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Submitted via IRC for ErnestTBass
In 1940, Britain had retreated back to their island fortress after being throttled in mainland Europe by invading Nazis. They would hide behind the sea and hope that their navy and air force could stop the possible German invasion of their island.
As the Battle of Britain raged on, the German and British air forces went head to head. Something strange happened, the Germans pulled of[sic] a series of highly effective night bombing raids. It's strange because night bombing was incredibly ineffective for the most part.
[...] This German bombing was much more effective than what the British could do at night. As a matter of fact, it was more accurate than what typical bombing could do in the day time.
Source: https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/england-was-almost-destroyed-by-radio-waves-df70830e8593
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Monday April 29 2019, @08:01PM (1 child)
While that is true, the massive advantage the Royal Navy had would have doomed any German invasion to failure.
There would have been losses for sure, but the Home Fleet was several times the strength of the German Navy, and warships can shoot Stukas down too.
This bit from the Wikipedia article on Operation Sealion caught my eye:
It is a very interesting part of history however, and it is no surprise there are so many alternate history stories about the Nazis winning WWII.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Tuesday April 30 2019, @01:59PM
Admiral Karl Dönitz was a very good warfighter, and I believe his opinion has weight. He was responsible for the North Atlantic submarine campaigns, which caused the loss of a lot of Allied shipping, to an extent that worried Churchill. Post-war analysis tends to the view that despite the apparent success of the submarine campaigns, they did not, in reality, come near to denying supplies to Britain, although at times it may have felt like it. Had the German submarine navy got the resources that Dönitz wanted early in the war, things might have been different.
The alternate histories are interesting. Certainly, it is easy to identify strategic mistakes made by Hitler and his Field Marshals, but I believe that even if all the right decisions had been made by Hitler et. al. the war would not have been a foregone conclusion for the Germans. This Quora answer is interesting: Could Germany have won World War II if they did not attack the Soviet Union? [quora.com] because it focusses on the practical necessity of needing oil to run a war. Churchill was worried the submarine campaign in the Atlantic was disturbing the UK's oil supply from the USA. Hitler had a bigger problem - he had to conquer working oilfields to further the war. The German war-machine failed to do so.