Why couldn't Nazi Germany invade Britain...

Why couldn't Nazi Germany invade Britain? I see lots of people saying that Britain was incredibly weak in WW2 and the Nazi's military was far superior. So I'm curious as to why Britain didn't fall to the Nazis.

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Part of the reason is that the Germans just didn't have the right equipment needed to do a naval invasion of that magnitude.

What? I'm genuinely curious how a weak country survived the Nazi bombardment

The British navy

Basically came down to the channel.

Why couldn't Napoleonic France invade Britain? I see lots of people saying that Britain was incredibly weak in the Napoleonic Wars and the French military was far superior. So I'm curious as to why Britain didn't fall to the French.

>incredibly weak in WW2

They had a good navy and air force.

I agree, the history channel really fucked up things for nazi germany.

it's incredible how 70 year old propaganda is still so widely believed today.

Germany's military was never in any meaningful way "superior" to British or French, especially when it came to naval power or logistics, which were what pulling sealion off would hinge on.

>planes
German planes mainly designed to support armies in the field, only 30 mins average flytime over the UK for most fighter aircraft due to fuel tanks.

>navy
Our navy was better, bigger, and well supplied

>Industrialism
Our industry was diffused across several major industrial centres, and our large number of factories meant that repurposing them as munitions works was easy

>logistics
Germans were rightfully suspicious of russians, so they were unwilling to shift the massive amounts of materiel and manpower necessary for an invasion to France

And an Empire.

>Britain was incredibly weak in WW2

Nobody has ever said this. Britain easily had the strongest navy in the region at the start of the war.

>Germany's military was never in any meaningful way "superior" to British or French,


That isn't quite true. Pretty much any modern historical look of the war will note that the Germans were far ahead of the Brits and the French (at least early war), in terms of things like inter-arm coordination, tactical bombing, airplane navigation, response time to tactical changes, combined arms tactics, etc. You don't get things like Gazala with a German military that is never in any meaningful way superior to a British one.

That being said, Sealion has no chance in hell of ever working.

You're generally on the ball, but this part

>Germans were rightfully suspicious of russians, so they were unwilling to shift the massive amounts of materiel and manpower necessary for an invasion to France

Is ridiculous. Fuhrer directives 20 and 21, the ones that shifted the army eastwards, were done in December of 1940, after the Germans had given up on a Sealion. If they had an opportunity, they'd have almost certainly made the attempt. Plus, an invasion of Britain wouldn't involve all that much in the way of land assets; the British had about 28 divisions in the UK, and getting a 3:1 advantage, assuming they can somehow get them across and supply them, wouldn't thin their defenses in Poland and Romania enough that the Soviets could launch some opportunistic strike.

>Britain easily had the strongest navy in the region at the start of the war.

You mean in the world.

Not him, but the American navy equaled the RN in tonnage and generally had more modenr ships.

I thought Coco was a Nazi collaborator?

Because Germans were stupid enough to rejects Wever's plans for building a strong strategic bomber airforce.

Oh and lack of navy.

>Because Germans were stupid enough to rejects Wever's plans for building a strong strategic bomber airforce.

If it costs you your CAS airforce, that's probably a bad trade. And let's face it; Britain dropped literally millions of tons of bombs on Germany and never procured a surrender. It's hardly likely that Germany, with less of an avionics industry to work with, would produce one by bombing Britain.

Strategic bombing has a devastating impact on morale. He-111's were useless in London raids, but a long-rage 4 engine strategic bomber would've made quite an impact in summer 1940.

The Germans had excellent avionics industry, they just wasted a bunch of precious resources on unnecessary projects.

Operation Sealion choked on Fish and Crisps.

>Strategic bombing has a devastating impact on morale.


No it doesn't. Morale effects don't mean much in total wars anyway, but you have a hell of a lot more failures of morale effect of strategic bombing, WW1 and WW2 and Korea and Vietnam, to pit against its rather paltry successes. Serbia in the 90s is the only one I can think of offhand, and even that was a very limited one.

>He-111's were useless in London raids, but a long-rage 4 engine strategic bomber would've made quite an impact in summer 1940.

Unlikely. For starters, you can't escort it, not without a radical redesign of your entire fighter program. Secondly, here's a pic related of tonnage dropped during the war. Tell me, where was the morale collapse on Germany? When did it slacken the war effort.

Thirdly, you can't just invent a 4 engine bomber program out of nothing, nor can you produce individual bombers without cost. You're going to have to give up something to get 4 engine bombers, and if the British are any indication, the flying artillery role is probably what's going to get the ax. Eliminate that, and suddenly, you might not even win against France, or have those quick easy summer victories that the very excellent German tactical bombing got. It plays to their strengths, good coordination between arms. Strategic bombing is all about tonnage and airplane production, which the Germans didn't do as well as.

>The Germans had excellent avionics industry, they just wasted a bunch of precious resources on unnecessary projects.

They made good planes, to be sure. But they never cranked out as many or trained as much pilots or aircrew as even Britain alone, nevermind the rest of the Allies.

This is either a cleaver shitpost or the most normie thing I've ever seen

The German's knew they couldn't pull of a naval landing without naval superiority which probably wasn't on the horizon for the Kreigsmarine for the foreseeable future.

I came here to post this exact same link

Well done

>Germany's military was never in any meaningful way "superior" to British or French

HOWLING

Business idea: Germany never comes up with the idea of Lebensraum, allowing them to enter the East not as conquerors but as liberators

No more partisan issues and no more manpower issues

There were people who seriously believed that the "Next Big War" after WW1 would be Britain Vs. The USA.


