Could Operation Sealion really have succeeded?

On the other hand if the Germans are really going to use all their uboats that means they all get called back a couple weeks before the planned invasion date at least. Then they are sitting targets in the shallow waters of the Channel. My guess is that would free up a few RN escorts as well.

As for finding the invasion fleet again if it's ships slipping along the French coast that's one thing. Ships anchoring off the English coast is another. The extent of the minlaying would also be something of a giveaway and a magnet. They are also going to have a hard time laying all those mines a night as if they are off just a bit and the invasion force wanders into the field it could significantly lesson the work of the RN.

As for the "Sandhurst Game" remember that some of the assumptions were made to allow for the Germans to land forces. It was an army game if the RN defeated the landing before it hit the shores there wouldn't have been a game.

One of the biggest problems I see for SeaLion or any of it's variations is that it was a chain composed of quite a few weak links if any one of them broke it would fail.

 

They were! The uboat fleet was recalled after the Armistice; it had been at sea virtually constantly since the outbreak of war - minelaying off British ports, patrolling off the coast of Norway etc., and was in BAD need of overhaul - which, like the rest of the KM, it got over the summer of 1940

As for freeing up RN escorts...do you think the British would actually dare rely on there being no uboats about and not send escorts???

Yes - but we're only talking a few hours at most of early-morning limited visibility between the invasion shipping arriving off the coast of England and and forst wave going ashore After THAT...in the full light of day - the Luftwaffe are flying CAP over the invasion shipping from France and WANTING the remains of Fighter Command to try and escoprt raids onto the bridgehead and shipping!

The invasion bridgehead will be like an open jar of jam to wasps to Fighter Command; the BIG air battle of the war will be over the invasion shipping and beaches rather than OTL over London in mid-September. The Luftwaffe's fighters will have what they wanted since they were stopped doing it in mid-August...the ability to freely engage RAF fighters for themselves as opposed to escorting LW bombers. And quite frankly - when the fighter geschwader were "free hunting" during the BoB they were winning on points!

That's WHY I went looking for the cross-correllation with RN patrols...and didn't find it! It was said SO often as a given that there were some funnies with the events that bothered me.

In fact - not only did the RN's destroyers FAIL to encounter what minelaying operations DID happen....they actually failed to intercept the one operation they did find out about! The six-KM destroyer minelaying operation in Falmouth Bay; three destroyers laying mines, three laying further offshore screening them. Some of the RN's anti-invasion destroyers in Plymouth were flushed to intercept them....but failed to catch - or even find - them!

They weren't intending their mine "barriers" to be THAT close to the invasion shipping lanes! Due to the numbers to be laid, and the pre-existing BRITISH fields - what they planned to do was very much string them together in the right places.

And to be fair - there were far more minefields to be laid down-current of the Channel Narrows than UP-Channel!

There was also the important factor hampering the defence that the KM be "seen" to be laying mines in quantity; no matter what they did or didn't lay....the RN would have to do exactly what their standing orders required them to do - muster at given points THEN be preceeded into the Narrows by minesweepers clearing the way through any mines that happened to be there

In other words - every time the RN transitied "known" minefield locations...remember how many decoy mines and fields the Germans planned to lay!!!...they would have to muster and be escorted/preceeded in and back out of the narrows. All of which slows down the British naval reaction

Actually - this is not quite correct; As a result of that bad-tempered AHF thread I actually bought the book compiled many years later by the man who ran the "Sandhurst game" for the Daily Mail newspaper...and the twenty-years-later recreation of the Sealion game at the IWN at Duxford

It turns out that the week and a half BEFORE the Sandhurst Game was actually spent gaming the possible preceeding events! Which is something the various published accounts of the Sandhurst game fail to mention In particular, the organisers/hosts gamed the Battle of Britain air element of the pre-invasion campaign...using a (university mainframe) computer for the first time ever in a wargame in the UK! If only to be able to attribute the "correct" numbers of surviving aircraft to both sides...

