Operation Sea Lion Orbats and Discussion Thread

My question wasn't about wether the Naziy could have tried, but how you could get out of the "Even the Nazis knew there was no point trying" territory. They could have won the Battle of Britain, forcing the RAF to retreat to northern Britain. But how could they accomplish naval dominance (or the illusion thereof) of the British Channel?

And following the Italian fleet would be the Royal Navy Mediterranean Fleet.

No Weserebung means that Germany has an open northern air flank that the British can exploit as an attack vector. Think of Germany as the hub of a wagon wheel and the spokes of that wheel as attack vectors of a bombing campaign. Now before France 1940, there were basing options, provided the Allies could obtain access and build fleets of long ranged bombers from metro France, the Benelux territories and Scandinavia. Of these territories, southern Norway and Sweden make interesting options in the aerial Mahanic / Jominic sense in that the Germans would have no effective geography along that geographic air battle space to set up a Kannhuber defense short of posting a flock of radar equipped trawlers in the Balticas an early warnin g system and createing a GCI system too far back too successfully defend their coastline from raiders who could pop over from as little as an hour's flight time away. Similarly, the corollary is that allied air power in the Mahanic sense yields an option to deny the Baltic Sea to the Germans. No France 1940. No Battle of Britain. No Battle of the Atlantic. No Barbarossa. No Sea Lion. All because the Luftwaffe has to stay home and worry about metro-German defense from the north.



British supply lines came across the Atlantic. Any Sea Lion has to include a U-Boat campaign prior and during the operation to starve the British of OIL. No aviation gasoline or heavy fuel oil number 4 and the RN and RAF are mobility hobbled two ways. Lack of ability to maintain station as a blockade / denial force and lack of training time. Now it is true that friendly nations and the empire could overseas fuel the RN and this did happen during the BoB, but that aviation gasoline had to be shipped in. This was a factor the incompetent Karl Doenitz and U-b West staff, but especially Raeder and his Operationsplanungsabteilung der Kriegsmarine did not understand in the U-boat part of Sea Lion. Kill tankers and one grounds the RAF in the UK.

Never mind neutralizing Chain Home or swamping the RAF fields in southeast England...



Incidentally notice that the Germans were able to split the RAF defense problem into two vector zones of concern? That was what Norway gave the Germans as an option. They did not have the technical means to exploit it. (Bombers could have been plumbed for wing drop tanks.), but the Germans never thought of it, until too late and then only for the Ju-88s and their derivatives.



I am not convinced. Barbarossa should have been a military do-never once the Battle of Britain was lost. It was Russian resources and acquiescence that allowed the Battle of France and the Battle of Britian in the first place. German air land offensives were going to be very battlespace constrained and time restricted in global effect once the Hitler regime lost access to the Baku oil and the Ukraine wheat which Stalin so abundantly and foolishly supplied the Germans from Poland forward until Barbarossa. This does not mean that the Battle of the Atlantic or the seizure of western Russia did not happen or the North African campaign was impossible. What it means is that those campaigns would never come to fruition because the Germans lacked time and means to break into territories or affect events outside those geographic battlespaces. They would never win in the Atlantic because they did not have the resources to keep the 300 or so submarines at sea of a fleet of 900 total they would have to build and man for two and a half years that they needed to deny that ocean to the allied navies and merchant marines. They would never have the steel, aluminum and oil and food to maintain an army of 6 million men and 45,000 armored fighting vehicles and trains system of 10,000 locomotives and 100,000 freight cars they needed to overland for three years to reach the Urals. And the air force of 25,000 planes, especially 8,000 bomber aircraft they needed?

Not to mention the 7,000,000 million tonnes of Mediterranean shipping and the supplies diverted to Italy so that they could actually reach Cairo?

Just some consequences of not doing the Sea Lion gambit properly. And I do agree that whatever attempts some revisionists make to the scenario to get the Sea Mammal to work, unless the Germans have Skippy the Alien Space Bat whistle up the 900 U-boats, something like the allied air forces of early 1944 and enough invasion shipping to resemble Operation Neptune, they are not going to be staging landings between Tungmere and Cantebury. I seriously question the competency and patience of the German leadership to even carry out the necessary year-long air and sea campaign to reduce the British isles to an invadable condition.



Maybe. The converse is that if the Italians had put their naval hearts into it, Merkur would have been 100% amphibious and the RN would have been in BIG trouble off Crete moreso than they actually were. The Axis had air superiority and the RN was driven from those waters. Add a surface battle element at that exact time and Matapan looks a lot different.