Was a German invasion of Britain in 1940 ever feasible?
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  Was a German invasion of Britain in 1940 ever feasible?
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Question: Was a German invasion of Britain in 1940 ever feasible?
#1
Yes and they would've occupied the whole country
 
#2
Yes but it had no chance of success
 
#3
No, it was never going to happen
 
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Author Topic: Was a German invasion of Britain in 1940 ever feasible?  (Read 1635 times)
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« on: May 26, 2022, 10:39:55 AM »

Hotly debated topic now.
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« Reply #1 on: May 26, 2022, 11:00:59 AM »

A german invasion being attempted is very feasible, though I find it very lazy to just claim that "it's the Nazis, of course they would do [insert dumb thing here]".
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TheReckoning
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« Reply #2 on: May 26, 2022, 11:49:20 AM »

Option 2.

The two opportunities for Sea Lion being launched would’ve been either if the British infantry at Dunkirk had been destroyed instead of evacuated, or if Germany had won the Battle of Britain. A total victory in the latter case is very unlikely (although not impossible), but the possibility of the Luftwaffe capturing the English Channel and putting the RAF on the defensive is certainly plausible.

However, Sea Lion being successful would’ve been totally impossible. The RN was simply so much more powerful than the Kriegsmarine that even if both the infantry had been knocked at Dunkirk and the RAF defeated during the Battle of Britain, getting sufficient troops across the channel was simply not feasible.

Thus, Germany posed no existential threat to the UK during WW2.  
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buritobr
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« Reply #3 on: May 26, 2022, 04:45:58 PM »

German invasion of Britain in 1940 was not so feasible: It is very hard to conduct an amphibious operation. Even the western allies, which had very large superiority of resources since 1942, took 2 years planning the operation.

German invasion of Britain in 1940 was not was not desirable for Hitler: his war was in Eastern Europe. He stated very clearly in Mein Kampf that his goal was destroying slavs, jews and bolshevism. The war in Western Europe was a not desired consequence for Hitler.
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dead0man
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« Reply #4 on: May 27, 2022, 06:38:00 AM »

no

Eventually, had the US not entered the war for whatever reason, after defeating the USSR (and assuming the UK and Germany don't make a separate peace in the mean time), the German Army could have forced their way onto Britain, but it would have been extremely costly to Germany.  Probably not as costly as defeating the USSR would have been, but a German dying in the process of killing Russians is a very noble death.  Dying trying to conquer their cousins in England is far less noble.  Their hearts won't be in it.  Which is why they'd likely try to use as many non-Germans as possible in the first few months of the invasion.  Probably be easier to convince a few hundred thousand nazified Frenchman to do it.


<and for all the anti-Americans who want to come in and say that the USSR would have defeated Nazi Germany even without America joining the war....link
Quote
"I want to tell you what, from the Russian point of view, the president and the United States have done for victory in this war," Stalin said. "The most important things in this war are the machines.... The United States is a country of machines. Without the machines we received through Lend-Lease, we would have lost the war."

Nikita Khrushchev offered the same opinion.

"If the United States had not helped us, we would not have won the war," he wrote in his memoirs. "One-on-one against Hitler's Germany, we would not have withstood its onslaught and would have lost the war. No one talks about this officially, and Stalin never, I think, left any written traces of his opinion, but I can say that he expressed this view several times in conversations with me."

<snip>

Most visibly, the United States provided the Soviet Union with more than 400,000 jeeps and trucks, 14,000 aircraft, 8,000 tractors and construction vehicles, and 13,000 battle tanks.

However, the real significance of Lend-Lease for the Soviet war effort was that it covered the "sensitive points" of Soviet production -- gasoline, explosives, aluminum, nonferrous metals, radio communications, and so on, says historian Boris Sokolov.

"In a hypothetical battle one-on-one between the U.S.S.R and Germany, without the help of Lend-Lease and without the diversion of significant forces of the Luftwaffe and the German Navy and the diversion of more than one-quarter of its land forces in the fight against Britain and the United States, Stalin could hardly have beaten Hitler," Sokolov wrote in an essay for RFE/RL's Russian Service.



