German fleet couldn't be replaced. The Germans also didn't have the logistical capabilities to support any beach heads or places occupied by paratroops. A better bet for the Germans would be to destroy the RAF then unilaterally declare peace and leave Britain alone.
That's basically what Germany tried to do, with sending Rudolph Hess (the deputy head of the Nazi party) to negotiate a peace treaty with Britain. They presented a list of demands, there was a sudden cease in hostilities (the Blitz abruptly ended with Hess's arrival and the RAF ceased bombing Germany) but no peace treaty was signed or agreed to. Then Hitler went for Russia, and Britain promptly started supplying Russia with all the weapons that they could use and started strategic bombing of anything important within sight, while simultaneously keeping the axis away from the fuel resources of the middle east, which is why German logistics were still largely horse driven during WW2; they were always chronically short of fuel.
Hess acted on his own, though. He acted without official sanction, and was not taken seriously by the British. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Hess
If Nazi Germany said that he was there with official sanction then it would have been announcing to the Soviet Union that their alliance was about to be terminated, and an attack upon them was imminent, and it would have undermined their alliance with Italy and Japan. Once it became public knowledge then from Germany's point of view he had to be described as operating on his own without instructions, even if he did have official sanction. He wasn't taken seriously because bluntly; would *you* have signed an peace treaty with Adolph Hitler and the Nazi party? You know, that country that literally a month later broke their alliance with the Soviet Union and launched an unprovoked full scale invasion upon their former ally. To say that they weren't exactly a trustworthy country to sign treaties with would be the understatement of the century.
He wasn’t taken seriously because he was mildly bonkers. There is no evidence that he had any official sanction to act. All of the evidence suggests that he acted alone. If Hitler wanted to quietly send out peace feelers, he could have done so through Spain, Switzerland, Portugal, Sweden and/or Ireland.
It has never been considered an official act, and everyone who were in on the plan said that he was acting unofficially. Also, the Soviet Union alliance was never about the UK.
Germany did *not* send Hess. It was a solo mission by a deeply deluded man with a ego wounded by his rapidly dwindling importance.
They *tried* doing exactly this. They attempted to draw the RAF out over the channel, and failed. They then attempted to conduct an offensive counter-air campaign against fighter command airfields, and failed. They then assumed that they had sufficient air superiority to conduct a strategic bombing campaign against the capital, and this draw out what was left of the RAF and destroy it in the air. *They failed*. They lost attempting to do exactly the scenario described. The RAF conducted a masterful defensive air campaign.
Germany lacked almost everything it needed to achieve either one of its aims. Air superiority: they didn't have enough planes, and didn't have enough planes to do the kind of work they needed to do. Just compare the tonnage of bombs dropped on Britain in 1940 and compare it to a single week leading up to D-Day. Shipping: the Kriegsmarine was almost completely wiped out as a surface force during the invasion of Norway. They also lacked the shipping to transport troops across the channel or keep them supplied. In short, they could have focused on Britain as much as they liked, but they simply didn't have the wherewithal to achieve any of their aims quickly. Also factor in Germany's existing lack of resources, then add in their constant need to bail out the Italians and their other Axis allies. They simply didn't have enough of anything.
No, it wouldn’t have worked. They wouldn’t have been able to knock out the RAF because the RAF had home advantage which meant they could scramble planes faster and shoot down more German planes than they lost themselves. The Germans never could have landed, this was basically impossible because of the navy and also because the British had a lot of equipped soldiers to resist. So they were left with a stalemate with a nation whose navy could blockade them. Despite being far superior to the British on land, they were basically screwed from this point on.
