German shock troops would have landed at Dover, dressed in British uniforms

Yesterday, Details of the plan to invade Britain emerge from a post-war debrief of a German soldier and are in an MI5 file made public at the National Archives.Cpl Werner Janowski was interrogated about his wartime work for the German Intelligence Service, the Abwehr:


German shock troops would have landed at Dover, dressed in British uniforms

Does anyone think it would have worked?

 

Dont know if you have seen the movie " Der Adler ist Gelandet"? It is abouthat topic and the Wehrmacht lost this fight. In my opinion was the movie not far away from reallity in that case.

Regards

Ulrich

 

Well, in the Bulge the main consequence of the "special" commandos was that from then any captured German soldier wearing clothes of the allies (rather better than the Germans, especially in late 1944) was shot.

Afik So it seems that there were more shootings than "special" commandos.
As I can, I'll hang a couple of photos.

Regards.

 

Unfortunately for the German's there was, unknown to them, a major naval command post under Dover castle, with a large garrison hidden in over 3 miles of tunnels and, to make matters worse for them, around Dover castle itself was a modern coastal battery with two 9.2 inch guns and four six inch guns.
So even if these special forces capture the docks the battery around Dover castle will sink anything which comes close.

 

I think the commando side of the operation would have worked had the British not have been alerted to the attack. The German commando's showed great combat abilities fighting across Europe and they were good at what they did, the problem for the Germans would still be the lack of Barges, the RAF and the RN, the problem was never taking Britain once on it, the problem was getting there.

 

The article focuses on air action, even suggesting that if their shock troops captured the Dover docks, their first step would be to inform the Luftwaffe (who are going to do what about it exactly?). It ignores the question of how either commandos or follow-on forces get across the Channel in the face of the RN.

 

It would have been doubtful that such a plan would've worked, for according to Maj. John Schrum,

Clear History of World War Two, As Seen Through The Eyes of The Warders, (@ page 471-72), By: Dean Louis Scinclaire, Copyright 1952, AEL Books (Defunct Re: 1958). -Cmd. Sgt. Maj. McKee

 

The concept of defence of the British Isles was based on a combination of Naval and RAF interdiction of the landing and any supply and reinforcement, and then a series of well designed, strong defensive lines moving steadily further up the country (much in the way Kesselring defended Italy). Getting ashore was the least of their problems.

 

The problem with the defense of Britain is although they are by no means short of men, they are short war materials for a full scale land battle against the Germans. Just look at what the Germans did to the Allies in France and in particular the MAginot line.

You can't compare the Tactics or the defensive stance taken by Kesselring in Italy to this, mainly due to the fact that in Italy the Germans employed well experienced troops, with good weaponry.

I do not believe the Britons would be able to stop the Germans, at least until they got to the scottish highlands, where the terrain would simply impair the German armoured units acting efficiently.

 

But that's the point, during the first 10 days of the invasion the German's only intended to land 9 infantry divisions, with some Panzers and very little artillery, so its going to be a slogging match where the British will hold the advantage in men, artillery, and tanks.

 

And the Maginot line was not the same sort of thing at all - the majority of the German attacks on it were from the rear. The comparison with Italy was purely to illustrate the progressive defensive lines tactic. In fact Kesselring was very poorly supplied in Italy with any quantity of weapons, as he believed he could hold with what he had, which turned out to be largely true. The majority of British regular troops in 1940 were of a high quality. Although the British were very short of Armour and anti-armour weapons, this was only for a fairly short period. The German defense in Normandy shows just what can be done with limited resources, and in the UK the advantage of the home field would have been felt.

In the numerous large scale wargames of the invasion carried out at RMAS, none of them concluded that the Germans would have been able to penetrate further than the GHQ line in any significant numbers. Those wargames may have had a certain amount of bias, but they were carried out in as unbiased and historically accurate way as possible.

If the air superiority the germans achieved to land was only local to the landing areas and the channel, then they would not have had any hope of making it as far as the Highlands of Scotland - which they would not have done anyway as it serves no strategic purpose. Pushing further North than the Northern part of the Midlands would be relatively pointless.

 

All in all it was a moot point even if the commandos managed to capture Dover docks, then what? Even if the RAF were a spent force there was still the Home Fleet to get past. The whole of Sealion was one of Hitler's more amateur plans, more wishful thinking than fact.

 

P.S. here is an example of the sort of quality troops available

 

No doubt, but the British were partly ready in France for the Germans and got hammered there, I doubt there forces with even less heavy arms would be capable of stopping the Germans indefinitely, no matter how many of the civilians raised up, I think it would only be a matter of time had the Germans actually figured out how to get across the channel easily.

 

If the Germans had managed to cross the channel within a week or two of Op dynamo, you may possibly have a valid point, however if you are considering the Germans crossing the channel during the period when historically they might have done (late September) then you are missing the point that British troops (and also Canadian) had extensively re-equipped and re-organised, prepared adequate defensive positions, and above all designed a defensive plan where the limited German resources available even in the worst case scenarios would have been unable to outflank the British troops in anything like the way they did in Belgium and France.

The problems of logistics, command and communication, along with the issues caused through poor international cooperation with the French and having to conform to their outdated ideas on manouevre warfare would have been largely absent in the UK after an invasion. The political problems with the issue of Belgian neutrality that put British and French troops into such an unfavourable situation in early 1940 would not have existed on the UK mainland.

