221: A Simple River Crossing

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In this episode, we explore the pivotal moments leading up to Operation Sea Lion, examining Hitler’s failed “Last Appeal to Reason” speech and the chaotic coordination struggles within the German military. Discover how conflicting priorities between the Wehrmacht branches delayed invasion planning, the critical role of radar in shaping the Battle of Britain, and the strategic miscalculations that shaped the course of the war.

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Summary

Hello everyone and welcome to History of the Second World War Episode 221 - The Battle About Britain Part 5 - A Simple River Crossing. This week a big thank you goes out to Mark, Austin, Emily and Kieran for choosing to support the podcast be becoming members. Members get access to ad free versions of all podcast episodes plus special member only episodes roughly once a month. You can find out more about becoming a member over at historyofthesecondworldwar.com/members.

After the fall of France the decision had been made by the German leaders to being preparations for an invasion of Britain. Such a major operation would require a major planning effort from all of the branches of the Wehrmacht and almost more importantly it would require a level of cooperation between the Kriegsmarine and the Heer, the navy and the army, that up to that point in the war had not been required. This would result in a series of disagreements throughout July and August 1940 that would occupy meeting after meeting and planning session after planning session. The core of the problem was that the two branches approached the operation from two very different directions. The Army’s approach was to determine how many men and how much equipment needed to be on the beaches in the first days, and then where those beaches need to be, to give the invasion the best chance of success. They were focused on the problems of what happened after those troops were landed and what they needed to be successful. The Navy’s approach was to determine the available shipping, landing craft, transport craft, and protection for those assets, and then use those numbers as a basis or planning. They were focused on making the naval side of the operation a success, and they knew that there would be limited sealift capacity. These two different approaches resulted in very different plans that would take time to come to an agreement on. And while all of those arguments were happening, Hitler decided to make one last attempt at bringing Britain to the negotiating table by giving a speech to the Reichstag on July 19th, the response was not what he hoped it would be.

The speech that Hitler would give a great example of what German diplomacy looked like with Britain during the summer of 1940. It was a lengthy and somewhat rambling speech that would be called the Last Appeal to Reason, with the idea being that Germany was completely ready to come to the negotiating table to end the war. You can read the full transcript of the speech online, archive.org, it is ten pages which apparently took over 2 hours to fully deliver. Hitler would point to the victories of the German military on the battlefield, the lenient terms that had been given to the Vichy French government, and that it was Britain that could make the decision any day to end the war. But there were two key issues with the speech that prevented it from having any real impact on the war. The first was that it was sorely lacking in details. One of the challenges faced by Britain and Germany in 1940, when it came to starting negotiations, is that they were of course at war, and they needed some starting place to negotiations. This would have been the ideal moment for Hitler to have unveiled in detail what Germany’s starting position would have been, perhaps including some concessions to give some power behind the pro-peace factions within the British government and other leaders. And instead of such proposals a large portion of the speech just reiterates the talking points already provided by the Nazi government for why the war was the fault of the French and British from the very beginning. Hitler makes it clear that it was not the fault of Germany that the Polish provocations led to a wider war, and that the war then spilled into Norway and then into France. Hitler would then also trumpet his own efforts to make peace earlier in the conflict, after the campaign in Poland had been completed, saying “All this, as I said once before, need never have happened, for in October I asked nothing from either France or Britain but peace. But the men behind the armaments industries wanted to go on with the war at all costs and now they have got it.”. So the first challenge was that the speech was short on the type of language required for a public declaration of a desire to begin negotiations to end a war. Lacking humility, compassion, and public statements of the desire to compromise. The second challenge was that large sections of the speech were really just designed to trumpet and glorify the German military. In sections it reads less like an appeal for peace and more like a rallying cry for the German people to unite behind the German military on their march to victory and glory. When speaking of the campaign in Norway: “All the units of our German navy covered themselves with imperishable glory in this action. Only after the war will it be possible to disclose the difficulties encountered in this campaign, such as setbacks and accidents. We finally overcame all difficulties, thanks to the conduct of the officers and men,”. Then referring to events in France: “The success of the most tremendous series of battles in the history of the world is due above all to the German soldier. He has proved again his worth in a convincing way in every battle in which he has fought. All branches of the German people take an equal share in this great achievement, The soldiers of the new provinces incorporated since 1938 have fought magnificently and have made their contribution to this heroic effort by all Germans.”. Then later in the speech he would reference the actions on the home front during the first months of the war: “In conclusion of these purely military observations on the events, the love of truth compels me to pay due honor to the fact that all this would not have been possible had it not been for the attitude of the home front and, more particularly, without the founding, the achievements and the activity of the National Socialist party.”. During the final sections of the speech, he of course has to throw in just some complete lies, as is tradition: “Believe me, gentlemen, I feel a deep disgust for this type of unscrupulous politician who wrecks entire nations and States. It almost causes me pain to think that I should have been selected by fate to deal the final blow to the structure which these men have already set tottering. It never has been my intention to wage wars, but rather to build up a State with a new social order and the finest possible standard of culture. Every year that this war drags on is keeping me away from this work.”. Then in the final few paragraphs he would make his appeal “In this hour I feel it to be my duty before my own conscience to appeal once more to reason and common sense in Great Britain as much as elsewhere. I consider myself in a position to make this appeal, since I am not the vanquished, begging favors, but the victor speaking in the name of reason.”. When I read through the speech, it does not feel like an appeal to reason, a call for negotiations, but instead a call for surrender. You don’t spend most of a speech talking about how amazingly powerful your military is if you want to negotiate, but that is exactly what you would do if you want to overawe your enemy into surrender. When the British Cabinet was informed the speech and read its contents they would ask Halifax to deliver to response. While it made since that the Foreign Secretary would be the one to address any possible negotiations, it was also well know that it was Halifax who was the strongest advocate for peace among the British Cabinet. And so the message coming from him made it clear that whatever the hopes were for the speech they would remain unfulfilled. In his broadcast on the next night Halifax would say “Hitler may plant the Swastika where he will, but unless he can sap the strength of Britain, the foundations of his empire are based on sand.”.

