Did Dr Andrew Gordon forget the first lesson of WWII naval combat? Air power overwhelmed sea power (see Prince of Wales and Repulse.) The Germans had to control the air over the channel before they could control the channel crossing. If the Germans had driven the RAF from the skies, then the Royal Navy wouldn't have dared to contest a channel crossing, all those ships would have been shot to pieces from the sky.

The RAF deserves the credit it got. Though I will concede that it was not nearly as outnumbered by the Luftwaffe as legend makes it. It was a fairly even battle.

What Brandon said. 1066 and all that.

One must get in line, for all the learned in military history we find here.

Military capabilities fit together like bricks to make a wall. Balanced, complete forces are what is needed for victory, which is why wannabes like Germany and Japan had so little chance.

Of course the Royal Navy was the countermeasure to the invasion threat, The Luftwaffe the counter-counter meassure, and the RAF the counter-counter counter measure. What mattered was that at the end of the game, the Germans came up one measure short.

The thread calls to mind the pronouncement of Admiral Earl St. Vincent concerning the threatened Napoleonic invasion, "I do not say that the French cannot come, I only say that they cannot come by sea."

Four measures: army, navy, air, occupation force.

They were never a threat.

By the same four measures, they were never a threat to France either...and yet.

Reading Grant's memoirs right now. Good humble man. Very reticent about Cold Harbor and other failures, but a very good read. The parts about the quartermaster and the telegraph logistics were revealing. Soldiers fight, but they must be supported, so I guess the Royal Navy gets big props for keeping the seas open. With a little help, of course.

Regarding a possible invasion, Churchill said in his World War II memoirs that he was hoping the Germans would try it: He thought Britain would inflict the greatest defeat on them ever seen in the history of warfare. Indeed, that's why he suspected they wouldn't try to invade, because he believed that the enemy is usually shrewd enough to avoid the mistakes you'd like them to make.

They were superior to France on the ground, but even at that couldn't occupy the whole country because there were too few Germans. It was over when they had to accept Vichy.

The Japanese had a credible record with naval aircraft (and sinking enemy ships). The Germans didn't.

Operation Sea Lion was never a serious gambit.

oj: they couldn't occupy all of France, yet somehow they had two million troops to spare to invade the Soviet Union? How can one not recognize the difference between tactical expediency and a strategic redirection? If the Germans had managed to control the air over the Channel, they would have done Sea Lion, and simply postponed the invasion of Russia for a year and taken the intervening time to annihilate the unarmed rabble that Britain had defending her shores.

Of course Churchill (whom I still believe was the greatest leader of the 20th Century) would say he hoped they would invade. He had his reputation as a war leader to protect (not that it needed much).

Yes, that's why they didn't have enough for France. Nor did they have enough to defeat the USSR. Nor had they won could they have occuppied it.

Nazism was not a serious threat to control continental Europe, nevermind the British isles and, of course, no one even pretends they threatened us.

They had enough to occupy France. They just didn't need the part that bordered on the Med (which is all they left Vichy). They also would have had enough to invade and conquer England, had they stuck to that plan, won air superiority, and gone for it. After (and only after) that was done, they would have been able to invade and defeat the USSR. They just couldn't do it all at once. And still, they came damned close. Too close. One less mistake here, a couple of redirected priorities there (remember they also took the time in early 1941 to conquer the Balkans), and they would have won the big prize.

You are reasoning backwards from the ultimate conclusion, factoring out their mistakes, and concluding it simply wasn't possible. Your post hoc reasoning is in serious error on this point.

They needed all of France and Spain and couldn't take all of the former or any of the latter. England was a pipe dream. There just weren't enough Germans. Demographics is destiny.

There were certainly enough Germans for an invasion of Britain. The British Army did not have any heavy weapons after Dunkirk. They lacked adequate coastal defenses. And despite Churchillian defiance, there was some amount of demoralization that would have increased the moment the Wehrmacht landed. The chances of American help - even just sending more material - would have declined rapidly.

Hitler never wanted to fight Britain, and he would have offered a light peace. The peace party was still strong in 1940 and they might have overturned Churchill. Any Nazi occupation of Britain would have been very light and not long - probbaly enough to round up dissidents and a few Jews. Why occupy when you can have Edward VIII resume his throne and make sure the peace is kept? And with Britain out of the war, there would be no real need to occupy France or the Low Countries. Hitler could move everything to the East.

Yes, the Brits certainly could have just signed a peace treaty, but Germany was no threat so withstanding a little bombing and retaining their honor was an easy enough course.

Hitler didn't want to invade Britain. Sealion was a bluff.

But, considering that the British Admiralty adopted a policy of never sending a ship larger than a destroyer into the English Channel after the summer of 1940, I wouldn't even give them credit for calling the bluff.