Operation Sea Lion, hyped up by the British as well as the Germans ?

Many think that the planned German invasion of Britain (Operation Sea Lion) was nothing more than a huge bluff to put pressure on the UK Government to come to terms. Thus the Germans had a vested interest in hyping it up at the time, as that was, literally, the whole point of it.
What is possibly less easy to comprehend is why the British did the same. Looking back on it now most informed observers know Sea Lion would almost certainly have been a disaster for the Germans (the "official" Sea Lion war game is particularly illuminating for this) but even at the time most of the British war leaders thought the same thing. Even Churchill said in his Memoirs of the Second World War* that the Sea Lion "would be a good battle for us". He even went further to hint it may even have been a positive outcome for the British had Germany tried invading as great damage could have been done to the German war machine.
Possible explanations for the British government whipping up such a fear of invasion at the time would be to motivate the British population to still greater efforts and/or to encourage the Americans into the war, either directly or indirectly.

* It must be admitted that this book is not always a 100% accurate recollection of Churchill`s war. In my own copy (the abridged version) there is disgracefully little (if any) mention of the Bomber Command offensive, the whole campaign is just air brushed out of the war, despite the huge effort put into it, the large numbers of aircrew killed, the swathes of German cities devastated, and Churchill`s singular enthusiasm for it at the time.....

 

Churchill worked wonders with the invasion threat....May or may not have been real to begin with at time of Dunkirk...short period...Churchill managed to turn it to nations advantage in my OWN opinion.

 

Since reading Brian Lavery's We Shall Fight On The Beaches I've been a bit dubious of the outcome of the Sandhurst games; after all, Adm. Forbes never ever intended to come further south than Great Yarmouth, and certainly never into the Channel to attack the German "sea bridge" with Home Fleet...and in fact issued orders that no element of Home Fleet was to waste their time cooperating with the other services in practising indirect, ground-observed shelling from seaward!

So, basically - the outcome of the "official" wargame was one that couldn't have pertained in the historical event of invasion!

 

As I understand it the battleships and aircraft carriers were withdrawn out of range of the German airforce (not that the latter was that effective at sinking large warships anyway) but the destroyers and cruisers were to be fully deployed. This makes sense actually. There were plenty of airfields were within range of the beaches so why risk the aircraft carriers ? And what`s the point in putting up a battleship against small invasion barges ? Particularly when destroyers could arguably do the job perfectly well, if not better and at less risk. Don`t they reckon that just the wash from destroyers travelling at 30 knots would probably sink most of the barges !
In fact the withdrawal of the large ships just makes it all the more obvious that the British Government didn`t actually feel that threatened by the German invasion, they knew they could beat it with Destroyers and wanted the save the battleships and aircraft carriers for later battles.

 

They were held at Scapa because the British just didn't know how much damage they'd really done to the KM off Norway! They thought that that Germany's finest was being held in the Baltic for a sudden massed breakout out of range of air recce....not that they were under repair at various yards!

There were three destroyer flotillas held at Harwich, Portsmouth and Southampton IIRC, each of a dozen destroyers and flagged by a cruiser...but the numbers were actually far looser than that - and they weren't "held" as such, just told off that in the event of an invasion fleet being spotted they'd have to rendezvous and act in concert; in the meantime they were sailing convoy escort into the Western Approaches, through the Channel, out making nightly recce sweeps into German convoy lanes etc. In other words, there would be a time delay, for some up to several days, before they were all in action in the Channel.

Again, I didn't realise that the situation was SO bad until I read Lavery. Well worth getting hold of a copy.

Having dispersal fields for Eleven Group down on the coast had already been demonstrated to be a bad idea; Manston was out of action a few times for days at a time, and Lypnme was closed entirely after being trashed early in the initial bombing campaign. Fighters flying from them didn't get enough altitude in time in reaction to raids appearing on radar and were consistently punished for it And of course, Sealion would only ever have been launched after the Luftwaffe gained at least local air superiority...and it is axiomatic that these fields would have been destroyed to gain it...