With the failure of the “last appeal to reason” preparations and planning for Sea Lion would continue. After Hitler’s speech on July 19th the Wehrmacht only had about 2 months to plan and execute the invasion, with the expectation being that the weather would be a major issue after mid-September. They were not going into the planning with a completely blank slate though, and before the war there had been work done on preparing for a possible war against Britain. Within the Luftwaffe there had been several studies done to try and determine the best path for an air campaign against Britain, with two notable examples being in September 1938 and August 1939. The result of these studies were not very positive. The later study, which was completed just weeks before the end of the war concluded that the Luftwaffe was incapable of achieving decisive results against the British. The only possibility would be to launch a long war of attrition, lasting at least 2 years, to wear down the British air defenses. Before the war the German Army also did some planning for the invasion, but even at that time the Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine were resistant to any plans from the Heer due to what they saw as unrealistic objectives. The Kriegsmarine had also done its own planning, but most of those plans were invalidated when the war started. The long term plan for a war against Britain had been in the form of the Plan Z naval expansion, which would have seen the German navy grow massively in size, but those plans were still mostly only on paper when war was declared in September 1939, and most were put on hold due to reprioritizing of manufacturing capacity. Without that massive expansion plan the overall belief among the German naval leadership was that an invasion of Britain could not be successful, to the point where they put very little effort into planning for an invasion before the war. And then the first 10 months of the war had cost the Kriegsmarine dearly, with the operations against Norway being a very costly success. Further operations in the North Sea would see damage to both the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau which meant that both would be in port for repairs during the summer of 1940. Before those costly actions the naval staff would produce a plan for an assault on the British coast, with the plan being for a landing to occur on the east coast of England, however it appears that this study was mostly ignored at the time, as focus was still on events in France. Throughout all of these planning efforts, one of the key issues that Germany would face would be that the various arms of the military were making their own plans, and it was always difficult to get them to work together. Hitler was in a position to force them all into alignment, but he was often hesitant to make and force definitive plans, instead oscillating between the various competing visions for the operation.

