What would we have done?

There’s been an a major attempt at Eden rehabiliation, which was DR Thorpe’s biography. It’s a good read, which I highly recommend, and it make you somewhat sympathetic to the pre-1950 Anthony Eden, but it can’t do much about the post-1950 one.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0712665056/203-7929528-1453523

and also http://www.lrb.co.uk/v25/n10/john01_.html (subscription required)

What are the counterfactual narratives here? I remember a Len Deighton book, though I haven’t read it. Where do they come down on this issue?

#3

The Deighton book may have been “SS-GB”.

The SS police officer in charge of New Scotland Yard affects British-Style dress and all that.

They were called the Home Guard Auxiliary Units. There was a documentary on them recently on TV. They weren’t COs, though: they were generally recruited from the Home Guard itself.

I would hope that the British would have behaved slightly better than the French. I cannot imagine, for a start, a British general agreeing to rule a Vichy state in Britain, or the same revulsion occuring towards the British government as occurred in France towards the Third Republic.

There would also have been a nucleus of resistance by the fleet, which would have fled to Canada – which of course was a country in its own right, not a colony, and so would not have surrendered at the same time as Britain, as Algeria did when France fell. The Empire and Commonwealth would have survived.

Humanity doesn’t suck, it’s merely trying to be fruitful and multiply, to fill the earth and subdue it – exactly as it was order to behave at the beginning of this whole thing.

“was ordered” that is.

seldom mentioned now is the fact that The first American casualties in the European theater of the war were inflicted by French troops resisting the North African landings. I would like to think that even had England been conquered, the use of its troops to serve German ends would have remained inconceivable.

There’s a movie recently reissued on DVD (by the guys who did Winstanley), which portrays an England where most people collaborate. I doubt things would have been any different in the UK from France, and I’m sure they would have had no problem finding a general from the British army willing to collaborate. People forget how much support there was for Hitler among the haute-bourgoise before the war.

I’ve read that a significant part of the “French” resistence were in fact Spanish refugees. They had a strong incentive to fight against the nazis, since being captured would easily mean death.

DSW

#17 “…other occupied nations behaved a bit better than France. Denmark? Sweden? True? False?”

True behaved better than False, as is always the case.

Sweden wasn’t occupied at all, and the popular story about Danish king wearing yellow star is a myth.

to gar lipow…
Denmark had it’s own visible Nazi party that facilitated the German’s control. As a result the occupation of Denmark was less brutal than elsewhere and control was graduated and more subtle…it took the majority of Danes a while to figure out they’d made a Devil’s pact.

the ITV WOrld At War DVD series shows this well.

In general..
The British AU units are indicative that the Brits were prepared to not cave so quickly, at least in spirit. But the Germans had a very detailed plan of the UK–they wanted to maintain the police force and indeed the Monarchy. They wanted to preserve the UK as much as possible–they couldn’t afford a lot of trouble from the locals so they needed acquiescence. I think they would have gotten it too ‘cos in 1940/41 the UK was in quite desperate straights and the US hadn’t committed fully then. But I can imagine that after a few years of occupation a revolt would have been organized–with some US support and perhaps Russian too ( assuming the germans would have taken the Ukraine and reduced Russia having no longer to worry about the UK and mediterranean fronts. The relative isolation of the UK as an island would work both for and against both occupation and opposition. In a way resistance might actually have been more sustainable than was the case in Denmark and FRance. But I’m sure had the Germans invaded as they planned they’d have one and gained a very grudging capitulation. The UK would have been nothing but trouble in the long run, more trouble than the French Resistance–and I mean no disrespect to the French by that. Simple geography at least, imposed different options.

There is more involved here than just the lack of a strong French resistance in occupied France. The French gave up pretty early on in the land war against Germany and their capitulation, the formation of Vichy France and its accomodation of German interests, made the war much harder for the Allied forces. In particular, there is simply no reason the French Navy or French colonial territories had to be surrendered to Nazi control or become ‘neutrals’ in the fight. If those forces had continued to fight on, the African campaign would have been a lot easier for the allied forces, as well as the naval struggle in the Atlantic.

So if the British and American merchant marine want to hold it against the French for not fighting hard enough, I think that’s fair.

