Chapter 8

The German Perspective

Give us ten days fine weather, and England is finished.

Joseph Goebbels

The preceding chapters have attempted to describe the evolution of the Operation Sealion plan, to examine the limiting factors, most notably the lack of a surface fleet, within which the German planners were obliged to work, and to demonstrate the shortcomings of the expedients to which they resorted in order to attempt to overcome these limitations. The reader may well assume, from the many references to the meetings and conferences between Hitler and his Army, Navy and Luftwaffe commanders, that Hitler was whole-heartedly committed to the invasion. If this was not the case, then, surely, the misgivings of Army and Navy chiefs would have led to the whole Sealion concept being abandoned at an early stage as impracticable.

There is, perhaps surprisingly, considerable evidence that this view is incorrect and this chapter proposes to examine the political, rather than military, aspects of the possible invasion, and to attempt to determine how Hitler really viewed the possibility of an invasion of Britain.

On 5 June 1940, the German offensive in France resumed with a drive south across the Somme. By then, thirty divisions, almost a third of the French Army, had been lost and only two divisions of the British Expeditionary Force remained in France. On 14 June Paris was occupied and two days later Marshal Pétain formed a new French Government, which immediately sought an armistice. When Hitler received this news, on 17 June, he actually performed a little hop of joy, which was captured by his movie cameraman; the pictures were subsequently doctored by British propagandists in order to produce the effect of a silly dance!

The following day, he travelled to Munich with Göring to meet Mussolini. The various remarks he made at this time shed considerable light on his state of mind. He said to Göring, ‘I shall come to an understanding with England’, whilst in his meeting with Mussolini he described the British Empire as ‘a force for order in the world’. Count Ciano, who was Mussolini’s son-in-law and the Italian Foreign Minister, wrote in his diary that ‘Hitler is now the gambler who has made a big scoop and would like to get up from the table risking nothing more.’

As early as 2 June, Hitler had, according to General Günther Blumentritt, voiced similar views during a conversation with General von Rundstedt at Army Group A headquarters, when he had expressed his admiration for the British Empire, which, together with the Catholic Church, was, in his opinion, an essential element for stability in the world. Britain would be offered an honourable peace if she would accept Germany’s position on the Continent.

The talks with Mussolini and Ciano ended on 19 June, leaving Mussolini disappointed at what he perceived to be the leniency of the proposed armistice terms – he had hoped to annex most of French North Africa and sought the surrender of the French feet. Hitler returned to his headquarters at Bruly-le-Peche in Belgium in order to prepare for the signing of the armistice and, as has already been described, met with Keitel and Raeder on the 20th.

The armistice was signed on 22 June, with the actual ceasefire to take effect on the 25th, and then Hitler took what can only be described as a holiday. There were no meetings with senior commanders between 23 June and 11 July.

The balance of the evidence, therefore, strongly suggests that Hitler did not at this stage of the war believe that an invasion of Great Britain would be necessary. Indeed, he had never even regarded Britain (or France, for that matter) as his primary enemy. His remarks to Raeder in June 1935, that the signing of the Anglo-German Naval Agreement was ‘the happiest day of my life’ were probably genuine. His ambition for Germany, clearly expressed in Mein Kampf, was expansion in Central and Eastern Europe. The war in the West had been brought about because Britain and France had been unwilling to give Germany a free hand in the East. As Trevor-Roper wrote: ‘The offence of France was its traditional policy of Eastern alliances, which had enabled it, for three centuries, to intervene in Germany. The offence of Britain was its refusal to be content with a maritime supremacy, its insistent tradition of preventing the domination of Europe by a single Continental power. But the offence of Russia was the existence of Russia.’ (Trevor-Roper 1973, chapter one).

Hitler must now have believed that Britain had no reason for continuing her former policy; Poland was no longer an independent state and France was defeated. Surely, he concluded, the British would take the pragmatic, sensible course of action, and in a very few days the first peace feelers would reach him. In such circumstances, there was no need to worry about planning an invasion.

