Sea Lion Delenda Est

Hello. I am a wanderer from the Before 1900 forum and require as much information on why Sea Lion was an impossible operation to shut down my Wehraboo friends, please and thank you.
 
https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/glossary-of-sealion-threads.180901/

Be warned, the fanboy and wehraboo tends to be very strong in these threads. But there's your source the arguments the pointless nitpicking, the fan wanks, the Allied Derps etc etc.
Much appreciated and do not fear, I have had to deal with constant arguments of the Werhmacht did nothing wrong, The SS were just conscripts, and the usual "they would have won if they dug in", I shall weather the storm!
 
Much appreciated and do not fear, I have had to deal with constant arguments of the Werhmacht did nothing wrong, The SS were just conscripts, and the usual "they would have won if they dug in", I shall weather the storm!

Ovaron and the usual suspects lurk there...beware your sanity.
 

Khanzeer

Banned
Hello. I am a wanderer from the Before 1900 forum and require as much information on why Sea Lion was an impossible operation to shut down my Wehraboo friends, please and thank you.
Just look at the naval balance June 1940
That was sufficient for me to shut up about the unnamed sea mammal , yrs ago when I started researching it
 
Just look at the naval balance June 1940
That was sufficient for me to shut up about the unnamed sea mammal , yrs ago when I started researching it
This one did it for me:
The germans were planning on using river barges to carry nearly all the invasion forces, as they had nothing else with even a fraction of the required capacity.
Not u-boats, not e-boats, not ju-52s, not pzIIs held up by hotair balloons, not icebergs propelled by wind turbines.

River barges aren't designed for sea-going.
2/3rds of the river barges didn't have engines, and the plan was they would be towed by the others.
At about 3-4 knots, when currents in the channel can run at 7-8 knots.
A good proportion of the river barges had non-german crew, so communication difficulties between towed and towing crew would be problematic.
Anything over 2 foot wave height is a "problem" for river barges, usually a terminal one. - i.e. a destroyer travelling at speed could swamp the lot, without even bothering to shoot.
The channel is not noted for its calm, mill-pond, surface, so the destroyer wouldn't be necessary on 9 days out of 10.
German plans required 2 days to get all the barges out of calais and boulogne, in full view of admiral ramsey in dover, before attempting the crossing.
The initial crossing needed 3 days notice to get going, and required sea conditions that could only be forecast 1 day ahead.
All supply and reinforcement/evacuation runs after the initial one would have to take pot luck with the weather.
The only exercise in getting some loaded barges to sea, and making an attempted landing on a (French) beach was a predictable chaotic disaster.

All of that is before the vast british navy, which included nearly as many armed (SEAWORTHY) trawlers as the germans had river barges, does anything.
 
Dumb question. Would there be any chance in a warm place that an Irish feint could be used as a distraction for a real seaborne invasion of southern England? Something like a FUSAG in reverse?
 
Dumb question. Would there be any chance in a warm place that an Irish feint could be used as a distraction for a real seaborne invasion of southern England? Something like a FUSAG in reverse?
The problem the Germans have in 1940 is that wherever the British think that those river barges loaded with the cream of the German army's finest are heading, they're going to try to sink them, first and foremost, once they're far enough out that it's clear that they're probably heading somewhere which is not continental.
The British have the option in 1940 of 'try to completely wreck the invasion before they land' which the Germans didn't really have in 1944.
 
The problem the Germans have in 1940 is that wherever the British think that those river barges loaded with the cream of the German army's finest are heading, they're going to try to sink them, first and foremost, once they're far enough out that it's clear that they're probably heading somewhere which is not continental.
The British have the option in 1940 of 'try to completely wreck the invasion before they land' which the Germans didn't really have in 1944.

Hence the FUSAG reference. Use barely buoyant flotsam as fake craft to distract the fleet from real landing sites. Probably wouldn't work given Plan W contingency (UK invasion of Ireland to deny Germans the island in case of landings) but that could also backfire...badly.
 
Hence the FUSAG reference. Use barely buoyant flotsam as fake craft to distract the fleet from real landing sites. Probably wouldn't work given Plan W contingency (UK invasion of Ireland to deny Germans the island in case of landings) but that could also backfire...badly.
It does nothing as a distraction unless and until it is launched.
And unless the German Navy and airforce comes out to protect a fake landing fleet, it gets sunk anyway. (And if the German Navy and Airforce come out to protect a fake landing fleet, that's fewer ships, aircraft, and crew left to protect the 'real seal' when it launches.)
 
Hence the FUSAG reference. Use barely buoyant flotsam as fake craft to distract the fleet from real landing sites. Probably wouldn't work given Plan W contingency (UK invasion of Ireland to deny Germans the island in case of landings) but that could also backfire...badly.

problem is you still need to tow that flotsam in order to make the fiction look real*, and that takes boats. Lack of boats is the German's big problem

Similarly to make it look real the German's can't just send off some tugs towing flotsam by themselves they have to devote reasonable escort resources to sell the trick, again they don't have a surfeit of such things to devote to a trick.

Where do you send your decoys? It has to be somewhere far enough away from your actual landing point but also close enough in time to actually sell the trick. So take the idea of going to Ireland. You have to have your distraction approach Ireland as the same time as you real invasion was setting off for the south coast, only that means the distraction fleet has to actually get there by crawling at a snails pace from realistic invasion departure points to their fictitious invasion sites (all under the noses of the RN and RAF, since there are not too many routes from occupied western Europe to Southern Ireland that don't go through British waters).




*ironically yes a bunch of hastily lashed together flotsam will be a convincing stand in for the actual German transport resources!
 
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To launch a cross-channel invasion you need command of the seas in order to both get there and to maintain supply lines. The Kriegsmarine wouldn't survive the afternoon trying to keep a patch of sea out of the Royal Navy's hands and the Luftwaffe didn't have the ability to close the Channel to the RN either.

This isn't even contemporary analysis: the Kriegsmarine believed unchallenged Air Superiority alone wasn't enough and knew they couldn't achieve Naval Superiority; the Luftwaffe believed they couldn't achieve unchallenged Air Superiority anyway; accounts from a whole host of senior Wehrmacht officers describe how none of them ever thought the invasion plan was serious and were relieved when it was abandoned.

Not even the Wehrmacht agrees with the Wehraboos on this one.
 
Hence the FUSAG reference. Use barely buoyant flotsam as fake craft to distract the fleet from real landing sites. Probably wouldn't work given Plan W contingency (UK invasion of Ireland to deny Germans the island in case of landings) but that could also backfire...badly.

In case of either Sealion or an attack on Ireland the plan was for Ireland to declare war and invite UK forces in. Honestly it would be even more stupid for them to try an attack on Ireland.
 
See, the problem is that there wasn’t any difference between barely buoyant flotsam and their actual “landing craft”.
Of course not, they were bimodal vessels that transformed from landing craft to flotsam to confuse the enemy. Eventually there would have been a version 2 that could transform back from flotsam into a landing craft but the project got cancelled in favour of designing machine gun toolkits that looked like ammo boxes so the enemy could not tell when you had run out of ammo and only had your toolkit left.
 
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