Finest Hour

Iain Ballantyne notes a discussion of Britain’s “Finest Hour” regarding the relative value of the contribution of the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force to Britain’s survival in 1940 and 1941. Ballantyne:

Certainly the German fleet was not up to the job of fighting off half a dozen British battleships, scores of destroyers and dozens of submarines. The battle-hardened Royal Navy would have ripped the German invasion ships to pieces.

I am deeply sympathetic to this perspective. Even with only partial fighter cover, the Royal Navy could easily have disrupted a German invasion fleet. Ballantyne notes that most of the heavy units of the Kriegsmarine had been damaged by the Royal Navy in early 1940, and would not have been available for action in Sea Lion. Any German invasion fleet would have faced not only the capital ships of the Royal Navy, but groups of cruisers and destroyers that might have proved an even more dire threat to any amphibious landing. Every Allied amphibious assault, Atlantic or Pacific, enjoyed massive local naval superiority, and only the invasion of Normandy would have rivalled the requirements of a German invasion of Great Britain.

The Royal Air Force certainly played a critical role in defending the United Kingdom from attack in World War II. But it was the Royal Navy that prevented invasion, just as it had in the Napoleonic Wars and so many times before.