the German naval Commander in Chief received Hitler’s Directive No. 16, his response was immediate. The Admirals were agreed that no date could be determined until the Luftwaffe had air supremacy over the Channel, but they produced a draft plan and on 28 July the army looked closely at it. The navy planners proposed a beach-head near Dover. By using the narrowest section of the Channel they could lay minefields to protect the invasion fleet corridor. Submarines would be assigned to the Channel, in spite of the difficulties these shallow waters presented to submarines, and more to guard the North Sea flank. It was estimated that the navy would require ten days to put the first assault ashore. The army was horrified.
For the attack westwards through France in May, the German army command’s objectives had proved ridiculously modest, in the light of its panzer General’s achievements. Now the army was determined to show more ambition. It told the navy that it wanted landings all along England’s south coast, from Folkestone to Brighton, with a separate crossing from Cherbourg. The army would need tanks and wheeled vehicles which meant all the car ferries must be employed, together with the other cross-Channel tourist facilities. The first wave must be ashore within three days. The primary objectives were massive areas of southern England almost as far as London. And, in case you are still taking all this seriously, the first wave was to consist of 260,000 men, 30,000 vehicles and 60,000 horses! Having looked at the navy’s proposal, Walther von Brauchitsch, the army’s Commander in Chief, and his Chief of the General Staff, Franz Halder, stated unequivocally, ‘We cannot carry through our part of the operation on the basis of the resources furnished by the navy.’
On 31 July Hitler summoned his army and navy chiefs to the Berghof, his chalet in the Bavarian Alps near Berchtesgaden. Grossadmiral Erich Raeder explained the navy’s position first. Preparations were going as fast as possible. The navy was scouring occupied Europe for suitable barges, but the work of modifying them for military use and getting them to the Channel ports could not be completed before 15 September. In view of the army’s demand for a wider front for the landing, and with the prospect of autumn storms, it might be better to plan for an invasion in May 1941, said Raeder.
Hitler did not get angry at this suggestion but he pointed out that the British army would be better able to deal with an invasion by the following year, and suggested that the weather in May would be little better than that in September.
Having put the navy’s point of view, Raeder left the conference. Hitler continued to discuss ‘Sea-lion’ with his army commanders. At one point he went so far as to say that he doubted whether it was ‘technically feasible’. However no such doubts intruded into the Directive of the following day. It was signed by Feldmarschall Keitel and came from the OKW, the High Command of the combined armed forces which Hitler personally controlled. Preparations were to continue, and all would be ready by 15 September. Meanwhile the Luftwaffe would begin a large-scale offensive and, according to the effects of the air raids, Hitler would make a final decision about the invasion at the end of August.
The most significant aspect of all this top-level discussion was the absence of Luftwaffe chiefs. At the Berghof meeting, where the ball was passed to Göring’s Air Fleets, there had been not even one representative of the Luftwaffe.
And so Göring’s so-called Eagle Attack (Adlerangriff) was born in the same bungling, buck-passing muddle that had left Guderian at Sedan without objectives, and then halted him while the men in Berlin thought about it. It was the same mess of contradictory orders that had stopped the German armour at Dunkirk. The top brass of the Wehrmacht were learning that it was safer to equivocate.‘Sea-lion was contemplated,’ said the jokers afterwards, ‘but never planned.’
There was no proper training for the highly specialised amphibious assault and no staff officers with enough experience to plan one. But, having passed the immediate problems to Göring, the army engaged in a series of energetic invasion rehearsals, and propaganda units filmed them for release to cinemas on the actual day. Even more diligently, the German navy searched the rivers and canals of Europe, and crammed the northern ports with barges from all over Europe. Countless men with saws and welding torches fitted each with crude ramps for sea-sick horses under fire. The barges were to be towed across the Channel in pairs, by tugs, at a speed of five knots. The lines of barges were expected to be at least twelve miles long. When they neared England, the plan said the barges were to be sailed into lines from which one unpowered barge would be lashed to a powered barge. Together they would assault the beaches.
Not even the initial assault boats (Sturmboote) were armoured. They were tiny vessels, some held only six infantrymen plus two crew. They were designed for river crossings and modified so that they could be launched from minesweepers that would take them as close as possible to the British coast. And the barge crews included Dutchmen, Belgians and Frenchmen with no vested interest in the operation’s success.
Even if one is generous enough to equate the modified German barges with what were later called LCTs (Landing Craft, Tanks), the Germans still had nothing to compare with the two vessels that the Allied armies were later to find indispensable for seaborne invasion. First, the LST (Landing Ship, Tank) that could survive a heavy sea, and yet had shallow enough draught to put tanks directly on to a beach. Secondly, the DUKW, which was a two-and-a-half-ton truck, with a hull and propeller fitted to it. Groups of them brought supplies from supply ship to beach very quickly, so releasing the ship for another trip.
Churchill did not take the threat of invasion seriously. On 10 July he told the War Cabinet to disregard Sea-lion. ‘… it would be a most hazardous and suicidal operation,’ he said. It is in the light of this that one must see Churchill’s boldness in sending tanks to Egypt in the summer of 1940. It also explains why he backed up Beaverbrook, the new Minister of Aircraft Production, when he poached personnel and commandeered property that built more fighters but caused delays and shortages in other war industries.
At this stage of the war, any German invasion – seaborne or airborne – would have been cut to pieces. British experiments with setting the sea ablaze were fearsome, and Bomber Command were secretly training their squadrons in the use of poison gas. A cover story about spraying beaches to destroy vermin had been prepared for release should the Germans object to this form of warfare. RAF Medical Officers assigned to the poison gas units were being fortified with copious draughts of ‘captured’ champagne.
All this has encouraged some to suggest that there was no real danger of invasion in 1940, and conclude that Fighter Command did not fight a decisive battle. This is a specious argument. Had the Luftwaffe eliminated Fighter Command, its bombers could have knocked out all the other dangers one by one. Given the sort of command of the air that the Luftwaffe had achieved in Poland in only three days, German bombers, guided by radio beams, could have destroyed everything from Whitehall to the units of the Home Fleet. There would have been no insurmountable problem for invasion fleets and airborne units if the air was entirely German.
The Douhet Theories
Like many high-ranking airmen, and manufacturers of bombing aircraft, Göring subscribed to the theories of General Giulio Douhet, an Italian who believed that armies and navies were best employed as defensive forces while bomber fleets conquered the enemy. Just before he died in 1930, General Douhet wrote a futuristic story called ‘The War of 19 –’. Often quoted but seldom read, Douhet’s words had such profound effects upon the German and the RAF High Commands that they are worth examining. Written in the documentary manner of H. G. Wells, Douhet’s story described how an ‘Independent German Air Force’ fought great aerial battles against the Belgian and French air units. ‘There was no doubt that the enemy’s purpose was to make the mobilisation and concentration of the Allied armies as difficult as possible,’ said Douhet’s imaginative fiction. The Allies replied with ‘night-bombing brigades’ that attacked German cities with explosives, incendiaries and poison gas.
Douhet’s