I don’t see why it’s unfair to cite the Channel Islands; the fact that the situation was adverse was precisely the point – they could have made heroic but futile gestures, but chose self-preservation instead. (And as I said, there were some acts of resistance, active and passive.) I’m not passing a moral judgement; I’m sure I would have done the same! But at the very least, the example of the Channel Islands provides no evidence that there would have been some sort of an innate tendency towards resistance to the Nazis in British culture or institutions, which is part of the myth of 1940.

I think, also, with the European resistance movements, the fact that Britain (and then the USSR and USA) was fighting on both gave them both some hope that their fight was worthwhile, and provided a conduit for practical assistance. That wouldn’t have been the case for Britain had it been conquered, or at least much less so.

The Len Deighton novel was of course SS-GB. There is also a very good novel Fatherland, by Robert Harris on the same theme. The real curve ball is of course ‘The Man in the High Castle’ by P.K. Dick which asks the question: what would the Americans have done if the Nazis (and the Japanese) had conquered THEM?

All these authors answer these questions in pretty much the same way: i.e. people would probably have just gone along with it. What people forget about the European resistence is that it relied upon external powers to help them to procure ammo, materiel, weapons etc, and that the vast majority of this (at least in the early years of the war) came from the UK. If Britain had been succesfully conquered and pacified, the European resistance movements would probably have just run out of steam. Likewise, if somehow the Nazis had completely conquered Europe and Russia (and the Japanese had taken Asia), and then, somehow, the USA had been defeated, where would the arms and ammo have come from for the American resistance? After a while (perhaps quite a long while admittedly) the US resistance would have been worn down too, and after that, most Americans would probably have gone along with the invaders. This is not to make a statement about the Americans or British, just to reiterate that we shouldn’t be too quick to judge those who collaborated when we haven’t faced the same difficult decisions ourselves.

The Brownlow/Mollo film has recently been released on DVD: It happened here. It’s an amazing film. There’s a truly disturbing sequence in the middle where they got a bunch of real British fascists to speak to camera. Another highlight is the newsreel sequence that includes the rewriting of the WWI Christmas day football match for pro-Nazi propaganda.

A large number of alternative history fiction and counterfactual “nonfiction” books and shorter work dealing with occupied Britain can be found at http://www.uchronia.net/bib.cgi/diverge.html?o=1000
and
http://www.uchronia.net/bib.cgi/diverge.html?o=1250,
as part of unchronia.net’s listing of alternate histories by date of divergence. Some of the listings obviously (from their titles) deal with this; others obviously don’t — and there are some whose main entries would have to be looked at.

Didn’t catch a typo in previous message: it’s http://uchronia.net. Best source of information on alternate history/counterfactuals, and among the best bibliographies on the Web.

Most americans have been instilled with a great since of pride in their country and would strongly agree with the phrase “live free or die”.

Well, if you believe Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5 (which is, of course, based on his experience being a POV), the American POVs were the most whiny and pathetic of them all.

Re #36: The entire French navy was left intact. That’s what I’m talking about. The germans won the land war decisively and it would have been a considerable sacrifice on the part of the french to continue fighting it. When the french agreed to surrender and form an ‘independent’ vichy france, the british were forced to conduct a surprise attack on a significant part of the french navy in a french harbor to insure the ships wouldn’t be used by the germans. The best part is that the french navy had the chutzpah to be indignant about it. The remaining portion of the french navy was destroyed by the germans in port after allied forces conquered north africa.

Also, I am sympathetic to the situation of occupied France, but these arguments that the british and the americans would have done the same and therefore the french should be forgiven just don’t fly. If germany had conquered england, the situation in europe truly would have been just about hopeless- that is a huge argument against useless resistance and you can’t use that argument to explain why first, the british wouldn’t have resisted and second, this makes what the french did okay. In comparison, the war was very much in doubt during france’s occupation. An active french resistance would have further sapped german resources, helping the allied cause.

that’s POW, of course, not POV. Damn abbreviations.

“say that France just “gave up”, especially considering that the British army and the RAF were pulled out of the fight”

I don’t think the army was “pulled out” – once the
Germans broke through, they had no choice but to
fall back towards the sea, and in such disarray
that they weren’t in a condition to put up much
of a fight. The choice to preserve
the RAF was deliberate, on the other hand, and
without that the Battle of Britain might well have
been lost and a German invasion might have been feasible.

I’m not sure a German invasion would have
succeeded: the Wehrmacht was tactically brilliant,
but I doubt their logistical ability to keep
adequate supplies flowing across the Channel.
The logistics involved in D-day and its aftermath were on a
vastly greater scale than anything the Germans ever did.

