Date: 2024-07-17 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00021318
Military
About WWII
Quora ... Could the Royal Navy have stopped a German invasion of Britain in the early days of WWII?
Burgess COMMENTARY
I was born in 1940 in the UK and grew up in a suburb of London during the war years. I know something of the Royal Navy and its role in the history of Britain, especially as it related to making the seas safe for commerce and making it possible for Britain to survive during the war years. I enjoyed reading the following though I am not sure of its complete correctness!!!!!!!!
Peter Burgess
Response by C M ... Global head, credit and business development. (2018–present)Updated Wed
I don’t think you really have a grasp on the sheer size of the Royal Navy Home Fleet and number of destroyers, cruisers, battlecruisers, battleships, monitors, MTBs, armed trawlers and submarines that would be concentrating on a patch of ocean from approximately Chichester in West Sussex to Ramsgate in Kent.
It’s not a very big area.
And you’re talking about hundreds of vessels. This force alone dwarfs the surface strength of the entire Kriegsmarine.
You’re also talking about zeroed-in batteries of artillery all along the coastlines able to bring down pinpoint accurate fire literally into the holds of the barges. One 25 pound shell into a river barge loaded with men and equipment doesn’t have a happy ending for the Germans on the barge. It just gets worse with the bigger Calibre guns.
The crossing would happen in daylight in perfect weather as the invasion fleet cannot make the crossing any other way. The Royal Navy gunners would have an absolute field day. They’d close up to five or six miles range and can’t miss from there.
Yes the Luftwaffe stukas would try to attack the larger British ships but they didn’t fare very well attacking our radar stations and were hacked out of the sky in droves even before Fighter Command had it’s act together in terms of bringing several squadrons to the fight in real force to break up the big formations later on in the Battle of Britain. Even a “defeated” Fighter Command (Ie: one that had been largely driven out of 11 Group forward stations) would be sortieing down from 10, 12 Group stations and take a horrendous toll of the Stukas and Ju88s trying to make a dent in the hundreds of thousands of tonnes of extremely highly motivated Senior Service steel charging at ramming speed into the flanks of the invasion force from the North Sea and Solent/Western Channel.
The Luftwaffe would have to accompany every Stuka raid with clouds of fighters as cover and these would have to stay with the Stukas. The Spitfires would have an absolute field day. Losses would be horrendous and neither side would be able to keep that kind of attritional tempo up for more than a day or two snd it would take much longer than this for (an uncontested) Luftwaffe to give even the slightest pause to the Royal Navy.
They wouldn’t be uncontested.
There’s just no way to stop that many ships. Bear in mind they didn’t have much in the way of dedicated torpedo bombers either - the Japanese dive bombers and torpedo bombers trained specifically for sinking ships. The Stukas did not have anything like this level of anti-surface warfare training or tactics.
Bear in mind that the Luftwaffe dive bombers would only really be able to attack the RN surface fleet while it is on the perimeter of the invasion fleet. Once they get into the meat of the barges and accompanying flak ship escorts, E boats and Destroyers etc they wouldn’t be able to reliably tell RN from Kreigsmarine and would be under orders not to start dropping bombs in amongst their own force. Knowing this, the RN destroyers would come steaming through the screen at almost 30 knots in a scene vaguely reminiscent of battlefields of much older history. We know what happens when you charge light unarmoured foot infantry in loose or no formation with (very) heavy horse.
Spoiler: it gets gnarly for the lads on foot and indeed so too for the lads in the landing craft in this scenario.
The RN destroyers would scythe through the barge flotilla just doing incredible charnel house butchery. They can even sink the barges by slicing right through them at 30 knots, heck even the wake of one passing close aboard would be enough to sink or inundate the kind of low freeboard, heavily loaded river barges the Germans were going to use. Likely the RN would lose most of the destroyers and MTBs they send in to attack the fleet like this but they’d tear the heart out of an invasion force horrifyingly quickly in doing so. Most RN destroyer skippers in WW2 were trained to be highly aggressive and always on the front foot and they would relish this kind of encounter. Depth charges would be fused to explode on contact and the Bofors and Oerlikon gunners would be told to go for the flak positions. The flak ships would get torpedoed very quickly simply because the barges they are supposed to be escorting don’t draw enough water to hit with a torpedo so they are the only targets. Killing the flak screen would be hugely beneficial for the RAF. The destroyers would therefore do the bulk of the up close open sights killing. The Stukas (or indeed anyone else) would have no chance of stopping them and would do more harm than good if they tried.
All the while you’ve got the RN heavy guns throwing eight inch and dustbin-sized fifteen inch rounds like a deadly rain into the rear of the invasion flotilla to try to break them up. The destroyers will be told only to engage the lead snd middle elements so the RN big guns can do their work.
Every so often RAF light and medium bombers would scream over at emergency power at 200 feet with bombs armed and fused for contact burst. They don’t even need to hit the barges to sink them. But they do and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of German troops die every time they fly over. It’s hard to miss from that close. The RAF could lose thirty or forty bombers snd dozens of fighters in one day to the desperate flak and ME-110 and 109 screens but this would be a trade off the RAF would be grimly happy to make because of the damage they would do.
All the while the fleet gets chipped away at, getting smaller and smaller, more dispersed, barges on fire, barges out of control and drifting, barges sinking, barges colliding with each other, with untold thousands of German troops drowning in their full combat gear in the sea. Thousands of them, many getting run down by their own vessels in the grim procession. You can’t imagine the mindset of the troops embarked watching this unfold all around them.
