Why couldn't they have built a navy and invaded with the presumption of not invading the USSR?

This is a fairly silly article. The reason the pilots weren't trained is that the all the goods ones were being killed, and the RAF was desperate for anything they could send up. Britain didn't have the luxury in 1940 to take time to train the pilots.

Furthermore, the claim that the Royal Navy was the real threat is correct, but they totally miss the point. If the Germans gained mastery of the air, the Luftwaffe would have sunk the Royal Navy. Airpower defeating seapower was one of the great lessons of WWII. Therefore, the air battle was decisive.

Britain had no invasion defenses, and no heavy equipment. It had all been lost in France and Dunkirk. If the Germans had managed to land any significant force on Britain, it'd have been a disaster.

So I'm guessing that those Heinkel bombers ran out of gas over Britian...
All you have to do to successfully fight a bombing campaign is interfere with the bombers aim. You don't have to shoot them down; if they don't make the target, it's a wasted mission.

Postwar assessments showed all bombing was a waste of time...period. Except Fat Boy & Little Man and we used them wrong.

If the Earth crashed into the Sun it would be a disaster and just as likely as the German landing.

Chris is on the right track. The Royal Navy was the countermeasure to the proposed German invasion, the Luftwaffe the countermeasure to the Royal Navy, and the RAF the countermeasure to the Luftwaffe.

Other than that there is no point in arguing. Everyone knows that ships don't matter, airplanes don't matter, and we should just spend all that money on choo-choo trains.

It seems as though the RAF barely hung on. Had Hitler first defeated it, rather than losing planes on general bombing missions, the Royal Navy would have been a sitting duck and the island would have had to surrender.

Plausible?

The British actually had more single engine fighters than the Germans. These planes, greatly aided by radar, won the battle by slaughtering the very slow, inadequately armed, and often unescorted bombers. The especially vulnerable Stukas were withdrawn from operations before the end of August. The German twin engine fighter, the Bf-110, was no match for the Hurricanes and Spitfires. The single engine Bf-109 was superior to both BUT it had limited range and could only stay over Britain for 15-20 minutes. It remains a mystery as to why the Germans did not fit these aircraft with drop tanks.

As to an invasion, the Germans had a very narrow window which, due to weather conditions in the Channel, would have closed by the end of September at the latest. I think their actual "drop dead" date was 9/17. Ten days before that they had switched tactics and started bombing London instead of the airfields, effectively forfeiting any chance of defeating Fighter Command.

The ad hominem attacks on the author in the comments section illustrate how difficult it is to have any serious discussion of the BOB in the UK. There the myth has an iron grip on history.

Every society has its myths and the Anglosphere is no exception. If you try to destroy a society's myths don't be suprised when you get treated like a witch.

IIRC (I don't have my back issues of MHQ right to hand) the RAF had a positive kill ratio versus both the Me-109 and the Germans overall, and their gunnery actually was pretty good once they discarded the pre-war doctrine of shooting from 300 yards. Don't forget, too, that an RAF pilot who bailed out over the UK and survived got right back in action, while a Luftwaffe pilot who bailed out over the UK was out of the war, period.

George: Outfitting the German bombers with drop tanks might have helped but what they really needed were four-engine bombers, which they decided against producing some 3 to 5 years earlier (that's when the BOB was lost).

Is the argument that the Nazis couldn't ever have taken England or that the Eastern Front drained away the necessary resources?

I know nothing about this subject..

Icons exist to be clast.

But isn't the point that the bombers were a waste of resources entirely? The only target worth bombing, as pointed out earlier, was the Royal Navy, and to do that they needed more fighters, and certainly not the V1 and V2.

It's true that Germany could have built a force of 4 engine bombers, but they saw the air force as flying artillery for the army, i.e., a tactical arm, rather than a strategic one. The bombers available in 1940 didn't carry enough bombs to cause anywhere near the damage that the Allies later inflicted on Germany.

Building bigger bombers would have meant cutting back on other armaments, possibly reducing the effectiveness of the army. Bigger bombers also would have consumed more fuel, which was always in short supply. When the Germans finally built a 4 engine bomber it was a dismal failure (the He-177). Had it been a successful design it would have appeared too late and in too few numbers to even marginally influence the war.

Had it come to an invasion many factors favored the British. Here are just three.

Except for invading some islands in the Baltic in 1917, Germany had no amphibious warfare experience. Norway didn't count. That was a matter of sailing into neutral ports and pulling up to the piers, a far cry from hitting the beaches. Given the short window, there wasn't time to conduct adequate training.

Even if the landings were successful, it would have been very difficult to supply just the first wave divisons. One need only look at the efforts the Allies made in 1944 to supply the Normandy landings (artificial harbors, pipelines) and contrast that with the Germans' very limited preparations/capabilities.

