Minden amit a II. világháborúról és a Harmadik Birodalomról tudni lehet
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robgros #12208 Angol BBC History-ból egy részlet:
Britain’s future hung by a thread in
the summer of 1940. Germany had
the military capability to successfully
transport troops across the Channel
and seize parts of southern England. All
that was required, argues historian Robert
Forczyk in a new book on the subject, was
for Hitler to give the invasion the green light.
Forczyk’s book looks set to raise eyebrows
because it flies in the face of received
opinion. Many historians now believe that
Operation Sealion – as the German invasion
of Britain was codenamed – was severely
compromised by the Royal Navy’s superiority
over the German Kriegsmarine. Hitler,
they contend, recognised this and so used
the apparent threat of an attack as a ploy to
bring Britain to the negotiating table. In
short, Sealion was, at least in part, a bluff.
Not so, argues Forczyk. “Sealion has
always been derided as a rather hollow
threat, because the German navy lacked the
strength to conduct it and Hitler was
unwilling to risk the failure,” he says. “Yet
the fact that the operation did not
happen, does not mean that it could not
have happened.”
After examining a wealth of naval
records, logs and war cabinet meeting
minutes, Forczyk has concluded that, had
Hitler decided to proceed, Britain would
have been hard-pushed to resist. German
ships, he says, could certainly have
reached British shores, as Nazi naval
capabilities were much stronger than
historians have recognised.
Key to that strength were German
invasion barges. “Many of these were
armed with 20mm flak guns and
howitzers: they were far from the slapdash
sitting-ducks of popular perception,” he
says. “And while the German navy had
few destroyers to deploy in the Channel,
it did have large numbers of light warships
to protect the barges from attack.”