German shock troops would have landed at Dover, dressed in British uniforms

The Germans would lose just based on logistics. The British would have everything they need at hand, and the Germans would have to ship or fly supplies across. They had a hell of a tough time supplying the Norway invasion, and lost a lot of their merchant fleet, not to mention their DD fleet. Stalingrad proved they couldn't adequately supply the troops from the air. I honestly think, the US would enter the war if Germany got a foothold in the UK.

 

No to mention that RAF airfields had pillboxes and a variety of defensive positions, not like the airfields in Crete, France, Norway, etc.

 

IIRC there wasn´t much armour in the UK after Dunkirk. One understrenght division mostly equipped with light tanks but that would not have mattered:

View attachment 13290

The X in the middle makes the position of RAF Lympne, an aux. field very close to the sea. The perimeter is what two airborne divisions could hold but only if they are 50% overstreteched, leave the beaches uncovered and have no reserves at all, the circle shows the range of a WW1 18pdr field gun. As one can see there is no way an airborne force could extend the perimeter beyond the range of the enemy artillery. And the division that defended the area actually had the 25pdr.

 

As some of you may be aware, I did some considerable work on he planned FJ ops for Sealion on AHF. They involved some MAJOR no-nos...

1/ dropping some miles away from Lympne and Hawkinge, then policing up themselves and their equipment THEN advancing on the airfields.

2/ due to the shortage of Ju52s after Norway and Holland, this insertion would involve two waves that were at least two hours apart! So in effect, the FJ would have been wandering around the landscape for hours with orders to surround both airfields before the third wave arrived, a glider/Ju52 landing inside both airfield perimeters just like Norway and Holland.

3/ any attempt to "surround" Lympne - wich was set on top of a low plateau - would have required them filtering along the foot of a steep rocky slope then advancing up it...all the time under the guns of the line of pillboxes along the Royal Military Canal!

4/ Each RAF aerodrome of the period was issued with one or more ploughs for their tractors that were to be used, after the "CROMWELL"/"ACTION STATIONS" orders were sent, to destroy the flightline! At best the FJ would have come into possession of useless airfields...

5/ ONLY these two airfields sat close enough to the coast to be attempted - and Lympne was already closed anyway! Like Manston (and Hawkinge) it was simply TOO close to the coast for fighters stationed there to get off the ground quick enough to get altitude for effective attacks on incoming bombers. But for the German planners - one of the major caveats was that having to dash to the rescue of Student's forces in Holland had skewed the whole course of the campaign in Holland; Student was only given these two operations on the basis that BEING so close to the coast, if their outcome was questionable on the day, it wouldn't skew the course of the whole invasion, and turn it into some mad dash dozens of miles inland to relieve the FJ!

To this, in the meantime, I've learned that among the major manpower drains on the British Army was this time, faced by Kirke, then Ironside THEN Brooke....was the number of men told off for the protection of vital points and installations; always more than 30,000 men (!!!), and rising to a high point of around 40,000, among these were two companies of regular infantry per aerodrome! In other words - they were NOT undefended.

 

See David Newbold's thesis; there was actually quite a lot of armour in the UK in numbers terms - "up to date" and "effective" are another separate matter!

However - don't write off the Vickers Lights - especially against infantry or FJ - a VERY small number of them proved very useful on Crete; and don't forget this was the Wehrmacht who had run away from attacking British bren gun carriers only weeks before in France! (Montefiore) Armour is armour, if all you have is a rifle...