The German army and navy did not cooperate very well and the navy and air force barely spoke. Coordination was so poor that the Luftwaffe sank two KM destroyers in the North Sea in February 1940.

The British have every right to their myth. Churchill's famous tribute to Fighter Command was accurate and fully deserved. But the odds on Germany pulling off a successful invasion were always very long, something I suspect Churchill understood better than anyone.

The Germans in Sea Lion would have had a victorious army with high morale. They'd be facing a demoralized British Army with no tanks, no heavy guns, and no major amphibious defenses. And this scenario also implies the Germans would have mastery of the air.

The Allies needed the strange inventions like artificial harbors and undersea pipelines because they were invading a beach with no harbor facilities. They avoided ports because they learned the Germans had them to well defended during the Dieppe raid in 1942.

In contrast, the Germans in 1940 could probably have seized any of several good ports on the channel coast on the first day of invasion. And they wouldn't have needed to cover the long distance from Normandy to England. On a good day, you can see Dover one from Calais. They would not have needed anything more than barges.

The Germans might have needed a while to cover the entire island, but all they needed to do to guarantee victory was dominate southern England and control some ports and airfields. That they could have done, and then it would have been only a matter of time before they built up enough forces to win.

Post-war, it turned out that the only part of the German economy that was vulnerable to Allied bombing was POL(Petroleum,Oil,Lubricants) production. We bombed it half-heartedly because we didn't realize how dire the fuel situation was for the Germans.

Here is an excellent book on the hypothetical invasion of England:
http://worldatwar.eu/index.php?esid=0ccec90a337bb2d9c9ef4ce5d8d72de8&lang=3&refcode=0&location=article&articleid=419&categoryid=10
Britain had a counter to every weapon the Germans could deploy in their attempt to dominate the Channel, except one: long range super-heavy artillery. With it, the Germans could make close range coverage of the Channel by English Destroyers untenable. If they had to redeploy those ships to more remote ports, the entire defense of the Channel starts to unravel.

What was the largest German amphibious landing of the war?

IIRC, that would be Crete. 7th Airborne by air plus 5th Mountain division by sea. Crete, if anything, was harder on the Germans since they had little air support and no naval support. Severely outnumbered, they still managed to rout New Zealand and British troops and forced the evacuation of the island.

OJ,

I don't think you realize how prostrate England was after the Fall of France. They soon recovered, but for the first few months they were extremely vulnerable to an invasion by even a comparatively small(say 3 division) invasion. They didn't even have enough rifles to equip the soldiers brought back from Dunkirk, let alone the newly formed infantry units. There was a critical shortage of all types of heavy weapons ammo, especially anti-tank shells and artillery rounds. Compounding the problem is the countryside of S.E. England. There is no natural terrain to defend once the Channel has been leaped.

Yes, but there's a Channel, isn't there?

Great discussion, folks. It's why I hang out here.

George:

Actually, Churchill said in his memoirs that he secretly hoped the Germans would try a landing because he thought they would suffer one of the worst military routs in history. He wrote something to Roosevelt about how the Germans were preparing for an invasion and the British were likewise preparing a welcome worthy of the occasion. However, in reality he thought an invasion unlikely on the principle that if you want an opponent to collosally screw up he is probably smart enough to avoid walking into your trap.

Granted, all of this means taking Churchill's assessment in his memoirs as the actual truth, which is a hazardous assumption. Churchill's operating belief in his writing was that he was never wrong about anything. I remember how surprised I was when I first read this in his memoirs, but my admittedly limited reading in this area makes me thinks that a German invasion would've been much tougher than is often portrayed.

"Yes, but there's a Channel, isn't there?"

Circular logic is not an argument. Because they were not successfully invaded does not mean they were not vulnerable to it.

It takes two to tango and ultimately Hitler had little interest in invading Britain.

Matt,

By the time Churchill got around to writing about the threat, it was past. The RAF was rebuilt, the infantry units had been replenished, and the Home Guard had received donated civilian firearms from the US(With help from the NRA, no less!) The window of vulnerability was from July to October of 1940.

The Channel is a straightish line, not a circle, though the fact that Britain is surrounded by water is, indeed, determinative.

Your argument is that but for the Channel the British would have been easy pickings. Mine is that the Channel exists.

Has everyone forgotten us?

"Your argument is that but for the Channel the British would have been easy pickings. Mine is that the Channel exists."

The Channel is just a body of water. It's not a magic shield that repels the Hun if you just wield it in his general direction. You must station troops on land, at sea, and in the air to vigorously defend it. In the Summer of 1940 there was a period of time when the Brits could not defend the Channel. If the Germans had been serious about invading England during that period, they very likely would have succeeded. They were not, and did not.

You're defeating yourself here as you point out they couldn't even cross an undefended Channel. Indeed, they never staged a significant successful amphibious landing, did they?