Beating a Dead Sea Mammal: How can a non-ASB Operation Sea Lion thread be created?

[Alternate_History_Buff]

WARNING: THIS DOES NOT DISPLAY A COUNTERFACTUAL SCENARIO!

This thread is created with the purpose of discussing a non-ASB successful Operation Sea Lion.

So what must happen to create a non-ASB Sea Lion?

1. Operation Dynamo fails, and 300,000 BEF troops are captured. The air force and parts of the Navy are gutted to try and desperately raise an army to stop the Germans (assuming Churchill rallies the nation to fight on still).

2. Germany must win the Battle of Britain in the air (maybe possible with better coordination, IDK cause I'm not a historian)

3. The Germans (somehow) decisively defeat the Home fleet. This may be helped if we assume the surface fleet is not catastrophically destroyed invading Norway in 1940. Also might be possible if we give the KM 2 Graf Zeppelin Aircraft Carriers with lobbying from Raeder.

Then there are a couple of other issues:
1. British plans included shelling the beaches with Phosgene and Mustard Gas, and there is no reason why they wouldn't do so should the Germans decide to invade
2. There were many stop-lines created with tank traps and fortifications. These defensive lines were hastily assembled however.
3. British Auxiliary units were secretly created to conduct partisan resistance. These units had relatively short supplies and were not expected to be operational for more than a few weeks.

Let's have a good discussion in the comments and be civilized. Tell me about what else awaits the Germans (or aids them in their Sea Mammal adventures) because I'm not a historian.

(I can already hear the AH Gods telling me that it is always going to be ASB.)

 

[weasel_airlift]

Brave man, we'll see how this ends up going...

1. Operation Dynamo fails, and 300,000 BEF troops are captured. The air force and parts of the Navy are gutted to try and desperately raise an army to stop the Germans (assuming Churchill rallies the nation to fight on still).

I'm not sure how important this part actually is. Yes, the men were recovered, but they had almost no equipment.

2. Germany must win the Battle of Britain in the air (maybe possible with better coordination, IDK cause I'm not a historian)

It is my understanding that Germany cannot "win" in the sense that it's normally meant. If the RAF gets chewed too badly, well they pull back out of range of German aircraft to refit and regroup. We'll assume that the Blitz never happens, but still, once the German troops start showing up, the RAF WILL be back

3. The Germans (somehow) decisively defeat the Home fleet. This may be helped if we assume the surface fleet is not catastrophically destroyed invading Norway in 1940. Also might be possible if we give the KM 2 Graf Zeppelin Aircraft Carriers with lobbying from Raeder.

Well, the carriers aren't going to help a whole lot, since any invasion force is going to be under land-based air protection. So, scratch them, use the steel for landing craft. Or tanks.

If the torpedo problem is fixed, I believe that Warspite is gone, Probably Nelson, maybe some other ships as well. That said, the RN still has a tremendous amount of old destroyers that are more than good enough for demolishing landing craft. It's simply not going to be possible to take out the RN on a complete enough scale. Yes, the German navy could be brought in, but even if all the RN battleships are out of commission, land-based air, carrier-based air, and submarines will make it extremely dangerous for German capital ships in the channel.

On the subject of landing craft...the Germans actually need some. A lot of them. And something on the order of an LST. They were going to use river barges to cross the channel.

 

[jlckansas]

WARNING: THIS DOES NOT DISPLAY A COUNTERFACTUAL SCENARIO!

Then there are a couple of other issues:
1. British plans included shelling the beaches with Phosgene and Mustard Gas, and there is no reason why they wouldn't do so should the Germans decide to invade
2. There were many stop-lines created with tank traps and fortifications. These defensive lines were hastily assembled however.
3. British Auxiliary units were secretly created to conduct partisan resistance. These units had relatively short supplies and were not expected to be operational for more than a few weeks.


(I can already hear the AH Gods telling me that it is always going to be ASB.)

