I've heard it described that the only way the Nazis could have successfully invaded Britain is if the sailors of the Royal Navy fell off their ships laughing to hard at the jury-rigged barges and Rhine pleasure boats the Nazis were planning to use as landing craft. If the Nazis delayed their timeline for Sealion they would end up in an even poorer position as the British Empire was in full on rearmament mode by 1940s and were marshaling the resources of the largest empire in the world - ruling a quarter of its landmass and a fifth of its population. The Nazis quite simply couldn't compete (and that is without mentioning the United States).
That's a ridiculous description.
The British defense of the home islands was deeply flawed in and of itself and susceptible to numerous vulnerabilities. Edmund Ironside dispersed his forces dangerously (to the point that he even deployed troops in the West Country to guard against a phantom invasion from Ireland) and only held the coast itself with a thin outpost line due to manpower deficiencies. Defense was designed to be passive and involve withdrawal from phase line to phase line. Ironside did not even create a general reserve. Those dispositions were changed after July 1940, but only slowly, so that maldeployment persisted well into 1941. Even when the British started to focus on likely targets and collect reserves, they picked the wrong ones. Alan Brooke decided that the Germans were most likely to target East Anglia because it was good tank country, even though virtually all of the
Wehrmacht's actual planning emphasized a Channel crossing to the southern English coast. Most reconnaissance assets were over the North Sea, meaning that the British were most likely to detect the German invasion as many as six hours after it actually left harbor. Much like the oft-mocked German defenders of Western Europe in 1944, the British of 1940 and 1941 made an awful lot of mistakes in preparing for a German invasion.
Britain was indeed amassing impressive resources backed by a vast overseas support network. But those resources were in turn cavalierly dissipated on the trivia generated
by that vast overseas support network. Britain sent valuable planes and troops to North Africa, West Africa, the Middle East, India, and Singapore even in the dark days of summer and fall 1940. This was not because Great Britain itself was well protected. It was
in spite of Great Britain's
dangerous vulnerability. At the very moment when the RAF was reeling from
Luftwaffe attacks and warning orders were going out to prepare for a German invasion in September 1940, the Royal Navy was sending 4,200 Royal Marines, two battleships, five cruisers, and twelve destroyers to Dakar to fight Vichy France
for no obvious strategic reason at all. The British victory in Operation COMPASS in December was quite impressive, but victory in Cyrenaica over the Italians was purchased at the price of the 2nd and 7th Royal Tank Regiments and 3rd Hussars, dispatched from Great Britain
in August. More of Churchill's pet projects consumed resources during these crucial months, like inaccurate "Z-battery" rockets, trench-busting "Nellie" vehicles, and "Beaverette" armored cars. The "Nellie" in particular, officially called "Cultivator No. 6", was a massive 130-ton vehicle with no weapons and paper-thin armor designed to circumvent fortifications from World War I. It was, as Robert Forczyk says, every bit as ridiculous as the infamous
Maus tank and its development continued well after there was obviously no point in making it at all. This dispersal of resources meant that
at the sharp end of a battle for the Channel and the south coast of England, the British would have been quite a bit weaker than their production numbers might have called for. Hell, even their
manpower was poorly distributed. While the regular forces of the British Army languished with low replacement levels for virtually the entire war, large numbers - perhaps as many as half a million! - of teenagers and men in their twenties stayed in the useless Home Guard formations.
While the RAF possessed a solid core of fighter aircraft and reasonably competent level bombers, neither asset would be particularly useful against an incoming invasion fleet. British close air support and dive bombing units were both small and poorly armed, and very vulnerable to air interception. They lacked the capability to mount a sustained and well-coordinated fight against an invasion fleet in the Channel. The panic response to the "Channel Dash" in 1942 exposed the weak state of British air and sea defenses there for what they really were: no German warships were sunk and a negligible amount of crewmen were killed against disproportionate British losses in airframes and pilots. Against an invasion fleet, the British would have had little room for embarrassment. And finally, while the RAF's Fighter Command was very good at defensive GCI radar intercept missions in daylight, it took frightening losses all the same. While Fighter Command's available airframe and pilot numbers grew during the Battle of Britain, that was largely due to cutting the number of hours required to qualify pilots and paring Fighter Command's actual mission down to, essentially, GCI and nothing else. Now, once the invasion was
already underway and German forces were already on English soil, the RAF would be much better positioned to fight - but only if the British avoided hurling the kitchen sink at the Germans during the actual invasion as a panic move. There is no particular reason to have any overwhelming amount of confidence in the British military of 1940 to avoid panic.