Also, in the three days immediately before the landings, the Luftwaffe was to turn away from bombing airfields to bombing every defence target along the South and South-east coast, and even if still open by some miracle, the airfields closest to the Kent and Sussex coasts would have been plastered THEN.

Why carriers? Attempting to use carrier aircraft would have been an abject disaster in the event of Sealion - what about that nasty requirement to steam at full speed into the wind to launch aircraft???

And of course - the FAA had plenty of shore airfields in the southern half of England to operate from; Fighter Command was actually using several during the BoB.

The destroyers would really only be free to operate at night; and of course behind whatever minesweeping assets the RN could deploy to clear fields laid by the Germans. As for sinking invasion barges simply by their wash...remember that the majority of converted flatbottom barges were far more stable than before by the time the Germans finished pouring their bilges full of concrete, and laying heavy wooden decking for transport etc.

Actually - it makes it more obvious that Forbes knew what he was doing as a seaman, rather than try to manouver capital ships in the quite shallow waters of the Narrows, dotted with some of the most famous sandbanks and underwater obstructions in the world...especially when their turning circles could easily bring them under the guns of the heavy artillery the Germans deployed on the French coast to interdict at least half the breadth of the Channel...and when a single missed mine could easily take out an entire major asset rather than one of several dozen destroyers the RN could deploy...

 

At some time directly after Hitler decided that Sea Lion was a non-starter, he kept up the illusion that he was planning an invasion of the British Isles to keep pressure off his true target to the east. I believe his words went something to the effect that; "a bluff is only as good as long as you make it seem to be reality." (paraphrasing)

 

IMO, Churchill hyping SEALION was a great way to get the country to pull together after the unheard of defeat of the Anglo-French forces on the Continent. He also used the David vs. Goliath image as a propaganda tool towards the USA.

I agree that putting capital ships in the Channel would have been extremely risky. The only real counter to the RN that the Germans had was the Luftwaffe. Hitting a BB unable to manuver radically is a lot easier than hitting a destroyer and even THAT is not that easy. Look at all the sortes it took the Luftwaffe in order to take out a few cruisers in the Med. Destroyers would have really messed up an invasion force and both Hitler and Raeder knew it. An invasion MIGHT have worked had the Germans had the invasion force ready to go right after the fall of France. It still would have been risky though.

Actually, the biggest problem that the Germans had was not the RAF or RN, but their own woeful lack of good intellegence re. British forces within the UK.

 

Hold on, I thought a destroyer could do 35 knots, that`s not far off 40mph. Even at 30mph in 10 hours that`s 300miles. They could have been in Newcastle and got down there within 12 hours.

Within range doesn`t mean on the coast !

That`s my point, use of battleships and aircraft carriers would be a bad idea anyway.

The barges were seaworthy ? That`s not how I understood it ! Didn`t I read somewhere that some sunk during training exercises ? Except they weren`t really training exercise in my view, because it was never going to happen, they were for the British to see.......

 

I believe you are thinking of this thread, and perhaps my own post #6?

Goto:

http://www.ww2f.com/sacred-cows-dead-horses/32952-operation-sealion-unternehmen-seel-we.html

 

Sealion again
1)The Germans never had air superiority above south east England ,thus no SL
2)The Germans had no transport fleet ,thus no SL (the speed of the barges was lower than the east west current)
3)The Germans had no surface fleet to protect the barges against the attacks of the RN,FC and ...(always forgotten) BC, thus no SL
4)The Germans could not capture an intact port to disembark the heavy things:artillery,tanks ,horses,ammunition,fuel....,thus no SL
5) Only a few thousand men would be disembarked on DDay,without artillery,tanks,etc,and they would be eliminated by the British,thus no SL
6) For the build up,SEVERAL weeks of good weather would be needed,but this was impossible in september .May I remind
a)that DDay was planned for 5 june,but was delayed to 6 june,because of a summer storm
b)on what happened (in june) to the Mulberriesne was destroyed by ...a summer storm
c)that Overlord was planned for the summer,not for september,not for march (May I remind what happened in march to the Herald of Free Enterprise?)

