It's alive!
Das Morbo, thank you for bringing this thread out of its deathly slumber! That gave me the stimulus to refresh my memory and read in more depth about the Battle of Britain and the Lend-lease program to the Soviets in WWII.
I might even agree with you that the Reich was close to "winning" in the Battle of Britain. But not nearly close enough for just a little more luck or effort, and not a decisive victory by any stretch - not unless the Germans committed much more forces and resources, which I don't think they could do in a reasonable time frame, even if they wished to (and they clearly didn't).
That "Fighter Command was on its knees" makes for a dramatic statement, but I don't think it is supported by the facts. Even at the height of the fighting the overwhelming majority of the fighter bases hit managed to become operational again within a couple of hours; none was taken out of action completely. And really no amount of additional persistence would lead to a major shift in the situation - and the map at the link below will help to explain why:
Battle of Britain map from Wikipedia
The blue arcs at the southern "foot" of Britain designate the range of Bf 109 fighters operating from France - I guess without any drop tanks, which did not become widely available anyway. Even with drop tanks most of Britain would still remain well beyond the extended range of Bf 109s, and given the failure of Bf 110s as escort fighters, any bombers trying to hit the more distant bases would likely suffer unsustainable casualties (as the Germans learned to their dismay when they tried bombing North England in force). Those same bases (and any additional ones that could be built) gave RAF's Fighter command relatively safe fallback positions, that would still allow them to remain relevant in the fight - something that seems to escape the notice of quite a few commentators. So, quite literally, there was a long way for the British fighters to go until their backs were against the proverbial wall.
And this lack of sufficient German fighters range was not something that had just "happened". It was a logical consequence of the conscious strategic choice to build the Luftwaffe for supporting ground troops. In all fairness, for the countries that did build their Air Forces for long range strategic bombing, the results probably did not live up to expectations; and it took years to develop successful long-range escort fighters.
It is also interesting to examine the claim that the RAF was just weeks from collapse. I think I may have found the source of these, and, as often seems to be the case, the original statements (made in the 1950s and 1960s) have likely been "severely distorted in transmisson". Analyzing the period of most intensive fighting between August 24 and September 6, 1940, the historians had pointed out that during those two weeks the RAF had been losing more fighters and pilots than it had been replacing, with one author remarking that "three more weeks of such a pace would have exhausted existing aircraft reserves". This conditional statement appears has been elevated out of context to the status of revelation, which, of course, ignores the fact that at the same time the Luftwaffe was also bleeding dry, and the "pace" of these two weeks was simply not sustainable by either side - all the while, as noted above, the RAF had a fallback option that the Germans could not effectively deny them.
All in all, at the end of the active phase of the Battle of Britain, the RAF had more pilots and planes than at the start, while the Luftwaffe had less - and that is a strong indication how a more prolonged campaign would have developed. A strong contributing factor was the fact that most of the combat was over British soil, so that a shot-down British fighter pilot had a much better chance of being saved and recovered in a relatively short time, while a German one had to hope to make it to France (or at least to the Channel and then not die from drowning or exposure).
So, in short, I think we can dismiss total Luftwaffe superiority over Britain as highly unlikely (given all the constraints of reality at the time). But even if we "gift" it to the Germans as a mental exercise, a quick and decisive victory still seems far from a foregone conclusion. Even with the massive amounts of resources that the US and Britain devoted to their strategic bombing campaign, it took years before the effect of attacks on military production facilities began to tell, and the morale of the German population stayed strong enough right until the end. I see little evidence that Germany could have mounted a similarly-sized or much more effective campaigh over Britain, so I don't think they could have crippled British industrial production or pounded the population into submission in a reasonable time frame.
As for attacks on the Royal Navy, I am afraid the actual Luftwaffe record is not that impressive to support the idea that they could fully interdict large-scale RN operations. More knowledgeable forum members may correct me, but I fail to remember any British warship larger than a destroyer sunk by German air attack, and it was only from mid-1943, when the guided bomb "Fritz-X" became operational that the Luftwaffe appeared capable to seriously damage modern, battle-ready capital ships. I am afraid that in 1940 and even later the Luftwaffe was simply not up to the level of early-1941 IJN naval avaiation that did manage to sink British capital ships in the Far East - but then again, Luftwaffe was not designed and trained for that purpose.
For merchant shipping - the Luftwaffe was and could be effective in the coastal waters of mainland Europe, but just lacked the "legs" to effectively reach into the Western Approaches and further into the Atlantic; that's why the Luftwaffe merchant tonnage "score" was a fraction of that achieved by the U-boats. Even so, as I've already mentioned in a previous post of mine, a "whole new level" of operations against convoys would not be enough - several "new levels" of effectiveness would need to be attained in order to make a meaningful difference.