The Royal Navy was also not well deployed to fight the Germans in the Channel for the very good reason that the Royal Navy's leaders thought that the Channel was a potential death trap for capital ships. Charles Forbes had only five capital ships in home waters in September 1940 and only one, HMS
Revenge, was on the south coast of England (and only then after Churchill gave him a direct order to deploy it to Portsmouth). It was backstopped by seven light cruisers and thirty-eight destroyers and destroyer escorts. Most of the vessels available for Channel service were Great War vintage or older. They would not have deployed against the five invasion fleets en masse but rather attacked in waves to avoid fratricide at night; based on response times from invasion threats, they were only likely to be able to even engage two out of five invasion fleets. The Germans had extensive minefields to cover their flanks, which would further slow the British response. The British lacked surface radar on the Channel ships, meaning that their hit probability was quite low. The barges were shallow-draft, which some historians have argued would mean that they could just be swamped by bow waves from the destroyers, but closing to that range would've been extraordinarily dangerous against the defensive assortment of weapons on the invasion barges (let alone the escorts; the Germans had modern destroyers and S-boats). And finally, Royal Navy success rates at attacking other German convoys during 1940 and 1941 were not great. Even the most aggressive destroyer leaders usually failed to kill more than one or two ships in any given convoy. In particular, the Royal Navy's failures north of Crete in 1941 fighting against lone Italian escorts were particularly embarrassing. German casualties during the invasion would most likely be inflicted by mines, not by the Royal Navy's surface assets.
Like the RAF, the Royal Navy would be better poised to fight once the Germans landed, but that fight would be a struggle of attrition with no clear and easy victor. The
Luftwaffe would be likely to make things extremely dangerous for anything other than British (and Dutch) submarines.
It would be up to the British Army to fight the Germans, and although there were slightly over a million Commonwealth soldiers on the island during the summer and fall of 1940 they were mostly support troops or AA crew. The Territorials existed but were of highly dubious quality in actual combat, and were half-trained at best. Less than two hundred thousand trained infantry, tankers, and artillerymen actually defended Great Britain, and as mentioned before those that
were defending the island were poorly deployed. Even in important sectors, the British deployed companies where they would be engaging regiments, in poorly sited fortifications (some of which dated to the Napoleonic Wars) whose positions were known to the
Luftwaffe. Artillery support was sparse and communications were by wire, not radio. AT defenses were almost nonexistent and were husbanded into "anti-tank islands" inland, while AP mines
were nonexistent (yes, the British Army had no AP mines in 1940) and were "replaced" by Mushroom mines with large amounts of explosive that killed British soldiers and civilians alike and were liable to be swept into the sea or set off by sympathetic explosions from
Luftwaffe bombing runs. These were far more laughable countermeasures than the mocked Atlantic Wall (or the unfairly-maligned German efforts to scrape together an invasion fleet), and much less likely to stop an invasion.
So what of the inevitable counterattack? Alan Brooke, after assuming command over Britain's seaward defenses in July 1940, viewed most of the commanders in both the regular and Territorial forces as unfit for service and did his best to weed them out as soon as he could. "As soon as he could" was, as it turned out, not very quickly, because Churchill's penchant of mounting overseas expeditions meant that many of the best commanders went elsewhere. Furthermore, British tactical doctrine remained deficient and technical capabilities were generally poor. It took until late 1942 to work out these problems in the Western Desert; in September 1940 Britain's most recent military experience of Germans was getting utterly trounced on the Continent three times (once in Norway, twice in France). And it's worth comparing British ability to counterattack to that of the vaunted Germans, who historically had difficulty organizing large-scale armored counterattacks against amphibious assaults in both Italy and France. Britain had never even fought an entire armored division together by fall 1940. Infantry divisions were significantly less mobile and under-supplied with motor vehicles, not much better than the infamous "static" divisions the Germans put in the Atlantic Wall. Why anyone would expect the British response to an amphibious invasion to be
better than the German one is beyond me.
The issue almost certainly would've come down to attrition, Guadalcanal writ large. Germany could get to Britain but lacked the kind of overwhelming power that allowed the Allies of 1944 to land multiple armored divisions in a protected beachhead. Britain faced inferior numbers but possessed few viable offensive military assets not already in Egypt. Further attrition in southern England would seriously threaten control over the Empire. Either way, it would've been a roll of the iron dice -
not a slam dunk for Blighty. And as possible as it is to imagine the Nazis going home in a prisoner exchange, it's equally possible to imagine the brittle British collapsing and opening the way to London.
Could you elaborate? I've read it on this forum often, and by posters I generally respect, that it was a pretty uncontroversial statement that Stalin and the Red Amy were planning a general offensive into central/western Europe in the mid to late 40s.
It's speculation. There are plenty of historians willing to indulge in that speculation who believed that Stalin
also considered the USSR and Nazi Germany to be fundamentally incompatible and viewed the 1939 agreement as a truce to clear the decks for the real war. But the simple fact is that we have no evidence one way or another about what Stalin planned to do. There are no offensive war plans for the RKKA that predate June 1941, apart from the one that as mentioned clearly described a last-ditch attack to weaken a Nazi invasion. The RKKA was only in a state of partial mobilization.
Now, these things are not conclusive evidence that Stalin
didn't want to attack. Far from it. He might very well have planned to attack Nazi Germany, either before the Soviet Union was fully ready or after a period of adequate preparation. But we don't have hard evidence that he did, and while it's perfectly reasonable to hold the opinion it remains, ultimately, one that is difficult to substantiate.
The reason I connect that to the
Icebreaker thesis is that most of the alleged evidence in favor of Stalin preparing a grand offensive into Europe in 1941 is either circumstantial, wrong, or both, and most historians agree on this. But most of the evidence about 1942 or 1943 is actually pretty vaporous too.