You have to read Newbold's thesis...and the complementary material on naval-history.net...to realise that when the Admiralty said they couldn't guarantee that the Navy would intercept or even FIND invasion shipping that they really meant it! Not only did they meant that in theory they wouldn't find it reliably - but in reality they didn't! It made its way into French ports without them finding it; only RAF photo recce revealed the buildup.

The Germans just need to get across the Channel in that one night and get the first wave ashore in any numbers - which would only take the first few hours of S-Day - for the invasion bridgehead to be a reality that the British would have to deal with - and that in attacking the Germans would be attriting them from and in the air. A good comparison is that the invasion itself creates an "Albert Canal bridges" situation along the coast of Kent and Sussex - the British HAVE to come out to play...they CANNOT ignore the situation and apply their limited efforts on some other aspect of the events - and every casualty the Germans make them absorb doing so is lost to the defenders for any other use.

 

The Germans have invaded Dover sir! Where shall we look for them?

The Channel is narrow enough to see across in daylight so I reckon the Navy could find the Germans easy enough. Plus what's the talk about anti-invasion destroyers? any armed ship was capable of dealing with barges the list shows 00's.The list there does not even show the Western approaches.

 

I take it you've never actually come across the wrinkle of the horizon being only three miles away at sea level??? You need to be several hundred feet in the air at least to see across the Channel right down to sea level. On top of the cliffs at Dover for example you're going to see MORE of the coast of France - but only down to a certain height because of the curvature of the earth!

(Navies have actually known this for many centuries - why do you think there's a "crow's nest" or lookout at the top of the tallest mast???)

You really don't know how this works, do you?

You CAN'T send ships of too great a draught into the Channel narrows because the water isn't deep enough to accomodate them EXCEPT in the really quite narrow deep channels right down the centre;

You CAN'T send large ships into that half of the Channel covered by German guns;

You CAN'T send vessels into the Channel that aren't fast or well-trimmed enough themselves to avoid falling ordnance once released from a bomber overhead;

You CAN'T send vessels into the Channel that don't have enough AA armament on board to survive there;

You CAN'T send vessels into the Channel that are as weakly armed or defended as the German escort vessels themselves; why did the Admiralty gather destroyers? Because if they gathered the hundreds of armed trawlers of the RNPS mentioned in your page of station assignments....they're as likely to be blown out of the water by one of the hundreds of GERMAN armed trawlers themselves!

You CAN'T send vessels into the Channel that are not intended for combat; which takes out all the boom defence trawlers, all the Submarine Depot Ships, all the tugs, etc. etc. from your list.


The Admiralty gathered 36 or so vessels...because that's what they had that would satisfy ALL the criteria they had to work within.

 

As stated previously, you can send in heavier ships than destroyers, and accept that you are going to loose many of those ships, because if the invasion succeeds, you won't have any RN at all. It becomes an existential question for the UK. You don't need to risk them, prior to the actual invasion having started. Once it has started, there is no reason not to risk them.

The Germans themselves knew they couldn't achieve naval superiority in the channel, and at no stage did they actually maintain air superiority for any extended duration either. The German high command in their own war game concluded that both were necessary for a successful invasion. As neither was ever achieved, nor was actually remotely close to being achieved, any invasion would fail dismally. The fact that the invasion was never launched, speaks volumes.

The question isn't really if they could get troops on the ground in the UK. That is a given. What is highly questionable, is if they could maintain the supply line over the channel to provide 11 divisions in the first wave with 3300 tons of supplies per day to keep them operational. And that is those infantry divisions (Fallschirmsjäger and Mountain divisions) just in the first wave. Add in the additional forces needed to exploit and widen the bridgehead (panzers and petrol), and the whole farcical episode collapses.

The Germans gave it their best shot, but with all their preparations, in the end, even they concluded it just wasn't feasible, that the risk was just far too great.

