The most significant aspect of all this top-level discussion was the absence of Luftwaffe chiefs. At the Berghof meeting, where the ball was passed to Göring's Air Fleets there had been not even one representative of the Luftwaffe.

And so Göring's so-called Eagle Attack (Adlerangriff was born in the same bungling, buck-passing muddle that had left Guderian at Sedan without objectives, and then halted him while the men in Berlin thought about it. It was the same mess of contradictory orders that had stopped the German armour at Dunkirk. The top brass of the Wehrmacht were learning that it was safer to equivocate. "Sea lion was contemplated," said the jokers afterwards, “but never planned.”

There was no proper training for the highly specialized amphibious assault and no staff officers with enough experience to plan one. But, having passed the immediate problems to Göring, the army engaged in a series of energetic invasion rehearsals, and propaganda units filmed them for release to cinemas on the actual day. Even more diligently, the German navy searched the rivers and canals of Europe, and crammed the northern ports with barges from all over Europe. Countless men with saws and welding torches fitted each with crude ramps for sea-sick horses under fire. The barges were to be towed across the channel in pairs, by tugs, at a speed of five knots. The lines of barges were expected to be at least twelve miles long. When they neared England, the plan said the barges were to be sailed into lines from which one unpowered barge would be lashed to a powered barge. Together they would assault the beaches.

Not even the initial assault boats (Sturmboote) were armoured. They were tiny vessels, some held only six infantrymen plus two crew. They were designed for river crossings and modified so that they could be launched from minesweepers that would take them as close as possible to the British coast. And the barge crews included Dutchmen, Belgians, and Frenchmen with no vested interest in the operation's success.

Even if one is generous enough to equate the modified German barges with what were later called LCTs (Landing Craft, Tanks), the Germans still had nothing to compare with the two vessels that the Allied armies were later to find indispensable for seaborne invasion. First, the LST (Landing Ship, Tank) that could survive a heavy sea, and yet had shallow enough draft to put tanks directly onto a beach. Secondly, the DUKW, which was a two-and-a-half-ton truck, with a hull and propeller fitted to it. Groups of them brought supplies from supply ship to beach very quickly, so releasing the ship for another trip.

Churchill did not take the threat of invasion seriously. On 10 July he told the War Cabinet to disregard Sea-lion. "… it would be a most hazardous and suicidal operation," he said. It is in the light of this that one must see Churchill's boldness in sending tanks to Egypt in the summer of 1940. It also explains why he backed up Beaverbrook, the new Minister of Aircraft Production, when he poached personnel and commandeered property that built more fighters but caused delays and shortages in other war industries.

At this stage of the war, any German invasion — seaborne or airborne — would have been cut to pieces. British experiments with setting the sea ablaze were fearsome, and Bomber Command were secretly training their squadrons in the use of poison gas. A cover story about spraying beaches to destroy vermin had been prepared for release should the Germans object to this form of warfare. RAF Medical Officers assigned to the poison gas units were being fortified with copious draughts of 'captured' champagne.

All this has encouraged some to suggest that there was no real danger of invasion in 1940, and conclude that Fighter Command did not fight a decisive battle. This is a specious argument. Had the Luftwaffe eliminated Fighter Command, its bombers could have knocked out all the other dangers one by one. Given the sort of command of the air that the Luftwaffe had achieved in Poland in only three days, German bombers, guided by radio beams, could have destroyed everything from Whitehall to the units of the Home Fleet. There would have been no insurmountable problem for invasion fleets and airborne units if the air was entirely German.

Strategy: The Douhet Theories

Like many high-ranking airmen, and manufacturers of bombing aircraft, Göring subscribed to the theories of General Giulio Douhet, an Italian who believed that armies and navies were best employed as defensive forces while bomber fleets conquered the enemy. Just before he died in 1930, General Douhet wrote a futuristic story called "The War of 19…" Often quoted but seldom read, Douhet's words had such profound effects upon the German and the RAF High Commands that they are worth examining. Written in the documentary manner of H. G. Wells, Douhet's story described how an "Independent German Air Force" fought great aerial battles against the Belgian and French air units. "There was no doubt that the enemy's purpose was to make the mobilization and concentration of the Allied armies as difficult as possible," said Douhet's imaginative fiction. The Allies replied with 'night-bombing brigades' that attacked German cities with explosives, incendiaries, and poison gas.

Douhet's fiction continues with the Independent German Air Force dropping leaflets telling the citizens of Namur, Soissons, Chalons, and Troyes that their cities are to be obliterated, and that Paris and Brussels will go the same way unless they sue for peace. The tale ends when those towns are obliterated, and the governments do sue for peace. It was the pressure that civilians under air bombardment would put upon their own government that formed the basis of Douhet's theories. At the end of his story he writes:

Impressed by the terrible effects of the bombings and the sight of the enemy planes flying freely and unopposed in their own sky, though they cursed the barbarous methods of the enemy, they could not help feeling bitter against their own aeronautical authorities who had not taken enough protective measures against such an eventuality.

Douhet believed that any nation devoting a large part of its air force to air defence, was risking conquest by a nation that spent everything on bombing fleets. Totally disregarding all the advantages that the defence enjoys in any form of warfare, Douhet smoothly concluded that "No one can command his own sky if he does not command his adversary's sky."

The German Army Air Service's tactics in the First World War had already proved that this was nonsense, but Douhet provided abundant quotes for ambitious bomber theorists. Such men, in Germany, France, Britain, and the USA, had long since decided that in war the importance of an air force (and its commanders) would be judged by the amount of damage done to the enemy, not by skill in defence. Douhet was important because he reinforced illusions about the effectiveness of the bomber and reduced still further the influence of the fighter pilots.

Although he had been a fighter pilot, Hermann Göring found Douhet's ideas easy to accept. He was not sympathetic to the complex technical devices which had converted air warfare from armed barn-storming to crude science. Like many of his contemporaries, he found it convenient to stick to von Richthofen's simplistic dictum that shooting down enemy planes was 'the only important thing' and that "everything else is nonsense." And Göring's Luftwaffe was dedicated to the offensive, designed for close co-operation with the invading German armies. It lacked long-range bombers, but — argued its leaders — what did that matter if the invasions were so successful that you could leap-frog forward with your medium-range machines from each new lot of captured airfields. It seemed to make sense.