5 Reasons Nazi Germany Could Never Have Won World War II

Though the British Expeditionary Force may have suffered a significant defeat during the early stages of the war, having being forced to withdraw back to the UK in the Dunkirk operation, the British Navy remained the premier naval force in the European theatre during this time period.

I mean, there's a reason the song says Britannia rules the waves, right?

Many arguments for how Nazi Germany could've won WW2 state that Hitler's regime could have prevented the Dunkirk evacuation by not making the decision to halt their advance towards the French shores on the 24 May 1940 and effectively disabled the British land army.

Other arguments claim that if the Germans had pushed forward following the evacuation with Operation Sea Lion and invaded Great Britain in September of 1940 that they could've effectively put an end to the Western Front and allowed them to solely focus on defeating the USSR.

The problem with this line of thinking is that even if the Germans had chosen to do both of those things, victory against the British was far from guaranteed.

In order to support an invasion into the British mainland, the German Navy would've needed to have some control over the channel crossing to allow the passage of troops and supplies. This would not have been possible due to the strength of the Royal Navy in the early part of the war, making the success of an amphibious invasion highly unlikely.

Some theorists have claimed that naval control of the English Channel wouldn't have been necessary and that the Germans could have launched an invasion from the air with paratroopers, but the Nazis had failed to seize control of British airspace during the Battle of Britain and even if they had, the effectiveness of trying to seize territory through an entirely airborne operation was proven to be limited to say the least in later Allied campaigns in Crete and Arnhem.