In WW2 Why DID the French surrender so easily?
Discussion
So fear is not a great way to get the best from your generals then.
Still back on subject, I know nothing about the French tanks of the period, the only footage I've seen are the machine gun carrier style and always assumed the tanks were all of that type. Were they actually good then?
Still back on subject, I know nothing about the French tanks of the period, the only footage I've seen are the machine gun carrier style and always assumed the tanks were all of that type. Were they actually good then?
s2art said:
The Home Fleet had several purposes, but the primary one would have been to stop an invasion if it occurred.
The prime function of the Home Fleet (both battle squadrons), and one that it did spectacularly well, was to negate the threat of the German fleet. The Channel was the responsibility of another fleet, which used smaller, lighter craft for rather obvious reasons. If the situation got to the stage where either or both Home Fleet battle squadrons were sent into the Channel we would have already lost the war.The reasons the Hood sank has been established but at the time it was seen as the pride of the British navy. It had been used in the Mediterranean - sinking the French navy. To suggest the Bismark was no match for the British navy is rather confusing. One would assume that in a pitched battle the Bismark would have had other German ships in the vicinity.
Both Bismark class ships could outgun any ship it could not outrun. It could show a clean pair of screws to the Hood.
The German fleet, whilst smaller than the British, was (obviously) a lot newer and had in the main better gunnery control. Further the British Home Fleet had to react so were always on the back foot. The so-called Washington Treaty boats were superb craft and stunning looking.
The Tirpitz spent most of it operational life in harbours in an around the Baltic and the coast of Norway, the bits designed by Slartibartfast, but its mere presence was enough to keep one battle squadron on standby. Whether the British admirals felt it was a match for the ships of the RN is open to question, but not they they believed it a substantial threat.
Post war there have been many suggestions that the British navy did not perform its various roles but there is no argument that the Home Fleet emasculated the German surface fleet of large ships. Some have suggested that Hitler's original intention was to use the Hipper class ships in partnership with the U boats in a blitzkrieg type war on the convoys. The sinking of the Bismark, against many predictions, seemed to put him off a bit. The fact that the RN had come out triumphant, despite the sinking of the Hood, seemed to kill his enthusiasm.
Any study of the sinking of the Bismark will show that in many ways the Germans ship was very unlucky to be caught by the British capital ships. Not to mention the British capital ships were lucky there were no U boats in a position to attack them and to help the Bismark.
And talking of studying the battle, I've been put right by email. Despite suggestions early on post war it would appear that the pocket battleship (Washington treaty more or less) Prince Eugen actually sank the Hood and not the Bismark which had engaged the King George V, said to be for obvious reasons. Far from being the 'lucky shot' of myth (and propaganda) the Hood was hit three times by the Eugen from a distance equivalent to firing a gun from Trafalgar Square (picked because my correspondent is ex-Royal Navy) whilst it was going up and down and pitching from side to side and hitting a specific half of the Greenwhich (picked for the same reason) dome which was also moving at speed and going up and down.
s2art said:
Mikeyboy said:
s2art said:
Mikeyboy said:
s2art said:
Jimbeaux said:
German forces were in site of Moscow when Hitler halted the march to divert forces. If he had continued, or not been fighting on the Western front, they would have taken Moscow. The channces are that Stalin would not have been able to mobilze his huge resources of people, etc. due to the disruption of occupation. All IMO.
I think that unlikely Jim. Stalin had already moved all the industries east, out of the way of the invasion forces. What is more, the Germans were at their utter limits and the winter was closing in. They might have briefly taken Moscow, but what then? Would have made Stalingrad look like a tea party.Hitler lost Barbarossa by getting obsessed by attacking a town over and over that he could have by passed.
That being said its hard to say how badly stretched German supplies would have finally been. The OKW were pretty good at working these things out so must have had a plan to get around that.
'A paper published by the U.S. Army's Combat Studies Institute in 1981 concluded that Hitler's plans miscarried before the onset of severe winter weather. He was so confident of quick victory that he did not prepare for even the chance of winter warfare in the Soviet Union. Nonetheless, his eastern army suffered more than 734,000 casualties (about 23% of its average strength of 3,200,000 troops) in the first five months of the invasion, and on 27 November 1941, General Eduard Wagner, Quartermaster General of the German Army, reported "We are at the end of our resources in both personnel and material. We are about to be confronted with the dangers of deep winter."[95]
The German forces were unready to deal with harsh weather and the poor road network of the USSR. In autumn, terrain slowed the Wehrmacht's progress. Few roads were paved. The ground in the USSR was very loose sand in summer, sticky muck in autumn, and heavy snow in winter. German tanks had narrow treads with little traction and poor flotation in mud. In contrast, the new generation of Soviet tanks such as the T-34 and KV had wider tracks and were far more mobile in these conditions. The 600,000 large western European horses the Germans used for supply and artillery movement did not cope well with this weather. The smaller horses the Red Army used were much better adapted to the climate and could even scrape the icy ground with their hooves to dig up the weeds beneath.
German troops were mostly unprepared for the harsh weather changes in the autumn and winter of 1941. Equipment had been prepared for such winter conditions, but the severely overstrained transport network could not move it to the front. Consequently, the troops lacked adequate cold-weather gear, and some soldiers had to pack newspapers into their jackets to stay warm while temperatures dropped to below -30 °C (-22 °F). While at least some cold weather uniforms were available, they rarely reached the Eastern Front because Hitler ordered that supply lines give more priority to shipments of ammunition and fuel. To operate furnaces and heaters, the Germans also burned precious fuel that was in short supply. Soviet soldiers, in contrast, often had warm, quilted uniforms, felt-lined boots, and fur hats.