 

Not at first but once they start getting info on where those uboats are there's certainly a decent chance they will reallocate some of the escorts. Since the uboats are going to have to a large extent either use the channel or navigate around about 3/4 of the Great Britain I'd think it would be something of a "tell".

Until that night and the next and the next for quite a few more nights.

But this is not quite the same case is it? The LW is tied up providing CAP to the invasion fleet and the RAF which means among other things that only about 1/3 of it's fighters can be there at any one time. Meanwhile fighter command can pick the time and use pretty much their entire force if they choose to. Oh anther thing I ran across in one of those sites I posted earlier. Apparently there were no escorts tasked for the paratroop flights and that was with the additional planning time that the historical Sea Lion had not the rush job we are talking about here.

But the shear magnitude of this effort brings to question the applicability of the RN failures to intercept or prevent the earlier efforts. Indeed some destroyers laying a few nusance mines compared to the massive barriers that Sea Lion called for is somewhat ludicrous.

That's quite interesting do you have any links or specfic books that go into any detail onit?

How do I get a copy? It's worth noteing that off Crete the RN didn't have too much trouble finding the German convoys and they had much more sea room. What changed?

But the same can be said of any German casualty can it not? Among other things for instance a failed Sea Lion would mean severe attrition to the uboat waffe. In the case we are talking about (i.e. a July invasion). It's not even clear that the Germans had the capability to move a division across (one of the sites I linked above mentioned they didn't). So even without any attritoin what can less than a division do? And it clearly would suffer at least some attritoin in crossing. Even without factoring in the RN or the RAF shore batteries, accidents, and even small arms would likely inflict significant losses before they even reached the shore. Then that night the transport fleet and it's escorts are likely to suffer signifcant casulaties as well.

 

Uboats were going around via the Northern Approaches anyway - because of two early losses when trying to transit the Channel north to south in 1939. They had been able to do that from the Low Countries during most of WWI - it wasn't until Roger Keyes took over the Dover Command from Adm. Bacon that his new tacvtics etc. stopped the majority of Uboats that tried to run the Channel by night.

The laying of the submarine induction loops on the seabed, and the laying of remote-switchable minefileds, at the start of WWII made running the Channel even mpre difficult - so those early losses drove the KM around the UK the long way

Also - the British were stuck in the same intellignce black hole regarding uboat movements in the summer of 1940 as they were regarding the KM's surface vessels; they couldn't "see" into the Baltic. Long range photo rcce could just reach the westernmost North German ports - Bremen, Kiel etc. but the vast majority of North German Baltic ports were out of reach. By the time the first uboats to be overhauled were operational again and out in the shipping lanes - the British were still taking losses from mines laid in the same shipping lanes; IIRC there was no indicator what had blown up cargo vessels at that point in time to discriminate between mines and torpedoes.

But remember - the British have fewer fighers than OTL IF Sealion is launched; they have to have LOST the local air superiority battle over kent and Sussex (at least) for Sealion to be ordered. They'll have further to fly each time to reach the combat area...in an era BEFORE RAF fighters could carry drop tanks. So THEIR time over the invasion bridgehead is limited this time, in the way that historically LW fighters were limited over London This time it's the Luftwaffe that are operating at short range fron their fields in France.

The problem is...the list of operational requirements for Fighter Command's fighters; they actually had half a dozen or so tasks laid out for them by priority - and they'll have those fewer than OTL fighters as mentioned above to carry them ALL out with.

Why would there be? The first wave was to go in just before full dawn IIRC - fighters would be worse than useless at that time! RAF monoplane dayfighters flying at night as nightfighters during the Blitz were only useful for morale purposes; MORE were actually destroyed or damaged in flying or landing accidents than they ever managed to damage or destroy GERMAN ones!

Actually - that was one of the LARGER planned German operations! In numbers of vessels, distance traversed across the supposedly-patrolled Channel, time spent in British waters etc..

As for the numbers of mines to be laid - mines CAN actually be laid in very large numbers in a short time! Some of the figures regarding the speed of laying and the mines laid in the German mines in front of the Skaggerak etc. are amazing - as are the numbers laid by the RN in the East Coast Mine Barrage.

