6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A witty history intended for reading for pleasure, April 30, 2005
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.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Are You Willing to Bleed a Little?, February 11, 2011
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.
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The true story of the Battle of Britain, November 17, 1998
By A Customer
This review is from: Operation Sea Lion: The Projected Invasion of England in 1940. An Account of the German Preparations and the British Countermeasures (Hardcover)
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."
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