German weapons malfunctioned in the cold. Lubricating oils were unsuitable for these temperatures, leading to engine malfunction and misfiring weapons. To load shells into a tank’s main gun, frozen grease had to be chipped off with a knife. Soviet units faced less severe problems due to their experience with cold weather. Aircraft had insulating blankets to keep their engines warm while parked. Lighter-weight oil was used. German tanks and armored vehicles could not move due to a lack of antifreeze, causing fuel to solidify.
Due to the fact that few Russian roads were paved, when the rains and snow came in late October and early November, most of the main roads turned to mud and with a combination of longer supply lines, the German advanced stalled within sight of the spires of Moscow. The Soviet December 1941 counteroffensive led primarily by Siberian troops trained for harsh winter combat recently arriving from the east along with the numerous T-34 tanks held in reserve advanced up to 100 mi (160 km) in some sectors, showing that mobile warfare was still possible in the Russian winter.'
Mikeyboy said:
So fear is not a great way to get the best from your generals then.
Still back on subject, I know nothing about the French tanks of the period, the only footage I've seen are the machine gun carrier style and always assumed the tanks were all of that type. Were they actually good then?
The French tanks were very heavily armoured for the time. Especially the Char Bis. This was immune to all German AT weapons at the time. So much so that the Germans had to use AA weapons(88's) or heavy artillery, usually the 10.5cm as that was the most common, although the panzer divisions had access to some 10cm guns that were even more devastating against armour. The other French tanks had small 1 man turrets, so this slowed down loading/aiming as the tank commander had to do this, as well as try to control his tank. The French idealogy was very much one of mobile pill boxes.Still back on subject, I know nothing about the French tanks of the period, the only footage I've seen are the machine gun carrier style and always assumed the tanks were all of that type. Were they actually good then?
The British tanks of the period, the cruiser tanks anyway(A9,A10,A13 etc) tried to follow the best traditions of the British cavalry by specialising in costly and wasteful attacks. The tanks were fast and well armed for the period with the 2pdr gun, whose main drawback was the lack of HE for the gun. All the British cruiser tanks were recognisably tanks, the MG carriers were used by the recon units and also as prime movers for some of the guns. The British also had the Mk VI light tank. This was armed with a MG or a besa HMG, they did look a bit wierd as the engine was at the front I believe, much like the scorpion light tanks.
The other tanks the British used were the infantry tanks of the Royal Tank Regiment. These were along the lines of the French tanks, slow heavily armoured and designed to support the infantry. The Matilda I was MG armed, the Matilda II had a 2pdr gun. The Matildas were the tanks used by Frankforce to counterattack at Arras and Stonne and initially enjoyed great success before the Germans were able to get some heavy artillery to use against them in direct fire mode.
German tanks were all recognisable as tanks, armed mostly with 20 and 37mm guns. A few were armed with a short barreled 75mm gun(Pz IVD & Stugs), they were intitially intended as infantry support, but quickly became the best armed
German afv.
Hopefully that gives a brief intro into the tanks of the main protagonists.
The British and German tanks were an equal match for each other, the British tanks having the slightly better gun, but the German tanks were used better and in concentrated amounts. The French tanks were designed for a different style of warfare and faired badly in a battle of maneuver, but did bloody the Germans a few times, such that Germans orders were changed to just bypass the heavier French tanks and not engage.
Given the Germans use of almost everything they captured, its telling that they only used French tanks as prime movers, training vehicles and target practice(with the exception of the panhard lorraine armoured cars, which they used extensively).
Derek Smith said:
s2art said:
The Home Fleet had several purposes, but the primary one would have been to stop an invasion if it occurred.
The prime function of the Home Fleet (both battle squadrons), and one that it did spectacularly well, was to negate the threat of the German fleet. The Channel was the responsibility of another fleet, which used smaller, lighter craft for rather obvious reasons. If the situation got to the stage where either or both Home Fleet battle squadrons were sent into the Channel we would have already lost the war.And if the fleet had been used to crush the invasion then, far from losing the war, it would have done so much damage to the Germans that it would have shortened the war in our favour. Catastrophic defeats tend to do that, and it would have made the Armada defeat look trivial by comparison. The KM knew this, Churchill and Brooke knew it. As Churchill said 'We are waiting, and so are the fishes'
Edited by s2art on Wednesday 15th December 00:04
Edited by s2art on Wednesday 15th December 00:10
Thought this would be of interest;
New Perspectives on the Battle of Britain
Seventy years on from 1940, it is time we acknowledge Britain was saved by its sailors as much as by its airmen
Dr. Andrew Gordon
My problem with Battle of Britain culture rests on just one specific point: the often stated and always implied[1] claim that ‘nothing stood between Britain and Nazi occupation except Fighter Command.’ This assertion, most attractive to the RAF, has been relentlessly amplified in recent weeks by the media, especially the BBC and the tabloid press. But it is quite untrue. Among other things, the largest operational fleet in the world stood between. Whatever opinions may be held elsewhere about operation SEALION (the vaunted German invasion), it was the German Navy (Kriegsmarine) that was going to have to sign the chit for a logistical, resource, force-protection and seamanship nightmare, and the more they studied the daunting obstacles facing them, the more anxious they became to be let off the hook.