Yes - "Sprawling Wargames" By Paddy Griffith...the man who organised the Sandhurst Game and IWM reconstructions! it's published as part of the "History of Warganing Project" ISBN 978-1-4452-0299-0. I should warn you - it ain't cheap! And you won't find it in your local librbary, nor possibly on Interlibrary loan.

Sign up to the British Library's ETHOS system on the Internet...look for theses by "Newbold" - then "pay" for the download - except its free!

1/ the British knew in complete detail when the Axis convoys would be leaving, and where they were heading for. The Luftwaffe - it was an LW-commanded operation to begin with, after all! - were kind enough to transmit FULL operational details for MERKUR about the place by Enigma-coded R/T transmission - unaware that the Luftwaffe's Enigma was long penetrated by the British! We had been already reading 40% or so of ALL their coded traffic - and the LW sent EVERYTHING by radio! - even as early as the BoB!

2/ Evading fall of shot from ships works...but isn't as effective as avoiding it dropping from aircraft overhead Also, it needs a very good turn of speed as well as sea room; which the Axis Crete convoys did NOT have!!! The majority of troopcarrying vessels in the convoys were Greek caiques...



...wooden hulled, with only a few knots' speed!

And I know you'll mention the barges at this point - but they'd been greatly reinforced by the Germans AND were steel-hulled anyway. The British carried out TWO sets of tests with the Fleet Air Arm's gravity ordnance, its "iron bombs" in the summer of 1940 - it discovered it needed "near misses" closer than 15 feet to damage or sink a barge! Which is really REALLy close accuracy for the early war period - when even Stuka pilots couldn't guarantee hits in less than 30 metres!

The issue for the Germans and combat attrition to the Luftwaffe suddenly isn't as big an issue as it would be for the British...

1 In JULY they still hadn't made good the losses in France and Norway...

2/ the landings....and previous air campaign against the RAF and its resources...would have impacted British fighter production, like the Hawker plant IN KENT at Brooklands building Hurricanes! OTL the Germans bombed the factory complex but his the Wellington production line in the sheds next door! By July none of the "shadow" factories were up and running, and Beaverbrook was still only cobbling together his Civilian Repair Organisation.

3. You have to look at the industrial output of France...belgium...Switzerland etc...to realise that suddenly, if there was an invasion and all those LDV/Home Guard volunteers who had been exempted from military service due their work in war industries would put on their uniforms....or in July their armbands!...and manned the barricades they couldn't go to work! War production would fall off a cliff.

 

Sorry LWD, the site made me post this in two bits!!!

Well - only if the British managed to find and destroy them, after all! Its FAR more likely to mean the end of the KM surface fleet

They can do what the British always feared they'd do, from September 1939 until they REALLY found out what the Germans were at...a fast "raid" aimed at London across the shortest distance on English ground But you'll need to read newbold for detail on this.

The other thing is - the Germans would of course have the capacity to move more than a division - but the whole effort would be more primitive - no time to ballast barges or reinforce them against enemy fire etc. - and they'd HAVE to take a port to make the whole thing practical...but the OTHER thing you'll see in Newbold if you haven't gathered it in the past from Fleming is - as of June and July virtually ALL British effort and concern was with Norfolk/East Anglia - the aforementioned shortest route to London for a "raid". Even as late as the 5th of September the Chiefs of Staff still weren't letting go of the East Anglia idea...

Just a quick aside - the "Emergency Batteries" had been built and armed as of late June and declaed "operational" by the ROYAL ENGINEERS...but in many places their gunnery offciers hadn't received RN training in how to use their RN gunlaying equipment, and as of mid-July hadn't conducted even their first training shoots!

 

Sorry LWD, the site made me post this in two bits!!!

Well - only if the British managed to find and destroy them, after all! Its FAR more likely to mean the end of the KM surface fleet

They can do what the British always feared they'd do, from September 1939 until they REALLY found out what the Germans were at...a fast "raid" aimed at London across the shortest distance on English ground But you'll need to read newbold for detail on this.

