Chapter 22: Operation Sea Lion: The Thwarted Invasion of Britain
Adolf Hitler encounters his first setback after taking over most of Europe
So far, Adolf Hitler had met with nothing but success.
Any setbacks he faced were temporary. One by one, countries across Europe had fallen. Some became client states, junior partners in the Axis coalition, some puppet governments, and others official parts of the German Reich. Then there were the odd neutral states.
But there had been no enemy states who had stopped Hitler at any step along the way.
This then is what Europe looked like in the summer of 1940.
All that blue is Nazi-controlled territory and their direct allies. Gray states are neutral. You can clearly see that all opposition on the European continent was neutralized by the summer of 1940.
Only the United Kingdom (and its colonies in the Middle East) are red.
Of course, the United Kingdom was far from a push-over. They controlled the greatest empire in the world.
Hitler was well aware that Britain was a redoutable foe. However, he continued to think they had more in common than not. He hoped that they would make peace. France fell quickly. Why wouldn’t their ally see the folly of continued resistance? The Soviet Union was neutralized. The United States seemed uninterested in fighting. Why would the UK not eventually capitulate, faced with the stirring string of successes by the Wehrmacht?
Shirer opens this chapter with a quote by General Jodl, Chief of Operations at OKW, written on June 30, 1940:
The final German victory over England is now only a question of time. Enemy offensive operations on a large scale are no longer possible.
Germany made no plans to continue fighting Britain.
Eventually though, Hitler did ask the Naval War Staff to examine the possibility of invading Britain. “It was the first time in history that any German military staff had been asked even to consider such an action,” Shirer writes.
Shirer himself spent some time in August on the Channel snooping around from Antwerp to Boulogne in search of an invasion army but couldn’t find anything worth writing about. Later, when he went through the secret German military files, he did find German plans to invade Britain in the fall of 1940, but that was in the fall.
It seems the turning point in German thinking occurred in July. After six weeks of hesitancy, and no sign that Britain would sue for peace, there was a growing recognition that Germany should maybe invade Britain, “if necessary.”
At the end of July 1940, Hitler summoned his military chiefs to his home at Obsersalzberg. And he put the question to his military leaders.
Admiral Raeder, the head of the Nazi navy, raised a concern of many: bad weather over the English Channel. He proposed waiting until May 1941. Of course, Hitler didn’t want to wait. In typical fashion, he wouldn’t take no as an answer.
On August 1, he asked them to make greater use of the Luftwaffe to attack the RAF and conduct terror attacks throughout the country. On the same day, Keitel drew up Operation Sea Lion, plans for the invasion of Great Britain.
In early September, the Luftwaffe began attacking London. It was the worst air attack ever up to that point, with 625 bombers protected by 648 fighters.
Between August 24 and September 6, the Germans sent over an average of 1000 planes a day to destroy enemy fighters. (For those of you who grew up with the Narnia Chronicles, these were the attacks that the Pevensie children avoided by being sent from London to the country home where they eventually discovered the magic wardrobe.)
The Germans had a preponderance in terms of pure numbers, but Goering made a tactical error. The Luftwaffe swtiched to massive night bombings of London on September 7. It was an accident, but Britain believed it to be deliberate, and so, in retribution, they then conducted their first bombing of Berlin the next night. Shirer was in Berlin at the time. He wrote that the flak fire was the most intense he had ever seen. No plane came down, but the morale of Berliners fell. This was a fundamental shift in the war.
From September 7 until early Novermber 3, the Luftwaffe pounded London every night for 57 consecutive nights.
It wasn’t enough. The Luftwaffe never really recovered from the Battle of Britain and the German navy couldn’t provide enough sea power to actually invade Britain. The RAF saved Britain. In those early days of air power, it was not something that was thought possible: an air battle could decide the course of the war.
On September 10, Hitler postponed the invasion. The Navy was struggling and the RAF was attacking French ports on the Channel intended for the invasion.
Hitler became ambivalent about whether it was actually worth invading Britain. “A long war is not desirable,” Hitler reportedly said to Halder. A successful landing would require complete air superiority, and the RAF was clearly denying that possibility. And, of course, the bad weather didn’t help either.
After more losses, on Septembre 17, Hitler eventually decided to postpone Sea Lion indefinitely.
In Shirer’s words:
Adolf Hitler, after so many years of dazzling successes, had at last met failure.”
Topical Posts
Podcast ep. 1: The Man, The Myth: Hitler in American Culture
The Problems with the German Character Explanation of the Nazis
Podcast ep. 2: Why are Dictators (and Techno-monarchs) Appealing?
Podcast ep. 3: Interview with a 20th Century War Correspondent: Jon Randal
If You’ve Fallen Behind on the Reading, This Post is For You
Who was William L. Shirer? — part 2 (The Nightmare Years 1934-1940)
Podcast ep. 4: The Exhilaration & Peril of Covering the Nazis (with Prof. Michael Socolow) (Video, Audio)
Podcast ep. 5: What American Reporters Saw That Others Didn't (with Prof. Deborah Cohen) (Video, Audio)
80 Years On: A Reflection on History and Journalism As We Commemorate the End of World War II