Board Thread:Questions and Answers/@comment-10975360-20131208111308/@comment-3398633-20131210182052

You still make it seem as if Britain was unbeatable. The Britain wouldn't have been able to prevent a landing if the RAF was defeated, since most of the Home Fleet was either destroyed or hounded back into the ports. Hitler had his armies and tanks readied for an invasion, but he needed the planes out of the way to ensure the ships made it to the isles safely. Its something no proper historian would dispute since even the British acknowledged the threat, and urged their pilots to fight on for that reason. An aerial defeat meant that the German could land their 300,000+ troops on the islands, and the British had no possible way of stopping a military force that just crushed the French and the Czechs, but regarded as the two most powerful military forces in continental Europe before the conflict.

Hitler was going to win in Russia for the final time. He didn't marshal enough troops to the fight when needed, didn't let his general led their men as they needed, he allowed his supply lines to snap like twigs because he was fighting on too many fronts, and he didn't prepare his men for the winter. He could have fixed all four easily, but his was Hitler, he didn't want to be hold he was wrong and wanted to do everything himself. If Hitler allowed the 6th Army and the 4th Panzer Group stay together as they were meant too, then Stalingrad would have fallen. Better yet, if he avoided Stalingrad altogether, then he could have concentrated on cutting the USSR in half. Stalingrad was an unneccessary target, that Hitler's generals stated could simply be avoided to accomplish their aims. But Hitler wanted Stalingrad since it had Stalin's name attached to it, and Hitler wanted good propaganda back home.

By holing up his troops in Stalingrad, Hitler gave the Russians time to reorganize their forces and counterattack. Up until that point however, the Russians couldn't do that since the Germans kept on moving deeper and deeper into Russia, never giving them much time to recoop their losses and plan a counterattack. Hitler was effectively countering the Russian nummerical advantage by messing up the Russians ability to properly unite against him. They were in full retreat until the most effective wing of the German invasion came to an abrupt halt, allowing the Russians to reorganize in safety, and come back in force, which wasn't possible at Leningrad and Moscow, where the Germans were bearing down on the Soviets in force, preventing a proper counterattack, henceforth the effectiveness of the blitzkrig.

The Battle of Stalingrad was totally unneccessary, as Hitler could have taken the oilfields of the Caucasus without having to take the city. He only needed to cross the Volga and ignore the city, and the oilfields would have been his. If you look on a map, Stalingrad was actually out of the way on the path to the oil regions of Russia. And if Hitler really wanted the city, he could have gone around it, and come from the rear, surrounding and destroying the Russian forces there. Also, not all of it was Hitler's fault. Stalin secured a NAP with Hirohito, who stated no invasion of Russia would come. This allowed millions of Soviet troops in East Asia to move back to the European front, allowing waves of Russian soldiers to land on the German advance. The Russian soldiers that fought at Stalingrad near the end of the battle came from that front with Japan. If Japan refused to sign the treaty, only possible if they didn't attack America, then the Russians would have only had half the men available to fight Hitler. With only half the troops and no reinforcements, Stalin would have been forced beyond the Urals for sure.

Back to Britain. Though the Kreigsmarine was in no shape to fight the British Home Fleet, the Home Fleet could nothing so long as the Luftwaffe was still flying. This was for the same reason German troops could not land on Britain. If Hitler won the Battle of Britain, the Home Fleet could be sent to stop the landing ships from reaching the shores of Britain, but without air support from the now-destroyed RAF, the Luftwaffe dive bombers and fighters would take out any naval forces the British had, something Churchill was all too aware as was Hitler, henceforth the importance of the battle. This was the objective as was stated by the Germans:

"Included in these preparations is the bringing about of those preconditions which make a landing in England possible; The English air force must have been beaten down to such an extent morally and in fact that it can no longer muster any power of attack worth mentioning against the German crossing."

As I stated before, landing wasn't a problem for Germany. Troops had been for a mass landing all across Southern England, with special effort targetted at Dover. The British knew any landing would have been a German victory, and their sitituation was deemed "hopeless" at the beginning of the battle land-wise. Also, Hitler had support from Mussolini which he declined. If he didn't, Italy would have sent ten divisions and thirty squadrons to support the German effort. And mind you, this was before the North Africa campaign. What counted against Germany was the fact that the British had radar, which if the Germans discovered could have found ways to getting around. Hitler had 495,000 troops arrayed for an invasion, not counting the 150,000 troops and 192 planes the Italians had if he accepted Mussolini's help. Hitler just needed to get them to Britain. The British had their air force as their only defense. The fall of the RAF meant the fall of Britain.

So let's recap on Britain. With Germany and Italy, that would been 645,000 troops and 2,742 aircraft against 1.5 million poorly trained, poorly armed Home Guard militias collected from across Britain, most of whom were ineligable for military service (Britain's own words not mine), and 1,963 aircraft. With no air support, the British soldiers would be fighting better-trained German forces on the ground, while in comparison most of the Britons in the Home Guard never held a rifle before. Hitler had 2,400 landing barges, and with no Navy to stop them (supposing the Royal Navy was defeated after the air war), the Germans would only have to hold the British off long enough for the entire landing force to arrive in force. The British had no heavy tanks up until the US involvement, meaning that they'd have nothing to stop the Panzer divisions. Since the British abandoned most of their equipment in Dunkirk, they had to rely on the static GHQ lines, which were only as good as the troops manning them, and they weren't that good. If London fell, then the rest of Britain fell. With the industrial heart of the isles in German hands, the British had no hope of outproducing the Germans, effectively leaving them without the ability to produce more guns, artillery, and tanks, the later two which required steel, which in turn had to be imported across the dangerous Atlantic from the US and the Dominions.