Quote:
Originally Posted by dduff442
It's funny how the 'when plucky little Britain stood alone' story has come to dominate all interpretations of the battle from either side's perspective.
Victory in the air was just the first step in a succession of feats -- each of increasing difficulty -- Germany needed to pull off in order to secure victory. Britain would not have thrown it's last resources into defending the SE or even defending London. The fighter Sqns would have been withdrawn and rebuilt if the BoB started to go wrong.
At that point, Hitler would have had the choice of gambling on a cross-channel attack (i.e. over 20+ miles of unsheltered atlantic waters), but without any navy to secure the sea lanes. One brief experiment was conducted with the landing barges... in daylight and with less than encouraging results.
Swarming across the channel en masse in darkness in their boats designed for inland waterways would have been an entirely different matter. Eisenhower had the most accurate weather forecast ever made in his hands when he ordered D-Day. Without similar information, Germany could have gotten lucky or it could have suffered an appalling fiasco.
Whether German air-landings would have resembled Eben Emael or Crete is anybody's guess but if they weren't much more like the former than the latter then all Germany's chances would have ended.
An German airhead on British soil would have been a deadly threat to Britain so at that point Fighter Command might have been expected to re-emerge with all the strength it could muster.
Cuisers and destroyers would have roamed the channel at night and, if they failed to cut German supplies, a BB could have been sacrificed on an end-run. Recalling the impact of Scharnhorst, Gneisenau etc. on convoys will illustrate the stupefying violence these machines could bring to bear on undefended merchants.
Five or six divisions would probably have defeated Britain's available field forces but you can't occupy a country the size of Britain with 5 Divisions. This was unfortunate for Hitler because sustaining even this force for a brief period was the absolute limit of Germany's logistical capabilities.
I'm Irish and, as Danes or Dutch or Portugese etc will tell you, there are few things as irritating as coming from a small country with a large neighbour possessing an assured sense of its own grandeur. Odd then, that this story is inverted when talking about the Battle of Britain. The prospect of invasion was one to be interpreted as an opportunity rather than as a risk.
Having talked up Germany's victories all through the summer of '40, Hitler was a victim of the expectations he had generated. If he didn't clinch it that year, however, he'd be left in exactly the same position as Napoleon: facing an adversary with unassailable naval power, a global trading network, ample supplies of everything Germany didn't have (oil, nickel, manganese, tungsten, rubber etc), willing to sustain the conflict literally for as long as necessary and able to do so for the foreseeable future. All exactly as in 1800-1812.
This wouldn't have been enough to secure an Allied victory, but Germany would never have known peace on its frontiers and sooner or later other powers would have joined the fight.
dduff
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That's actually a very well thought out and accurate post. Maybe the main consideration in achieving air superiority was the ability to protect or cripple the royal navy (depending on which side one came from). I know for a fact that the reason my county's government chose to side with the allies and suffer 4 years of brutal occupation, resulting in losing 10% of its total polulation to reasons ranging from reprisals to hunger, was that the people in charge simply thought "this is a world war fought over long distances, navies will play a big part and the UK has the best navy of them all'.
Greece was ruled by a dictatorship when Mussolini's ambassador in Athens delivered the ultimatum, asking for free passage and occupation of certain strategic territories. The Greek dictator at the time was closer ideologically to the fascists of Italy and Germany, plus the local royal family was of Danish/German descent and prone to side with the axis. In fact, they tried that in WWI as well, the end result was that pro-allied politicians formed a separate government in the north and nothern Greece was with the allies, while southern Greece was pro-central powers and Athens got occupied by the allied fleet.
The reason both the king and the dictator decided to oppose the axis was two-fold. First of all, the Greek people always root for the underdog and dislike the aggressor, so any attempt to join the axis would have been met by intense resistance from the inside. Second, they were expecting Britain to exhaust their enemies through naval power and blockades, especially since they were suspecting the US would either join the war itself (which it did) or put its industrial power to use in "propping up" Britain when things would get tough through lend-lease.
To make it short i think that even if the luftwaffe had achieved complete air superiority in southern UK, even a suicide run by the royal navy could have wrought terrible losses on the German invasion fleet and either thwart the landings altogether, or diminish numbers so much that ground troops on British soil would be able to hold their ground and achieve a stalemate or more. Maybe 90% of the royal navy units operating in the area would be sunk, but if the RAF had kept some reserves to buy them time and provide air cover they would be able to do substantial damage to the German invasion fleet.
Of course, if the RAF was totally depleted by that point and the warships operated with no cover at all, it would be a totally different story.
Overall, this is a pretty good discussion with lots of opposing, yet well argued points. Well done everybody
