VULNERABLE ISLAND WAS AN OXYMORON:

Nor was Britain herself so powerless in 1940. It had the world's largest navy, supported by a huge merchant fleet. The risk of confronting that naval power is now often used to argue that the German invasion of Britain could never have taken place. This exaggerates the extent to which the Royal Navy was invulnerable to air attack, but almost certainly naval forces were an important addition to the balance sheet of armed power. The RAF also contributed Coastal and Bomber Commands to the battle; Churchill on August 20th, 1940 devoted a lot more lines in his famous 'Few' speech to the bomber crews than he did to Fighter Command - 21 lines to six. Britain also had an army that was less ill-equipped and unprepared than the popular post-Dunkirk myth suggests. Behind all this military effort was one of the world's most advanced and technically sophisticated industrial economies and one of the world's principal financial centres. If invasion could have been done cheaply, Hitler would have come. But British power in 1940 was not such an easy nut to crack.

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