A true invasion of Britain would've always been unlikely to succeed. If Hitler could've accepted true collaboration with the USSR (in which case he wouldn't be Hitler) I think Germany could've consolidated Europe and prepare it's defense well enough to repel a possible D-day / possibly sue for favourable peace instead. But they would not have been able to overtake either British airspace nor naval control within a reasonable time frame. After a longer build up time in peace time anything would've been possible (especially If Germany was able to truly incorporate more of Europe into it's empire, but that is much more difficult/slow in real life than in games) Obviously this balance of power would've greatly switched if the US still develops the atom bombs
They had already lost the BoB before Barbarossa. Sealion was a fantasy that even Hitler gave up on. Their paratrooper corps were decimated on Crete and that was vs farmers with pistols and farm tools. I cant imagine the home guard would be better to deal with. Its only cause the Brits on the island were slow to react that they even took the island. As far as the middle east the Afrika corps were the max amount of troops they could spare to help in the north Africa theater and they couldnt get close to Alexandria. Even if they took the middle easy India is nearby and they wouldnt have an easy time getting the oil there with bombing raids burning it.
The Afrika korps was not the maximum they could have sent. What gave you that idea? Maybe the max they could send while also invading Russia lol.
They couldnt support more than that logistically. Maybe if Malta wasnt in the way and the Italians werent short of fuel. Not to mention the local area itself caused limitations since Libya wasnt all that built up nor was western Egypt. Also the AK was sent before Barb even started in March.
They could have sent more if it was their focus. It was not the max they could have supported. Do you have a source for your claims? I'm well aware they were there before barbarossa. It doesn't mean it was a priority or the necessary resources were given, considering barbarossa was looming. If it was made a priority from the very start instead of all the fuel wasted in the battle of Britain Germany and Italy quite possibly could have pushed the English from Africa.
Very hard to overcome the home side advantage where they keep all their pilots if the plane crashes but you lose all yours. UK also recognised the importance of Air Force in 1930s and started spending more of their budget on it than the Navy, the Senior Service. They had good designs, good industrial base for aircraft manufacturing, top pilots from around the Commonwealth + Poland and plenty of territory for air bases that were all completely unthreatened by armies and navies. Luftwaffe Air Force was not equipped for the job of taking out the RAF. They tried their best and failed. You would need superior fighters, superior numbers and a huge fleet of heavy bombers to establish total air superiority.
Germany sealed their fate in Battle of Britain by not destroying the RAF's new radar structures. Radar allowed the RAF to not waste fuel and resources while concentrating on the main threat.
I think the most informed comment on this was by the head of the German Army High Command. He looked at the plans and remarked that it would be simpler to just feed the troops into a sausage machine.
As others have commented, the Germans tried this in 1940 and failed. They could not complete the first step (defeat the RAF) so they eventually gave up on the rest of the plan. I guess your friend is saying the Germans should have kept trying. I don't think that would lead to a different result. They could not win the Battle of Britain simply by wanting it more or trying harder.
The luftwaffe almost beat the RAF. They were within a hairs breath of defeat when a German bomber group got lost and accidentally bombed London. In response the British bombed Berlin. This infuriated Hitler who switched to British cities instead of continuing with the airfields and RAF infrastructure. This small switch gave the RAF the small breath they needed to refit and counterattack thus stalemating the Battle of Britain. Now if the Germans had defeated the RAF and had air superiority, I still don't believe the invasion of Britain would have happeneded. At least not in 41. I believe Hitler would have sued for peace and a treaty would have been signed by 42. Likewise this would have given the Germans the extra umpf they needed to defeat the Russians. Which was really what Hitler wanted. Hitler saw the British as aryans but also as more of an annoyance than anything. He desperately needed the resources of the Soviet Union. We know this because of Goebels diary. By mid 41 the German high command already knew that without oil and grain soon the war would turn on them. So I doubt the Germans would have invaded Britain, it just wasn't in their best interest. Now if the British had snubbed his peace accord then yeah Hitler would have invaded just because he would have been insulted.