Under Lend-Lease, the United States provided more than one-third of all the explosives used by the Soviet Union during the war. The United States and the British Commonwealth provided 55 percent of all the aluminum the Soviet Union used during the war and more than 80 percent of the copper.

Lend-Lease also sent aviation fuel equivalent to 57 percent of what the Soviet Union itself produced. Much of the American fuel was added to lower-grade Soviet fuel to produce the high-octane fuel needed by modern military aircraft.

The Lend-Lease program also provided more than 35,000 radio sets and 32,000 motorcycles. When the war ended, almost 33 percent of all the Red Army's vehicles had been provided through Lend-Lease. More than 20,000 Katyusha mobile multiple-rocket launchers were mounted on the chassis of American Studebaker trucks.

In addition, the Lend-Lease program propped up the Soviet railway system, which played a fundamental role in moving and supplying troops. The program sent nearly 2,000 locomotives and innumerable boxcars to the Soviet Union. In addition, almost half of all the rails used by the Soviet Union during the war came through Lend-Lease.
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Filuwaúrdjan
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« Reply #5 on: May 27, 2022, 07:31:33 AM »
« Edited: May 27, 2022, 08:43:33 AM by Filuwaúrdjan »

It was considered as a serious threat in Britain throughout 1940 and was certainly seriously considered as an option by the Nazi high command throughout that year: even if we ignore the known existence of blueprints, plans and proposals, their actions alone are suggestive of this - there would have been no point in the Battle of Britain otherwise. The chances of success would be a different question: Britain was sufficiently well-prepared by the autumn of 1940 that any invasion would have almost certainly have been about as suicidal as Barbarossa though in a different way,* which means that any potentially successful invasion would have to have been launched over the summer.

This is where things get interesting: the general view in Britain at first was that a summer invasion was at once overwhelmingly likely and a very frightening prospect given the Fall of France and the relatively unprepared nature of Britain's defences during the first half of 1940, but it happens that the Nazis were nowhere near as well-organised or as good at strategic planning as was (understandably at that point) widely assumed, and so preliminary preparations for an invasion only began as the window for a potentially successful assault began to close. Had an invasion occurred before British mobilisation and fortification was complete, then it would still have been a very dicey prospect and it seems likely that the general view of the British public at the time (that any invasion would be beaten back comfortably) was probably quite justified, but, of course, on paper the invasion of France should not have been successful and the Fall of Singapore should not have occurred, which are both useful warnings against assuming that the most likely outcome is the only plausible one. Wars are dangerous and risky things and those in charge can and do make catastrophically stupid decisions and lose their nerve.

Whatever the hypotheticals, it is clear that the British government was correct to treat the threat seriously, because the best way to make sure that a threat like that becomes an unlikely prospect is to accept that it is possible and to respond accordingly. As the failure of the Soviet Union to prepare for invasion, or even consider it plausible, demonstrates in reverse.

*I see no particular reason to doubt the outcome of the 1974 Sandhurst wargame - which simulated an autumn invasion - on this. While we should not confuse its findings for facts, it is perfectly reasonable to treat them as overwhelmingly strong probabilities.
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afleitch
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« Reply #6 on: May 27, 2022, 08:50:48 AM »
« Edited: May 27, 2022, 08:53:58 AM by afleitch »

If we bear in mind that the fall of France happened so fast, that by the time of the Battle of Britain, Germany had European superiority, except in the Balkans (where 'diplomacy' more so than militarism secured that last piece of the puzzle)

The Battle of Britain was an extension of that 'diplomacy', designed to knock Britain out of the war. Even if it had succeeded, in terms of inflicting greater structural air and naval damage, even with 'superiority', the Germans would be hampered by geography from air supply to coastal tides.

I agree with Al's takeaway from the 1974 wargame. The only further point to make is that a few military historians have more recently pondered that a broad beach head, could have been secured and supplied for much longer than the game assumed; enough to see a formal diplomatic withdrawal rather than an evacuation, which could have been part and parcel of a wider 'peace' offered to Britain.
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TheReckoning
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« Reply #7 on: May 27, 2022, 09:40:19 AM »

It was considered as a serious threat in Britain throughout 1940 and was certainly seriously considered as an option by the Nazi high command throughout that year: even if we ignore the known existence of blueprints, plans and proposals, their actions alone are suggestive of this - there would have been no point in the Battle of Britain otherwise.

