Could the Royal Navy have done much to stop a German invasion of the UK in 1942?
I'm not asking what the RAF might have been able to do? I'm not interested in how many troops the Germans would have needed or whether (given their original timeline schedule and dispositions) the Germans could have found all the troops that would have been required?
I'm asking whether the UK's 'senior service' had reached such a nadir that it would have been effectively powerless to stop a German crossing of the Channel from taking place?
I inquire, since in February 1942, things had got to such a low point that the Germans were able to sail much of their surface fleet (including two of their most powerful warships
Scharnhorst and
Gneisenau) up the English Channel, in broad daylight, and the only real damage that the German fleet took was from air-laid mines encountered once they were already well clear of the Channel itself.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_Dash
Some of the highlights of the events which led up to this included such disasters for the Royal Navy as:
- The loss of multiple cruisers and destroyers in the Mediterranean in 1941, including during the evacuation of Crete.
- The loss of the battlecruiser Hood in May 1941.
- The loss of the carrier Ark Royal and the battleship Barham to U-boats in the Mediterranean in November 1941.
- The loss of the battlecruiser Repulse and the battleship Prince of Wales off Malaya in December 1941.
- The knocking-out by Italian frogman attack of the battleships Queen Elizabeth and Valiant in December 1941.
- The Japanese advance across the South China Sea at the end of 1941/start of 1942 drawing off Royal Navy ships to that theatre.
If it had been down to
just the Royal Navy in 1942, with what they had in hand in UK waters, could they have prevented Germany from conquering the UK?