225: The Senior Service

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This episode of History of the Second World War dives deep into the pivotal role of the Royal Navy during the Battle of Britain, exploring how its strength served as a critical counterbalance to the Luftwaffe’s air campaign . As the podcast traces the evolving strategies of both sides, it highlights the tense interplay between Germany’s aerial ambitions and Britain’s maritime defenses, setting the stage for the dramatic air battles that would define the conflict. With insights into the strategic mind games and the looming threat of Aldertag (Eagle Day), this episode offers a gripping look at the high-stakes clash that shaped the course of WWII. Don’t miss the untold stories behind the skies and seas! Hello everyone and welcome to History of the Second World War Episode 225 - The Battle About Britain Pt. 9 - The Senior Service. This week a big thank you goes out to for supporting the podcast by becoming members. Members get access to ad-free versions of all of the podcast’s episode plus special member only episodes roughly once a month. Head on over to historyofthesecondworldwar.com/members to find out more. The Battle of Britain was an air campaign, with the Luftwaffe seeking to achieve its goals over Britain and the Royal Air Force trying to stop it. There were supporting actions at sea and on the ground, but the vast majority of the efforts on both sides were centered on the air campaign. Over the last 4 episodes the podcast has tracked the evolution of German plans, and the evolution of the British defenses against those plans. But this episode will be mostly dedicated to the greatest strength that the British had, the Royal Navy. The Royal Navy had long been the pride of the British military, and really society, it was an institution that dated back centuries and had for most of that time been the greatest weapon and greatest shield of the British Empire. Looking back on it today we know that there was some weaknesses, and at the start of the war it was overstretched with commitments spanning the entire globe, but it remained undefeated. The early war Royal Navy also, I think, gets overshadowed by what would happen in the Pacific after 1941, with the two huge fleets of the Imperial Japanese Navy and the American Navy duking it out over thousands of miles of ocean. The Royal Navy of 1940 was facing a much more varied set of constraints, and was forced to spread its resources then to fight a war in the North Sea, and the North Atlantic, and the Mediterranean, and still have forces in the Pacific. But in 1940 the Royal Navy was the strongest navy in the world, with the more capital ships and a greater ability to support them in operations than any other Navy. They would be passed by the Americans and the Japanese in later years, but the majority of the ships that would bring those two navies above the Royal Navy were not completed and some of them were not even started in the summer of 1940. The fleet that would win the Pacific war for the United States was not even ordered until the Two Oceans Navy act of July 1940. Confidence in the ability of the Navy to continue that tradition of defending the seas was high, at all levels. Churchill was a navy man, the government as a whole understood how important the Navy was to British supply lines, and the people of Britain also believed that the Navy would come through with one Home Intelligence report saying that there was still widespread confidence in the navy and that “the Navy will win the war for us in the end.”. On the German side, and especially among the leaders of the Kriegsmarine, there was a tremendous fear of the Royal Navy and its ability to respond to any invasion attempt. Once the invasion fleet left port it would be vulnerable to all different kinds of British attack, and the only most likely to derail the invasion and destroy the invasion fleet was Royal Navy surface ships. The big ships, the battleships, cruisers, aircraft carriers, they were all a concern because they were larger and more powerful than anything available to the German Navy during the summer of 1940. But the threat was so much more numerous than just the big ships, countless destroyers, motor torpedo boats, and other smaller vessels would attack the invasion fleet, and in fact were attacking the invasion preparations they were not even waiting for the fleet to sail. For example on the night of 8-9 September motor torpedo boats attacked Ostend and a mixed force of cruisers and destroyers attacked Calais and Boulogne. In all three cases their goal was to disrupt and harass the invasion preparations that were occurring in those ports. This justified the feeling of vulnerability among the German naval leaders, and their concerns about what might happen in the English channel if the invasion was actually ordered. But the Germans did at least have the beginnings of a plan for how to counteract the power of the Royal Navy, and it all started in the air.