But strangely, the approach did not come. Hitler returned to Berlin and after a triumphal motorcade through the city on 6 July, met Count Ciano on the 7th. In his absence, General Halder (OKH Chief of Staff) had referred in his diary, on 22 June, to ‘preparations against England’ and a week later OKH had produced outline proposals for the landing of thirteen divisions across a 200-mile front. On 30 June, Jodl produced his memorandum considering what military actions could be implemented against Britain, and on 2 July a Führer Directive signed by Keitel suggested that a landing was a possibility. Finally, on 3 July, the British responded, not with peace feelers but with the ruthless neutralization of much of the French feet.

Not surprisingly, Ciano found Hitler uncertain as to what action to take, but willing to admit that the war in the west might have to continue. Hitler still seems to have been undecided when he met Raeder on 11 July and discussed with him the peace offer he intended to make to Britain when he spoke to the Reichstag on 19 July. By the time the speech was made, however, Hitler seems to have decided that his ‘appeal to reason’ would fall on deaf ears, as he had already issued Directive 16 three days earlier. The clear conclusion must be that if Britain would not willingly accept the inevitable, then measures must be taken to ensure her submission.

How this was to be brought about was, however, less clear. The Army might talk confidently about a ‘mighty river crossing’ but the Army commanders and planners were ignorant of the perils of amphibious warfare. Indeed, the lack of even elementary knowledge of the sea exhibited by senior officers led to incidents which were both amusing and revealing. Two of these are worth recording. Firstly, there was the case of the commander of one of the two mountain divisions allocated to Army Group A. This individual took what must have seemed the sensible decision to have his men given swimming lessons, which would take place in the sea at 0900 hrs each morning. The training programme for the division had been worked out with German military thoroughness and could not easily be amended. Consequently, the soldiers would arrive on the beach punctually each morning, only to find that the sea, which was governed by tides rather than training programmes, had receded further from them each day.

The second case was that of General Erich von Manstein, commander of XXXVIII Corps, who would have crossed the Channel with Captain Lindenau from Boulogne in the naval tender Hela. Manstein chose to go swimming with his driver and his aide-decamp, leaving his staff car on the beach – only by commandeering a tractor were they able to rescue the Mercedes as the incoming tide lapped around its wheels. These incidents are not described here to suggest that the officers concerned were fools. They were not, they simply lacked any knowledge of the sea, yet senior officers with similar backgrounds could happily regard crossing the English Channel as akin to crossing a large river.

Hitler, however, was not so naive. At a Commanders-in-Chief conference in Berlin he was clearly well aware of the problems, referring to the invasion of Britain as ‘an exceptionally daring undertaking, because even if the way is short this is not just a river crossing but the crossing of a sea which is dominated by the enemy… a defensively prepared and utterly determined enemy faces us and dominates the sea area we must use’. Already, on 21 July, Hitler was aware that the crux of the matter was control of the sea, and that the Royal Navy still remained supreme.

If this was the case, and Hitler appears to have accepted it at an early stage, then how else could Britain be brought to heel? The only viable alternative was a combination of attacks on the shipping lanes bringing supplies to Britain and an air offensive to break civilian morale. Attacks on shipping would not have an immediate impact, given the small number of U-boats and commerce raiders available at the time, but the air offensive was more promising, and it is here that German and British beliefs in the role of air power diverge. The traditional British view, put simply, has always been that if the Luftwaffe had destroyed Fighter Command then the invasion would have been certain. In other words, the Battle of Britain and Operation Sealion are inextricably linked. Lose the former and the latter would inevitably follow.

The German view is best expressed by Colonel Paul Deichmann, Chief of Staff of Kesselring’s Fliegerkorps II: ‘I personally always viewed Sealion and the air offensive as two quite independent projects.’ Göring himself, at a Luftwaffe conference on 16 September, less than a week from the target date for Sealion to sail, said, ‘Sealion must not disturb nor burden the Luftwaffe operations.’ What these remarks demonstrate is that, to the Luftwaffe, the air fighting over Southern Britain was not part of the preparation for invasion, but had an even more ambitious objective: that of bringing about the conquest of Britain by air power alone.

