Seelowe

there was the anglo-german naval treaty of 1935, which specified exactly how much of what type the germans could build. in 1939 hitler renounced the treaty, but a naval build-up is a long term investment which takes quite some time. imperial germany started in the 1890ies and reached a level which was becoming dangerous to british supremacy after 1910. all this while imperial germany had a much larger merchant navy and a pool of experienced seamen to draw from.
ships have to be build, sailors trained etc. this is a gap which cannot be closed short-term.

Regarding mabadesc's point 4, would not a total Luftwaffe supremacy over the channel deter British warships intervention against an invasion fleet in the narrow areas? As far as I know, Hitler was more terrified by the perspective of his landing crafts being blown up by RAF rather than the Royal Navy.

the axis had supremacy over the eastern mediterranean and didn't prevent the RN from interfering, just as they didn't prevent the Dunkirk evacuation, despite Göhring's promises.

This post has been edited by dead-cat on February 14, 2009 04:54 am

Please spare me Göring's promises! He didn't deliver ANY of them. But I thought of an effort made to invade England similar to the effort made with Crete in 1941. The last push did it, in spite of heavy losses; don't get me wrong, I don't compare the islands between them, but neither the distance from the main theater of operations wouldn't have been the same. It seems that in 1940 the Germans wanted only easy victorie, with extremely small losses - if any heavy damage was at risk, they wouldn't do it. IMO, at least...

This post has been edited by MMM on February 14, 2009 08:27 am

the defences of crete are not similar to those of england, nor was the mobilization potential
crete was a different kind of operation. i brought it as an example, that air superiority does not necesarily annihilate the enemy's navy. the RN was weaker in the mediterannean than in home waters also.

other than that, everybody wants easy victories at small losses, except perhaps, the honourable Sir Dougle Haig (this is a flamebait).

I knew that; I only wanted to underline that the conquest of Crete was made with heavy losses in spite of many contrary circumstances. I also know that RN was/is stronger in the Channel, and I also know that the Germans had Italian naval help, which in summer 1940 they would not have had.

to what effectively amounts the Italian help, there is a quote from Churchill, who, when told that Italy joined the germans, said: "That’s fair; we had them last time."

That's hillarious! Great observation.

Gen. Dénes

The Mediterranean was a much larger area than the channel so the chances to detect and attack enemy ships decrease accordingly.

At Dunkirk (5 destroyers sunk by Luftwaffe), the evacuation was still under protection of RAF, so Luftwaffe did not act unopposed.

they would hardly be able to destroy every british aircraft. however, they did have supremacy over dunkirk. 5 (or 6) destroyers i'm sure wasn't regarded a very high price. the invasion of norway costed the KM 10 destroyers, 1CA and 2CLs. again, while german aircraft archived air supremacy.

This post has been edited by dead-cat on February 14, 2009 11:10 am

Why should anyone destroy

????
As for the Supermarina, I never regarded it too high, as well (I mentioned it only for fear of being accused I didn't do it ) - and Churchill's memories, even in the abridged version translated in Romania, one could find many such remarks. I remember reading it when I was student and writing down the interesting quotations. Unfortunately, I lost them However, it is a book well-worth reading!
Winston Churchill - Al doilea război mondial, vol. I-II, Ed. Saeculum I.O., Bucureşti, 1997.

This post has been edited by MMM on February 14, 2009 08:27 pm

I was talking the kind of air supremacy Allies had on D-Day.

Let's not compare D-Day (06.06.44) with Dunkirk (29.05 to 04.06 in 1940), more precisely not after two and a half years of US war production... for which the Germans had no match.

MMM, I was obviously not comparing D-Day with Dunkirk (one was a large scale invasion, the other one was an evacuation). I was referring to the dead-cat's implication that Luftwaffe had to eliminate every single aircraft of the RAF, which, of course, was not the case. Luftwaffe had a number of operational aircraft in 1944, but far insufficient to interfere with the landings or to do anything at all in the area of the beacheads. On the opposite, during the Dunkirk operation, it appears that RAF shoot down 132 planes with the cost of 145 according to this Wiki article

I know very well that, as I already had written an essay (for my PHD studies) about the Dunkirk evacuation in january 2008! I was just stating the difference between the militar and industrial powers involved in the conflict.