Lets add in a whole lot of artillery with everything from 2 inch mortars up to 13.5/15/18 inch railway artillery ranged in on every square inch of beach and out into the channel. Remember once you get above a 6 inch shell a near miss in the water itself is going to cause trouble to the craft the Germans are using. They are not using purpose built landing craft like the allies did.

 

[Mike D]

1. Operation Dynamo fails, and 300,000 BEF troops are captured. The air force and parts of the Navy are gutted to try and desperately raise an army to stop the Germans (assuming Churchill rallies the nation to fight on still).

This would never happen to be honest - the UK is a naval power and has been for centuries. The Royal Navy is the UK's primary defence and has been since the days of Alfred the Great. If we need to build a new army in a hurry we'll call up WW1 veterans and whatever civilian men we can train in time. Without the Royal Navy the Empire is dead and gone and the home islands are defenceless.

 

[weasel_airlift]

This would never happen to be honest - the UK is a naval power and has been for centuries. The Royal Navy is the UK's primary defence and has been since the days of Alfred the Great. If we need to build a new army in a hurry we'll call up WW1 veterans and whatever civilian men we can train in time. Without the Royal Navy the Empire is dead and gone and the home islands are defenceless.

The Navy would not have been gutted, even by a catastrophic failure of Dynamo. They would have lost some forty destroyers and a cruiser, and maybe some auxiliaries. Even the RAF would not be gutted by catastrophic losses. Yes, it would hurt, but not enough to cause an invasion. I believe only 14 squadrons of aircraft were committed.

 

[ar-pharazon]

I don't know if this qualifies as ASB but could particularly bad weather damage or destroy the British fleet and ports?

Or more movie esque-have German agents successfully infiltrate Britain and cause mass havoc. I dunno German intelligence commandos land on the beaches sneak into London and detonate a bomb underneath Parliament.

It's movie esque and extremely unrealistic but it isn't physically impossible

 

[Deleted member 94680]

WARNING: THIS DOES NOT DISPLAY A COUNTERFACTUAL SCENARIO!

This thread is created with the purpose of discussing a non-ASB successful Operation Sea Lion.

So what must happen to create a non-ASB Sea Lion?

1. Operation Dynamo fails, and 300,000 BEF troops are captured. The air force and parts of the Navy are gutted to try and desperately raise an army to stop the Germans (assuming Churchill rallies the nation to fight on still).

There were more soldiers available than the 300,000 rescued by Dynamo. The Government and Military expected to rescue 30,000 at best and still planned to carry on fighting.

2. Germany must win the Battle of Britain in the air (maybe possible with better coordination, IDK cause I'm not a historian)

ASB, without a pre-1936 POD.

3. The Germans (somehow) decisively defeat the Home fleet. This may be helped if we assume the surface fleet is not catastrophically destroyed invading Norway in 1940. Also might be possible if we give the KM 2 Graf Zeppelin Aircraft Carriers with lobbying from Raeder.

Even bigger ASB than 2. but if you have a POD that makes 2. possible, you can't have this happen without ASB. If you have 3. happen with a pre-1930 POD, then 2. is impossible.

Then there are a couple of other issues:
1. British plans included shelling the beaches with Phosgene and Mustard Gas, and there is no reason why they wouldn't do so should the Germans decide to invade
2. There were many stop-lines created with tank traps and fortifications. These defensive lines were hastily assembled however.
3. British Auxiliary units were secretly created to conduct partisan resistance. These units had relatively short supplies and were not expected to be operational for more than a few weeks.

Let's have a good discussion in the comments and be civilized. Tell me about what else awaits the Germans (or aids them in their Sea Mammal adventures) because I'm not a historian.

(I can already hear the AH Gods telling me that it is always going to be ASB.)

Unfortunately, this is the crux. The PODs required for this to be even remotely possible probably mean the removal of the Nazis and therefore, would there even be a WWII?


Also, FYI - https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/glossary-of-sealion-threads.180901/

 

[Ian_W]

None of this explains how the Germans are supposed to supply ~8 divisions across beaches, with a military with zero experience in amphibious operations.

 

[HexWargamer]

"... successful Operation Sea Lion."