The other thing is - the Germans would of course have the capacity to move more than a division - but the whole effort would be more primitive - no time to ballast barges or reinforce them against enemy fire etc. - and they'd HAVE to take a port to make the whole thing practical...but the OTHER thing you'll see in Newbold if you haven't gathered it in the past from Fleming is - as of June and July virtually ALL British effort and concern was with Norfolk/East Anglia - the aforementioned shortest route to London for a "raid". Even as late as the 5th of September the Chiefs of Staff still weren't letting go of the East Anglia idea...

Just a quick aside - the "Emergency Batteries" had been built and armed as of late June and declaed "operational" by the ROYAL ENGINEERS...but in many places their gunnery offciers hadn't received RN training in how to use their RN gunlaying equipment, and as of mid-July hadn't conducted even their first training shoots!

 

Any point in mentioning that the British intended and planned to withdraw the Home Fleet to Canada rather than commit it to a battle that it might contribute to but be lost in the process....and thus NOT be around for the REST of the war???

And that in the summer of 1940 FDR was already trying to pressurize the Canadians to had it over to Washington if the British did so?

Actually - they came quite close for a week and a half at the end of August and the beginning of Seotemnber 1940, when if you plot the major airfield raids that closed airfields for a day or more on a map, it becomes clear they pretty effectively opened a corridor to London through Eleven Group This was the week and a half period when, spearheaded by Erprobungskommando210's new tactics, the Luftwaffe had returned for a short time to low-level fast, "no warning" raids on Eleven Group fields and did far more damage than the first time...

Unfortuantely, the Luftwaffe only did this TO give themselves access to London; but this was the period that forced Dowding to seriously consider withdrawing Eleven Group to north of London.

APART, that is, from the 1st of September 1940 when Goering told Student at Karin Hall that Hitler wasn't ever going to launch Sealion?

 

A lot of things were seriously considered. There was a war going on.

FDR and the US was not even in the war yet, so he can dream on. As to reshoring the home fleet to Canada, yes, of course it was also considered. But without any real allies, and with the loss of the UK (and its industry), there'd be no hope for the Commonwealth to continue the fight in any real, meaningful fashion anyway.

While I'd not mark Göring's ravings at any particular time as credible, there may be something to be said for it to be an attempt to bluff the UK. But if that was the case, then it, too, failed.

 

By the summer of 1940?

Let's see - they had sold the French a HUGE number of aircraft, some of which had arrived, many of which were on the high seas when the Armistice was agreed and they were redirected to the UK as the British bought them up, the British Purchasing Commission was ordering all manner of war materiel and weapons in the U.S, the USN was pressured by FDR to declare 50 old destroyers of no conceivable use to the defence of the U.S. so they could be transferred to the British in return for a netowrk of bases that completed their surveillance area on the Atlantic side of the Panama Canal, 1,000 WWI-era QF 75mm artillery pieces were remounted on modern single trail cariages with pneumatic tyres and transferred to the british along with stocks of HE and A/T ordnance, U.S. infantry weapons of ALL types were being sold to the British - including all the WWI era .303 "Enfield" pattern rifles from various manufacturers, their .300 equivalents, Thompsons, BARs, Private U.S. citizens and citizens' committees were buying up weapons privately and sending them to the UK for the new "LDV"...

...and was doing ALL this on an extremely "partial" basis - using the "Presdiential Exceptions List" to the Neutrality Laws - In other words FDR was trading with ONE side in the war but not the other.

A LOT of people - including FDR himself, Harry Hopkins, Tyler Kent, Winston Churchill etc. regarded this as the U.S. being "in" the war. They certainly weren't "out" of it! They were firmly taking sides.

 

Nations sell weapons all the time. Sometimes, they do not sell them to one side or another, all based on politics. That in no way shows any intent to actually join the fight. The US sold weapons. Primarily, FDR had to win an election.

