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

That's only one instance, I was thinking more of the bombing of Barcelona (13 raids by Sperrle's Aviazione Legionaria), the carpet bombing during the Asturias campaign, etc. There was also the "recent" events in Ethiopia, when the RA flattened the Abyssinian city of Harar, and badly damaged several others.

Really? Don't forget London in 1916, 1917 and 1918! Terror is exactly what gripped the capital; 10,000 men and twelve fighter squadrons were held back from France, industrial production fell off, and the public and press freaked The British government was extrapolating from that far much more than events in Spain etc....see Rodney Madison's article "Air Warfare, Strategic Bombing" in The Encyclopedia of World War I: A Political, Social and Military History.

During WWI, for 300 tons of ordnance dropped on London, the Germans did£2 million of damage, and killed 1,400 Londoners and injured 4,800. At Guernica...40 tons of bombs in total resulted in 3-400 dead. In other words - the death rate per ton of ordnance delivered had ~doubled in 20 years.

We have to be careful here - for there were plenty of successful examples of precision bombing - Amiens, CHASTISE, the Tirpitz raid by 617 Sqn...what you/we need to be precise (sic) about is that precision bombing as part of a strategic campaign was less than useful. Close air support at the tactical level was dependent on precision

 

If Sea Lion was a bluff, what was the purpose of the Battle of Britain?

 

Sea Lion became a "bluff" when the Battle of Britain failed. The success of one (BoB), was required for the real implementation of the other (Sea Lion). As soon as the RAF couldn't be swept from the sky, the other was simply continued in "bluff" to keep the world's eyes away from his real and original intent of attacking east into the USSR.

 

The assumption was that the LW could defeat Britain .If Britain gave up,SL would be the transport of the occupation troops.If Britain did not give up,butif there would be a chaos,then SL would be an invasion .

 

To be fair to the British - they could only ever see at most a third of the picure of what was going on on the other side of the Channel courtesy of Bletchley I.E. the Luftwaffe's part of anything; and ONLY if it was relayed by radio Luckily, by the middle of August 1940 they had thankfully started seeing Luftwaffe liaison officers reporting the contents of Sealion planning meetings by radio...in some detail Even then they were conscious that they were only seeing that part of the picture the Germans were careless enough as to let them see - hence the caveats on the actual location of the invasion being put out right up until the middle of September I.E. the south-east coast OR East Anglia/Essex.

Look at the history of the winter Blitz of 1940 into 1941...particularly the fiasco over the advanced SIGINT warning for what turned into the Coventry raid. When it came to listening in to operational details sent back and forth by the Luftwaffe, ULTRA was like getting a filled-in crossword puzzle..only every couple of days....and no clues to got with it In the case of the target codenames for the 1941 blitz, for instance - the British had the list of codenames, but THEN had to try and work out what target (city) they each referred to! Some were obvious - some most definitely were not.

....but unless Air Intelligence could work it out, the boffins couldn't deploy their generating vans to give the Luftwaffe false bombing beams to follow

The same sort of shell game occured with the invasion threat through the end of 1940 into 1941; ALL the signs of the Germans planning for a new offensive were maintained...tho' at the same time the British got hints of operations first in the Med (MARITA) against the background of an all-over huge operation in the East. Which one was the bluff??? So they finished plugging holes in Stop Lines, putting hard tops on top of the coastal batteries thrown up in a hurry after Dunkirk etc etc....

The British were QUITE relieved when the Wehrmacht REALLY moved East in June! Even as late as April/May, Churchill was still measuring the possibilities of giving Hitler a bloody nose on Crete in terms of the damage they could do to the FJ - "the best chance for killing paratroops" - in the context of removing an essential and dangerous element in Hitler's prospective invasion plans.

 

Not sure I agree with that. At the end of the day, at any stage of the war, who exactly was doing all the invading.........

 

Even if the Luftwaffe had achieved their best possible result (i.e. driving the RAF to airfields North West of London), Sea Lion would still, almost certainly, have been a disaster for the Germans.

 

Get a hold of Lavery, and a copy of David Newbold's thesis. And as you read Lavery - remember he's a naval historian...