My problem is with the word 'successful' ... first they have to gain a foothold = this could be done, even against RAF opposition and with the Home Fleet intact
(yes, they would take losses, however it's quite possible for the Luftwaffe to hold off the RAF long enough for the transports to come in at dawn and a few thousand men to land ..
== yes it takes time for the towed Rhine barges to cross the Channel from France, but the Home Fleet is in Scotland and will take even longer to arrive ..)

Once the bridgehead is obtained, the Panzers have to be bought across - and landing half-a-dozen at a time from converted barges directly onto the beach isn't going to cut it .. they need a Port ... Dover, say

Taking Dover takes time (even against "Dad's Army") - time for the Home Fleet to arrive and, together with the RAF, turn the transports / barges into matchsticks ..


NB. Neither the Navy or Air-force personnel would be 'gutted' to create a new Army - the priorities woukld be :- RAF, Navy, Army in that order ..


OK - so how COULD it happen (without an earlier POD) ?

1) RAF - as others have pointed out, it's bit of an issue == if the RAF start to loose big they can pull back . however Luftwaffe COULD have taken down Chain Home transmitters (and stuck to bombing RAF airfields) .. so a surprise dawn landing would be possible, maybe even with local air superiority ..

2) Home Fleet - well the obvious 'answer' is massive minefields to close off the Channel and to pull every U boat out of the Atlantic and form their own 'stop lines' between Scapa Flow and the landing beaches .. this COULD delay the Fleet for perhaps 24hrs (depending on how many losses they were prepared to take) .. long enough for the first landings and first reinforcement / supply wave ...

3) Reinforcements and supply - they need Dover in a real hurry i.e.by afternoon of the first day - the only answer I can think of is a massive Sarin nerve gas attack morning of day 1 (this will be no problem if the British have already started to use mustard gas on the landing beaches) == although better would be a midnight attack on D1 i.e. before the first landings ..

However whilst that gets a force ashore, how can they sustain it against determined Sea and Air opposition ????

D-Day involved some 5,000 ships against essentially no Air or Sea opposition, an undersea petrol pipeline and two Mulberry Harbours ... a few hundred barges is at least 'an order of magnitude' too few for a successful invasion ..

 

[SsgtC]

yes it takes time for the towed Rhine barges to cross the Channel from France, but the Home Fleet is in Scotland and will take even longer to arrive

Except for one problem. Some of the assembly points for the barges were actually in view of the UK. And assembling the barges was expected to take anywhere from 24-72 hours. By the time the barges are assembled and ready to be towed, the RN will be in the channel in force and the assembly points will have been "visited" repeatedly by the RAF

 

[FBKampfer]

Their best chance is building up their airborne strength to a corps or two. There's significantly less build time for transport aircraft than a fleet of ships.

Add on the fact that the Fallschirmsjägers had a well-earned reputation for incredible daring and suicidal courage, and you can secure an unopposed landing for sea-borne forces.


Second, you need to bring the Italians into play. Regia Marina + KM = Royal Navy after a few battleships eat it. Additionally the U-boats need to be leveraged for a direct battle. All of them in the northern channel should make a decent screen. Perhaps sink or cripple a capital ship or two.

It'll take a crazy run of 6's, but it's no more improbable than how frequently the Japanese caught the stupid-ball IOTL, or how much of an Ameriwank the 20th Century was, or even the fact that OTL US politics would seem an outlandish fascist TL if things had panned out a bit differently in the 60's and 70's.


Its difficult, not impossible.

 

[vizzer]

A more competent German General Staff might ask the question "What happens if we get into a war with Britain and need to invade the British Isles?" and them commission some staff studies on what shipping is available, how many troops can be transported and supplied and how can they be protected.
At which point they look at the size of the RN compared to the KM decide it is a really bad idea and head off to get drunk.

After sobering up they look at what resources they can use to try and even things up, which probably comes down to improving the LW's anti-shipping capabilities. As shown by operations in the Mediterranean it was possible to make this more effective particularly in a Dunkirk type situation against relatively slow moving targets.
If British destroyers & other light craft can be destroyed or driven out of the immediate Channel area then this makes a landing attempt more feasible.