However, assuming the success of a German
invasion, I’m fairly sure there would have been
a sizable segment of the British population
prepared to accept a Vichy-like compromise,
while others, especially in the remoter areas, would have put up a fight.
Eden’s comment is wise.

Mpowell,

That narrative is quite wrong, actually. Churchill ordered the attack on Mers El Kebir over the objections of most of his senior admirals, who believed that the French fleet would not fight on the German side. The attack was botched, and the most valuable French ships escaped. The French Fleet later scuttled itself at Toulon in November 1942 to avoid falling into German hands.

If the French Navy didn’t join the Germans after Mers El Kebir, it’s pretty absurd to think they would have joined in its absence.

This doesn’t absolve the French Navy or Vichy France; I wish the French had joined the Royal Navy, regardless of political objections. But there’s no need to exaggerate the French failure.

“Don’t forget that a large fraction of the US believes that at some point in their lives they will have to make a choice to “live free or die”.”

Posted by jet

Oh, Bullsh*t. Most Americans are submissive; look at what happened to all of those militia whiners once Bush took over. They went from ‘I love my country but fear my government’ to ‘I {heart} the Imperial Executive’.

Barry,

You are smoking crack if you think they are that blindly loyal to the Republican party. They dread the that Bush’s worse-than-Clinton expansion of federal power falls into the hands of the left. Hit up ar-15.com sometime to see how the gun toting far right sees Bush.

Not sure the situation in Europe would have been hopeless if UK had surrendered – at least not in the sense that Nazism would have prevailed. It is a matter of fact that Germany was beaten by Russia. Yugoslavia is also instructive since it more or less liberated itself. Europe would have been completely dominated by Soviet-style communism, of course. In that sense, the importance of Churchill for the survival and revival of western-style democracy cannot be overestimated.

Jet: ‘live free or die’? As exemplified by the current sheep-like conformity to corporate indenture? Or by the extraordinary range and variety of political discourse?

You are smoking crack if you think [libertarians] are that blindly loyal to the Republican party.

When freedom is outlawed, “libertarians” will be saying “life was worse under Clinton”.

Rob, Mers el Kebir wasn’t botched, not in the military sense. Some RN admirals thought that the MN could be trusted never to go over to the Germans, but others (notably and rather crucially Pound) did not. Churchill may well have been misinformed about one important issue, though: in his later autohagiography, he claims that French naval assets in the north were surrendered to advancing Germans troops without a fight, which could not be further from the truth. Perhaps he invented that later – there’s no evidence in his papers that he actually thought it at the time.

In the event, Cunningham (too senior to sack) disobeyed Churchill’s orders, ignored the deadline, and got a local deal which immobilsed the MN squadron in Alexandria. Somerville followed them, and attacked on time at MeK – at least partly because Gensoul, his opposite number, misrepresented the severity of the British ultimatum in his cable to Paris. That attack worked: 1 battleship destroyed, 2 knocked out for a year or more, 1 slightly damaged in situ, 1 escaped to Toulon. It was the subsequent attempts to destroy Richlieu at Dakar which were screwed up royally.

As for the later scuttlings in Toulon, who cares? By the end of 1942, the smart money was coming round to the Allies winning, and French attitudes had (accordingly?) changed. In the summer of 1940, most people worldwide thought that Germany had already won and that was that. Mers el Kebir was not only the military blow that preserved the UK’s invulnerability to invasion, it was a very definite political statement; a boat-burning exercise.

One more point, which just occurred to me. Jet’s point only holds, of course, if people perceive what is happening to them as an invasion. But of course, in the real world, things can be ‘spun’.

For example, take ‘the glorious revolution’ of 1688, which has long been seen (by the English) as a wonderful and fantastic event in the history of England, much better than the French revolution in which English men threw off yada yada yada.

The actual facts of the matter was that 1688 was an invasion by the Dutch, which succeeded because of the various quislings and traiters in the English aristocracy, who had a near pathological hatred of Catholicism.

And so it has been taught for many centuries, and it’s only recently that historians have shown that the ‘received version’ is victor’s propaganda. (even now many people will tell you with a straight face that the last time the UK was invaded successfully was 1066).

