Preview; work in progress

Sept 15 1940

The collapse of the RAF came suddenly. Ignoring the provocation of Bomber Command raids on Berlin
Germany kept unrelenting pressure on Fighter Command airfields and aircraft production facilities.
Between August 15 and September 10, the RAF lost 310 pilots and twice as many machines. By
September 15, with its remaining forces pulled back to 13 Group in the north, it could no longer
provide meaningful fighter cover over Southeast England.

Forward airfields like Manston and Hawkinge were too dangerous to be used except as
temporary holding fields from which to meet the first raids of the day. As September 15 dawned,´
the weary pilots of 605 and 72 squadrons arriving at Hawkinge saw an ominous sight off the coast...



Lines of ships stretching from Folkstone to Dover!



The ever-present 109s in attendance



The last of The Few threw themselves at the bombers pounding the landing zone



And at the ships charging the shore



The true Battle of Britain had begun.

More on the upcoming BoF mission pack

http://www.a2asimulations.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=19792

Great pics!

I know there is an endless (and probably pointless!) debate about whether Germany a) intended to invade and b) could have achieved it. But I hold to my own viewpoint which is if the British could use fishing trawlers and colliers to lift 400,000 men off the beach at Dunkirk under heavy air attack, Germany could have done the same in the other direction had it a) wanted to and b) had air superiority.

To those who say air power would not have prevented the Royal Navy intervening - bah humbug. Anything less than a heavy cruiser was vulnerable, and even heavy ships could be sufficiently damaged to by Luftwaffe 1940 arms as to be non-operational:

09/01/1940 German bombers sink three merchantmen in North Sea.

16/03/1940 Germans bomb Scapa Flow naval base.

03/05/1940 Destroyer Afridi sunk by German bombers off Norway.

29/05/1940 The British destroyer HMS Wakeful is hit and sunk by a torpedo from the German E-boat S30. HMS Grafton which was nearby try's to rescue the sailors from HMS Wakeful, but is itself hit by another torpedo from the same German E-boat and begins to sink. Another British destroyer, HMS Comfort moves up to help, but HMS Grafton fires on her in the mistaken believe that she is a German ship, sinking HMS comfort. 15 other vessels are also sunk by Luftwaffe Stuka attacks near Dunkirk on this day.

31/05/1940 Heavy Luftwaffe attacks sink two French destroyers off the beaches at Dunkirk.

01/06/1940 The British destroyers Keith, Basilisk and Havant and the transport Scotia are sunk by Luftwaffe dive bombers, near Dunkirk.

06/07/1940 German aircraft and minesweepers sink 4 British submarines, Narwhal, Spearfish, Shark and Thames. The first German U-boat base in France is opened at Lorient.

20/07/1940 German aircraft sink destroyer Brazen off Dover.

27/07/1940 German aircraft sink destroyers Codrington at Dover and Wren off the Suffolk coast.


On 10 January 1941 Illustrious was attacked while escorting a convoy east of Sicily by Axis Savoia-Marchetti SM.79 and Ju-87 "Stuka" dive-bombers, being hit by 8 bombs and suffering extensive damage.

The Royal Navy would have taken some decent losses, especially in smaller ships but it hardly is guaranteed that the Luftwaffe and the Kriegsmarine would have been able to effectively keep the Royal Navy away from the landing ships.

At Dunkirk the Royal Navy didn't use anything larger than a destroyer and they managed to evacuate over 300,000 troops. This was despite the best attempts by the Luftwaffe to destroy those ships.

The Royal Navy in 1939 had 9 battleships, 35 cruisers, 4 aircraft carriers and 95 destroyers in home waters or in the Atlantic. If you only factor in maybe 1/3 of those ships being close enough to defend the home islands or not under refit you still have at least 3 battleships and 11 cruisers up against two battlecruisers (the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau), a couple of heavy cruisers and a handful of destroyers of the Kriegsmarine.

Of course the Gneisenau was under repair at Keil during this time due to a torpedo hit from HMS Clyde and the Scharnhorst was under repair for torpedo damage incurred during the sinking of the HMS Glorious. Both ships may have been available in October of 1940 but neither ship moved out of Keil until December of 1940. Bismark was still undergoing sea trials in September of 1940 and wasn't available until early 1941. The only operational heavy cruisers for the Kriegsmarine were the Admiral Hipper and Prinz Eugen and the PE wasn't completely worked up by October of 1940. The pocket battleship Admiral Scheer was commerce raiding in october of 1940 but could have been held back. The Lutzow was heavily damaged following the Norwegan adventure and wasn't available for any operations until 1941.