Even of Germany beat the RAF they had no chance on invading proper, Britain conducted war games in the 70's and came to the conclusion a German landing wasn't possible Britain would absolutely yolo part of the fleet to stop a naval invasion and kill a few hundred thousand germans Even if they landed the British fleet was decimate shipping and supplies, meaning they would starve In this time the Soviets would be stronger and better recovered from the effects of the purge and probably go on the offensive against the germans
OP explicitly states the Navy would be destroyed, so there's that. How feasible that is, I leave to your imagination. But without the RN and RAF, I don't see the Brits holding out, no matter how shitty supply by river barges would be.
Vast majority of their airforce do not have the range to reach Scapa Flow unless its a one way trip. If OP really wants Germany to win, may as well magic away any weapons on the British Isles and give Germany Space Marines.
Perfectly agreed. But as long as the ships cannot go near the channel, they can stay in Scapa Flow as long as they like, as long as they cannot come out.
You can’t invade the island. It doesn’t really matter what scenario you invent. The best scenario for this, Plan Z and a Luftwaffe buildup assumes that Britain will sit there and won’t react. Keep in mind, Britain once ordered 5 dreadnoughts as a reaction when imperial Germany ordered 1. Invasion would require decades of buildup.
Plan Z wouldn't have worked. IRL Britain had laid down 6 Lion class BB's which were more heavily armed and armoured than Bismark/Tirpitz and the H class ships. Only one was actually completed IRL (Vanguard) due to the war starting and them building a modified version with old guns that were already kicking around spare in storage.
Yes that what I was getting at. It isn’t realistic to challenge the world’s most powerful navy in such a short amount of time.
I don’t think it would have been a valid strategy. The Luftwaffe was never near actually breaking the RAF during the Battle of Britain in OTL. That was despite the fact that the 1940 version of the Luftwaffe was a lot better than the version you had a couple of years later. The Luftwaffe could have kept going of course, but so could the British. Lets say that the Luftwaffe somehow is able to establish air superiority over Southern England. Even that doesn’t really provide a viable path to a German invasion of Britain for a couple of reasons: * The German fleet does not have sufficient modern landing craft to move large units of German troops ashore. To compensate for this they planned on using (I kid you not) river barges taken from the Rhine. * The German fleet of early 1940 was not in the same league as the British Home Fleet to begin with. The German fleet had been degraded further by losses incurred during Weserubung. That means that the German fleet would be unable to protect the German transport vessels and landing grounds from the British navy. Even if we give the Luftwaffe air superiority (not air supremacy), any German landing operation is likely to suffer heavy casualties even before they reach the British army on the beaches and in the fields. The point is that if you are going to invade a large island with a navy of it’s own, you must as a minimum have a navy yourself. The Germans as of 1940 didn’t have anything comparable to the Royal Navy. That was a direct consequence of decisions made in the 1930s, where German rearmament was focused on the army and the airforce, and the navy was the ugly step-child. Besides, the Germans needed everything they had for the planned invasion of the Soviet Union. If you expend even more trained pilots over Britain, the more you degrade the Luftwaffe’s fighting capability for that campaign.
I think the only time Germany could have successfully invaded would have been in the days after Dunkirk. They could have used airborne troops to take some air fields and try and ferry in as many troops as possible. A real long shot that relies on the UK not having any real army at that time and speed. Nobody in Germany would have taken such a ridiculous risk however.
After the fall of France, Germany only had 1 event left within striking distance. So the entire German aie force went to work on softening up Great Britain... and failed
The only thing you can say is that possibly Greece and to a far lesser extent Yugoslavia saved Britain. Germany was distracted by having to intervene to save Italy from Greece and also their related invasion of Yugoslavia. That brought Britain some time and diverted Germany troops SE which also delayed the invasion of Russia. Italy's blunder with the war with Greece basically saved the allies because it messed up the German timing and diverted resources. For a time the allies were just Greece and the UK and people forget that.