To say the British troops got hammered in France is largely inaccurate. Firstly they were largely in Belgium, not France. They mostly withdrew in good order and when they did counter attack, they caused the Germans a great deal of concern. The strategic situation was the problem, not the tactical one, and the strategy was largely driven by the politics and the French doctrine.

Even if all the conditions for the German invasion were as good as they were for the allies in 1944, the Germans simply did not have enough transport capacity in 1940 to get adequate troops across the channel, let alone supply them after they were put ashore. It just couldn't have happened that way.

If the Germans had tried to invest London, the troops they had available would have been very quickly embroiled and spent - and if they had decided to bypass London, their flanks would have been too vulnerable to maintain supply during any operations further North or West.

 

The BEF was only ten divisions strong, and the nearly 200 German divisions broke through in a French sector, after that there was little the BEF could do but fall back

At the time of Operation Sealion the German navy had, 1 heavy cruiser, 3 light cruisers, 10 Destroyers and around 18 Torpedo Boats serviceable to defend the invasion fleet against the strongest navy in the world, it was never, ever, going to be easy.

 

I know, but the number of divisions the British could field would never be able to match the Germans at least numerically at this stage in the war.

I know that as well, I don't doubt the Germans were never going to be able to achieve a victory in the historical ww2 timeline, I was merely pointing out that had the Germans held a similar superiority the Allies had in 44 the Operation would have been different.

 

nearly 200 German divisions broke through?? Forces on both sides in 1940 were roughly equal - about 135 divisions each - as were forces in the crucial northern sector, about 75 divisions each, including Dutch and Belgian on the Allied side. The German breakthrough in the Ardennes and advance to the Channel coast was conducted by 13 panzer and motorized divisions, with leg infantry following up. Success was due not to sheer numbers but to German tactics and strategy, Allied (mainly French) shortcomings, and air superiority.

Getting back to Sealion, the issue is not how many troops the Germans had but how many they could get across the Channel and support in action. Delivering and supplying panzer units would be crucial. IMO their chances on the ground were good if they could maintain a steady flow of reinforcements and supplies into their beachhead - but that's an almost insuperable if.

 

Well the panzer units they could deliver much less supply over the beachheads were very limited. To get their amor and heavy artillery ashore they needed to secure an operating port. Since the British were prepaired to destroy the port facilities rather than see them captured and had the capability to do so getting a functioning port before their bridge head collapsed would be very problematic (i.e. the probability would be so close to zero as to not make any difference.).

 

I dont really think the British could have defended that well, as even their best ships could not take down Japanese aircraft which were far more vulnerable to fire than any German aircraft, and the Germans overcame far greater resistance than the French are ever given credit for.
In Rommel's papers, he talks about how the French forces would flank so aggressively that the German infantry which was to work with tanks would be split from the tanks by French pincers any time the Tanks got more than a half mile ahead. The French operated just outside the effective range of the armor, and would then be able to hit the infantry which followed.
Rommel also talks about times when there was nothing he could do to beat the French but to go around them. There was more than one time he had to bypass the French. The supposed tenacity that the British population had and the French did not, is a total fallacy. The French fought hard and effectively at a unit level, but the logistic situation on a nation level was horrendous, and the even though units had sucesses against German troops, they were in the wrong place for it to matter. The Germans would take casualties, get fed up, and go around. The French troops could have made counter attacks, except that they had no idea where to move or what to do. They just sat still or fled after the Germans bypassed them.
In order for the British to have defeated even a small number of tanks, they would have had to have a way of controlling the movements of units which was superior to the Germans, which is absolutely not the case. It doesnt matter if the British had 200 tanks a few miles from the Germans, if they didnt do anything when the Germans drive by them. The Germans had better radios, while the British could not supply radios in nearly as many numbers, and their tanks were not trained to make use of them at the time.
They didnt have any effective anti tank weapons at the time, except for whatever 2 pounder's they could manufacture after Dunkirk. They would have had to deploy them in fixed positions, and without the ability to notify the command when they engaged the enemy. They had suspended 6 pounder production in favor of the 2 pounder at the time, and their tank tactics were even worse than the extremely poor tactics used in Normandy. The British failed to create an effective form of combined tactics with tanks even by the end of the war, let alone after dunkirk. They would have been moved down piecemeal against concentrated German armor.
If you dont believe that a few Germans tanks could take on a huge force of British tanks, then you need to read up on North Africa. Even at the very end, the last dozen German tanks required several hundred Allied tanks to defeat, when the Germans had next to no supplies and the Allies could even burn gas on the ground to keep themselves warm at night. A few tanks could absolutely be used successfully against the even more pitiful force of tanks which Britain had in 1940.
The real issue here is how the Germans could have supplied themselves. Its quite possible they could have delived several thousand tons of supplies each day just by air. A single ship can carry several thousand tons, so it doesnt really take as many ships as many people believe. This isnt Stalingrad, the Germans had a large force of aircraft which could be used to transport materials, and they didnt have to fly nearly as far. During Stalingrad, the Germans were trying to deliver 1000 tons per day, but ended up only being able to carry a fraction of that. If they were to try the same thing in Britain, it would have been quite a bit easier, as the distance is a magnitude shorter and they had even more aircraft. It would have been technically possible for them to drop over 3k tons of supplies a day. Thats three times what Rommel requested for North Africa, and 9 times what was actually delivered. Just imagine a force several times better equiped than Rommel in NA, and against a force which was a fraction of the size of the Allied force in NA. The British would have been pummeled.