Roosevelt summoned Canadian diplomat Hugh Keenleyside for a meeting (25th May 1940, 11:50 am). The President suggests that American and Canadian safety must now be the number one priority. Since Canada is still technically part of the British Empire, Roosevelt requests that the Canadian prime minister, Mackenzie King, persuade Churchill to send the Royal Navy to Canada rather than surrendering it to the Nazis. It's obvious what the US wants. Needless to say, PM King was rather aghast at the idea.

Somehow, you are suggesting that the US, which couldn't extend the 50 obsolete destroyers as a gift when originally asked, but Churchill would instead giveaway almost the entire Home fleet? When the UK was faced with an existential threat?

The president could not just simply decide to join the war. Non-interventionist sentiment persisted in Congress, and in the country. Charles Lindbergh, and the Sears-Roebuck millionaire Robert Woods where both powerful and vocal advocates of non-intervention. Selling weapons shows no intent of actually joining the fight, in the near term, in the least (and were it not for Pearl Harbour, which itself was 18 months away ...).

This was the Commonwealth's darkest hour, and the US was happy to make money, and tool up factories. Was this time needed, and put to good use? Yes it was. But let's be realistic: In May 1940, FDR could not guarantee he would win the upcoming election. He could not guarantee he would get the US to provide more "aid". Lend Lease was not yet even on the drawing board. Firstly on the 2nd of September, came the "Destroyers for Bases", and not until December 1940, when Churchill declared the coffers bled dry, was Lend-Lease proposed (17th December, signed March 1941).

FDR himself, as well as his Republican opponent Wendell Willkie both promised "never to send American boys to fight in any European war". So what, exactly should encourage the UK to strip away her most important national defence asset and lie prostate in the mud? Sheer gratitude from being allowed to purchase Lee Enfields?

The US were most certainly not in the war. Just because you don a supporter jersey, and stand on the side lines shouting encouragement, doesn't make you part of the actual team. Sweden sold steel to Germany. But Sweden was definitely not "in" the war. Was the sales of US equipment important? Of course they were. Was the good will tangible? Of course it was. But the US was ambivalent. At this stage of the war, it is not a foregone conclusion that the US will fight at all.

 

The US not being in may 1940 in the war ,was irrelevant for Britain ;what was relevant was that the US would be in the war in the very next future .The election of Willkie (the Republica, FDR) as opponent of FDR was only the final proof that the US would join the war . Goebbels wrote in his diary : we must finish the war with Britain very quickly,otherwise the US will intervene . The whole German strategy was founded on the certainty that the US would intervene .And so was the whole British strategy .

 

It was FDR's intent that it wouldn't be a "giveaway".... More a "take".

The U.S did NOT sell weapons to belligerents...by law; there was however the "Presidential Exceptions List"....which FDR made full use of in a partisan way. That's taking sides however you split it.

The depth of his personal invovlement with Churchill in the governance of the war through 1940 was almost entirely unknown in the U.S. at that point; but he was receiving the daily War Cabinet reports, Home Security Reports etc. via the U.S. State Department from the Foreign Office straight off Churchill's desk...and his comments and material coming the OTHER way was being decrypted in the U.S. Embassy in London - one particular member of which staff took umbrage at FDR's role...and the rest of the U.S. by proxy...in the war.

I see you missed the clue I gave you

Actually - it was already being discussed between the two leaders then. The "cash and carry" system continued because FDR couldn't deliver (sic) on Lend Lease....not because it wasn't understood in the Oval Office that the British needed it and Churchill was already repeatedly asking for it.

 

Just to add something about the Battle of Britain, I have a WWII book that states Britain had 2,300 Hurricanes alone by the time the Luftwaffe started attacking in the mid-late summer of 1940, and approx. half that amount in Spitfires. The section said Britain had fully mobilized their aircraft production at that time. That counters all the shows I've seen where its stated that Fighter Command had 700 fighters total, so either all those fighters were spread throughout the empire and in the Fleet Air Arm, or the book I have is flat out wrong.

