ChrisDR68 wrote: Bottom line to this discussion on Germany's naval blockade (or attempted naval blockade) misses the point for me. To to be sure of knocking Britain out of the war Germany needed to physically invade and conquer the country.
Bingo and my thoughts exactly.
On a somewhat related note - the same holds IMO true for the battle of britain or the attempt to gain air superiority over southern England. At times the LW indeed managed to hold the RAF down but it never availed to anything in the end, Germany simply had no proper invasion fleet ready to launch, thus the Battle of Britian was merely a gesture of menace, a bluff, but it had no substance behind it, it was an empty token. Even if germany had secured air superiority over a longer period of time it still couldnt have launched the invasion at that stage. And because of that the whole battle of britian was costly and useless. Both of these aspects of the early war (battle of atlantic and battle of britain) from the german viewpoint had little to no prospect of success in the long run with no invasion fleet at hand, both failures can be derived to the same old general miscalculation on germanys part: There was no proper strategy to fight England, there were no plans what would happen if a war with britain broke out. Hitler imo never intended to fight england and was caught on the completey wrong foot when it came to having to fight them.
I do not think a large navy would have been needed for the invasion, btw, I mean as in building a large number of big surface units as a precondition for it.