The wartime planning for the invasion would really get rolling in late June, as the campaign in France was winding down. The problem hanging over all of the German planning was that the best months to launch the invasion had already passed by the time that the campaign in France had surrendered, the May through July time frame would have been preferable but those were simply not possible, but it did mean that the clock was ticking and the preparations had to be accelerated as much as possible. This resulted in many situations in which preparations had to blinding power ahead even though the exact plan was still unknown. This would be the period of greatest divergence between the German military leaders, even though there would be multiple times when the German Navy, from Admiral Raeder tried to inform them of the correct level of possibilities. Once of these instances would be during a meeting on June 20th, even before the French armistice, in which Raeder would give a report on a variety of invasion related topics. This included the Navy’s preferred landing sites and the shipping that would be available for the operation. This was at a time when the general outlines of the German Army’s plan were massive and completely unworkable. Raeder also did not get much help from Hitler in this instance, as his mind was already moving on to other topics including the fanciful ideas of the German invasion of Iceland to control the Atlantic and the plans to deport all of Germany’s Jews to Madagascar. Throughout June multiple orders were given out to the German military arms to continue planning, first just exploratory items that tried to determine if an invasion was possible and then later more detailed planning on how it would be executed. A little over a week later the OKW produced a plan for setting up more detailed planning with the German General Staff, including the idea that the entire operation would be treated as a mighty river crossing. This idea was absurd, I am just going to use that word, because crossing the English channel, and then being completely dependent on supplies from the sea made it far different than any possible river crossing.

Everything started with the Luftwaffe, and nothing could truly move forward until they have achieved their objectives of suppressing, if not destroying the abilities of the RAF to react to an invasion. This was never going to be easy, and it took time for the plans and the preparations to be made, even as the Channel War continued. There were many tasks that the Luftwaffe was not used to planning for or executing on, and most of their experience had been during operations in conjunction with the army. There would also be a growing concern throughout July that the Luftwaffe did not appear to be doing as much as it could. This was not really true but around Germany there was a noted drop in excitement in the German population with the head of Nazi propaganda, Goebbels, writing “Wonderful weather, too good for our air force.”. This would continue until July 20th, even at a time when the plan for the invasion was for it to go forward on August 15th, which left the Luftwaffe dangerously short of time. But at the front the Luftwaffe was doing everything that it could be be ready for the task ahead, including updating its target lists, and one of the major areas of concern were the odd towers that the British had erected and which were emanating various electronic signals. These were of course the Chain Home series of radar stations, and while the Germans did not know the specifics of how exactly they worked, they did know what radar was and so the assumption was made that they were some kind of early warning system. Once this was identified, by the German radio monitoring service, new orders were given to the Luftwaffe leaders that they needed to add them to their target lists for the opening days of the attacks. What exactly they were doing did not matter, just that it would be better if they no longer existed. Overall, the plans that were confirmed by Goering would result in a continuation of the Channel War for the next few weeks, until a high level meeting would be held on August 1st where the Luftwaffe plans were finalized. The meeting would see some interesting disagreements between the Luftwaffe high command and the Luftflotten commanders that were closer to the front, those being Sperrle and Kesselring. Their primary concern was that they did not believe that the German bombers would be doing anything over Britain until the British fighter force was greatly damaged, maybe even destroyed. But this was simply not possible given the timeframe, the Luftwaffe could not wait for any kind of war of attrition to occur. Instead the plan was to start a 13 day plan for the completely destruction of the RAF, the objective that the vast majority of the Luftwaffe’s strength would be committed to. These 13 days would be split into three phases, with each phase designed to push the destruction closer and closer to London under the idea that it was in those areas of England that the RAF was strongest and also the areas that the RAF would commit the greatest part of their strength to defend. The first 5 days would be focused on areas between 150 and 100 kilometers of London, the second phase would push in to 100 to 50 kilometers, and the final phase would be within 50 kilometers of London. Between each of the three phases there would be break day, to evaluate and prepare for the next day. I like this quote from To Defeat the Few by Douglas C. Dildy and Paul F. Crickmore which serves as a very clear criticism of the Luftwaffe’s plans at this point in time: “For daylight operations, by choosing such a geographically based roll-back strategy it is readily apparent that the Luftwaffe’s leadership viewed their challenge from a ground-based, almost ‘army’, perspective. Experienced only at the tactical level and never trained or educated as military professionals at the operational or strategic levels of conflict, the Luftwaffe’s leadership were almost without exception unequipped to address the problem from an airpower perspective.”. I like this criticism specifically because it highlights how you cannot always map concepts between different military capabilities. In theory pushing the area of the attacks closer into London seems fine, but it highlights the fact that the exact area being focused on by the Luftwaffe did not matter at all. The RAF could always base their fighters outside of those zones and continue to attack the Luftwaffe every time they attacked. This is a good preview of what would happen during the height of the battle in August and September when a critical part of the RAF’s response to German raids was actually to attack them with squadrons from outside of the main area of the attack.

Notes

Put this link in the notes: https://archive.org/details/my-last-appeal-to-great-britain-a-last-appeal-to-reason/mode/2up