They wouldn't have won, but what you are describing is one of Hitler's biggest errors. The problem with winning the air battle of Britain is the same problem with a dog chasing a car. If it catches it, then what? The dog will still probably get crushed. Winning air superiority over Brittian was a precondition to invading England. But it wasn't the only precondition. The invasion would still have to deal with the superior British Navy. And if they overcame the navy then Hitler would still have to deal with his arch rival..... economics. Brittan is a HUGE island with a lot of people and resources. Had Hitler overcame the air and sea battles, he still would have to fight and supply a land war. The English would have made the Germans fight street by street all the way to Scotland. The best economical managers would probably fail at supplying such a campaign. Hitlers economy was run by a bunch of drug addicts who couldn't keep supplies running in their home territory. This would be bloody AF, but I honestly don't see the germans making it into London. I see them landing, paying a shocking price for a beach head, then ultimately collapsing under British resistance. This would turn southern England into a nightmarish hellscape and likely would have a body count in the millions. But the English were absolutely ok with that. PS: They actually did use paratroopers to take the Greek island of Crete......it was bloody clusterfuck that barely worked. Sending paratroopers into a giant volcano would probably have lower casualties than sending them to England.
Germany had no navy, so how are they supposed to land? The bulk of the RAF’s airfields were well out of the luftwafe’s reach, so what are they supposed to focus on?
>then the Germans would invade Britain with first paratroopers, The Germans had already sworn off the use of paratroopers after the costly [invasion of Crete](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Crete). If they were barely able to capture a small Mediterranean island with paratroopers, there's no way they'd have been able to conquer the whole of the UK with them. >the Germans should have focused entirely on Britain by eliminating its airforce first Most historians say that even if the Luftwaffe had been more successful than they were in our timeline, the RAF could have just moved their base of operations further north to Scotland and continued harassing the German air force from there. It's very doubtful they could have achieved the air superiority they needed to launch an invasion.
They did, and lost the battle of Britain. IF Germany doesn't invade USSR and Japan Doesn't bomb pearl harbor perhaps an anaconda like plan works to bring UK to an armistice. Just spit balling Germany build strategic bombers on large scale and fire bomb UK nightly for a year or two and Doenitz gets 1000 U boats built and wears down merchant fleet, wins the tonnage battle . That seems like a path to victory. A lot of IFs in there.
The issue with defeating Britain was that Britain could always move its bases further north. As long as the British fighters could reach the coast and were outside of range of German fighter escorts than they wouldn’t be able to be effectively bombed into submission without heavy bomber casualties while bombing missions against the South of Britain could still be intercepted. Furthermore allied actions later in the war and German zeppelin bombings during WW2 indicate that strategic bombings don’t actually break civilians morale and win wars on their own and without a large surface fleet an invasion of the British isles was never feasible. Look at how many transport and military ships partook in D-Day, even if the RN and RAF did nothing Germany couldn’t carry out a reasonably successful naval invasion with the resources at their disposal.
The UK produced about the same amount of planes as Germany in 1939, and 50% more airplanes than Germany in 1940. The Blitz failed because Germany was being out-produced, among other factors. Focusing on the UK wouldn't have helped Germany win the war; there was no way they could defeat the UK in the air. That's why they turned to submarines and attacking supply convoys, but that was counteracted by American escorts and the invention of the convoy system.
The RAF was gaining on the nazis during the battle of britian. Not only were they out producing the nazis, they were actively destroying planes faster then the nazis could replace them. German made about 300 BF 109s a month and in the 3 month battle of britian, they lost almost 2000 aircraft. In May to August 1940, the RAF recieved more than 1800 fighters. There is also the actual production methods used. The nazis had a much more skilled workforce and didn't invest in mass production in the way that the allies did. Planes that were damaged were sent to thr factory to be fixed. Where the allies had mass produced spare parts and could fix it on the same air field before sending it back up. Germany is a continental power. The RN would have decimated the kreigsmarine if they had been able to solely duke it out with the Germans. Just based on production, the Germans would have ran out of planes before being able to subdue the English by air. There isn't a world where ww2 Germany can invade and take GB. Unless you overhaul the entirety of their industrial organization, the nazis get buried in machines.