That‘s completely false. German High Command, including Hitler, were well aware that invading Britain would be, in all likelihood, completely suicidal. But they hadn’t given up making Britain back down through other means. One of those means was a defeat in the air so Britain would accept peace terms. That was the main reasons for the Battle of Britain, although it’s possible that if the defeat had occurred decisively, Hitler may have ordered an invasion.

In my opinion, it might’ve been better for the UK to actually not prepare for the invasion on the surface, entice Germany to invade, utterly annihilate them, and keep fighting from that point.
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« Reply #8 on: May 27, 2022, 02:12:29 PM »

It was considered as a serious threat in Britain throughout 1940 and was certainly seriously considered as an option by the Nazi high command throughout that year: even if we ignore the known existence of blueprints, plans and proposals, their actions alone are suggestive of this - there would have been no point in the Battle of Britain otherwise.

That‘s completely false. German High Command, including Hitler, were well aware that invading Britain would be, in all likelihood, completely suicidal. But they hadn’t given up making Britain back down through other means. One of those means was a defeat in the air so Britain would accept peace terms. That was the main reasons for the Battle of Britain, although it’s possible that if the defeat had occurred decisively, Hitler may have ordered an invasion.

In my opinion, it might’ve been better for the UK to actually not prepare for the invasion on the surface, entice Germany to invade, utterly annihilate them, and keep fighting from that point.

Even if the Nazis had no chance to successfully invade Britain, they still could have potentially killed millions of civilians and no sane nation would risk losing millions of their own civilians.
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NewYorkExpress
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« Reply #9 on: May 27, 2022, 02:26:13 PM »

no

Eventually, had the US not entered the war for whatever reason, after defeating the USSR (and assuming the UK and Germany don't make a separate peace in the mean time), the German Army could have forced their way onto Britain, but it would have been extremely costly to Germany.  Probably not as costly as defeating the USSR would have been, but a German dying in the process of killing Russians is a very noble death.  Dying trying to conquer their cousins in England is far less noble.  Their hearts won't be in it.  Which is why they'd likely try to use as many non-Germans as possible in the first few months of the invasion.  Probably be easier to convince a few hundred thousand nazified Frenchman to do it.


<and for all the anti-Americans who want to come in and say that the USSR would have defeated Nazi Germany even without America joining the war....link
Quote
"I want to tell you what, from the Russian point of view, the president and the United States have done for victory in this war," Stalin said. "The most important things in this war are the machines.... The United States is a country of machines. Without the machines we received through Lend-Lease, we would have lost the war."

Nikita Khrushchev offered the same opinion.

"If the United States had not helped us, we would not have won the war," he wrote in his memoirs. "One-on-one against Hitler's Germany, we would not have withstood its onslaught and would have lost the war. No one talks about this officially, and Stalin never, I think, left any written traces of his opinion, but I can say that he expressed this view several times in conversations with me."

<snip>

Most visibly, the United States provided the Soviet Union with more than 400,000 jeeps and trucks, 14,000 aircraft, 8,000 tractors and construction vehicles, and 13,000 battle tanks.

However, the real significance of Lend-Lease for the Soviet war effort was that it covered the "sensitive points" of Soviet production -- gasoline, explosives, aluminum, nonferrous metals, radio communications, and so on, says historian Boris Sokolov.

"In a hypothetical battle one-on-one between the U.S.S.R and Germany, without the help of Lend-Lease and without the diversion of significant forces of the Luftwaffe and the German Navy and the diversion of more than one-quarter of its land forces in the fight against Britain and the United States, Stalin could hardly have beaten Hitler," Sokolov wrote in an essay for RFE/RL's Russian Service.



Under Lend-Lease, the United States provided more than one-third of all the explosives used by the Soviet Union during the war. The United States and the British Commonwealth provided 55 percent of all the aluminum the Soviet Union used during the war and more than 80 percent of the copper.