>Because Germans were stupid enough to rejects Wever's plans for building a strong strategic bomber airforce

Every bombing campaign against Britain was an abysmal failure. Spending more money on a failing horse would have been ludicrous.

Naval Invasions are tricky to pull off. Just because the United States made it look easy after doing it so many times to the Japanese doesnt mean anyone else could do it that well.
So take the logistical difficulty of it, and then combine that with Britains massive naval advantage and you've got a recipe for disaster. Even if at the time the Luftwaffe was capable of doing massive damage to the RAF pre battle of Britain, Germany would be woefully mismatched against the British navy.

>There were people who seriously believed that the "Next Big War" after WW1 would be Britain Vs. The USA.

I know the interwar US Navy was approaching parity with the RN due to the same building programs that ended up spawning the Washington Naval Treaty, but do you have any contemporary sources who said this? I'm interested because it's such an odd thing to think of considering how WW2 went.

>What is Kriegsmarine
>What is Luftwaffe

Yanks only think ground war because they came in late. Nazis couldn't invade Britain because they couldn't invade Britain.

Weak my arse mate

Most of the Luftwaffe's planes were designed for close air support, not air superiority. The RAF was the exact opposite which gave them a huge advantage. The British military's radar and dispatch systems were far more advanced than the Germans (the germans also didn't know anything about this, yet another intelligence failure on their part) which allowed them much more rapid interceptions than the Germans had planned for. British aircraft factories pumped out more fighters than German aircraft factories every single month of the battle of britain. And since the fighting was happening on British soil if a pilot was downed and survived in decent shape he could just be given a new plane and sent right back in the air. Conversely if a German pilot bailed and survived he was behind enemy lines and would be captured or killed quite quickly. Many perfectly healthy and capable German pilots spent the rest of the war in a British prison camp.

And even if they had defeated the RAF (which as history showed was a damn big if) there was still the matter of actually crossing the channel without naval superiority, the hope was that the Luftwaffe could keep the royal navy busy long enough to get the barges to cross the channel. The problem here is that even though its a short distance from calais to dover the crossing would have taken several hours at best, and then they would have had to keep the crossing clear to bring over resupply. This was something that had never really been attempted before, and it made the German admiralty extremely nervous as it had the potential to become an absolute disaster.

>yet another intelligence failure
you could make a calender of every intelligence fuckup by the German military during WW2,

Russia

>Most of the Luftwaffe's planes were designed for close air support, not air superiority.


That's not actually true. The Germans spat out a hell of a lot more 109s than they did CAS planes of all types.

> The RAF was the exact opposite which gave them a huge advantage.

And that is definitely not true. The British focused far more on bomber production than air superiority production.

>its a short distance from calais to dover
Sea Lion was going to send troops to multiple spots from multiple spots, most of them taking far longer routes than the straight line from Calais to Dover.

Because british navy and airforce were better.

Literally Goering is the only reason Germany didnt win the war. What a useless cunt

British intelligence, American steel, Russian blood.

>Literally Goering
>Not the fact that everyone on the axis side was subhuman trash that should have been mass sterilised.

How would they get their military to Britain? You need to cross the channel for that.

air lift whilst sending an abandoned destoryer for the shore duh. classic case of bait and switch

Even with a strategic bomber force, what could they have possibly done?

The combined aerial might of the US and Britain couldn't bring Germany to her knees alone. What could Germany alone have possibly done?

You couldn't win a war from the air alone at the time of WW2.

The Battle of the Atlantic is what determined the outcome of the 2nd World War, at least in Europe. Everything else that happened in the European theater hinged on that. In order to win the war, Germany would have needed to have a much larger navy at the beginning of the war.

In 1939, Germany only had 2 battleships. Gneisenau and Scharnhorst. Bismark would not arrive until 1940, and Tirpitz wasn't finished until 1941. So at the beginning of the war Germany only had 2 battleships, both of which were poorly armed in comparison to their British rivals. They did have the advantage of being very fast, which made them excellent for raiding the Atlantic early in the war, but they were still too few in number to have the kind of impact that they needed to have in order for Germany to win the war. Germany also had a handful of cruisers, again in numbers too small to have the necessary effect that Hitler wanted.

>US Navy
>IJN

I think that Japan had the best navy at the beginning of the war.

This guy right here, Alfred Thayer Mahan, had a huge impact on the strategic thinking of world powers, and he was one of the people who believed this. However, I can't find any source that confirms he still considered Britain to be a threat after WW1. He was more worried about Britain in a pre-WW1 context.

>british navy
Yes.

>and airforce were better.
No.

Germany had (initially) better tactics due to their Legion Conder experience. Their aircraft were in some regards better and definitely had better armament; for the most part they were however more or less evenly matched. The reason why Britain was able to defend against the German attack was that they were in a very well defensible position which gave them a huge tactical bonus. A German pilot who had to bail out over Britain either had to swim home or become a POW, while a British pilot could continue fighting. Also, German fighters lacked the range to operate effectively over Britain, having to cross the channel first and running short on fuel by the time they were over the British Isles. Lastly, Britain had a formidable radar-response system which allowed them to accurately engage any German attempt to attack them.

Rather than the British air force being 'better' it was a matter of the German air force not being 'better' enough to overcome the tactical odds. Had the situation been reversed, with Britain attempting to attack Germany, they would have failed just like the Germans.