Coastal artillery joins in as the slaughter continues. The Stukas cannot protect them. RAF fighter command Spitfires and Hurricanes, Whirlwinds, even Defiants strafe the barges non stop and the Germans see their vaunted 109 and 110 Jagdstaffels decimated by Spitfires diving from above when they try to stop them. Vast dogfights of dozens of fighters from down low right up to twenty thousand feet break out all down the coast. The sky is full of diving, plunging aircraft.
Onwards the flotilla inches. The beaches are fifteen miles away now from the lead elements but still more than three hours remain before they reach the beach. Barge after barge explodes, veers away, breaks into pieces.
More artillery… water spouts, spray, cordite, the stench of vomit and burned flesh on the breeze… NCOs trying to rally the men, not many others speaking. Horses screaming as they die. Deathly horror in the barges as the men aboard watch their comrades dying by the untold thousands all around, waiting for their turn.
Closer in, zeroed in, chillingly accurate mortar rounds. Then the machine guns, barely audible over the crash of Royal Navy heavy guns.
The Germans know it’s over when the Royal Navy are able to bring cruisers and heavy capital ships to five miles from the landing beaches to engage the pitiful few Germans clinging on to life on the shingle, unable to push inland as they have no way of countering the British mortars and dug in artillery. They have almost no panzers. They have no artillery and few mortars but no way to spot them. They have no air support.
The second wave flotilla heads into the Channel the following day to a scene of hellish devastation. Even before leaving port the seas are heaving with face down bodies wearing Feldgrau. The horizon is filled with smoke and the noise of the RN heavy guns thunders across. It is a terrifying sight. Tenders and fishing boats weave in and out carrying the lucky, soggy wounded back to France. It is truly terrifying. Morale hits an all time low.
Gleefully, the battered but still extremely combat effective RN force regroups and reloads for its second full day of mass murder on a scale never before seen at sea. Fighter Command seizes the initiative to bring fighters back to 11 Group stations knowing the Luftwaffe cannot stop them any more. The battleships get into formation, more destroyers arrive overnight and prepare to embark on their own brutal steel cavalry charge. A formation of dozens of RAF Wellingtons raid Calais and Boulogne…
Then the Wehrmacht High Command lose their nerve and call the second wave back lest they lose another 30,000 men and all their equipment. This isn’t going to work. The U Boats, E Boats and the Luftwaffe are taking a bitter toll on the defending British naval forces on both flanks but not nearly doing enough damage. Charging this many men in their flimsy barges into the teeth of that many RN heavy guns and those hateful destroyers and having them inch across at 3 knots is not just foolhardy but suicidal.
Mindful of the upcoming Russia campaign the German Wehrmacht are loathe to lose the cream of their experienced panzer troops and infantry. The first day losses can be replaced but it will take time which the Fuhrer will not give them. Adding the same again is just not workable and the generals fear open revolt amongst the junior officers tasked with going, should they continue to press ahead.
The Royal Navy are just too strong.
Frankly it would have shortened the war in UK’s favour had the Germans tried it. It really is hard to overstate what an unmitigated catastrophe for Germany it would have been had it happened. I’d like to think they wouldn’t have attempted it even if the 11 Group fighter strength had been moved north and west had the Luftwaffe been able to force them. As it happened they didn’t so they didn’t.
For sure Hitler’s relationship with Goering would take a huge dive as it was one thing to promise to beat the RAF then not do it, but it is something else entirely to fail to do it then fail to protect a landing force that was almost wiped out, along with the cream of the Heer’s experienced infantry and panzer grenadier divisions. Hitler was a soldier himself and would feel the loss very keenly.
One thing worth noting here is that the casualty rates would have been really unusually high. Whereas a division or Army Group suffering 30% casualties dead and wounded would be considered to be “badly mauled” and probably not combat capable, the divisions sent over in the invasion would suffer 80%+ casualties and have a far higher proportion of these being killed vs wounded relative to a battle that would take place on land. What we are talking about here is divisions **lost** in the widest sense of the word. Very few survivors, very few wounded. Just gone.
Later the phrase “decisive naval victory” would come to be symbolized by the awful slaughter in the Channel, remembered in the annals of popular culture for being mindless massacre on an industrial scale where men went bravely, gravely in their tens of thousands to their inevitable doom in the same way people remember the Charge Of The Light Brigade, Stalingrad or the first day of the Somme.
We saw later in the war when the Germans lost an entire Army Group at Stalingrad how the Nazis reacted. They diverted blame and covered up the scale of the loss. Even in this case, there we’re many more taken prisoner by the Russians than would ever see a British POW camp in this scenario. It would be a staggering reverse.
German schools would teach the event as one of the blackest, bleakest and most traumatic in their history.
One wonders then whether the Germans would have sent the Afrika Korps to North Africa had the Seelowe Slaughter occurred. The smart money in my opinion would be on Hitler telling Mussolini to make do against the British in Tunisia and Libya and to take the Suez Canal himself without German help. This then raises a couple of interesting sliding door moments. With Egypt safe and the Italians hammered in short order, Malta a much safer place than it was and no need for the Americans to land in Tunisia, might Crete have held? Might Yugoslavia? And could the Allies have invaded Sicily months or even a year or even more earlier than they did?
It is a fascinating thing to wonder on.