In the same way if the US WAS ever invaded it is highly unlikely that it would be ‘spun’ as an invasion. Instead it would be perceived as a defence (of the constitution probably) with, perhaps, natural born American patriotic protestants merely being helped by our German friends, protecting the constitution against a coup d’etat (by the Jews? the ‘negroes’?) attempting to install a pro-communist government via the usual judeo-bolshevik sneakiness.

Thus a German invasion (or coup d’etat) could be masked as a DEFENCE of democracy or at least of the Republic (this is the idea behind the Revenge of the Sith, as my fellow nerds will know).

Did I dream that I heard a Radio 4 documentary about them?

You didn’t, and you can Listen Again.
Here’s the Real Audio link for the broadcast. And for those who don’t have Real installed, here’s the programme blurb on the BBC site.

On Eden, he had a very good war. He got Munich right; he effectively handled not only Churchill but also de Gaulle. The reason his reputation is mud is nothing to do with that, and everything to do with Suez.
( … and Proyect, you tool, if you must talk about Iraq, that was your opening. Spare us your crass equivalence between the Resistance and the insurgency.)

It must be remembered that occupation by a foreign power was not a rare event for the population of continental Europe. We think of it as a terrible tragedy and humiliation but most European countries have been invaded and occupied several times (England being a sort of exception). Probably it was seen as not the end of the world but as something ugly and unpleasant that one had to live with for a while. The experience of WWI (huge casualties, destruction, etc.) probably had some weight too. Also, it was not unreasonable to think that the war was probably over; France had fallen and England wasn’t in a great position. The catastrophic decisions to invade the USSR and declare war to the USA happened later and they were completely unexpected.

Jet,

The reason that we think that use of mustard gas to prevent the German horse-drawn artillery from getting anywhere is unimportant is because it was.

The German landings – based on barges with a six-inch freeboard drawn from Rhine service – were simply impossible, even without the Royal Navy taking a hand. The English Channel’s weather would have done the job.

A surrender by the UK was possible. An invasion wasnt.

And as for collaboration – yeah, it would have happened.

Ian Whitchurch

abb1:

J.G. Ballard, writing about his childhood experience of Japanese P.O.W. camps (Empire of the Sun), takes just the opposite line, contrasting the grit and self-sufficiency of the American P.O.W.s with the whiny helplessness of the British.

Maybe Ballard and Vonnegut should get together sometime to compare impressions.

Hadn’t known there was anything secret about the UK Home Guard but certainly when it came to the units that were openly preparing to defend London, veterans of the Spanish Civil War including Tom Wintringham and George Orwell, made considerable efforts to prepare their fellow Londoners for a house-by-house defense against the Germans. Orwell wrote repeatedly that control of the London Home Guard should be removed from the hands of the WWI generation, not only for reasons having to do with his political views, but also because their experience of trench warfare had not prepared them to defend a major city.

Actually Orwell, though he had fought bravely in Spain by all accounts, was a mechanical klutz and caused an artillery accident during training that nearly killed a fellow member of his Home Guard unit.

…contrasting the grit and self-sufficiency of the American P.O.W.s with the whiny helplessness of the British.

Sure, it just shows you that generalizing about huge groups of people (based on “live free or die” motto or whatever) is probably not a good idea.

Yo 16. “In Tim Powers’ Last Call, what we see of the resistance (which isn’t all that much, that part of the story doesn’t take up that many pages) is pretty leftist and marginal.”

You may have the wrong book there. Just reread it recently and it’s all about the Fisher King and gambling for souls in Las Vegas.

Also just saw It Happened Here”.

It’s a stunning work, especially when you realise it was made by two teenagers with fuckall money. While it never explains how the Nazis took Britain, it paints an utterly believeable picture of how life in Albion would have gone on under their regime. The British way of dealing with the final solution is an utterly chilling climax, especially because it unfolds in such a hints and glimpses documentary way.

And for how Germany could have taken the UK pre WW1, check out Saki’s forgotten novel “When William Came”. Towards the end, an old Tory matriarch advises the upper class huntin’, shootin’, fishin’ and ridin’ protoganist to become a commercial traveller as the best way of travelling around formenting resistance to the Hohenzollerns.

Also, apparently it was Colonel FM Bailey who was tasked with forming the Brit stay behind guerilla version of the Nazi Werewolves (The Badgers?) in SE England should the Krauts get through Winnie’s plan to pump oil into the English Channel and then set it ablaze.