While the Luftwaffe’s air campaign had several objectives, one of the most important was to reduce the ability of the RAF to interfere with its attacks on the Royal Navy during the invasion. The hope was that, once the RAF had been reduced in numbers, the vast majority of the Luftwaffe could be focused on attacking any ships of the Royal Navy that would try to interfere with the naval aspects of the campaign. During the entire course of the Battle of Britain the Navy would stage almost nightly patrols and minesweeping efforts throughout the most likely invasion routes. They were not the kind of operations that were publicized or celebrated, and they were far less noticeable than the air battles happening over British cities, but they were always happening. The Navy would also work with the Royal Air Force to ensure that they were both prepared for any possible German invasion activity. From the side of the RAF, they would continuously provide intelligence through overflights of the ports where it was known that an invasion fleet would be staged out of. This would feed information to the Navy, and the RAFs own bomber squadrons which would be active in their efforts to disrupt preparations through night time bombing raids. Both the RAF and the Navy ensured that they were making efforts to provide invasion warnings as soon as any invasion fleet set sail, with the Navy carrying out night time patrols by trawlers and other small vessels . If any of those small ships caught sight of the enemy they would be able to provide important early warning at a time when every hour of additional warning would increase British chances of stopping the invasion. One of the challenges that was never fully solved was what RAF and Naval coordination would look like if the invasion fleet put to sea. The challenge was that Fighter Command was ill equipped to put in place strong fighter cover for the Royal Navy, as had been shown during the early stages of the Channel war when they had tried to protect the merchant shipping in the English Channel. All of the things that helped intercept Luftwaffe attacks over Britain reversed when the RAF approached the French coastline, with distance and time being against the British fighter aircraft rather than against the Germans. This meant that a combination of flight endurance, distance to patrolling stations, and required numbers would have required about 1/5 of the total Fighter Command sorties for each day that they were required. This would have put a serious dent in its ability to perform other missions. Because of this Dowding, at the head of Fighter Command, did not really plan to utilize his fighters against the invasion fleet. Naval strike aircraft would be sent against the German ships, whether from Coastal Command, Bomber Command, or the Royal Navy but Dowding’s fighters would mostly stay back, escorting them out to the coast and then back to their airfields. The theory in all of this was that it was better for the RAF to conserve its strength, rather than using it all against naval targets which, to be honest it did not have a great chance of meaningfully impacting. As would be shown during the Norwegian campaign and in many instances in the Medtierranean, the Royal Air Force was really bad at hitting enemy naval vessels. Most of this was down to training and doctrine, with little training and equipment dedicated to making sure bombs hit naval targets. The good news was that the Luftwaffe was, for the most part, also really bad at engaging with naval targets. Yes, they did have some success against merchant shipping during the early weeks of the campaign, but there would be a vast chasm between dropping a few bombs on slow moving merchant ships and much smaller and more maneuverable naval vessels. This was a major problem because even the smallest of the Royal Navy’s destroyers or motor torpedo boats were extremely deadly for the slow moving invasion groups. It did not take a 16" shell from a battleship to sink a river barge. The best option for the Germans would have been to try and destroy the Royal Navy’s ability to respond to an invasion before the invasion even started. This would have entailed a major bombing effort against the port facilities in southern England, but this would have required major focus, and would have been risky due to the anti-aircraft defenses of those areas. And there was simply nothing that could be realistically done about the Royal Navy’s facilities further north. But the real problem was that the Luftwaffe had a massive list of tasks to complete during July, August, and September, too many for all of them to get done. Bomber Command did execute many attacks during August and September against the growing mass of German shipping earmarked for the invasion. This would result in almost 10% of the invasion shipping being damaged or disabled at various times during those months. But all of that was done while the German shipping was just sitting, stationary, when they were at their most vulnerable, when they put to sea things would get much more difficult. This meant that if the invasion fleet sailed the Royal Navy was at least partially on its own on its own, but do not worry, it had a plan.

The first stage of that plan, was naval mines. I mentioned mines in a previous episode, but I will discuss them here again, mostly to emphasize their importance to both the British and the Germans when it came to a possible invasion. Both sides had the ability to lay and to sweep mines, that was never the problem, but what was the problem for the Germans was the fact that they could not guarantee any level of control of the nighttime water off either coast. During the dark hours the Royal Navy were constantly performing three different duties in the channel and along both coasts. They were first of all simply patrolling for German ships, using the hours of darkness as a time during which the Luftwaffe had no chance of attacking. The second was the sweeping of German mines to ensure that there were always paths through the German minefields. The third, and most dangerous was placing mines themselves in the hopes of those mines finding German ships. British mines were placed everywhere, that meant that they were along the coastline, particularly in areas where the possibility of invasion was high. They were also placed far out into the Channel in the hopes of disrupting German shipping as far out as possible. Mines were also placed along the continental coasts, which was only possible because the British minelayers could quickly move along the coast at night, lay their mines at the determined locations, and then be back in British ports by the time that it was light enough for a German response. The German minesweepers were more limited in their abilities specifically because of the patrols of Royal Navy ships every night, which made clearing enough of the mines difficult. Their were some efforts to perform daylight minesweeping operations, and there was some success with the practice due to the difficulties that the RAF or Royal Navy had in interception, but that just revealed that there were simply not enough German minesweepers to keep up with the number of mines being placed. The mine fields could be made up of thousands of mines, for example the Dover barrage, which was just one of several large mine fields consisted of over 9,000 separate mines that the Germans would have to deal with in some way. And those mines were directly in the path that some of the German invasion convoys would have to take on thier way to their landing areas. To make matters worse the British used a variety of different mine types, both contact mines that required a ship to run into them, and magnetic mines which would be set off by the magnetic field of a ship that passed over them. With the mixture of mines, the large permanent mine barrages, and then randomly appearing mined areas due to British minelaying, it was a very challenging situation that there was no easy solution for. This would have been another area on which the Luftwaffe should have put greater focus in the weeks leading up to the invasion, directly attacking the port facilities that supporting the mining operations, but the resources just did not exist.

