(01-12-2018 01:49 AM)chiefsfan Wrote:  

(01-12-2018 01:16 AM)Kaplony Wrote:  

(01-10-2018 11:00 PM)arkstfan Wrote:  There was no chance of Germany successfully invading Great Britain successfully with or without the Dunkirk evacuation.

The Royal Navy could have taken 4 to 1 losses vs Kreigsmarine and still been able to maintain operations in the Med vs Italy. The Germans had only one heavy cruiser, two light cruiser and four destroyers available immediately after the fall of France. D-Day the Allies had 5 battleships, 20 cruisers and 65 destroyers.

The German “plan” for invasion was designed to use a Dunkirk style cobbled up fleet primarily relying on river barges. They estimated they could land 100,000 soldiers in 10 days. The Allies landed nearly 160,000 in the first 24 hours of Overlord. Germany had less than 40 available minesweepers to clear a path to the invasion. The Allies used 350 ships to clear mines and it took about a month. Unlike the Germans the UK had tanks of oil on standby to dump at each potential land site and planned to set the slicks ablaze which would have been rather deadly for packed wooden barges.

The Luftwaffe could not have protected the landings. They lost 25% of their fighter pilots to death, injury, POW by July 1940. The Brits were out-numbered but each day built more fighters than Germany was building and any pilot shot down who escaped death or injury was stuck in a new plane. The Luftwaffe managed 327 sorties on D-Day vs about 14,000 by the Allies. Germany could not have achieved that sort of air dominance.

The civilian population of France was friendly to the Allies, that would not have been the case in Sea Lion.

It is likely that between the limited shipping capacity and Royal Navy and Royal Air Force that a German invasion force would quickly be out of food and ammunition and hurting for reinforcements.

Sea Lion was called off because they couldn’t gain air superiority, naval superiority and even with them needed at least 10 good weather days and an absolute minimum of three and had extremely limited access to any weather data west of the French Coast while the UK had weather data from Ireland, Iceland, Greenland, Canada, the US and convoys. They were looking at shooting into the dark. Remember their best guess at weather convinced them June 6 was a improbable date for attack.



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Destroy the BEF on the beach and simply the threat of invasion is enough for Great Britain to sue for peace. As it stood even with the evacuation the Brits were scared enough that they resorted to building trucks armored only with concrete to serve as mobile pillboxes to fight the feared invasion.

The evacuation at Dunkirk gave the Brits exactly what they needed when they needed it most....hope.

Yes and No. A lot of the transcripts from those cabinet meetings in the UK right around the time of Dunkirk are available publicly now, and they make an interesting read.

Even with failure at Dunkirk, Britain's idea of peace and Hitler's were likely radically different. The people in the UK who supported appealing for peace believed that Germany would look to get out of the fight cleanly, and not request much in the way of reparations. Others were convinced that Germany would insist on the UK giving up a lot of its colonial territories in Africa and Asia, and there was little chance the British would ever do that.

If Hitler had come to the table with reasonable demands, there's a decent chance Britain gets out. That's a big ask though.

What would Hitler want in Africa other than the pre-war status quo? What could he have use for in Asia? That was the Japanese. The Middle East would be the only potential issue.