There was so much wrong with the materiel and methods available for SEALION, that it is difficult to know where to start.
The basic order-of-battle facts are that, having lost ten destroyers in Norway, the Germans now had only ten to protect four beach landing areas. At the beginning of September the Admiralty had disposed sixty-seven (plus six cruisers) for immediate response to an invasion alarm. The first warning of the invasion’s sailing would come, it was hoped, from RAF reconnaissance over the assembly ports. But in case – as was likely – the Germans waited until after dark before commencing their 12-hour[2] toil across to England, the Royal Navy had a pool of 700 armed patrol craft (requisitioned motor yachts and trawlers) of whom around 200 were on picket duty ‘off the north coast of France’[3] every night. So, owing to either the air reconnaissance or the trip-wire patrols, there was a high likelihood that the German invasion armadas would have found British destroyers flotillas[4] between them and their intended landing-beaches when they approached on the morning of their D-Day. As well as torpedoes and guns, each destroyer carried 40 depth-charges filled with 600-800lbs of Amatol (depending on Mk) which would have demolished the tows of wallowing barges packed with soldiers and horses.
The second tranche of RN interventions would have been the thirty-four corvettes and sloops, and the MTBs, employed on East Coast and Channel convoy routes. Then, within twenty-four hours of the alert, the cruisers and capital units of the Home Fleet would have started to arrive from the far north and west. 165 minesweepers of varying pedigree were at hand to maintain swept channels. Finally, many of the thirty-five submarines based in home waters would have headed for the Channel to disrupt the shuttling back and forth of barges required by the German build-up for the next ten days.
The RN would have taken casualties – it’s never baulked at that. But to inflict serious losses the Luftwaffe would have had to discover capacities it had yet to demonstrate and yet to train for. Off Norway, the Home Fleet had been bombed for days on end, but only two of its destroyers (out of an inventory of over eighty) were sunk. During Dunkirk, many destroyers were damaged by air attack, and for a while the most valuable ones were withdrawn (in the manner of Fighter Command from France), but none of the four sunk[5] by the Luftwaffe were in open water and free to manoeuvre at speed when fatally attacked. In brief, the war so far had provided no evidence that, in extremis, air-power – German or British[6] – was a naval operations show-stopper. In 1940, the Luftwaffe’s Stukas were specialists in Army close-support, and the anti-shipping skills which some of them were to train for in the autumn, and which they were to display in the Mediterranean in ‘41 (starting with Fliegerkorps X’s attack on Illustrious in January) cannot be retro-fitted to the previous summer.
The ‘Brief Statement of Reasons for Cancellation of Invasion of England’, prepared by the German Naval Historical Staff in 1944,[7] states:
As the preliminary work and preparations proceeded, the exceptional difficulties became more and more obvious. The more forcibly the risks were brought home, the dimmer grew faith in success… just as in Napoleon’s invasion plans in 1805, the fundamental requirement for success was lacking, that is, command of the sea. This lack of superiority at sea was to be compensated for by air superiority. But it was never even possible to destroy enemy sea superiority by use of our own air superiority… The sea area in which we were to operate was dominated by a well prepared opponent who was determined to fight to the utmost of his ability. The greatest difficulty was bound to be that of maintaining the flow of supplies and food. The enemy’s fleet and other means of naval defence had to be considered as a decisive factor. Owing to the weakness of our naval forces there could be no effective guarantee against the enemy breaking into our area of transports, despite our mine barrages on the flanks and despite our air superiority.
Grand Admiral Raeder (head of the Kriegsmarine in 1940) said much the same, in almost the same words, after the war; and had tried to dodge out of the invasion as early as July 11th.[8] The last sentence quoted above appears to mean that, even if the Luftwaffe had won the air battle of Britain, the Kriegsmarine would still not have wanted to attempt SEALION.
The same Kriegsmarine document acknowledges that ‘there was an air of relief among leading [naval] personalities when sufficiently solid grounds were found to warrant postponement and finally cancellation.’ And it is obvious that in August-September 1940,[9] the best outcome for the Kriegsmarine would be for the invasion to be cancelled and for someone-else to take the blame. Thanks to Fighter Command’s victory over the Luftwaffe, that is what they got – their get out of jail card. But that is not at all the same thing as there being nobody but the RAF ready, willing and able to defeat Operation SEALION.
Whether the air battle was the cause or the occasion for the cancellation of SEALION is therefore a moot point. Hitler’s order on the 17th September to ‘postpone’ the invasion appears directly consequent on the Luftwaffe’s losses of the 15th, held to be the climactic day of the Battle of Britain. But as Professor Ian Kershaw tells us, ‘Hitler had never been convinced that the German air offensive would successfully lay the basis for the invasion of which he was in any case so sceptical.’ And:
‘between 10 and 13 September there were signs that Hitler had gone utterly cold on the idea of a landing. On 14 September he then told his commanders that the conditions for ‘Operation SEALION’ had not been attained. The military chiefs themselves did not believe that a landing at that stage could be successfully carried out. ‘I had the impression at this discussion,’ wrote Nicolaus von Below many years later, ‘that Hitler had given up hope of a successful invasion of England the following spring. In autumn 1940 the great unknown, the fairly improvised crossing over the sea, frightened him. He was unsure.’ [10]
No doubt the result of the air battle on the 15th assisted this attack of cold feet –– but so too may have the deployment of the Home Fleet southwards from Scapa Flow to Rosyth on the 13th, bringing the heavy ships eight hours closer to the invasion arena. Further, to launch a laborious and protracted invasion into the equinoctial gales would have been inviting disaster. The German High Command had actually been warned way back in July that ‘the weather in the North Sea and Channel during the second half of September is very bad and … the main operation would therefore have to be completed by September 15.’[11] The pencilled-in date kept slipping, but by mid-month Hitler’s mind was diverting to the bombing of London and (covertly) to Russia. To borrow a Napoleonism, he was learning that an elephant cannot easily kill a whale.
