Originally posted by Shuckins
It was never the German's intent to try to occupy Britain with only planes.
First they would seize control of the Channel....possibly faking the launch of the invasion to draw the RN into those narrow waters. The resulting battle would have been a bloodbath for the Royal Navy.
Secondly, the U-boats would starve the country of supplies and arms by savaging the Atlantic convoys.
Third, the Germans would launch the invasion, possibly moving directly across the Channel, but perhaps attempting a landing at a less obvious point, as the Allies actually did during Operation Overlord.
All of which would take place after German bomber raids had rendered the British naval bases inoperable.
A combined arms operation all around.
Sorry, but this is almost all wrong.
Germany could not sieze full control of the channel because they had a huge material disadvantage in naval forces and no real prospect of achieving meaningful air superiority.
The U-boat arm was already operating at full capacity in the atlantic and the small number of escorts engaged were having little effect on the outcome. The limting factor was the small numbers of available u-boats and crews, not allied escort vessels.
The area of planned invasion is a matter of record. Germany would have landed on sites between Hythe to the east and Rottingdean to the west.
The luftwaffe could not render British naval bases inoperable because they were mostly out of range of effective fighter cover.
To take it further.
A prospective invasion had to occur in the south east of england because that was the extent of Lutwaffe single-seat fighter cover. The problem for Germany was that the channel at this point is very treacherous, with very stong currents, and sand-bars blocking otherwise prime invasion beaches. The flat-bottomed barges they intended to use would have been limited to towing at 5 knots or less, even assuming perfect weather conditions and would have been sitting targets for the large numbers of small coastal defence vessels clustered in the straits of dover, without any need for the large part of the Home Fleet to get involved. The elements of weather and sea conditions alone would have made it a very perilous undertaking even without the factors of naval and air opposition.
Air Superiority - one point that everyone seems to have missed is that even if the LW hadn't shifted target to London, it was only 11 Group of Fighter Command that was being hit, since 11 Group covered the part of the country within range of effective LW fighter cover. If the pressure on 11 Group had been maintained, Fighter Command could have fallen back to the untouched fields of 12 and 10 Groups which were outside Luftwaffe single-seater fighter range but which were still situated close enough to allow fighter cover to be launched over the channel, as well as to contest LW raids in general.
Faulty strategy on the part of the german leadership prevented an air victory for Germany: they generally still subscribed to inter-war theories of strategic bombing which focussed on the effect on public morale. Couple this with strategic discrepancies between the Luftwaffe leadership; Sperle wanting to keep hitting air defense infrastructure for example while Kesselring wanted to force the issue by bombing London into submission. No real coherent plan was the result.
There seems to be a certain misunderstanding here as to what the German strategy actually was for Operation Sealion. Erich Raeder set out four essential preconditions for an invasion to have even a chance of success. These were:
1. Elimination of the home fleet or at best rendering it unable to intervene.
2. Elimination of the RAF
3. Prevention of the RN submarine forces from intervening
4. Destruction of Coastal Defences
Point 1 was a pipe dream. the RN's main anchorages were out of range of LW fighter cover, and unescorted raids on the ports were not viable as evidenced by those attempted by Luftflotte 5 against the north of england in which the LW bombers were very roughly handled by 13 Group Fighter Command. Point 2 couldn't happen because the LW couldn't hit 10 and 12 Group's infrastructure without taking unsustainable losses, whilst 10 and 12 Groups could still contest the invasion area. Point 3 would have been difficult to realise as German anti-submarine capacity was very lacking in 1940 (even more so than the British). Little was ever done by Germany to address point 4.
