Operation Sea Lion
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"The German invasion of England took place in July 1940 after the British retreat from Dunkirk. Strongly resisted at first, the German army took many months to restore order. But the resistance movement, lacking outside support, was finally crushed. For three years it lay dormant. Collaboration increased as the population became adjusted to the tedium of occupation... Then, in 1944, the resistance movement reappeared ..."--It Happened Here (1964) by Brownlow and Mollo |
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Operation Sea Lion, also written as Operation Sealion was Nazi Germany's code name for the plan for an invasion of the United Kingdom during the Battle of Britain in the Second World War. Following the Fall of France, Adolf Hitler, the German Führer and Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, hoped the British government would seek a peace agreement and he reluctantly considered invasion only as a last resort if all other options failed. As a precondition, he specified the achievement of both air and naval superiority over the English Channel and the proposed landing sites, but the German forces did not achieve either at any point during the war, and both the German High Command and Hitler himself had serious doubts about the prospects for success. Nevertheless both the German Army and Navy undertook a major programme of preparations for an invasion: training troops, developing specialised weapons and equipment, and modifying transport vessels. A large number of river barges and transport ships were gathered together on the Channel coast, but with Luftwaffe aircraft losses increasing in the Battle of Britain and no sign that the Royal Air Force had been defeated, Hitler postponed Sea Lion indefinitely on 17 September 1940 and it was never put into action.
See also
- Auxiliary Units – Planned British resistance movement had a German invasion been successful
- British anti-invasion preparations of World War II
- Cross-Channel guns in the Second World War
- Junkers Ju 322 Mammut and Messerschmitt Me 321 Gigant, competing Grossraumlastensegler heavy cargo glider designs for an invasion of the UK
- Kantokuen - The planned Japanese invasion of the Soviet Union
- Operation Felix – The planned German invasion of Gibraltar
- Operation Green (Ireland) – The planned German invasion of Ireland
- Operation Herbstreise, a planned series of deception operations to support the German invasion of the United Kingdom
- Operation Herkules – The planned German invasion of Malta
- Operation Tannenbaum – The planned German invasion of Switzerland
- RAF Fighter Command Order of Battle 1940
- Shingle Street#World War II