The first misconception about the summer of 1940 is that German planning was a thing of Teutonic rigour and logic. In fact they had no coherent game-plan for prosecuting the war against Britain after the collapse of France, and it took them some time to realise that the war was not over. Then, Goering boasted that he would bring Britain to heel through a campaign of shock and awe, which would include the destruction of the RAF, making an invasion unnecessary. Partly as a Psy-Ops ploy against British morale, Hitler ordered SEALION to be prepared, but executed only as a last resort[12] and if necessary[13] (which logically meant: if Goering failed to fulfil his boast).
Local air superiority would have sufficed for invasion, but within Goering’s grand scheme was the desideratum that the Luftwaffe somehow achieve air supremacy over England, from airfields in France. Partly because the other German Services were anxious to raise the ‘air’ bar to an improbable height, the invasion project became illogically linked with this sweeping precondition which could most plausibly be attained from airfields in England after an invasion. An obvious parallel is the Allies’ invasion of Sicily in 1943: given the distance from fighter bases in Tunisia and Malta, it would have been daft to make air supremacy over the island a condition for invading. Instead, the Allies exploited air superiority over the landing areas until airfields ashore, from which supremacy could be contested, were up and running. Ditto Normandy.
German leaders were thus unfocused and irrational about the linkages between the air-campaign and a mooted invasion; and they were hopelessly disunited. Goering remained dismissive of SEALION and never bothered to attend a planning meeting, possibly because the project anticipated the Luftwaffe’s failure to defeat Britain single-handedly.
Long before the air battle started, Air Chief Marshal Hugh Dowding understood that defence against invasion was going to be a joint business, as his famous letter of 16th May, calling for Fighter Command to be withdrawn from France demonstrates. The conditions he specified were: ‘…if an adequate fighter force is kept in this country, if the fleet remains in being, and if Home Forces are suitably organised…’ This seminal letter is commonly quoted by Battle of Britain celebrants, but the words underlined here by me, and the bit about the Army, never seem to get mentioned.
A most telling piece of evidence, and one whose implications cannot be forever evaded, is the War Cabinet’s despatch in mid-August of an armoured brigade with ‘nearly half our best available tanks’[14] to fight the Italians in North Africa. This seemingly bizarre decision must have been permitted by one of only two possible ‘home defence’ assumptions: either Churchill was already taking for granted a decisive RAF victory in the developing air battle; or he (First Lord of the Admiralty until three months previously) did not really believe that SEALION would get ashore, irrespective of the air battle. The latter is strongly suggested by a conversation Admiral Sir Charles Forbes had with Churchill shortly after the war. Forbes had been C-in-C Home Fleet in 1940 and had protested at the withdrawal of destroyers from Western Approaches against an eventuality which (in his view) was unlikely to happen. At a Navy Club dinner in 1947 he took Churchill to task, and Winston ‘told the admiral that “He himself had never believed that invasion was possible.”’ To which Forbes replied ‘to the effect that he had camouflaged it very well.’[15]
Perceptions of SEALION’s prospects varied between, and within, every Service, British and German, with varying degrees of bias, and none can be validated. In the analysis of Wing Commander H.R.Allen (himself one of The Few):
‘It was seapower that ruled the day in 1940, and fortunately Britain had a sufficiency. The air situation was, of course, important, but by no means fundamental. Without doubt the five hundred or so section, flight and squadron leaders of Fighter Command earned their laurels. But the real victor was the Royal Navy, the Silent Service…’ [16]
In reality, the issues are impossible to apportion categorically. But clearly the Home Fleet, along with Bomber Command, Costal Command, the Army, the weather (worse, that summer, than remembered), Goering’s grandstanding, disunity in the German high command, and the huge practical obstacles facing SEALION all went into the powerful witches’ stew which cursed the project.
In summary, the link between the air battle and the non-event of SEALION is much less direct and exclusive than commonly wished by the RAF’s Battle of Britain celebrants. Certainly, Fighter Command added daytime command of the air to the indisputable command of the sea which Britain already possessed, but the airspace over southern England did not thereby become the last court of appeal against invasion. None of the above is new; but the sailors have been silent for too long, and popular understanding of the ‘whole-picture’ needs to be adjusted so that credit for strategic effect may be shared (belatedly) where credit is due.