Lend-Lease also sent aviation fuel equivalent to 57 percent of what the Soviet Union itself produced. Much of the American fuel was added to lower-grade Soviet fuel to produce the high-octane fuel needed by modern military aircraft.

The Lend-Lease program also provided more than 35,000 radio sets and 32,000 motorcycles. When the war ended, almost 33 percent of all the Red Army's vehicles had been provided through Lend-Lease. More than 20,000 Katyusha mobile multiple-rocket launchers were mounted on the chassis of American Studebaker trucks.

In addition, the Lend-Lease program propped up the Soviet railway system, which played a fundamental role in moving and supplying troops. The program sent nearly 2,000 locomotives and innumerable boxcars to the Soviet Union. In addition, almost half of all the rails used by the Soviet Union during the war came through Lend-Lease.

Without Lend-Lease the Soviet Union would not have defeated the Nazis. With Lend-Lease, the Soviet Union didn't really need the United States to formally enter the war. They did need the supplies the United States brought in, however, but their superior manpower combined with American supplies was enough to defeat the Nazis.
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brucejoel99
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« Reply #10 on: May 27, 2022, 03:02:13 PM »

It was considered as a serious threat in Britain throughout 1940 and was certainly seriously considered as an option by the Nazi high command throughout that year: even if we ignore the known existence of blueprints, plans and proposals, their actions alone are suggestive of this - there would have been no point in the Battle of Britain otherwise.

That‘s completely false. German High Command, including Hitler, were well aware that invading Britain would be, in all likelihood, completely suicidal. But they hadn’t given up making Britain back down through other means. One of those means was a defeat in the air so Britain would accept peace terms. That was the main reasons for the Battle of Britain, although it’s possible that if the defeat had occurred decisively, Hitler may have ordered an invasion.

In my opinion, it might’ve been better for the UK to actually not prepare for the invasion on the surface, entice Germany to invade, utterly annihilate them, and keep fighting from that point.

lol so if you were in charge, you'd just be proof that "those in charge can and do make catastrophically stupid decisions"? k
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Mr. Smith
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« Reply #11 on: May 27, 2022, 06:14:00 PM »

Doable, but no winnable.
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Meclazine for Israel
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« Reply #12 on: May 27, 2022, 06:14:36 PM »

Yes,

Hitler had a soft spot for the English. He could have destroyed them at a couple of stages with the Luftwaffe. Perhaps he was looking for a simple surrender or alliance. I don't know.

The difficulty with an amphibious landing was equal in both directions, so it was not a priority.

In hindsight, he was clearly about to setup a monumental front with Russia and target Lithuanian, Latvian, Estonian, Romanian and Ukrainian Jews.

His megalomaniacal thinking was therefore more East than West.
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RINO Tom
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« Reply #13 on: May 30, 2022, 12:51:38 PM »

no

Eventually, had the US not entered the war for whatever reason, after defeating the USSR (and assuming the UK and Germany don't make a separate peace in the mean time), the German Army could have forced their way onto Britain, but it would have been extremely costly to Germany.  Probably not as costly as defeating the USSR would have been, but a German dying in the process of killing Russians is a very noble death.  Dying trying to conquer their cousins in England is far less noble.  Their hearts won't be in it.  Which is why they'd likely try to use as many non-Germans as possible in the first few months of the invasion.  Probably be easier to convince a few hundred thousand nazified Frenchman to do it.


<and for all the anti-Americans who want to come in and say that the USSR would have defeated Nazi Germany even without America joining the war....link
Quote
"I want to tell you what, from the Russian point of view, the president and the United States have done for victory in this war," Stalin said. "The most important things in this war are the machines.... The United States is a country of machines. Without the machines we received through Lend-Lease, we would have lost the war."

Nikita Khrushchev offered the same opinion.

"If the United States had not helped us, we would not have won the war," he wrote in his memoirs. "One-on-one against Hitler's Germany, we would not have withstood its onslaught and would have lost the war. No one talks about this officially, and Stalin never, I think, left any written traces of his opinion, but I can say that he expressed this view several times in conversations with me."

