Hitler throws the dice, Seelöwe utter disaster

Sandhurst is the army Staff College they had to let them land or they don't get to game anything ;). (repeating What if above)

The light units based on the south coast
are probably larger than the entire KM :eek:.
 
26 divisions are in the three waves, per Wiki. AIUI, this wasn't dependent on the barges coming back and reloading.

No

They planned that the landing of all of the first wave would take IIRC 8-10 days ie the barges needed to come back and reload, even to get the first wave across.
 
To be fair, most of the RN is a couple of sailing days away, so this is likely.

The light units based on the south coast are going to make a mess of some of the first wave, but if Sealion was launched, some German prisoners would be landed.

A couple of days sailing away, from where Alexandria? Scapa Flow was some 24hrs steaming @20knots from the Straits of Dover but the bulk of the Home Fleet (Nelson, Rodney, Hood, 2 x CLAA, 12 x DD) was based at Rosyth. The 'light units' on the South & East coast included over 30 X DD + 6 X CL all within a few hrs steaming of invasion fleets which would take up to 19hrs to cross & then take a considerable time to offload. An invasion force protected by 7 X DD & some large TB.
 
The biggest possible failure would actually occur if the Germans did land large elements of the army, the British manged to contain them and the Royal Navy is used to destroy resupply convoys. The RN would be able to do some damage to the first wave but not stop it completely.

The best case for the Germans is that the first wave is stopped mid-channel allowing retreat and the salvation of many thousands of soldiers and their equipment.
 

Saphroneth

Banned
Sandhurst is the army Staff College they had to let them land or they don't get to game anything ;). (repeating What if above)

are probably larger than the entire KM :eek:.
Be fair, at this point the entire KM has about two units above destroyer that can be relied on to both know how their ship works and take it out of the docks without lots of water coming in. Everything else is either small (about ten DDs and some torpedo boats of various sizes), broken (the Scharnhorst springs to mind) or not yet completed (Bismarck's crew are still not sure how these big AA gun things work, AIUI).

So yes, there's probably several commands which are larger than the KM's fleet units. Heck, HMS Revenge (HMS sacrifical battleship)weighed 30,000 tons, so the remaining KM DDs as of 10 September:

1 1934 at 3,100 t
8 1934A at 2,200 t
1 1936 at 2,800 t

are actually outmassed by HMS Revenge alone.

Yes, in order to outweigh just one of the ships slated to oppose the invasion, the Germans need to pull together their operational heavy cruiser (the Scheer) and all ten DDs.
 
A possible outcome is the Army decides Hitler is really crazy and will lead Germany to ruin and Hitler and the Nazis fall in a coup.

Probably not. While Sealion may end up being a disaster, that probably shortens the war by at least a couple of months due to economic disclocation and a weakened Luftwaffe, Germany has still done better in 1940 than it did in the whole of the First World War.

teg
 
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