To some extent, there is a parallel with Trafalgar. The Channel Fleet under Nelson’s senior, ‘Billy Blue’ Cornwallis, had been blockading the main French fleet in Brest for months, and to it was expected to fall the task of defeating the invasion. So credible were Cornwallis’s ‘far distant storm-tossed ships, on which the Grande Armée never looked’ (Mahan’s words) that Napoleon had already decamped and turned his elephant east. To assume, as many still do, that if Nelson’s Mediterranean Fleet had failed to find Villeneuve’s Franco-Spanish fleet, or been beaten by it, the British would soon have been speaking French, is a leap of mythology which vaults over the very existence of the main British naval force. It also makes the security of Britain look a more hand-to-mouth affair than it actually was. In due course after Trafalgar the ships of the Channel Fleet dispersed to other duties, their goal-keeping role in deterring invasion unsung and overlooked by popular history. Likewise the Home Fleet in 1940. To point out that the public in time of war demands simple, iconic images, painted in primary colours, detracts nothing from the bravery of Nelson and his men, or indeed of the pilots of Fighter Command.
All that having been said, the air Battle of Britain, and the marvelous rhetoric which Churchill wove around it, very likely saved Britain in a less direct way: by helping to persuade neutral America that we were worth backing. With our engineering industries diverted from exporting to war production, we were fast running out of the gold and dollar reserves with which to buy food and raw materials. By November the coffers would be empty. Unglamorous as it sounds, balance-of-payments meltdown was the real, if invisible, danger in late 1940, and Churchill’s real gamble. If Congress had not solved Britain’s ‘dollar problem’ in early 1941 by passing the Lend-Lease Bill, we would soon have had to make peace or starve. A succession of events – the ‘Deliverance of Dunkirk’, the sinking of the French fleet, the ‘Battle of Britain,’ the Blitz, our military support for Greece – combined to tip the American scales in favour of Lend-Lease. Of this list, the Battle of Britain presented the most powerful image: the first positive, media-visible, strategic-scale rebuff of Hitler’s armed forces.[17] An ambient fleet-in-being victory could not possibly have had such an impact on its own.
Notes:
[1] In the film The Battle of Britain, Air Chief Marshal Hugh Dowding (Lawrence Olivier) declares (words to the effect) that if Fighter Command loses today’s battle, ‘They’ll be in Whitehall within a week.’
[2] The shortest routes: Etaples and Boulogne to Eastbourne (around 50 miles); Calais to Rye (around 60 miles); Dunkirk to New Romney (around 70 miles).
[3] Words of the German Navy War Diary (Fuehrer Conferences on Naval Affairs, 1939-45 (Naval Institute Press, 1990) p.139).
[4] Certainly the 37 based in Harwich, the Thames Estuary and Portsmouth.
[5] Grenade, Basilisk, Havant and Keith.
[6] Nobody has convincingly explained to me how the RAF would have destroyed the invasion once it was at sea. Carpet-bombing (one suggestion) would have been far less productive than bombing the invasion barges packed together in harbour – which the RAF had been doing for weeks, destroying some 12% of them.
[7] REPORT ON THE GERMAN NAVAL WAR EFFORT, Part I, Appendix II. (NHB)
[8] See REPORT OF THE C-IN-C NAVY TO THE FUEHRER ON JULY 11, 1940… in Fuehrer Conferences…. pp.114-5.
[9] In my view, had BARBAROSSA succeeded and Hitler revisited SEALION in the spring of ’42, the balance of naval Orbats would have been markedly less unfavourable to Germany.
[10] Hitler, 1936-1945, p.310. There may be a word (either ‘until’ or ‘even’) missing after ‘England’. See also Fuehrer Conferences, Op.Cit.
[11] Quotation from “rough notes” of a ‘Fuehrer Conference’ on July 21st. The insinuation in the notes, which were signed by Raeder, is that these views were expressed (or agreed) by Hitler, but that is not definite. (Fuehrer Conferences… p.119).
[12] REPORT OF THE C-IN-C NAVY… (Fuehrer Conferences, p.115).
[13] Hitler, Directive No.16 (Fuehrer Conferences, p.116).
[14] Churchill’s own words, quoted in David Reynolds, In Command of History (Penguin, 2004), p.191
[15] Stephen Roskill, Churchill and the Admirals, p.121. Roskill’s source was a letter in his possession from Forbes to Sir Godfrey Style, Forbes’s one-time flag-lieutenant, dated 6/2/47.
[16] Who Won the Battle of Britain? (Arthur Barker Ltd., 1974) p.207.
[17] See for example, Richard P.Hallion’s ‘The American Perspective’ in Paul Addison & Jeremy A.Crang, The Burning Blue (Pimlico, 200)
Dr Andrew Gordon is a maritime historian at Kings College London, and the author of The Rules of the Game. He is currently working on a biography of Sir Bertram Ramsay.
New Perspectives on the Battle of Britain
Seventy years on from 1940, it is time we acknowledge Britain was saved by its sailors as much as by its airmen
Dr. Andrew Gordon
My problem with Battle of Britain culture rests on just one specific point: the often stated and always implied[1] claim that ‘nothing stood between Britain and Nazi occupation except Fighter Command.’ This assertion, most attractive to the RAF, has been relentlessly amplified in recent weeks by the media, especially the BBC and the tabloid press. But it is quite untrue. Among other things, the largest operational fleet in the world stood between. Whatever opinions may be held elsewhere about operation SEALION (the vaunted German invasion), it was the German Navy (Kriegsmarine) that was going to have to sign the chit for a logistical, resource, force-protection and seamanship nightmare, and the more they studied the daunting obstacles facing them, the more anxious they became to be let off the hook.
There was so much wrong with the materiel and methods available for SEALION, that it is difficult to know where to start.