<snip>

Most visibly, the United States provided the Soviet Union with more than 400,000 jeeps and trucks, 14,000 aircraft, 8,000 tractors and construction vehicles, and 13,000 battle tanks.

However, the real significance of Lend-Lease for the Soviet war effort was that it covered the "sensitive points" of Soviet production -- gasoline, explosives, aluminum, nonferrous metals, radio communications, and so on, says historian Boris Sokolov.

"In a hypothetical battle one-on-one between the U.S.S.R and Germany, without the help of Lend-Lease and without the diversion of significant forces of the Luftwaffe and the German Navy and the diversion of more than one-quarter of its land forces in the fight against Britain and the United States, Stalin could hardly have beaten Hitler," Sokolov wrote in an essay for RFE/RL's Russian Service.



Under Lend-Lease, the United States provided more than one-third of all the explosives used by the Soviet Union during the war. The United States and the British Commonwealth provided 55 percent of all the aluminum the Soviet Union used during the war and more than 80 percent of the copper.

Lend-Lease also sent aviation fuel equivalent to 57 percent of what the Soviet Union itself produced. Much of the American fuel was added to lower-grade Soviet fuel to produce the high-octane fuel needed by modern military aircraft.

The Lend-Lease program also provided more than 35,000 radio sets and 32,000 motorcycles. When the war ended, almost 33 percent of all the Red Army's vehicles had been provided through Lend-Lease. More than 20,000 Katyusha mobile multiple-rocket launchers were mounted on the chassis of American Studebaker trucks.

In addition, the Lend-Lease program propped up the Soviet railway system, which played a fundamental role in moving and supplying troops. The program sent nearly 2,000 locomotives and innumerable boxcars to the Soviet Union. In addition, almost half of all the rails used by the Soviet Union during the war came through Lend-Lease.

Without Lend-Lease the Soviet Union would not have defeated the Nazis. With Lend-Lease, the Soviet Union didn't really need the United States to formally enter the war. They did need the supplies the United States brought in, however, but their superior manpower combined with American supplies was enough to defeat the Nazis.

I think you can make the argument that the Soviets could have beaten the Germans, but total victory (i.e., reaching Berlin) was only achievable with American and British forces coming from the west, IMO.
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Filuwaúrdjan
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« Reply #14 on: May 30, 2022, 02:32:40 PM »

In my opinion, it might’ve been better for the UK to actually not prepare for the invasion on the surface, entice Germany to invade, utterly annihilate them, and keep fighting from that point.

lol so if you were in charge, you'd just be proof that "those in charge can and do make catastrophically stupid decisions"? k

Robert Brooke-Popham has come back from the grave and has an account on Atlas.
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President Johnson
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« Reply #15 on: May 30, 2022, 04:08:40 PM »

It was a pipedream, especially since the United Kingdom would have gotten uniquely strong aid from the United States at the time. There's no way any US government would have allowed the Nazis to conquer Britain.
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Georg Ebner
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« Reply #16 on: May 30, 2022, 07:21:19 PM »

No.
Firstly: Let us reject any scare-mongering sensationalism - even a successful inVasion would have just delivered the world the hilarious picture of English gentleMen turning into guerilleros (unless the Hitlerists had extincted most Britons).
Secondly: De facto without agents there the Reich's experts thought, that their AirWar over Britain would have eliminated its WarIndustry nearly alltogether - when in reality the UK achieved at that time the biggest inCrease of all big powers!
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TheReckoning
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« Reply #17 on: May 31, 2022, 01:09:23 AM »

It was considered as a serious threat in Britain throughout 1940 and was certainly seriously considered as an option by the Nazi high command throughout that year: even if we ignore the known existence of blueprints, plans and proposals, their actions alone are suggestive of this - there would have been no point in the Battle of Britain otherwise.

That‘s completely false. German High Command, including Hitler, were well aware that invading Britain would be, in all likelihood, completely suicidal. But they hadn’t given up making Britain back down through other means. One of those means was a defeat in the air so Britain would accept peace terms. That was the main reasons for the Battle of Britain, although it’s possible that if the defeat had occurred decisively, Hitler may have ordered an invasion.

