Two thirds of a century later, many historians are saying that the RAF didn't win the Battle of Britain.

This theme comes up several times in the article: Even if the RAF had been defeated the fleet would still have been able to defeat any invasion because fast ships at sea could easily manoeuvre and "were pretty safe from air attack".

In other words, the RAF wasn't defeated. I will not doubt the Royal Navy's ability to repel a German invasion fleet, but it didn't come to that. The RAF prevented Germany from gaining air superiority, which limited Germany's ability to defend an invasion fleet.

I didn't say the RAF was defeated.

Having read the linked article, this looks like a case of a reporter trying to turn a minor bit of historical research into some grand conflict.

The Royal Navy was Britain's deterrent against invasion. Duh.

The RAF protected the RN against air attack. Duh.

RAF by itself couldn't have stopped an invasion, neither could RN. That's why Britain _had_ both a Navy and an Air Force. Germany tried to rely on air power alone and lost.

This is a non-controversy. I hate it when journalists try to gin up academic research into some kind of brawl.

The commenters in the Telegraph article have pretty much turned the History Today argument into the roadkill it deserves to be. If you read the article, read the comments.

What wasn't touched upon was the political context. Had the Germans gained air superiority, the Tory wet defeatist gang led by Halifax and the non-Communist left anti-war elements (if you read Orwell's wartime journals, you will see that even the latter were not negligible) with their "the bomber always gets through' defeatism, might have been able to cause Churchill's government to fall, and capitualte without testing the theory that the Navy could have stopped the invasion without air superiority.

It does look like rather pointless reporting. Throughout the war the German navy pretty much lost any surface ship engagement. There were a few exceptions, sinking the Hood, for example - but that was the exception. Typically German capital ships met fates like the Terpitz.

The U-boat fleet was different, and there's certainly some interesting discussions to be had if the snorkle had been made to work.

I didn't say the RAF was defeated.

Did anyway say you did?

I'm referencing the story. It too didn't say the RAF was defeated, but that's why I find the reporters assertion that "the RAF won the Battle of Britain" as some myth is absurd.

It reminds me the question asked after the 1991 Persian Gulf war: Could the USAF won the war on their own, without the need of the 100 hour ground campaign?

If the Germans had gained air superiority it is possible that they could have prevented the Royal Navy from destroying the invasion force (which didn't have to be big since the British essentially had nothing in the late summer of 1940) after all the Luftwaffe was able to punish the Royal Navy pretty badly during the invasion of Crete. Without air superiority the Germans would not have had a chance. The interesting issue is whether the British had to fight at all or should have pulled back their squadrons to the west of Britain out of range of the ME109s and not taken the chance of losing a battle of attrition.

Typically German capital ships met fates like the Terpitz.

Question, my history's vague here. Why was the Terpitz in a fjord instead of out at sea? Was it being refitted, upgraded, or what? I know the sister ship's story (Bismark), and I know the end of the Terpitz story, but I never learned why she was just sitting there.

Even "fast" ships are sitting ducks for aircraft. Just days after Pearl Harbor, Japanese torpedo bombers made short work of the battleship HMS Prince of Wales and battle cruiser HMS Repulse.

Without Allied air cover, the Luftwaffe could have picked off British ships at their leisure.

Not to mention bombing ports, shipyards, etc.

A few nostalgic historians may attempt to rehabilitate the battleship admirals, but the airplane changed history.

Wait, the history that I grew up reading said that the whole original *point* of the Battle of Britain was to take out the RAF so that the Luftwaffe could then turn on the Home Fleet at Scapa Flow without getting the snot beat out of them.

Once both were eliminated, then invasion could then proceed. But attacking the Home Fleet without first destroying the RAF was considered foolish.

Of course, then there was that accidental bombing of London, then the retaliatory bombing of Berlin, and then all thought of destroying the RAF, which was on its heels, went out of Hitler's mind and he ordered the Blitz.

In an indirect way, it was Hitler that won England the Battle of Britain. Once the pressure was off of the RAF airfields and onto the cities, the RAF was able to recover and increase its strength, sapping the German bombers until the cost was simply too high and the effort was abandoned. The RN was therefore never under an immediate threat.

The pros at Sandhurst gamed Sealion extensively over the years. Getting the Germans anything past an embarassing surrender is basically impossible.

If the RAF bases in Southern England were made untenable, the plan was to cover the south from bases further North. Since the German fighters couldn't reach that far, attacking them would be suicide. Scapa Flow was right out - even getting bombers that far was pretty hard.

Attacking ships from the air is a specialist skill - one that the Germans hadn't developed by 1940. It was their failiures at Dunkirk that prompted changes - hence ther sucesses in the Med in '41.

The German plan for Sealion was to land foot soldiers, with no transport apart from their feet. Very little artillery and a handful of tanks. Lots of horses though. What they thought they were going to do with seasick horses, I don't know.

Basically their transport would sink if you sneezed, and would take a day and night to cross the Channel. The army they planned to land could be defeated by the French General Staff of 1939 - on their own, without the French Army. In one Sandhurst game, they simply allowed the German army to wander around a bit until the lack of supplies became embarassing...

Basically, this stuff has been known to anyone looking at Sealion for a long time.

"Attacking ships from the air is a specialist skill - one that the Germans hadn't developed by 1940."

Stuka = Dauntless, it wouldn't have taken long
to master it. And for torpedo bombers, the U boats would have stood in nicely.

Of course, some historians claim that Hitler was never serious about Sealion. Believing that it was a faint to bring Britain to the negotiating table.

As for the Terpitz, it was docked because it forced the convoys to Russian to use an inordinent amount of protection. Just the rumor that one of the Germain battleships had come out forced PQ-17 to scatter and allowed them to be picked off piecemeal.