my understanding is that yes, the battle for air superiority over Britain was nearly won by Germany.
However, I don’t think Germany was ever close to Naval superiority e.g. the Bismark was sunk within 8 days of its first offensive operation. This was August of 1940, before Britain had won air superiority. Naval superiority is pretty important for landing craft. Oh, in the topic of landing craft how would Germany have actually transported enough troops? Also the geography/topography of southern England is more defendible (cliffs of Dover).
I can’t easily find how many Axis troops were being used to defend Europe’s Atlantic coast, but it seems that Hitler had imagined using 300,000 as part of his Atlantic Wall, and that the he had fallen short of that. Britain evacuated 338,000 troops from Dunkirk. That number of troops being used defend the cost of southern England is um a lot.
Also, I think you’re misrepresenting the alliance with the Soviets. Nazism was inherently anti-communist and Stalin knew that war was a matter of time. By the time the Nazis could have built sufficient landing craft for an invasion Stalin would have finished his purge/reorganization of the Red Army. As soon as those boats got wet the Red Army would have been rolling towards Berlin.
Honestly, I think it would have greatly shortened the war, at the cost of more of Europe being subjected to Soviet domination.
I’m not a historian, but here goes:
my understanding is that yes, the battle for air superiority over Britain was nearly won by Germany.
However, I don’t think Germany was ever close to Naval superiority e.g. the Bismark was sunk within 8 days of its first offensive operation. This was August of 1940, before Britain had won air superiority. Naval superiority is pretty important for landing craft. Oh, in the topic of landing craft how would Germany have actually transported enough troops? Also the geography/topography of southern England is more defendible (cliffs of Dover).
I can’t easily find how many Axis troops were being used to defend Europe’s Atlantic coast, but it seems that Hitler had imagined using 300,000 as part of his Atlantic Wall, and that the he had fallen short of that. Britain evacuated 338,000 troops from Dunkirk. That number of troops being used defend the cost of southern England is um a lot.
Also, I think you’re misrepresenting the alliance with the Soviets. Nazism was inherently anti-communist and Stalin knew that war was a matter of time. By the time the Nazis could have built sufficient landing craft for an invasion Stalin would have finished his purge/reorganization of the Red Army. As soon as those boats got wet the Red Army would have been rolling towards Berlin.
Honestly, I think it would have greatly shortened the war, at the cost of more of Europe being subjected to Soviet domination.