The basic order-of-battle facts are that, having lost ten destroyers in Norway, the Germans now had only ten to protect four beach landing areas. At the beginning of September the Admiralty had disposed sixty-seven (plus six cruisers) for immediate response to an invasion alarm. The first warning of the invasion’s sailing would come, it was hoped, from RAF reconnaissance over the assembly ports. But in case – as was likely – the Germans waited until after dark before commencing their 12-hour[2] toil across to England, the Royal Navy had a pool of 700 armed patrol craft (requisitioned motor yachts and trawlers) of whom around 200 were on picket duty ‘off the north coast of France’[3] every night. So, owing to either the air reconnaissance or the trip-wire patrols, there was a high likelihood that the German invasion armadas would have found British destroyers flotillas[4] between them and their intended landing-beaches when they approached on the morning of their D-Day. As well as torpedoes and guns, each destroyer carried 40 depth-charges filled with 600-800lbs of Amatol (depending on Mk) which would have demolished the tows of wallowing barges packed with soldiers and horses.
The second tranche of RN interventions would have been the thirty-four corvettes and sloops, and the MTBs, employed on East Coast and Channel convoy routes. Then, within twenty-four hours of the alert, the cruisers and capital units of the Home Fleet would have started to arrive from the far north and west. 165 minesweepers of varying pedigree were at hand to maintain swept channels. Finally, many of the thirty-five submarines based in home waters would have headed for the Channel to disrupt the shuttling back and forth of barges required by the German build-up for the next ten days.
The RN would have taken casualties – it’s never baulked at that. But to inflict serious losses the Luftwaffe would have had to discover capacities it had yet to demonstrate and yet to train for. Off Norway, the Home Fleet had been bombed for days on end, but only two of its destroyers (out of an inventory of over eighty) were sunk. During Dunkirk, many destroyers were damaged by air attack, and for a while the most valuable ones were withdrawn (in the manner of Fighter Command from France), but none of the four sunk[5] by the Luftwaffe were in open water and free to manoeuvre at speed when fatally attacked. In brief, the war so far had provided no evidence that, in extremis, air-power – German or British[6] – was a naval operations show-stopper. In 1940, the Luftwaffe’s Stukas were specialists in Army close-support, and the anti-shipping skills which some of them were to train for in the autumn, and which they were to display in the Mediterranean in ‘41 (starting with Fliegerkorps X’s attack on Illustrious in January) cannot be retro-fitted to the previous summer.
The ‘Brief Statement of Reasons for Cancellation of Invasion of England’, prepared by the German Naval Historical Staff in 1944,[7] states:
As the preliminary work and preparations proceeded, the exceptional difficulties became more and more obvious. The more forcibly the risks were brought home, the dimmer grew faith in success… just as in Napoleon’s invasion plans in 1805, the fundamental requirement for success was lacking, that is, command of the sea. This lack of superiority at sea was to be compensated for by air superiority. But it was never even possible to destroy enemy sea superiority by use of our own air superiority… The sea area in which we were to operate was dominated by a well prepared opponent who was determined to fight to the utmost of his ability. The greatest difficulty was bound to be that of maintaining the flow of supplies and food. The enemy’s fleet and other means of naval defence had to be considered as a decisive factor. Owing to the weakness of our naval forces there could be no effective guarantee against the enemy breaking into our area of transports, despite our mine barrages on the flanks and despite our air superiority.
Grand Admiral Raeder (head of the Kriegsmarine in 1940) said much the same, in almost the same words, after the war; and had tried to dodge out of the invasion as early as July 11th.[8] The last sentence quoted above appears to mean that, even if the Luftwaffe had won the air battle of Britain, the Kriegsmarine would still not have wanted to attempt SEALION.
The same Kriegsmarine document acknowledges that ‘there was an air of relief among leading [naval] personalities when sufficiently solid grounds were found to warrant postponement and finally cancellation.’ And it is obvious that in August-September 1940,[9] the best outcome for the Kriegsmarine would be for the invasion to be cancelled and for someone-else to take the blame. Thanks to Fighter Command’s victory over the Luftwaffe, that is what they got – their get out of jail card. But that is not at all the same thing as there being nobody but the RAF ready, willing and able to defeat Operation SEALION.
Whether the air battle was the cause or the occasion for the cancellation of SEALION is therefore a moot point. Hitler’s order on the 17th September to ‘postpone’ the invasion appears directly consequent on the Luftwaffe’s losses of the 15th, held to be the climactic day of the Battle of Britain. But as Professor Ian Kershaw tells us, ‘Hitler had never been convinced that the German air offensive would successfully lay the basis for the invasion of which he was in any case so sceptical.’ And:
‘between 10 and 13 September there were signs that Hitler had gone utterly cold on the idea of a landing. On 14 September he then told his commanders that the conditions for ‘Operation SEALION’ had not been attained. The military chiefs themselves did not believe that a landing at that stage could be successfully carried out. ‘I had the impression at this discussion,’ wrote Nicolaus von Below many years later, ‘that Hitler had given up hope of a successful invasion of England the following spring. In autumn 1940 the great unknown, the fairly improvised crossing over the sea, frightened him. He was unsure.’ [10]
No doubt the result of the air battle on the 15th assisted this attack of cold feet –– but so too may have the deployment of the Home Fleet southwards from Scapa Flow to Rosyth on the 13th, bringing the heavy ships eight hours closer to the invasion arena. Further, to launch a laborious and protracted invasion into the equinoctial gales would have been inviting disaster. The German High Command had actually been warned way back in July that ‘the weather in the North Sea and Channel during the second half of September is very bad and … the main operation would therefore have to be completed by September 15.’[11] The pencilled-in date kept slipping, but by mid-month Hitler’s mind was diverting to the bombing of London and (covertly) to Russia. To borrow a Napoleonism, he was learning that an elephant cannot easily kill a whale.