In my opinion, it might’ve been better for the UK to actually not prepare for the invasion on the surface, entice Germany to invade, utterly annihilate them, and keep fighting from that point.

Even if the Nazis had no chance to successfully invade Britain, they still could have potentially killed millions of civilians and no sane nation would risk losing millions of their own civilians.

I mean, only 150,000 French civilians died in the Nazi invasion of France, and that was a successful invasion. “Millions of dead civilians” would be reserved for countries which had populations the Nazis viewed as inferior, while the Nazis actually considered English people as Aryans.

It’s a pretty incontrovertible fact that if Nazi Germany could’ve been tempted into attempting Operation Sea Lion, millions of lives would’ve saved in the end, as the Germany would’ve been defeated so strongly it might prevent them from even attempting Barbarossa.
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All Along The Watchtower
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« Reply #18 on: May 31, 2022, 10:44:40 AM »

any invasion would have almost certainly have been about as suicidal as Barbarossa

Though also, and it’s critical to remember this, the Nazis didn’t want war with Britain if they could help it, whereas war against the USSR was explicitly a war of annihilation that was a core ideological imperative of the Third Reich even if in reality it was indeed suicidal.
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Lord Halifax
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« Reply #19 on: May 31, 2022, 06:19:25 PM »

No.
Firstly: Let us reject any scare-mongering sensationalism - even a successful inVasion would have just delivered the world the hilarious picture of English gentleMen turning into guerilleros (unless the Hitlerists had extincted most Britons).

Britain doesn't really have that much terrain suitable for guerilla warfare. There are mountains in the Scottish Highlands and Snowdonia and a few smaller ones elsewhere but it's not exactly Yugoslavia or Greece.
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Filuwaúrdjan
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« Reply #20 on: May 31, 2022, 06:40:51 PM »

It feels like a joke, but hedges would actually be a serious problem in large parts of the country - the areas defined as 'ancient' rather than 'planned' countryside (i.e. where the open fields system never developed). The Norman bocage (a very similar landscape) was enough of a nuisance for the Allies after D-Day and in that case those defending (obviously) did not have the support of the population.
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Georg Ebner
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« Reply #21 on: May 31, 2022, 07:43:59 PM »

It feels like a joke, but hedges would actually be a serious problem in large parts of the country - the areas defined as 'ancient' rather than 'planned' countryside (i.e. where the open fields system never developed). The Norman bocage (a very similar landscape) was enough of a nuisance for the Allies after D-Day and in that case those defending (obviously) did not have the support of the population.
...and then Your jungle, the agglomerations with their endless series of terraced houses - no chance, at least not for a continental...
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PSOL
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« Reply #22 on: June 01, 2022, 10:22:17 AM »

There’s no good and easy way for the British to extract natural resources for what it was worth short term to take control of Britain. Contrast this with what the Nazis already took over and how their allies and possible trade partners in Vichy France or Spain can provide the rest with far less bargaining power.
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Meclazine for Israel
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« Reply #23 on: June 04, 2022, 04:50:23 PM »

No.
Firstly: Let us reject any scare-mongering sensationalism - even a successful inVasion would have just delivered the world the hilarious picture of English gentleMen turning into guerilleros (unless the Hitlerists had extincted most Britons).
There are mountains in the Scottish Highlands and Snowdonia and a few smaller ones elsewhere.....

I had never heard of Snowdonia in my life until yesterday.

Now I have heard it twice in 2 days.
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brucejoel99
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« Reply #24 on: June 04, 2022, 08:25:44 PM »

No.
Firstly: Let us reject any scare-mongering sensationalism - even a successful inVasion would have just delivered the world the hilarious picture of English gentleMen turning into guerilleros (unless the Hitlerists had extincted most Britons).
There are mountains in the Scottish Highlands and Snowdonia and a few smaller ones elsewhere.....

I had never heard of Snowdonia in my life until yesterday.

Now I have heard it twice in 2 days.

That's the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon for you.
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