 

But lJ I don't suppose the Germans would be sailing with their bow doors open.

 

Yes, but some of them assigned to the flotillas were told off on convoy escort duty right out into the Atlantic too That's why I said "some"...

Do you honestly think the RN would or could afford to sit around and wait for them?

The I classes could indeed do that speed....but noone was going to be steaming at THAT speed through minefields. Or at night into (very) crowded waters.

Quite true....but then we have to look at the OTHER issues....like the relatively small number of tactical bombers the RAF could dispose for anti-invasion duties - only seven Blenheim and five Battle squadrons IIRC from Lavery. The RAF's medium force had been butchered in France, remember And they
1/ couldn't bomb the actual invasion flotilla accurately at night

2/ the RAF and the FAA conducted two sets of ordnance tests on their gravity munitions - suprisingly, it took a hit or very near miss to do any appreciable damage to barges! The RAF were going to have to excel themselves...in an environment dominated by the LW

3/ they of course couldn't be everywhere at once - they were under the control of the Army the minute the Germans actually landed, to begin attacking locations where the Germans would be likely to break out from the beaches inland...and part of their time would be spent both before AND after that dropping gas ordnance. In THAT case....who would be attacking the invasion fleet?

The invasion flotillas were made up of a whole variety of seagoing craft, everything from small merchant vessels, to armed trawlers (the Germans mobilised and armed as many fishingboats through WWII as the RNPS did) to motor launches, all of which would be seaworthy. Yes, as pulled from the banks of the Upper Rhine and canals in Belgium the two barge classes assembled for the job were questionable for other than brown navy use - but what's why the Germans weighted them with concrete bilges and made other changes.

 

Damn,I thought that the weather was bad and that this was one of the reasons of the desaster,but,on second thoughts,the weather was very good .
OTOH,the weather in the Channel is very capricious;a well known exemple are the sudden depressions (in Dutch:channel rats) starting in the eastern part of the Atlantic,with a possible storm in the Channel (a wind of 62-74 km per hour is not unusual ):result oor barges .

 

It's not going to do much for the defenders either Apart from the destroyers, the other lines of defence at sea for the British were the RN's coastal craft - the early-gen MTBs and MGBs/MLs...and the 600+ armed yatchs and fishingboats of the Auxiliary Patrol.

These latter two classes, the coastal forces and the Auxiliary Patrol, were valuable because they could - with their shallow draughts - operate INSIDE both RN and KM minefields So they were going to be vital for interdicting invasion shipping close in to shore.

 

I'd say if the British authorities played up Sea Lion it was simply a prewar momentum. They certainly had every reason to take war with Germany seriously whether or not one should take the idea of a German invasion of the British Isles in 40-41 very seriously, so you're not really playing anything up if you prepare for a super-weapon assault or an invasion, if anything the improved ready-state might help general moralé and best of all it begins to organise emergency and other crucial infrastructure to function under severe pressure and if necessary, under battlefield conditions. Then there is the matter of psychologically preparing a nation of housewives and schoolkids for war, first instinct of any citizen is sack the government, stop the war. They don't care about whys, they care about their own children.

Between the wars however there was a serious economic issue and yet the British and French were rather busy with an arms race in the 20s-30s because now that Germany was put in its place things could go back to mediaeval times. Problem was citizenry didn't so much like whole new fleets of warplanes and warships at a time where working people were eating out of bins and still being told they have to go to work.
This was when the Luftwaffe scare mongering by the British Parliament started, and that ridiculous "pocket battleship" scare mongering by international journalists jagging for a pullitzer in investigative fiction.
The ridiculous assertion that it was all part of a secret backup plan by the Kaiser to get back at the old european colonial nations for defeating germany in the event. In papers at the time, not just were they beaten to submission in Versailles, but in the press they were the mediaeval mercinaries, the thieves of christianity, barbarians which are compelled to attack other nations, etc.

It was for money, and at that time Germany was a sacrificial lamb. Once you get a whole parliament on that kick, kinda hard to dislodge them from it. Even when you've got Hitler and Göring standing right in front of them saying, we aint the kaiser pal.