Finally, please, note that at no point in my deliberation do I need the switch to bombing London to actually happen. Even without it, the whole logic of attrition would have led to similar results, just the timeline and the casualty amounts might differ. In general, I am very sceptical of claims that single actions or bad decisions turn history around 180 degrees. Cases where that can be reasonably argued are rare and far between. For the more particular case of the Reich in WWII, in my opinion, the trend of strategic failure is just too strong to attribute solely to individual mistakes. After the victory in France and the occupation of Yugoslavia and Greece (with the latter two being relative lightweights), Germany had some very impressive battlefield successes and outstanding campaigns, but lacked a clear and decisive strategic victory, one that would set the course of war on a particular theater conclusively in its favor. Apart from the failure to knock Britain out of the war, the Battle for Atlantic was decisively lost; the Afrika Korps failed to break through to the Suez canal; Moscow, Leningrad, Stalingrad and the Caucasus oil fields were not taken; the beachheads in Normandy, and Anzio (and elsewhere for that matter) were not crushed; to cap it off, the Ardennes offensive also failed. Now all those can't possibly be all due to single errors - they rather point to "systemic problems".
So what the Germans could potentially do to mount a successfull invasion of Britain? In my mind, to stand a reasonable chance, for a start they should have stopped severely underestimating the strength, capability, resources and resolve of Britain as whole and RAF in particular. To wit - the intitial expectation was for the RAF to be effectively destroyed in 4 days! During the Battle of Britain, both sides seemed to have overclaimed enemy lossess by a factor of three; but while the British overestimated German strength (so things kind of balanced themselves out), the Germans kept underestimating British strength, so they kept being unpleasantly surprised by the British resilience continually denying them their "rightful" victory. So, in essence, to hope to win the German command should have recognized the need for and achieved a Barbarossa- or D-Day level concentration of force, and that would have taken time - after all, the Luftwaffe has lost almost 30 percent of its strength in the otherwise successfull France campaign. Even before the scale of the underestimation (by the Germans of the British) was fully clear, Admiral Raeder had claimed that a successfull invasion force could not be prepared before Spring 1941. So time and effort was needed, the same time that Britain (and Uncle Joe at the other end of the continent) could have used to strengthen themselves, too.
And a potential Sea Lion would also have more serious drawbacks compared to the D-Day invasion - it would go into an area where the population would be openly and undeniably hostile; and it would not have had the "training runs" that were the Allied landings in North Africa, Sicily and Italy.
And, by the way, Hitler himself seemed to have realized that a large scale invasion was impossible - he is reported to have stated "even a small invasion could go a long way", so essentially he was relying mostly on British morale collapsing.
And now for something completely different... or maybe not.
The issue of the role of Lend-Lease in the fight on the Eastern Front is so polarizing and hotly debated, that it would probably take a whole new thread without leading to a majority-accepted conclusion (and this post is quite long as it is). So I will try to be brief and present my arguments with as little discussion as possible.
- The Lend-lease to the Soviets came overwhelmingly from the US, not Britain, so even knocking the latter out of the war would not necessarily preclude all help.
- Losing the British Islands does not necessarily mean that all parts of the Commonwealth would go out of the war, as well - unlike Vichy France that fairly easily subordinated its colonial empire to the Axis, Britain demonstrated unequivocally it was not ready to just roll over and beg. So at least some lend-lease supply channels will likely stay open - after all, Iran at the time was occupied not only by British, but Soviet troops, as well. Even if we British were to be called back, the Soviets would stay and secure the channel.
- The Battle for Moscow is considered by many to be the single event that settled the war winner question for good. The Lend-lease agreement with the Soviet Union was signed in November 1941, when the battle was already on, so the Soviets won it all on their own. Arguments that the 1942 summer German offensive could have turned the tide if only it had concentrated on one target tend to ignore that fact that to get to the major oil fields the Wehrmacht would have had to push through a mountain range as high as the Alps, and that at Stalingrad there was no effective way to stop Russian reinforcements coming from the east - in the end there were two whole fresh fronts just on the other bank of the river waiting to pounce (which they eventually did).
- The large majority of Lend-lease help to the Soviet Union came in after mid-1943, and by that time the writing was on the wall, anyway. For example, out of the approximately 12 000 tanks the Russians got, less than 2 000 seem to had arrived in 1941 and 1942.
So essentially the Soviets passed their worst crisis of late 1941 without any significant Lend-lease help, and in 1942 the facilities relocated to the east started coming on-line and ramping production in a big way. Just to put things in perspective, compared to the 12 000 Lend-lease "tanks" (which number might include tank detroyers, SPGs and other AFVs), the USSR started the war with probably about 20 000 tanks and produced 72 000 more tanks (out of 95 000 AFVs) during the war years. With or without Lend-lease, then, the Soviet Union would not collapse by 1942 - again, short of catastrophic breakdown in population morale and/or government, for which (as in the case of Britain) I don't see sufficient evidence.
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