Customer Reviews

Operation Sea Lion

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Ian Fleming's brother Peter wrote this charming account of German amphibious invasion plans after Dunkirk, and Britain's plans to repel any invasion they might try. Fleming was peripherally involved in these plans, having been assigned during the dangerous post-Dunkirk period to preparing to wage guerrilla warfare behind enemy lines if the Boche took the beaches and moved inland, but this book is not a personal account but a broad history of the political, military, and psychological factors that went into invasion preparations on both sides, and the final German decision to back off.

Contrary to other reviews, this is not a book about the Battle of Britain. In Fleming's chapter on the Battle of Britain, he notes that the subject is covered extensively elsewhere and he only gives it attention as it relates to the Germans' plans for what they'd do after they won that battle, and on why they decided not to invade. It's more about what might have happened than about what did happen.

Fleming's favorite themes are the indomitability of the English mood at the time (which he amusedly puts down as much to cultural momentum as to courage) and Hitler's fatal misjudgment of it. He makes a convincing case that Hitler put off invading because he thought, wildly incorrectly, that the British were terrified and on the verge of making terms. He also persuasively posits that it was ironically good for the Reich that Hitler hesitated to implement Operation Sea Lion, because the invasion plan was doomed to fail. But Fleming's theses aside, this book is best read for his evocative and witty description of Britain's national mood between Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain -- a mood he underlines with illustrations drawn from the cartoons in contemporary Punch magazines. You can't help but respect the British and envy their courage after reading this entertaining book.

If author Peter Fleming's commas were thorns, if his footnotes were barbed wire, and if his frequent obscure foreign phrases and literary allusions were broken glass, many a reader of "Operation Sea Lion" would be bleeding to death after the first twenty pages and retreating for good. (See other amazon reviews.)

Somehow, Fleming needed three or four chapters to warm up before making his main thesis clear. It is that:

(1) German plans in 1940 to invade Britain after the fall of France were uncharacteristically sloppy and uncoordinated.
(2) Only Admiral Raeder, the head of the German navy, realized the incredible complexity of a huge cross-channel operation, and Germany's inability to carry it off with the limited resources he commanded. Raeder never quite told the Fuehrer.
(3) Hitler, himself the chief proponent of invasion planning, vacillated repeatedly between believing in an outright invasion, on the one hand, or expecting Britain's impending political capitulation, on the other.
(4) Germany's attacks on RAF installations and aircraft factories had Britain on the ropes by September of 1940, but, out of pique at the RAF's bombing of Berlin, it threw the Luftwaffe instead against metropolitain London, where they were more vulnerable to ground and air attacks and imposed far less military damage to the British war machine.
(5) By 1941, the invasion was a chimera. The Luftwaffe was weakened, and Hitler's head had been turned by the prospect of taking the Soviet Union.

Fleming takes far too long to get his story out. He wastes a lot of time describing (poorly and incompletely) British efforts to defend itself against invasion, and tells the German view of the story in a jumbled chronology, sometimes leading the reader to wonder what in the world was going on. Just in time, though, his choppy writing style finally improves (though he's still far to enamoured of footnotes for my taste).

Before you buy this one, I'd do some more research, in amazon or elsewhere. The topic's important and instructive enough to warrant your time. It's dead certain that later books on Sea Lion had better access to archives and eyewitness than did Fleming, and will tell the tale more coherently.

The true story of the Battle of Britain. This book is a good read. It's about the planning of the Battle of Britain on German side, and the planning of the British defense, on the British side. If the Battle of Britain had succeeded, it would have been the first successful cross-Channel invasion since William the Conqueror in 1066. Hitler's half-hearted attempt at an invasion was bungled from the start. He didn't count on Britain being prepared. He was expecting Britain to be like Poland and the Soviet Union with its planes on the ground like sitting ducks. Churchill had once said that French said that Britain would have her neck wrung like a chicken. Then he quipped "some chicken--some neck."

The definitive history of the Battle of Britain read this book! Operation Sea Lion is about the planned German invasion of Britain. It's also about the British countermeasures. Not many people know that the British removed the street signs from London's streets to confuse the Germans if they'd invaded. It also confused the British drivers. There are some editorial cartoons as well. One has a man on the telephone, he's probably a British Cabinet Minister or Sir Hugh "Stuffy" Dowding, and the caption's "Get me Messerschmitt 109." Operation Sea Lion was supposed to be like Operation Overlord--a cross- Channel invasion. The British were prepared and they defeated Goering's vaunted Luftwaffe.

So much of what happened - for good or evil - during World War II in the West occurred because of what was in Hitler's mind. This overarching determinant of events is clearly seen in his thinking about invading the British Isles following the fall of France in 1940. In Hitler's strategic thinking, as Fleming notes, he "neither needed, nor wanted to conquer England" but "he wanted to eliminate her as an opponent." Part of the reason Hitler failed to accomplish either purpose was due, of course, to the steadfastness of the British government headed by Winston Churchill and King George VI (Fleming is quite fulsome in his praise of the monarch during this period) and its people.
But an even larger part was due to Hitler's ambivalence and strategic mistakes - lunging into Norway at a cost of 3 cruisers, 10 destroyers and 8 submarines and allowing the British to evacuate both Norway and Dunkirk. To this end, the author does a very good job of exploring "the twin mirages in Hitler's mind" - that the British would simply "capitulate" rather than fight on; and that in any case, its fighting capacity would "disintegrate." Hitler believed "The British should have sued for peace but they did not" and that seems to have come as a great surprise to the Fuhrer.
German intelligence, Fleming notes, was strewn with "errors and naiveties" but the British matched them with so many "flimsy or obsolete makeshifts" that it was good that the Germans never came ashore and put everything to the test. At the same time, their abortive plans to land 9 divisions on British soil during the first wave on S-Tag seems simplistically optimistic, even within the context of British weakness on land.
The "protracted anti-climax" following the aerial Battle of Britain meant that the British had won and Hitler would call off Operation Sea Lion and move on to the even more grandiose invasion of the Soviet Union. There would be no German invasion of the British Isles, but as Hitler feared in his "Inselwahn" (or "island madness"), there would subsequently be an Allied invasion of the Continent.
As this book makes clear, the summer of 1940 was truly a hinge of history.

The author's writing style made for extremely painful reading. The punctuation had more commas than I've encountered before causing long and overly complex sentences. After 10 pages or so I had to put it down and buy a different book on the subject.