BBC James Holland - Battle of Britain

[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 The fighter Sqns would have been withdrawn and rebuilt if the BoB started to go wrong.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