The first misconception about the summer of 1940 is that German planning was a thing of Teutonic rigour and logic. In fact they had no coherent game-plan for prosecuting the war against Britain after the collapse of France, and it took them some time to realise that the war was not over. Then, Goering boasted that he would bring Britain to heel through a campaign of shock and awe, which would include the destruction of the RAF, making an invasion unnecessary. Partly as a Psy-Ops ploy against British morale, Hitler ordered SEALION to be prepared, but executed only as a last resort[12] and if necessary[13] (which logically meant: if Goering failed to fulfil his boast).
Local air superiority would have sufficed for invasion, but within Goering’s grand scheme was the desideratum that the Luftwaffe somehow achieve air supremacy over England, from airfields in France. Partly because the other German Services were anxious to raise the ‘air’ bar to an improbable height, the invasion project became illogically linked with this sweeping precondition which could most plausibly be attained from airfields in England after an invasion. An obvious parallel is the Allies’ invasion of Sicily in 1943: given the distance from fighter bases in Tunisia and Malta, it would have been daft to make air supremacy over the island a condition for invading. Instead, the Allies exploited air superiority over the landing areas until airfields ashore, from which supremacy could be contested, were up and running. Ditto Normandy.
German leaders were thus unfocused and irrational about the linkages between the air-campaign and a mooted invasion; and they were hopelessly disunited. Goering remained dismissive of SEALION and never bothered to attend a planning meeting, possibly because the project anticipated the Luftwaffe’s failure to defeat Britain single-handedly.
Long before the air battle started, Air Chief Marshal Hugh Dowding understood that defence against invasion was going to be a joint business, as his famous letter of 16th May, calling for Fighter Command to be withdrawn from France demonstrates. The conditions he specified were: ‘…if an adequate fighter force is kept in this country, if the fleet remains in being, and if Home Forces are suitably organised…’ This seminal letter is commonly quoted by Battle of Britain celebrants, but the words underlined here by me, and the bit about the Army, never seem to get mentioned.
A most telling piece of evidence, and one whose implications cannot be forever evaded, is the War Cabinet’s despatch in mid-August of an armoured brigade with ‘nearly half our best available tanks’[14] to fight the Italians in North Africa. This seemingly bizarre decision must have been permitted by one of only two possible ‘home defence’ assumptions: either Churchill was already taking for granted a decisive RAF victory in the developing air battle; or he (First Lord of the Admiralty until three months previously) did not really believe that SEALION would get ashore, irrespective of the air battle. The latter is strongly suggested by a conversation Admiral Sir Charles Forbes had with Churchill shortly after the war. Forbes had been C-in-C Home Fleet in 1940 and had protested at the withdrawal of destroyers from Western Approaches against an eventuality which (in his view) was unlikely to happen. At a Navy Club dinner in 1947 he took Churchill to task, and Winston ‘told the admiral that “He himself had never believed that invasion was possible.”’ To which Forbes replied ‘to the effect that he had camouflaged it very well.’[15]
Perceptions of SEALION’s prospects varied between, and within, every Service, British and German, with varying degrees of bias, and none can be validated. In the analysis of Wing Commander H.R.Allen (himself one of The Few):
‘It was seapower that ruled the day in 1940, and fortunately Britain had a sufficiency. The air situation was, of course, important, but by no means fundamental. Without doubt the five hundred or so section, flight and squadron leaders of Fighter Command earned their laurels. But the real victor was the Royal Navy, the Silent Service…’ [16]
In reality, the issues are impossible to apportion categorically. But clearly the Home Fleet, along with Bomber Command, Costal Command, the Army, the weather (worse, that summer, than remembered), Goering’s grandstanding, disunity in the German high command, and the huge practical obstacles facing SEALION all went into the powerful witches’ stew which cursed the project.
In summary, the link between the air battle and the non-event of SEALION is much less direct and exclusive than commonly wished by the RAF’s Battle of Britain celebrants. Certainly, Fighter Command added daytime command of the air to the indisputable command of the sea which Britain already possessed, but the airspace over southern England did not thereby become the last court of appeal against invasion. None of the above is new; but the sailors have been silent for too long, and popular understanding of the ‘whole-picture’ needs to be adjusted so that credit for strategic effect may be shared (belatedly) where credit is due.
To some extent, there is a parallel with Trafalgar. The Channel Fleet under Nelson’s senior, ‘Billy Blue’ Cornwallis, had been blockading the main French fleet in Brest for months, and to it was expected to fall the task of defeating the invasion. So credible were Cornwallis’s ‘far distant storm-tossed ships, on which the Grande Armée never looked’ (Mahan’s words) that Napoleon had already decamped and turned his elephant east. To assume, as many still do, that if Nelson’s Mediterranean Fleet had failed to find Villeneuve’s Franco-Spanish fleet, or been beaten by it, the British would soon have been speaking French, is a leap of mythology which vaults over the very existence of the main British naval force. It also makes the security of Britain look a more hand-to-mouth affair than it actually was. In due course after Trafalgar the ships of the Channel Fleet dispersed to other duties, their goal-keeping role in deterring invasion unsung and overlooked by popular history. Likewise the Home Fleet in 1940. To point out that the public in time of war demands simple, iconic images, painted in primary colours, detracts nothing from the bravery of Nelson and his men, or indeed of the pilots of Fighter Command.