That meant the Kriegsmarine could manage maybe one battlecruiser, on heavy cruiser, one pocket battleship and several destroyers against 3-5 Royal Navy Battleships, 12-15 cruisers and probably 30 destroyers.

So the German Navy wouldn't have been much more than a speed bump for the Royal Navy en route to the combat zone.

The Luftwaffe had serious problems dealing with sustained attacks on Royal Navy ships. Although the Royal navy lost several cruisers around Crete and a couple in attacks at Malta but the Luftwaffe never succeeded in stopping the ships from getting through to port. The Germans never did manage to sink a British capital ship with aircraft. Most Luftwaffe aircraft like the He 111 and the Do 17 didn't natively carry torpedoes and bombs carried by stukas could cause some damage to battleships but probably wouldn't sink a heavily armored dreadnought. By running fast during the day, outside the range of the Stukas and with minimal risk from He111s and Do 17s the ships could be in position to make a fast run in on the beachhead with heavy cruisers in the night.

Think Savo island but with the British running in at night to savage the ships during the evening and then running out of range during the day. The only way to knock out the Royal Navy would be to destroy Scapa Flow but that was out of range of fighter escort and the bombers would have been savaged by the few RAF aircraft left. Even if they managed to damage the Royal Navy there still would have been enough firepower left in the RN to get through to the beaches. Unlike the Imperial Japanese Army the Luftwaffe didn't have the training in naval attacks (especially with torpedoes) and the JU88 wasn't fielded in enough numbers at that point.

Even if the Luftwaffe managed to sink half of the Royal Navy and somehow could have kept the RN subs out of the channel half of the Royal Navy would have been present and desperate to stop the German invasion. I honestly believe that there was no operational way that the Germans could have neutralized the Royal Navy. The leaders of the Kriegsmarine didn't think so either and neither did many Wehrmacht leaders. Most were against the invasion because of the risk of losing troops in makeshift landing barges to the fast craft of the Royal Navy or the big guns of the larger warships.

As I said, one of those arguments no one wins, but good fun anyway...

Accept the main thesis of your arguments, IF you look at it as a naval conflict primarily then it is absolutely true the Germans would have had trouble supplying the beach head by sea and maintaining a reliable sea route against RN pressure. But the vaunted RN would have had to have been within 3 hours sailing of Dover, and in force, to have interdicted the invasion fleet. Even assuming they were magically loitering undetected within range of the Channel, they would have had to engage in an environment of constant air attack. If the RN capital ships were so invulnerable to air attack and so able to project power, why was the fleet hiding at Scapa and not defending the 30,000 tonnes of shipping lost in the Channel up to that point? The British did not have our hindsight to convince them their fleet was safe from air attack. This argument ignores also the ability of Germany, again due to air superiority, to mine the approaches to the Channel and prevent the RN from reaching the invasion zone until too late.

Germany was painfully aware of its naval limitations and Raeder successfully argued for a limited spearhead of 150,000 troops focused on a single landing zone to ensure it could be protected. Could the combined Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine, with no meaningful RAF air assets availble, have forced a landing at a single landing zone given favourable weather? I still have not seen a compelling argument to say no. The post war exercise conducted by Sandhurst military academy as I recall considered naval and air assetts and still concluded Germany could have achieved a beach head even without complete air superiority.

Could that landing zone have been expanded to allow an invasion without the invaders being thrown back into the sea? Ah, that is another question entirely!

But would it have needed to successfully invade? Or would a panicked parliament have thrown Winston out on his breeches and sued for peace? Thank goodness we will never know!

I understood that having planned the D-Day landings, the Allied command came to understand that operation Sealion could not have happened, purely down to the planning and logistics.

I expect a reasonable percentage of the invasion troops could have been landed. Supporting them afterwards would have been tricky, Southern England having been thoroughly surveyed and defences built.

Glad that we never had to find out!

Amen to that last!

It is quite typical of military planners to assume the enemy could not do simpler or better what it took them years to plan and months to assemble. But history is full of examples where this happened. I don't know why, but Dien Bien Phu springs to mind.

- The Viet Minh have no artillery
- Even if they did, they could never get them through those forests because we certainly couldn't
- Even if they did get them through those forests, they would never get them up those mountains, because we certainly couldn't.

Depending on weather and speed, crossing time from Calais to Dover was about 3 hours. I maintain that by the time the British land based observers sighted the German invasion fleet in the Channel and roused the British fleet at Scapa Flow, the first jackboots would have already been hitting the beach at Dover.

Hein