Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

Could Germany Have Successfully Invaded Britain, 1940? June 13, 2015

The greatest month in German history (militarily speaking) began 10 May 1940 with the attack in the west and ended 14 June when the Wehrmacht entered Paris. Yet that month was clouded by Britain’s survival. Hitler had two ways to pacify Britain: first, he could break Britain militarily (invasion); second, he could convince Britain to withdraw (negotiation). Once Churchill was in power and once the cigar-chomper had stamped his will on the war cabinet the first was never going to happen. There remained, then, the option of invasion: the much vaunted Operation Sea Lion. Sea Lion never went ahead for a number of reasons. Military historians point to the fact that the RAF retained (just) air superiority over the Home Counties, there was the escape of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk and other British smaller successes. However, the truth is that Britain wasn’t invaded for one far more important reason: Hitler simply wasn’t keen on the idea. He liked the British? He admired the British? The invasion didn’t feel right in his bones? It made sense to keep the Empire going? Whatever the reason the invasion was, to use a phrase of one historian of 1940, contemplated but not planned.

In the summer of that dreadful year the British were not aware of this, of course, and acted, sensibly, as if the invasion would take place.  Beach’s question is a simple one: had the Germans decided to invade could they have pulled it off?  Drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com Britain’s war cabinet was convinced that, while Britain retained air superiority, an invasion was unlikely to succeed: in fact, the war cabinet was so convinced of this that it was believed that an an invasion would be a good thing, because it would fail so calamitously. On the German side, there were similar opinions. The German navy, especially, did not look forward to ‘dying bravely’ at the hands of the Home Fleet: the German army was (understandably) confident that it could finish off the mauled British army, but was worried about getting to Blighty with its feet dry. One man, however, believed to the end of his days that it would have been possible: smiling Albert Kesselring, perhaps Germany’s most capable WW2 general. Kesselring in his postwar memoirs pooh-poohed the impossibility of an invasion. His requirements for the success of a hammer-blow invasion were as follows.

Diversionary bombing

Soften up fighter command in the chosen area.

Neutralise British infrastructure (radars, shore guns etc) with paratroopers and gliders

Bring all German naval power to bear on a narrow corridor in which the Home Fleet would not easily operate.

Kesselring was certainly right about one thing. The RAF did not have the power to destroy or even seriously damage an invasion fleet from the air. Everything would have depended on how quickly the Home Fleet would have rallied out and how well it could have interdicted German supply lines. Beach can see how a German army could have got a convincing foothold and how that German army could have defeated every British force at hand. But what he can’t see, pace Kesselring, is how the German army could have continually supplied that force. If fighter command had been defeated, perhaps a continual run of air supplies could have made a difference, but fighter command had not been defeated.

Beach sometimes idly wonders whether the Nazis’ best chance was actually in late May while the British army was being rolled up in northern France. At that point the Home Fleet was thinly stretched as it began the Dunkirk operation. British morale was much lower than a fortnight later, after the ‘miracle’. German glider attacks and parachute attacks on Britain itself would have met fairly limited resistance; or at least it would have taken time to get the very few crack British and Dominion units on hand to the relevant part of the island. The invasion would have distracted from attempts to rescue the BEF and would have been a powerful tool in the hands of the ‘appeasers’ who wanted to negotiate their way out.  But would even the Wehrmacht have been capable of carrying that kind of an operation out on the back of Operation Fall Gelb?

And a British poem from WW2 dedicated to Hitler:

Napoleon tried it. The Dutch were on the way.

A Norman did it — and a Dane or two.

Some sailor King may follow one fine day;

But not, I think, a low land-rat like you.