That's what I think it was. A combination of interwar political momentum which is fictional in premise, and the simple fact that it probably couldn't hurt at that point to take the Germans more seriously than they did themselves.

 

There's very little sign of a pre-war INVASION hype; Fleming actually spends a chapter of Operation Sealion discussing the history of public perception of the threat. There was certainly far less than before/during/immediately after the First World War; at least one attempt to re-stage a bestselling Edwardian era play based on a putative invasion fell flat on its face in the 1930s.

What there WAS however was a vastly overblown idea of the threat posed by strategic bombing Hence the whole idea of the German "knockout blow" that would only take three days to kill hundreds of thousands of people, and paralyse the life of the nation and the morale of the population. For an excellent discussion of this, and how it fed into public emotions and British Civil Defence, see Peter Laurie's old Beneath The City Streets.

And of course - THEN - it was conflated with the possible threat from an as-yet undeveloped atomic explosive....

Virtually noone took the idea of invasion seriously until the middle of May 1940....then the government panicked. If you get your hands on a copy of David Newbold's thesis on the defence of the UK, you'll see the difficulties that were CONSTANTLY thrown in the way of General Kirke's attempts to create a credible anti-invasion counterattacking force; basically, he was assigned whatever troops were in the UK....but every time a formating division became available and fully trained, it remained in his command for at most weeks...sometimes even just DAYS! - before he was informed it was to be sent to France! He never, ever had more than two divisions under his command to defend against what was seen as the threat then - of a large but temporary raid, a smash-and-grab or interdiction aimed at some major resource...launched in a hurry from Northern Germany.

 

I will admit that Winston talk a good defiance in his memoirs about Sealion...

But against that - there's Brooke's memoir recording that during the days of greatest threat in the second half of September 1940, while Churchill was being equally defiant and upbeat in Cabinet...he was phoning Brookie on the hour every hour asking about the weather state in the Channel...!

 

Walter Boyne (very enjoyable gentleman to listen to), speaks about the strategic bombing hype of the interwar period. Mentions an authoritive study was commissioned because it was getting a little bit away from Parliament, for them it was mostly about securing a generous military budget in harsh economic times as France was seeking to define continental politics and borders, Britain didn't want them in such a leading position. The study quantified likely results per tonnage of bombs which were well shy of the public scare campaign, that famous parliamentarian claims of the early thirties such as "the bomber will always get through" were simply unfounded, at that time the greatest bomber fleets in the world could barely manage to hit a dozen houses in a coastal port under fire.

What I find likely is that this kind of record defines the interwar mentality. I mean if it wasn't for the Holocaust which throws all bets off, you could really find all the initial belligerant nations were equally to blame for the war situation. That is the great shame of it all, that it can never be recognised because of the war crimes establishing firmly who was evil and whom was good.

 

...and yet Cabinet chose the cheapest of the various bombing options put to them by the Air Staff

1/ In Spain, the Condor Legion was doing FAR more than that...

2/ The possible effects of a German air assault that the British Cabinet worked with were actually far worse than even the publically-debated figures; see Peter Laurie.

 

You mean Guernica? Actual estimates are around 500 deaths aren't they? It was more shock of the "domestic" target than actual effect of the bombing, and if anything served to fuel the hype of terror bombing, which wasn't really much of a terror in strategic terms back then. Cripes, surveyors have even cited half the far more shocking domestic bombing of WW2 itself was superfluous and often raised industrial output with patriotic vigour, eg. Hamburg, unless it was repeatedly levelled on a weekly basis from then on, which was't very realistic. This was one of the points which brought carpet bombing into question postwar, but the truth was precision bombing was a myth until about the 80s for simple technological and pragmatic reasons.

I can't remember what the Parliamentary estimates are, Walter Boyne mentions them, something like 100 deaths for every ton of bombs. The study I referred to adjusted this figure to closer to a dozen per ton if the bombs even fell anywhere near the target area to begin with, which wasn't very often.