Orwell touched upon this issue in some of his essays and letters from the early fourties. I am at work and do not have the book at hand but his general feeling was that the rich and decently well off would quickly surrender and that many of these people indeed had sympathies for the German side. I’ll have to go back and check on the details but in any case, I highly recommend The collection of Orwell writings called “My Country Right or Left-1940-1943 Collected essays, etc.” I ripped through this thing like a cheap novel and so much of it remains relevant.

There’s another factor as well. If Britain had capitulated under invasion, what’s the likelihood that a puppet government would have entered the war in the Pacific on the Japanese side after Pearl Harbour?

One argument says that Hitler was never very likely to press home an invasion of Britain because there weren’t enough Jews there. He wanted to kill Jews so the USSR was the place to go.

Before 1941 their preferred solution was to expel Jews, not to kill them. Something like 70-80% of the German and Austrian Jews emigrated or were expelled. So, even assuming that everything the Nazis did was about the Jews (which it wasn’t, of course), the logical conclusion would have to be the opposite – that they would’ve actually preferred to invade a country without Jews.

Just because Sealion was militarily impossible (which it was), doesn’t mean that it was necessarily a conscious bluff rather than a serious intention. Hitler ordered a lot of militarily impossible operations in his time.

“it was revealed that in the ‘60s some surviving Nazi generals and the British wargamed ‘Operation Sealion’. The result was that the invasion failed. As long as the British could keep hold of their navy they could have harried and, eventually, cut off, any German invasion force, which would then eventually have been slowly destroyed by a process of attrition.”

The key is air power. Ships without air support
were sitting ducks, as shown by the rapid
destruction of “Prince of Wales” and “Repulse”
off the coast of Malaya. *If* the Luftwaffe
could have destroyed the RAF, then the Royal
Navy would not have been able to operate for
long – especially in the confined waters of the
Channel.

In this regard, the Germans made two bad mistakes:
first taking their focus away from attacking
airfields in order to bomb London; and second,
failing to build any heavy four-engine bombers.
The short range of their fighters was also a
problem – they could only fight over England very
briefly (20 minutes ?) before having to get back
across the Channel.

With slightly better weapons *or* slightly better
leadership, the RAF could have been wiped out.
But even without the RAF and the Royal Navy, I
think the logistics of supporting a large invasion
force across 20+ miles of stormy water might
have been beyond Germany’s capability. They would
have needed to capture a good port quickly, and
also get together a lot of shipping. All in all,
a dicey proposition.

Isn’t there something a populace needs in addition to a “fighting spirit” in order to wage a resistance? I’m thinking, um, bullets?

When I think of Europe, I think “land of no guns.” Maybe this is wrong, but I remember one of the biggest shocks that British troops had when they came to the US was that when they went into the countryside, colonists were almost universally armed and would take potshots at them (taking an ungentlemanly aim at the officers!).

One can talk about an Iraqi “fighting spirit,” but I imagine it would have been greatly diminished had the Coalition effectively secured all the munitions dumps in the first days of looting. (of course, the Coalition would have had to control the borders as well)

All I’m saying is a lot of options may have been closed off to a French Resistance in the first days, if the Germans did a good job nailing down the ammo. Don’t forget, guerilla warfare was harder back in those days, too–bombs were harder to make, harder to hide and deploy, and did less damage.

I can see where armed resistance is a very path-dependent thing, and less about toughness or national character than it is about opportunity. And hell, it’s not always the winning option. Look at Montreal and Quebec. The French lost that war, and the place has been English longer than it was ever French. Not that you’d know by walking around. So, really, who won the war?

As Brendan notes in #59, the determining factor for the success of any occupation is its legitimacy. If it can be adequately justified, with at least a window-dressing of legality, the populace will seize upon that as sufficient reason for their acquiesence. Resistence is a very costly alternative to acquiescence.

For example, the Supreme Court of the United States
gave the Bush junta enough legitimacy to seize power; and, as most Americans looked to the Court for legal justification, we agreed to accept the coup as a fait accompli.

Chris,

Mers El Kebir was botched militarily; the only ships of consequence at MEK were Dunkerque, Strasbourg, and the six French super-destroyers. Dunkerque was damaged, but eventually managed to make it to Toulon. Strasbourg and five of the super-destroyers escaped without damage. The ships destroyed and heavily damaged included obsolete French dreadnoughts that wouldn’t have affected the course of the war in any case.