Göring believed that, as Douhet had predicted, civilian morale would collapse under aerial bombardment and the British people would demand that their government sue for peace. In such circumstances, Sealion could indeed take place, but as a symbolic operation only, akin to the formal entry of German troops into Paris, against the background of a Britain brought to terms by attack from the air. As is now known, Göring was wrong, as he had been before when he undertook to destroy the surrounded British forces at Dunkirk, and as he would be again when he promised to supply Stalingrad from the air – but at the time it must have seemed to Hitler that it was, at least, worth trying.

The three German armed services seem to have viewed the idea of Sealion in different lights. The Luftwaffe, as explained above, regarded it as an irrelevance. The British would be brought to heel by aerial bombardment alone, after which the Navy could ferry an occupation force across the Channel if this was what the peace treaty required. The Army, originally sceptical, was interested for a time but became dubious when realization dawned that the river-crossing analogy was inappropriate, and that the Navy could not protect the invading force from interception and probable annihilation by the Royal Navy en route.

The German Navy, which effectively meant Admiral Raeder, was in a difficult position. Erich Raeder had been a professional naval officer since he entered the Naval Academy at Kiel in 1894, at the age of eighteen. He had fought at Jutland and subsequently became Chief of Staff to Admiral Franz Hipper, probably the ablest German admiral of the First World War. Raeder had been head of the Navy since October 1928 and first met Hitler in April 1933.

For a long time thereafter Raeder believed that he could educate Hitler in the importance of sea power. Raeder was a traditionalist in naval matters, holding to the battleship-focused Tirpitz tradition, and his words at the outbreak of war (‘Today the war against England and France broke out which, according to the Führer’s previous assertions, we had no need to expect before 1944. The surface forces are so inferior in number and strength that they can do no more than show how to die gallantly and thus are willing to create the foundations for later reconstruction’), when the ambitious ‘Z Plan’ fleet existed only on paper, clearly demonstrate a sense of betrayal. Despite his confidence in his ability to educate Hitler, Raeder found himself a lone voice among those close to the Führer – the only man with a grasp of the realities of sea warfare.

When instructed by Directive 16 to produce a workable plan, Raeder could not simply point out that the operation was impossible. To say ‘no’ to the Führer would be dangerous both for his service and for himself. At the various conferences with Hitler, therefore, he continually sounded a note of caution, emphasizing the dangers of the operation without actually saying that it should not take place, and insisting throughout that Luftwaffe air supremacy was essential. This was a masterstroke – Raeder knew that Sealion would be a disaster for the German Navy and that air supremacy could not halt the Royal Navy, but by placing the emphasis firmly on the Luftwaffe he had found a means of escape.

If Göring was right and the British were forced to come to terms, then Sealion, if it took place at all, would be unopposed, yet if the Luftwaffe failed then he could argue that his prime requirement had not been fulfilled.

Whatever views Raeder and his senior officers may have held, however, it is clear that his naval planners certainly did take Sealion seriously. After the War, Admiral Walter Ansel of the US Navy, who had worked on the plans for Overlord, saw the final plans produced by the German Navy, and commented on the performance of the German naval staff as follows: ‘To anyone acquainted with the problems that faced them – the tension of strife, the meagerness of resource in working staff, in experience and in material, and most of all in the shortness of time – these men had performed veritable prodigies of amphibious warfare planning and preparations’ (Ansel 1960). Whatever the misgivings of their seniors, the fact is that the middle-ranking officers on the German naval staff had, by September, produced a workable plan and had assembled the vessels to carry it out.

In accordance with the requirements of Directive 16, therefore, both the Army and the Navy had produced their plans. The troops were ready and sufficient transport vessels had been made available to embark them. The fact that senior commanders in both services were opposed to the operation by this stage would not have stopped it if Hitler had given the order. He had ignored or overridden the advice of his professional military advisers before and been proved right. Unlike them, he had concluded that France could be defeated quickly, and his army had duly achieved in a matter of weeks and with light casualties what the army of the Kaiser had attempted unsuccessfully for four years. He might have believed the same of Sealion.