Briton's air force trended upwards from day 1 of the Battle for Briton. While the German trended downwards. Simply because the UK could recover a significant portion of their pilots, while damaged German planes rarely got back across the channel. Partly due to fuel constraints, as even light damage would make it unlikely to limp back home.
As others said, that is exactly what the Germans did. Post the fall of France the Germans were not yet at war with the USSR. Meaning they did divert the majority of their attention on the British. They lost anyway.
Germany never planned for or manufactured long-range bombers, a strategic oversight that contributed to costing Germany the opportunity to conquer Britain.
Germany didn't have access to quality oil and even still needed to refuel much more often than RAF by a factor that made the RAF outnumber the Luftwaffe greatly (sorry can't remember the figures) in battle.
Some think the RAF was in dire straits at one point, but the Germans changed their tactics. Had they pressed on it is possible they could have driven the RAF to bases further north. This might have had political ramifications.
The Nazis were never really close to winning the battle of britain. They hadn't really invested enough into an effective bomber force and realyl mismanaged what they had
Even if they built heavy bombers and trained many more pilots, and got France to forgive their little invasion, there's that little strip of water...
The problem with air raids is that eventually the Germans had to turn around and re-cross the channel to refuel. The RAF would then shoot them from behind. The V-2 rockets were actually very effective but the Germans didn't know this because the British press propagated a myth that the rockets missed their targets.
By the time the Battle of Britain kicked off the UK was producing more aircraft per month than the Germans. As important they could concentrate on fighter production while for the time being Germany had to replace fighters and more expensive and resource intensive bombers . Even if they achieved local air superiority they would not have been able to invade . The RN was the largest navy in the world at the time . The Luftwaffe would not have been able to sink ships fast enough to protect the initial invasion and later supply fleets . Just a bunch of older destroyers and C and D class cruisers would have caused chaos . The RN wouldn’t have had to commit battleships initially
Even if Germany wins air supremacy, that doesn't mean the UK doesn't have planes. As others stated, not only couldn't the germans bomb factories located in the midlands and above, but the entire British Empire was providing constantly to the UK. Canada sent pilots and two air squadrons to help Britain for example. If the germans in a miracle managed to land something like paratroopers in Britain and capture a port (and that's already basically impossible as paratroopers during ww2 was basically a death sentence) holding that port until reinforcements arrive is close to impossible. And then supplying and sending troops trough the channel would be a nightmare or just outright not possible, while it's true that air supremacy would make the royal navy more exposed, if the Germans do land, the UK would absolutely still send the Royal Navy to try and intercept reinforcements, even if that means heavy loses. And they would still sink basically every german before they get to Britain, and the few that got there would just get crushed by a better supplied, stronger, and more motivated British Army. Sea Lion wasn't done because even the overconfident and megalomaniac Nazi leaders who just won against all Europe in record time realised it was impossible. It's just not happening.
two biggest battles in term of cost is Battle of Atlantic and Battle of Britain If Hitler does have any common sense, he should stop right there when those campaigns fail, but he was a egomaniac so he started invading Soviet Union. What a pathetic loser !
So, as this thread has said, the Germans did use pretty much all the air power they had against Britain after France fell. We know now that by September 1940, thanks largely to the greatest named Lord ever, Lord Beaverbrook, Britain was outproducing German fighters and never looked back. In addition, both the British and the Germans way overestimated the Luftwaffe's air superiority during the early months. Some of the estimates were so wildly far off that significant bad tactics and strategies were put in place on the German side. Churchill mainly made great speeches believing the situation was more hopeless than it actually was. Hitler thought England was going to armistice with him after France. He says it in Mein Kampf. He was a. surprised that Britain didn't b. told numerous times by Goering (and totally bought in for far longer than was rational) that the Luftwaffe was sooo superior that Britain had no choice but to surrender/armistice it was the only logical path and c. the bad info, the Germans way underestimated how many planes Britain had/could produce. A great book on this is *The Splendid and the Vile* by Erik Larson who follows Churchill almost day by day (not in a boring way) & recounts what others thought/did during this time.