Moreover, my point stands; there is no evidence that the French would have gone over to the Germans. If they didn’t go after Mers El Kebir (and they didn’t) then they just plain weren’t going to join the Axis.

Finally, the point about Toulon was to contradict the earlier assertion that the Germans sank the French fleet, which is completely inaccurate. The Germans were trying to capture the French fleet when the French sailors scuttled it.

Brendan, I thought it was Google that was bringing us world domination (though one pundit has pointed out that it would be in beta perpetually).

If I get what you’re saying, basically the wargaming showed that Germany didn’t have the resources to do their own version of DDay?

Rob, Provence and Bretagne (and Lorraine FWIW) were extensively reconstructed in the mid 1930s: new AA and engines. Are you getting confused with Paris and Courbet, unreconstructed dreadnoughts stormed in British habours in July 1940?

Dunkerque was knocked out for a year or more, which is what the RN needed, given that it had 5 more battleships on the way.

I take your point that we now know that the balance of opinion inside the MN was overwhelmingly to scuttle if ever there were orders from Paris to take up the fight on Germany’s behalf [see Martin Thomas ‘After Mers-el-Kebir: The Armed Neutrality of the Vichy French Navy, 1940-43’ in English Historical Review, Vol. 112, No. 447 (Jun., 1997) , pp. 643-670].

But that was not clear in London in June 1940, and Churchill and Pound were in no mood to leave intact the only weapon that could conceivably have made Sealion possible. Read Churchill’s papers, and this becomes clear. More here:
http://www.open2.net/historyandthearts/history/one_transcript_page4.html

[Yes, I know it’s Michael Portillo. But he didn’t write the script.]

A couple of points:
1). Even if the Luftwaffe had beaten the RAF and secured air supremacy over southern England, a German invasion of Britain in late Sept/Oct 1940 would have probably have failed for two reasons, both involving the time of year.
A. The increasingly long nights would have given the destroyers and torpedo boats of the Royal Navy excellant cover for destroying the slow moving barges the Germans were relying on to supply the invasion force. To save their supply fleet, the Germans would have had to restrict its operations to daylight only, which would probably have crippled their ability to get enough supplies to the Invasion Force to succeed or even to hold any beachhead.
B. The increasing severe Channel storms of Autumn would have also have severly restricted the ability of the Germans to re-supply at a high enough rate their invasion force.

2). The Germans did not have to conquer Britain directly to force the UK govt to surrender. A successful U-Boat campaign may well have starved Britain into surrendering. Indeed in the winter of 40-41 & 42-43, the U-Boats came close, particularly on the second occasion to doing just that. Also a successful German conquest of the Middle East, taking first the Suez Canal and then Iraq & Iran, where Britain’s oil came from, would have probably forced the British to terms. Rommel may well have done this had he been given a tenth of the force that was committed to the invasion of Russia.

3) The French did surrender rather quickly in 1940. Moreever unlike all the other nations the Nazis conquered, excepting Denmark, France did not just surrender militarily and send a govt-in-Exile to Britain, it surrendered politically as well. Vichy France was the legal and constitutional sucessor to the Third Republic. DeGaulle and his followers were deserters.
Also the Vichy govt collaborated far more enthusastically with the Nazis in turning over Jews for the Death Camps then any other govt in Western Europe including Fascist Italy.

This last point should be remembered in the next 20 to 50 years as Western Europe decides whether to resist or surrender to the onslaught of Militant Islam. So far, the picture is not a very encourging one. At the current rate, I believe Sir Bernard Lewis’ statement that Western Europe will be Islamic by 2100 is likely to be correct.

Richard – sorry, I failed to make myself clear. Once the RN’s sunk all the German navy, which would take about two days, then it only needs to have one destroyer left to cut the German army off from any meaningful resupply. It’s worth noting as well that single RN destroyers did cause significant damage to German major units in 1940 – Gneisenau was not available for Sealion becuause of damage from a torpedo from HMS Acasta, for example. Bismarck wasn’t either: although commissioned, it needed a lengthy working-up cruise in the Baltic before being made ready for its first (and as it happened, last) sortie in spring 1941.

That’s all from me. If you still think it’s a goer, take it to soc.history.what-if and see how long you last.

It’s good to see that ‘Alien Space Bats’ employed in its intended context.