One thing is for certain, at least at that time, Hitler did not like to engage in battles that he did not believe that could he win. That leads me to conclude that he was never very serious about Sealion in the first place and that it was mostly a ploy to get Churchill out of the war. So the question is, if the
Luftwaffe had secured overwhelming air superiority, would that have been enough to take the Royal Navy out of the equation, and allow a landing with river barges (another issue of course)? Here, the article goes on to say:
Quote:
But weren’t ships lost at Dunkirk?
We lost six destroyers and had a cruiser damaged. But they were virtually stationary, picking up troops. A better example is Norway – where despite constant air attack the navy suffered no significant loss. There was damage from shock, from splinters. Nothing more. Because ships were free to move and fight back.
People forget that no capital ship had ever been sunk by aircraft at this time. The US air force staged a 1920s bomber demonstration. Against old German warships moored, unmanned, with no anti-aircraft guns, no damage control. Even so it took three waves of bombers to sink these sitting ducks. Tackling the big ships of the RN in 1940 would have been a very different task. Especially as the Germans could no more than dent our capital ships – they had no armour-piercing bombs. They’d had no reason for such weapons.
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The conclusion the authors draw, or at least what I interpret as their conclusion, is that even without effective air support, against an invasion force supported by German fighters, the Royal Navy would have been an effective fighting force.
This again really brings up the question of whether Hitler was ever all that serious about invading Britain. My
guess is that he was not because he did not have the naval capacity to do so. He might have considered an airborne assault at a later date, but by a year later, after the Battle of Crete, he had sworn off on another such action, and was looking eastward anyway.
As is well known, his real hope was for a peace settlement with Britain, or barring that a stalemate. He believed he had such a stalemate in 1941 and that's why he felt free to launch
Barbarossa. The rest, as they say, is history.
Nothing I say here is meant to minimize the contributions of the RAF, or the bravery of its pilots and crews, or of its importance in winning the war. As we all know, at that point in time air cover for ground troops and armor could and did turn battles, and strategic bombing (another slightly taboo topic and one which provokes emotions) by both the RAF and US aircraft was an essential ingredient in the overall victory by Allied forces in Western Europe.