For the Royal Navy, in the event of a German invasion attempt, there were multiple phases of operations that would be undertaken to destroy the invasion, hopefully before any German boots were walking on British sand. The commander of the Royal Navy’s home fleet, Admiral Sir Charles Forbes, commanded the most powerful British ships in the region, but these large capital ships would not be the first line of defense. This was because there was concern that if they were committed in the wrong circumstances they would get chewed up by Luftwaffe attacks before they could bring their big guns to bear on the invasion fleet. And in a lot of ways, they were also overkill, due to aerial reconnaissance and other sources of information there was a decent understanding of what forces the German navy would have available for the operation, and that did not include any of their larger capital ships, which at the time were just the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. With those ships removed from the equation the battleships, and even the larger cruisers, of the home fleet were not strictly required. Instead the Admiralty developed their plans around using destroyers and cruisers to disrupt the invasion fleet as quickly as possible. This would start with the ships that were based in the ports of southern and southeast England, which was named Nore Command and the Dover Command. There were seven light cruisers, 32 destroyers, 6 destroyer escorts, and 17 motor torpedo boats in the Nore command that would be the first line of defense. Not all of them would be committed to the first operation, but as soon as the signal was sent various groups of ships would be moved into routes to block likely or confirmed landing beaches. In the east around Dover 2 light cruisers and 8 destroyers would be dispatched immediately while 5 destroyers would be sent out from Plymouth at the same time. Due to their numbers and their strength the destroyers were key to this operation, using all of the weapons available to them, not just their larger 5 inch guns but also machine guns, torpedos, and even their depth charges with plans to use these anti-submarine weapons against the cables that would be used to tow the unpowered river barges across the channel. The destroyers would also be joined by motor torpedo boats, as well as corvettes, all of which were more than enough to cause serious damage to the most vulnerable targets. The Germans were not completely defenseless though, and as many of the ships of the invasion fleet as possible were armed with machine guns and anti-aircraft guns for use against British ships. These 2 and 3.7 centimeter anti-aircraft guns would be very dangerous due to their high rate of fire and their ability to severely damage the upper decks of many of the British ships that would be fighting against them. This would be particularly dangerous for the gunners on many of the British ships, because most of the fighting positions on British destroyers and smaller ships were unarmored and often simply open air. To try and minimize the possibility of damage either from the German surface vessels or from Luftwaffe attacks the destroyers and cruisers would try to attack at night, but there would be challenges with this plan. Radar was not widespread in the Royal Navy during this early period of the war, and in fact none of the destroyers had radar installed, which made interceptions in the dark far more challenging. But even with the difficulty the British were aided by the predictability of their enemy, they were not hunting agile warships that could be anywhere, instead they were tracking slow, unwieldy, river barges that would almost be forced to sail in a straight line to minimize their time at sea. This made it much more likely that the interceptions would occur, even in the darkness.

If this initial defense did not stop the invasion in its tracks, and the German forces did manage to land on the beaches and establish beachheads the next phase of the Royal Navy’s response would begin. During this phase, with the exact landing beaches identified and the German naval forces committed to specific routes and timings in their attempts to keep the invasion forces supplied, the response could be properly planned and operations executed. This would be particularly impactful for the German plans because of the length of time that it would take to move the first waves of German fighting troops, and then their mobile second wave, onto the beaches with some estimates on the German side planning for it to take weeks. This would give the Home Fleet time to marshal its forces and execute its very sophisticated plan of throwing everything at the German ships. The Royal Navy had many advantages that made this brute force attack more likely to succeed, first of all they just had more ships and more powerful ships. The second was that they were not tied down by anything, they were free hunters in a target rich environment. The third was that the vessels that were the most important targets, the barges and transport craft, were also the most vulnerable, it did not matter if every single German Kriegmarine ship survived, because destroyers could not put tanks on the beaches, and that is what the Germans would need to succeed in their invasion. German airpower would remain a problem, and in reality the larger British ships could not operate in the Channel for long periods during the day. But once the invasion started that did not matter, because as long as they could execute nightly runs through the English Channel they could do everything that they needed. Once the beaches were set, the positioning of the German transport ships would be well known, and every night the Royal Navy could cause serious damage to anything that stayed off the beaches. There were strategies that could have been employed to reduce the effectiveness of these raids, keeping the barges away at night, but that would also greatly limit the ability of the German forces to land supplies, and that achieved the British objectives just as well as actually destroying the barges. A barge stuck in a German port due to fear of the Royal Navy was just as useful to the German forces as one sitting at the bottom of the channel. And this is before even getting into discussions of British and Allied submarines that could also operate in the English Channel. In the long run these may have been just as dangerous as the surface ships. These were all known issues for the German Navy, and the only real hope that they had was that the Luftwaffe’s air campaign would degrade the RAF’s strength enough that the presence and abilities of the Luftwaffe would provide some counter balance to the strength of the Royal Navy. Next episode, the air battles begin, because August 13th, 1940 would be Aldertag, or Eagle Day