Consequently, Hitler’s own views on the likelihood of a successful invasion, touched upon briefly earlier, should now be examined in more detail. The unavoidable conclusion must surely be that, apart perhaps from a short period in mid-July, he did not believe it to be a realistic possibility. His attitude to war against Britain and France has already been explained and there can be no doubt that he appreciated the real practical problems which stood in the way. The clearest expression of this doubt can be seen in the phrasing of the introduction to Directive 16 itself: ‘I have therefore begun to plan for, and if necessary to carry out, an invasion of England.’ When compared with subsequent directives concerning Yugoslavia (‘Yugoslavia … must be crushed as quickly as possible’) and Russia (‘The German armed forces must be ready to crush Soviet Russia in a swift campaign’), the language of Directive 16 is almost pusillanimous.

However doubtful Hitler had been about the chances of a successful invasion, he was faced with the fact that the elimination, or at least neutralization, of Britain was strategically essential if he was to attack Soviet Russia. He had told his generals on 23 November 1939 that ‘we can oppose Russia only when we are free in the west.’ Nevertheless, he seems to have taken little direct part in the planning of Sealion and certainly did nothing to suggest that he was wholeheartedly behind the operation. Von Rundstedt, commander of Army Group A, never believed that the Sealion preparations were anything other than a bluff, and as early as 21 July 1940, the head of OKH, von Brauchitsch, was briefed by Hitler to ‘start dealing with the Russian problem’. Just over a week later, on 29 July, Jodl told the head of OKW’s planning section, General Warlimont, that Hitler had made up his mind to prepare for war with Russia, and by 9 August Warlimont’s staff were already starting work on deployment areas for troops in the East.

The evidence is therefore compelling that, at a very early stage of the Sealion preparations, Hitler had made up his mind to attack Russia, even though this contradicted his previous insistence that Germany must be secure in the West before taking decisive action in the East. Sealion preparations would continue, as Hitler may still have clung to the hope that the Luftwaffe bombing campaign would succeed, and the build-up of invasion forces would add to the pressure. In any case, as Hitler admitted on 14 September, to cancel Sealion would involve a major loss of prestige. Only on 12 October 1940 could Keitel issue a directive stating that ‘preparations for Sealion shall be continued solely for the purpose of maintaining political and military pressure on England.’

At the same time, the apparent emphasis on Sealion would help maintain the secrecy of the planning for Operation Barbarossa. In a memorandum to Admiral Kurt Assmann, head of the German Naval Historical Staff, in 1944, Raeder stated that he had no idea that an attack on Russia was being planned, and Göring claimed that he knew nothing of the intention until November.

In conclusion, therefore, it is clear that after at most a brief dalliance with the idea Hitler had realized that Germany did not have, and could not in any foreseeable future expect to possess, the one factor which would have made the operation possible: command of the sea. His Luftwaffe adjutant, Nicholas von Below, was later to write of Hitler: ‘In autumn 1940 the great unknown, the fairly improvised crossing over the sea, frightened him. He was unsure.’

The final words should perhaps be given to Admiral Assmann, whose staff prepared in 1944 a ‘Brief Statement of Reasons for Cancellation of Invasion of England.’:

As the preliminary work and preparations proceeded, the exceptional difficulties became more and more obvious. The more forcibly the risks were brought home, the dimmer grew faith in success … just as in Napoleon’s invasion plans in 1805, the fundamental requirement for success was lacking, that is, command of the sea. This lack of superiority at sea was to be compensated for by air superiority, but it was never even possible to destroy enemy sea superiority by use of our own air superiority. The sea area in which we were to operate was dominated by a well prepared opponent who was determined to fight to the utmost of his ability. The greatest difficulty was bound to be that of maintaining the flow of supplies and food. The enemy’s fleet and other means of naval defence had to be considered as a decisive factor. Owing to the weakness of our naval forces there could be no effective guarantee against the enemy breaking into our area of transports, despite our mine barrages on the flanks and despite our air superiority.

After the War, when Assmann could be more candid in his remarks, he was to write:

When the time came for the final decision to be taken, none of the responsible personalities was ready, despite his knowledge of the weighty matters at stake, to take a firm hand against the operation. All, however, were inwardly relieved to be able to find, in the lack of air mastery, a sound argument which would openly justify them in abandoning the operation.