Another area to consider is means to "quickly" unload supplies/follow-up forces through improvised or damaged harbours once an initial landing has been made. Again, if such preparations/planning has been put in place pre-war then the chances of Sealion improve from "God help us" to no more than "This is a very risky operation".

 

[RodentRevolution]

This thread is created with the purpose of discussing a non-ASB successful Operation Sea Lion.

So what must happen to create a non-ASB Sea Lion?

Remove the "success criteria", as others have pointed out above the odds of Seelöwe being successful in forcing the British to capitulate are somewhere between microwafer thin chance and no chance. The essential problem for Sea Lion was that it was doomed to failure if any one of the British Armed Services showed up in addition to the Home Guard. Even without that the weather and its own inherent logistical flaws create opportunities for some major catastrophes.

However even an as predicted disaster Seelöwe could be interesting.

1: The first "wave" which would actually be transported in two separate lifts consisted only of infantry with some attached armour. The actual first landing had tanks envisaged as part of the mix but few left the divisional artillery behind except IIRC for the two mountain divisions and only partially compensated for that with some attached rocket launchers. The second lift would comprise the necessary trains, service support elements and artillery for the infantry divisions to function as actual field forces. Only with the third surge of transports would the elements of the panzer gruppe proper attempt to cross. It would take a certain degree of resilience by the KM and silliness by both for the operation to continue long enough to actually impact the Heer's ability to conduct long term operations rather than just waste a lot of men.

2: The barges, boats and ferries assembled for the operation were all non-insignificant assets to the economies of Germany and Occupied Europe, their being diverted to Sea Lion had consequences that negatively impacted for example German production of torpedoes. Their loss would have even more of an impact. Not enough to "bring the whole rotten edifice crashing down" but it would be felt.

3: The level of loss amongst RN ships and personnel in the event of a hot Sea Lion is perhaps the most vigorously contested area of debate. Some would argue that losses might effectively cripple the Royal Navy at least for a short while at the other extreme there are those who contend a Seelöwe Shlact would free up the British to be far more aggressive in the Med and elsewhere.

4: What effect if any would British use of poison gas have on world opinion.

There is a lot to discuss about a hot Pinniped it is just adding the word successful which requires multiple independent PODs that elicits the screams of ASB.

 

[MBaker224]

When I joined this site two years ago the first thing I did was create a sort of role-play scenario where I gave the player character the same timeframe to plan the invasion of Britain as the Wehrmacht had to plan Barbarossa, and operated on the assumption that the Soviets have no offensive plans and that Hitler is magically sane enough to not want to invade Russia without first defeating Britain.

Here's what I came up with.

"As the aphorism goes, you enter war with the army you have, not the army you want.

For one, as I'm sure you know, the Germans lacked landing craft. In OTL they did manage to develop some prototypes by 1942, and by the same point had even come up with some pretty durable Mulberry-type constructions that they ended up using in other areas later in the war. Though it would not have totally eliminated their supply deficit (I think if they captured an intact port AND used these constructions, they still only had like 60% of the supply they needed to maintain heavy fighting), it might have helped a bit.

Perhaps it's amateurish of me, but it's not that difficult to imagine faster development of such technologies if the Germans were not distracted by their war with the Soviets, and had their full intellectual capacity invested in conquering Britain. The player character would still likely have to petition Hitler to postpone the invasion (something that anyone undertaking this task would do well to avoid if possible, since every day the British Army regains a bit of their strength, and the only place the Germans have an advantage is on land).

And the invasion force would likely still end up a hybrid of the new landing craft and converted river barges, perhaps with the first few waves made up of troops in the new craft, and the subsequent waves being carried in on river barges. It is my understanding that sheer luck would have been on the Germans' side here, as there were periods of pretty calm weather in 1941.

German R&D could also feasibly jerry-rig (pun intended) some planes for naval warfare given a year, though even if the Germans managed to quickly seize coastal defenses and turn them on the British, it wouldn't have prevented the Royal Navy from brushing aside the German landing fleet after maybe a day or two. (I think it took them two days in the 1974 Sea Lion wargame).