All that having been said, the air Battle of Britain, and the marvelous rhetoric which Churchill wove around it, very likely saved Britain in a less direct way: by helping to persuade neutral America that we were worth backing. With our engineering industries diverted from exporting to war production, we were fast running out of the gold and dollar reserves with which to buy food and raw materials. By November the coffers would be empty. Unglamorous as it sounds, balance-of-payments meltdown was the real, if invisible, danger in late 1940, and Churchill’s real gamble. If Congress had not solved Britain’s ‘dollar problem’ in early 1941 by passing the Lend-Lease Bill, we would soon have had to make peace or starve. A succession of events – the ‘Deliverance of Dunkirk’, the sinking of the French fleet, the ‘Battle of Britain,’ the Blitz, our military support for Greece – combined to tip the American scales in favour of Lend-Lease. Of this list, the Battle of Britain presented the most powerful image: the first positive, media-visible, strategic-scale rebuff of Hitler’s armed forces.[17] An ambient fleet-in-being victory could not possibly have had such an impact on its own.
Notes:
[1] In the film The Battle of Britain, Air Chief Marshal Hugh Dowding (Lawrence Olivier) declares (words to the effect) that if Fighter Command loses today’s battle, ‘They’ll be in Whitehall within a week.’
[2] The shortest routes: Etaples and Boulogne to Eastbourne (around 50 miles); Calais to Rye (around 60 miles); Dunkirk to New Romney (around 70 miles).
[3] Words of the German Navy War Diary (Fuehrer Conferences on Naval Affairs, 1939-45 (Naval Institute Press, 1990) p.139).
[4] Certainly the 37 based in Harwich, the Thames Estuary and Portsmouth.
[5] Grenade, Basilisk, Havant and Keith.
[6] Nobody has convincingly explained to me how the RAF would have destroyed the invasion once it was at sea. Carpet-bombing (one suggestion) would have been far less productive than bombing the invasion barges packed together in harbour – which the RAF had been doing for weeks, destroying some 12% of them.
[7] REPORT ON THE GERMAN NAVAL WAR EFFORT, Part I, Appendix II. (NHB)
[8] See REPORT OF THE C-IN-C NAVY TO THE FUEHRER ON JULY 11, 1940… in Fuehrer Conferences…. pp.114-5.
[9] In my view, had BARBAROSSA succeeded and Hitler revisited SEALION in the spring of ’42, the balance of naval Orbats would have been markedly less unfavourable to Germany.
[10] Hitler, 1936-1945, p.310. There may be a word (either ‘until’ or ‘even’) missing after ‘England’. See also Fuehrer Conferences, Op.Cit.
[11] Quotation from “rough notes” of a ‘Fuehrer Conference’ on July 21st. The insinuation in the notes, which were signed by Raeder, is that these views were expressed (or agreed) by Hitler, but that is not definite. (Fuehrer Conferences… p.119).
[12] REPORT OF THE C-IN-C NAVY… (Fuehrer Conferences, p.115).
[13] Hitler, Directive No.16 (Fuehrer Conferences, p.116).
[14] Churchill’s own words, quoted in David Reynolds, In Command of History (Penguin, 2004), p.191
[15] Stephen Roskill, Churchill and the Admirals, p.121. Roskill’s source was a letter in his possession from Forbes to Sir Godfrey Style, Forbes’s one-time flag-lieutenant, dated 6/2/47.
[16] Who Won the Battle of Britain? (Arthur Barker Ltd., 1974) p.207.
[17] See for example, Richard P.Hallion’s ‘The American Perspective’ in Paul Addison & Jeremy A.Crang, The Burning Blue (Pimlico, 200)
Dr Andrew Gordon is a maritime historian at Kings College London, and the author of The Rules of the Game. He is currently working on a biography of Sir Bertram Ramsay.
OP was answered sufficiently well ages ago. Just need to say Derek I have enjoyed your posts. Think you have a sound grasp of the complexities of the situations that existed back then and I find your posts interesting.
Strange to think that you are of that generation who are still linked so strongly with these events. I am two generations removed from it, but I still have my Granddads medals and his bit of wood taken from H.M.S. Warspite.
Edit.
I remember watching a doc, or reading a paper on an alternative Russian attack which would have gone through the oil rich lands in the south and then up, rather than straight across. In hindsight it would have stood a better chance of success....can't remember if it was on the condition that Britain had Halifax as leader and had an armistice but think it was linked to it. Memory a bit flaky
Strange to think that you are of that generation who are still linked so strongly with these events. I am two generations removed from it, but I still have my Granddads medals and his bit of wood taken from H.M.S. Warspite.
Edit.
I remember watching a doc, or reading a paper on an alternative Russian attack which would have gone through the oil rich lands in the south and then up, rather than straight across. In hindsight it would have stood a better chance of success....can't remember if it was on the condition that Britain had Halifax as leader and had an armistice but think it was linked to it. Memory a bit flaky
Edited by Halb on Friday 17th December 19:40
heebeegeetee said:
We might have stood firm during WW2... but feck me we've surrendered everything since. I often find myself quite objecting to the French being accused of being surrender monkeys... I think they've done a very good job of hanging on to their culture and way of life.
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