Following swift victory in the Battle of France, Germany believed the war in the west was won. However, the United Kingdom refused peace talks. As a result, more direct measures to break British resistance were considered.
Grand Admiral (Großadmiral) Erich Raeder of the German Navy (Kriegsmarine) oversaw numerous studies for a German naval assault across the English Channel. The earliest of these, made around November 1939, identified the conditions for invasion:[citation needed]
The Royal Navy had to be eliminated.
The Royal Air Force (RAF) air strength had to be eliminated.
British coastal defences had to be destroyed.
British submarine action against landing forces had to be prevented.
The German Army High Command (Oberkommando des Heeres, or OKH) originally planned an invasion on a vast scale, extending from Dorset to Kent. This was far in excess of what their navy could supply, and final plans were more modest, calling for nine divisions to make an amphibious landing with around 67,000 men in the first echelon and an airborne division to support them.[3] The chosen invasion sites ran from Rottingdean in the west to Hythe in the east.
The battle plan called for German forces to be launched from Cherbourg to Lyme Regis, Le Havre to Ventnor and Brighton, Boulogne to Eastbourne, Calais to Folkestone, and Dunkirk and Ostend to Ramsgate. German paratroopers would land near Brighton and Dover. Once the coast was secured, they would push north, taking Gloucester and encircling London.[4] There is reason to believe that the Germans would not attempt to assault the city but besiege and bombard it.[5] German forces would secure England up to the 52nd parallel (approximately as far north as Northampton), anticipating that the rest of the United Kingdom would then surrender.
Adolf Hitler's initial warning order on 16 July 1940 reflected the most current thinking and set out the revised minimum pre-conditions. He prefaced his order by stating, "I have decided to prepare a landing operation against England and, if necessary, to carry it out".[6]
Hitler's conditions for invasion were:
The RAF was to be "beaten down in its morale and in fact, that it can no longer display any appreciable aggressive force in opposition to the German crossing".
The English Channel was to be swept of British mines at the crossing points, and the Straits of Dover must be blocked at both ends by German mines.
The coastal zone between occupied France and England must be dominated by heavy artillery.
The Royal Navy must be sufficiently engaged in the North Sea and the Mediterranean so that it could not intervene in the crossing. British home squadrons must be damaged or destroyed by air and torpedo attacks.
This placed responsibility for Sealion's success on the shoulders of Naval High Command (Oberkommando der Marine or OKM) Grand Admiral (Großadmiral) Erich Raeder and Air Force High Command (Oberkommando der Luftwaffe or OKL) Imperial Marshal (Reichsmarschall) Hermann Göring.
Italian dictator Benito Mussolini offered troops, but Hitler declined.[7] However, the Italian Air Corps (Corpo Aereo Italiano or CAI) did participate towards the end of the Battle of Britain
The main difficulty for Germany was the small size of its navy. The Kriegsmarine had lost a sizable portion of its large modern surface units in the Norwegian Campaign, either as complete losses or due to battle damage. In particular, the loss of a large portion of their destroyers was crippling. The U-boats, the most powerful arm of the Kriegsmarine, were not suitable for operations in the relatively shallow and restricted English Channel. Although the Royal Navy could not bring to bear the whole of its naval superiority against the Kriegsmarine (most of the fleet was engaged in the Atlantic and Mediterranean), the British Home Fleet still had a very large advantage in numbers. British ships were still vulnerable to enemy air attack, as demonstrated during the Dunkirk evacuation and by the later Japanese sinking of Prince of Wales and Repulse. However, the 22 miles (35 km) width of the English Channel and the overall disparity between the British and German naval forces made the amphibious invasion plan risky, regardless of the outcome in the air. In addition, the Kriegsmarine had allocated its few remaining larger and modern ships to diversionary operations in the North Sea.
Barges assembled for the invasion at the German port of WilhelmshavenThe French fleet, one of the most powerful and modern in the world, might have tipped the balance against Britain. However, the preemptive destruction of the French fleet by the British by an attack on Mers-el-Kébir and the scuttling of the French fleet in Toulon two years later ensured that this could not happen.
Even if the Royal Navy had been neutralised, the chances of a successful amphibious invasion across the channel were remote. The Germans had no specialised landing craft, and had to rely primarily on river barges. This would have limited the quantity of artillery and tanks transported and restricted operations to times of good weather. The barges were not designed for use in open sea and even in almost perfect conditions, their progress would have been slow and the craft vulnerable to attack. There were not enough barges to transport the first invasion wave nor the following waves with their equipment. Without specialized landing craft, the Germans would have needed to immediately capture a port, an unlikely circumstance considering the strength of the British coastal defences around the south-eastern harbours at that time. The British also had several contingency plans, including the use of poison gas.
(this is a plan of millenium!)
yuzuha sama Community Member 
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