Donitz suggested narrowing the front to pretty much just the area right across from Calais, and any player character would probably do well to heed his warnings. I imagine the Luftwaffe maybe getting the upperhand (though not total Air Supremacy since the RAF can always retreat out of range) in Britain after a year of focused attacks on Fighter Command, but the Germans will never get Naval Superiority let alone Supremacy.

This would be enough time for the Germans to get quite a few men ashore, and if they utilized the entirety of the Fallschrim as basically suicidal delaying troops, they could probably get a foot hold in the area with pretty heavy casualties.

Any sensible attack plan would go beyond this, landing more troops and having detailed plans for driving North to London, but in practice the Germans are unlikely to get further than this. They might be able to land the second wave if the Royal Navy is particularly hesitant (it comes down to Morale really, which is hard to predict, the Luftwaffe might be able to scare the RN into hesitating if their makeshift anti-naval force has some early success).

The best case scenario for the Germans would probably still be an outcome similar to Stalingrad, with a large German force encircled and under constant attack with surrender out of the question. Casualties would be heavy on both sides, though since presumably Babarossa isn't happening, the Germans would most certainly not come out crippled, and might even be able to absorb their losses (certainly, they wouldn't be as bad as they were in Russia OTL). The British on the other hand may have Pyrrhic victory, with their Army in even poorer shape.

I'm working on an attack plan of my own, I've decided to call it Operation Chiroptera. Of course, it is preceded by the air war, which I've renamed Operation Schlagerangriff."

That, I feel, all still applies even if the Germans decided to destroy the British at Dunkirk rather than letting them escape. I also feel that the Kriegsmarine defeating the Royal Navy in a pitched battle is nigh impossible.

 

[MBaker224]

I think many people forget that the Axis in WWII tried a lot of things that looked very unsound on paper, but wound up working due to sheer dumb luck or sheer Allied incompetence. German generals considered a coup when Hitler informed them they'd be drawing up an invasion in France in 1940, but they still went through with it and it wound up working. Operation Sealion wasn't called off because Hitler and the OKW were prudent enough to see that it wasn't worth the risk. Operation Sealion was called off because Hitler was too stupid to realize that defeating Britain was necessary to German victory in the war, and had already set his sites on the USSR.

 

[Gudestein]

I always like the discussion, but its a notorioisly tough outcome you are seeking. My signature contains a TL which is not ASB but requires a handful of the right below 50% probability events to fall into place. Even then, the Germans were only bluffing that they could invade.
The result was that the British wanted peace and got it. So no Sea lion.

 

[Normal for Norfolk]

Except for one problem. Some of the assembly points for the barges were actually in view of the UK. And assembling the barges was expected to take anywhere from 24-72 hours. By the time the barges are assembled and ready to be towed, the RN will be in the channel in force and the assembly points will have been "visited" repeatedly by the RAF

That & the Home Fleet was neither planned to combat the invasion nor would be needed. That was the job of Nore, Portsmouth & possibly Plymouth Command which have been more than sufficient. As well as the assembly time there is also the time taken to move the invasion force across the Channel. The most westwards from Rotterdam would have taken 19 hours.

 

[Broek]

A German Victory in the BoB and a German Capture of the Frech navy go a long way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scuttling_of_the_French_fleet_in_Toulon#Ships_sunk

Landing ships and supplying the invasion forces will still be a problem though.

 

[SsgtC]

That & the Home Fleet was neither planned to combat the invasion nor would be needed. That was the job of Nore, Portsmouth & possibly Plymouth Command which have been more than sufficient. As well as the assembly time there is also the time taken to move the invasion force across the Channel. The most westwards from Rotterdam would have taken 19 hours.

Plus the fact that several of the ports that the barges were gathered in, could be shelled by R-class battleships from their moorings. Not exactly an ideal situation for Germany

 

[oldironside]

Err, didn't we settle this the last time we had a thread on this? As far as I recall, even the mighty CalBear descended to point out that the whole thing was totally impossible.