 

First of all - is it a "WWII-era" book....or a book "about WWII"? Period books...and al other public sources...did tend to be coloured by official propaganda etc.

As for the rest - there is TWO issues at work here...

1/ how many aircraft Fighter Command had...and

2/ how many could the "Dowding System" the command-and-control system for ground Controlled Interception...handle? THIS was limited to 740-750 at any one time the length of the country...

And locally, in each Sector there was a limit on the number of aircraft that could be managed in the air until ALL aircraft were equiped with VHF radios (only starting at the start of the summer, only half done by the end of September...) - the "big" Sector station control rooms could IIRC only handle four squadrons at a time because HF radio only permitted them four separate radio channels at any one time

See the problem? The WHOLE Sector control room station, as of the start of the Battle of Britain - could only handle a certain number of squadrons....and thus a certain number of aircraft...up and down the ENTIRE length of the system; it was not, for example, 750 over Kent...

As for aircraft numbers - I'm not sure off the top of my head how many new builds that the Mnistry of Aircraft Production managed during the offocial campaign dates for the BoB...although I wouldnt be suprised that the manufacturing totals you mention are correct for the period from the start of July to the end of October. I.E

But you have to take into account aircraft lost, aircraft so badly damaged that though they returned to base they had to be struck off as opposed to being repaired, and the number destroyed on the ground....

...and the number of new builds....or older, worn-out aircraft...that were simply parked up in "Satellite Landing Grounds" BECAUSE the 51 squadrons of Fighter Command were up on establishment for aircraft at any given time. You didn't crowd a working, front-line airfield with ranks of unused aircraft, there were barely-equiped landing grounds - I live near the sites of two of them in Northern Ireland - where spare aircraft were stored....a fighter squadron had 12 aircraft rostered daily for operations + 4 for an "airfield defence flight" + 6 to 8 more to allow for swapping aircraft out for repair or regular servicing and "hours" checks etc. Thus a single fighter squadron had 22 to 24 aircraft....and on big, three-squadron Sector stations there would already be 72 plus several "cmmunications" aircraft...runabouts and hacks ....without having to accomodate any more!

So the ATS ferried aircraft around the country as necessary; from the factories or Beaverbrook's "Civilian Repair Organisation"'s car factories converted into major repair centres for battledamaged aircraft...."forward" to fighting airfields at night as combat loss replacements or "to the rear" for storage at the SLGs

And that's before you take into account that Fighter command was short of PILOTS to fly fighters, not the aircraft themselves... THAT was the real issue as the Battle progressed. The sheer number of aircraft being manufactured or repaired wasn't a problem....

 

The book is called World War II: A Visual Encyclopedia. Here's the excerpt: "By 7 August 1940, a few days before the Battle of Britain started, the totals had grown to 2,309 Hurricanes and 32 squadrons, compared with 19 squadrons of faster, but harder-to-build Spitfires."

 

Not according to the original post that I can see. I agree it is what the Germans wanted but there simply isn't time for it in the time frame posted.

They may not catch the first wave on the way in but possibly on the way out and/or the second wave. Then how do the paratroopers get resupplied.?

That particular effort may have been one of the larger planned but from the analysis I've seen of German mine laying capacity of the time the effort Sea Lion called for was if not beyond their capabilities certainly stretching them. Then there's that over tasking problem as some of these vessels were also the ones that were suppose to be sweeping mines at the same time. The time frame mentioned in the OP also creates some logistics issues here as well.

Thanks I'll see what I can find on it.

Actually I wasn't going to because the OP's time frame pretty much eliminated the barges from the equation. They simply didn't have the time to gather them much less make all the modifications. In any case how long did they wait to see if a barge sunk? Was this a test of immediate sinkage or did they give it a few hours? And were they modified like the German barges? I can see the possibility that the modifications actually made them somewhat more susceptible to shock damage (especially the kind that showed up over time).