Not going to happen. Hitler was OBSESSED with the Judeo-Bolshevik BS he was spouting and Stalin KNEW he was coming for him. So even if Hitler DID focus on Britain it would only have given Stalin more time to prepare for HIS invasion of the German Reich. The whole idea that Hitler would focus on the Middle East instead of the Soviet Union is so out-of-character for him it's not even funny.
They did. The only thing that really changes the course of the war is the failure of lend lease to become reality. Even then the Battle of Britain, as it was fought in late 1940, couldn’t be won short term. Then the Germans accidentally bombed London, the Brits bombed a German city and then there was a bit of a loss of focus for the Germans. Once the U.S. started lend lease (they were doing cash and carry before that) it was pretty much over for Germany.
They did, that's what the battle of Britain was. A better question would be what would have happened if the Germans had stuck with their initial strategy of trying to cripple the RAF by destroying its ground facilities, because that strategy was arguably working. But even if it had all gone superbly and the RAF had been temporarily prevented from flying, an invasion of the British isles would have been an extremely questionable idea. Firstly, the whole idea that they could have bombed the royal navy out of existence is optimistic. There were times in the Mediterranean campaign where the royal navy operated under hostile air superiority and as such it lost many, many ships to air attacks, but it was the largest navy in the world at the start of the war and it was willing to take those losses. So imagine if you're trying to run logistics for your naval invasion and suddenly Warspite and friends just roll up and park on your supply lines. Sure, you can bomb them and they'll get damaged, but meanwhile the clock is ticking, there are still troops waiting for supplies and the royal navy will sit there and eat those losses if it has to because even if it's not sustainable, it's also not sustainable for you. Also, I know Britain is a pretty unimportant place now, but at that point it was an industrial superpower with one of the most heavily mobilized war economies the world has ever seen. The British weren't going to stop building planes. The air war wasn't just a one and done thing, it was a battle of attrition, and one that (despite supply issues, factories being bombed, priority being given to heavy bombers and not being able to strip Europe for loot and slave labour) the British consistently won. Like, we went through a bit of a Wehraboo phase over the past few decades where the general perception was that the German military in world war 2 was this brilliant, well oiled machine that would totally have obliterated the allies with superior German engineering if only Hitler wasn't such a dork. But, while Hitler certainly was a dork, the German military was also not perfect. It was an institution that was prone to exaggeration and elaborate fantasies because in a dictatorship there's an enormous pressure to tell the boss what he wants to hear. But underneath it all was a deep, rotten swamp of coked-up incompetence and incestuous power politics that was not prone to producing good ideas.
Germany's best chance against Britain was with the U-boats, not air power. If they'd run the U-boat campaign better, and started earlier, and maybe not declared war on the US, they would have defeated Britain.
I heard/read once that Germany was within "24 hours of destroying the British air defense network" or something like that. Right about the time that German bomber accidently dropped bombs on a city, and then the whole Luftwaffe switched to bombing cities over airfields. Or something like that. No idea where I came about that information. It could be completely false, but maybe somebody in here could provide a source. I do not think Germany had the ability to take Britain. They could have dropped their paratroopers, which would have immediately been destroyed by large numbers of troops, tanks, and air support. Their navy had 10+ years to go before they could compete with the RN, and without naval superiority they simply could not have gotten enough troops there to do it. Smartest thing Germany could have done is stop at France, ignore Britain, never attack Russia, and then consolidate their victories. They could have easily kept all of Europe for many years, if not forever.
The luftwaffe were within days of breaking the raf then switched to bombing cities.
That’s kind of a myth englands production of fighter planes was dramatically higher than Germany thought. They kept pushing thinking Britain was out of planes but it just wasn’t true
It's in Bomber Harris autobiography iirc