The Sea Lion that sank

Operation Seelöwe

One of the evergreen hypothetical questions of World War II is “What if Germany invaded Britain?” War history buffs often ask the question, and, in fact, the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst in Great Britain held a wargame (Read our earlier article) in 1974 to find their own answers. What they found, and what the overwhelming majority of historians also believe, is that the attempt would have ended up in a catastrophe for Germany. Today’s article is about Operation Sea Lion, the planned but never attempted invasion of the United Kingdom.
 
Nazi Germany invaded France in May 1940, and achieved clear victory in a month and a half. The British Expeditionary Force was forced to retreat and was evacuated at Dunkirk between May 25 and June 4. (Read our earlier article) 338,000 soldiers made it to safety in Britain, though at the cost of having to abandon all heavy equipment. British morale was sagging after the months of the Phoney War when Britain and France were already at war with Germany but saw little action, and the sudden shock of the loss of France. The table seemed set for Germany’s next step: forcing Britain out of the war.

Much speculation has been made about the German decision to stop their armor before they could attack the British forces trapped at Dunkirk. The order was requested by General Gerd von Rundstedt and granted by Hitler, but the motivation behind it remains unclear. Some historians argue that von Rundstedt requested the stop to let the units rest and resupply for perfectly valid tactical reasons; others suggest that Hitler was making a gesture of peace to Britain by allowing the men to escape. Once thing that’s sure is that Hitler was hoping to get the United Kingdom to surrender to terms without a fight – he was already eyeing the Soviet Union, and knew that every bit of resource spent on forcing Britain to its knees was resource unavailable in the east. Of course, what the Führer did not realize was that British public sentiment and Churchill’s intransigence on the matter made any sort of surrender impossible.

The idea of invading Britain had been floating around since September 1939, the beginning of World War II. Hitler’s Directive No. 6 called for an offensive to “win as much territory as possible in Holland, Belgium, and northern France to serve as a base for the successful prosecution of the air and sea war against England.” Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, commander-in-chief of the German navy, the Kriegsmarine, anticipated a possible invasion of the island nation and had his operations officer draw up a document about the possibility of such an action. The paper identified four prerequisites for such an invasion to have a chance of success: destroying the Royal Navy or keeping it away, destroying the Royal Air Force (RAF), destroying all Royal Navy units in the landing zones, and preventing British submarines from interfering with the landings.
 
The Heer, the German army, wrote its own study paper in December 1939 with input from both the Kriegsmarine and the Luftwaffe. The study suggested an attack in Britain’s eastern coast with 100,000 men; the navy would simultaneously transport these people and keep the Royal Navy away from the operation, while the air force would control the air over the landing zones. Both the navy and air force rejected the idea. The former pointed out that it had no chance of standing up against the Royal Navy’s Home Fleet, and that organizing transportation for that many men would take a year; Luftwaffe-chief Hermann Göring declared that a landing in Britain could only succeed if the country was already completely beaten.

The first version of the invasion plan was called Löwe, “lion,” and described as “a river crossing on a wide front,” which greatly irritated the Kriegsmarine, which was the only arm of the German military with an inkling of just how difficult the naval part of the operation would be. The name was later expanded to Seelöwe, literally “Sea Lion” (a relative of seals). While Germany went to some effort to disguise the nature of upcoming military operations in their names, this particular choice of name was not very clever. The idea that Operation Sea Lion might be a naval operation against a country whose coat of arms prominently features lions was not a difficult leap. In fact, British intelligence deduced the general nature of the operation from the name alone.

Unlike the 1939 army study, Sea Lion called for landing along the southern coast of Great Britain. More specifically, it first called for an extremely wide front stretching from Ramsgate in the southeast corner of the island to Lyme Bay to the west of the Isle of Wight – the front would have been more than three times wider than the one established by the Normandy landings on D-Day. The plan originally called for over forty divisions to land on the British coast in three waves. The first wave would mainly comprise infantry and some flamethrower tanks; the second would be bulk of the tank forces and the motorized infantry; the third wave would bring more footsoldiers. The first wave would also land thousands of horses to pull heavy equipment once the advance inland began. Two airborne divisions would land behind enemy lines, though the army and the air force could not agree on whether this should happen simultaneously with the first landings or afterward.

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