'Operation Sea Lion', the amphibious and airborne invasion

>>38944661
Strange to post here, I'd think you'd better post on /his/ where people might have some knowledge on the strength of forces defending bretain as well as the nazi's striking power in such an invasion.
Personally I think it would've failed, and I think the nazi's themselves thought that too as they never went through with it. I think the english woul'd retailiated with a lot of force, seperating the diffrent landing parties and destroying them piecemeal before they could link up and establish the 1st Connected bridgehead. Even before that airborne landings and naval transportation would've been harried by the british airforce as well as their navy, what little they could get out into the channel in time.

I think it would have been a failure had it gone ahead. The boats they were gonna use to cross the channel were river barges not suited to rough seas, and once wind of any landing party on the move the Royal Navy would have come in and bombarded them and any possible beachheads.

Not only that the RAF would have still been able to harass the landings at all times with bomber and fighter runs while the Luftwaffe would have had to leave the area at short times due to fuel. Of course this is same for the RAF but they were over their own land so distances to the combat area would be much shorter.

The logistics would be a hassle as well. It would take a lot to get the equipment over by sea which runs the risk of being ambushed by the RN and the air transportation would run the risk of being decimated by large numbers of RAF fighters.

TLDR; it would have failed one way or another.

>>38944661
Sea Lion was so fucking retarded on every level that it seems impossible that it was ever conceived of as a real plan.

>shored up our Eastern seaboard from possible Nazi air, sea and submarine raids on the East coast?

German bombers weren't capable of hitting the US even when launched from western France, I'm not sure why taking England would give them a better chance.

>>38945722
The Ju 290 reportedly made a flight from France to around 12 miles off the coast of New York in 1944, so yeah they had the range but any sort of large scale attack on America from German bombers just seems pointless in a strategic sense.

>Operation Normandy

But in all seriousness it's a moot point, the Germans could never have achieved the required naval superiority.

>>38944661
>dude, let's put our soldiers on river barges
>and try to float them across a heavily-mined channel that we don't control or have air superiority over
>then those troops will somehow establish a beachhead even though we lack enough specialized landing craft to let them do so
>and we're going to land enough of them to take large amounts of territory in England without any kind of reliable supply line
>and we're going to commit our entire military to this operation, leaving us with no way to fight the Soviets should they decide to attack

There is just so much stupid involved in the plan. Maybe it was originally written as a joke and somebody just misunderstood it.

>>38945775
They didn't have the range. For starters, even if it was capable of reaching New York, they would need enough fuel to return since there's no place to refuel between France and the US, which was impossible for the Ju290 to carry. So you'd be sacrificing one bomber and a full crew for every flight you made, and there's no guarantee that your bomber will even hit its target (could easily be shot down by the US before dropping a single bomb). Germany couldn't afford to do that.

Like so many other Nazi plans, it sounds amazing until you try to apply real-world logic to it then it all falls apart.

>>38945850
Ok I admit I made a type and may have some details wrong, but it was a Ju-390 that carried out the flight to just off the East Coast of America and the returned back to France, staying in the air for a total of 32 hours.

I agree that the venture is/was totally worthless and it seems like it was just a thing of proving that they could do it. A huge risk, all things considered. I think the plan for the "Amerika bomber" project was to fly a plane over with a nuke attached and drop it over New York with the plane supposedly being a bomber version of the Ho-229 seeing as it had radar reducing elements.

>>38944661
If germany had invaded and conquered them they would still have lost to the soviets

Not only were they planning to use river barges in the English Channel, but the crewmen of those barges were completely unprepared and untrained for the conditions of the Channel and would have no radio communications among them. It would be an absolute disaster.