For more than half a century, it seemed that fascism in general and Nazism in particular had suffered their inexorable defeat and permanent annihilation in the Second World War. But with Right-wing authoritarian and ethnic nationalist movements on the rise across the world, the irrevocability of Nazism's eradication now seems less certain. Throughout the late-20th century, one neglected body of British writing stressed that Nazism's defeat was never inevitable, nor was its spirit entirely exorcised. Looking at that work now lets us see why postwar British writers continued to dwell on the possibilities of a Nazi triumph.
Britons consider the defeat of Nazism to be a defining national achievement, and they have been especially aware of its chanciness. That's why every 15 September commemorates how precarious the situation appeared on that date in 1940 when the Battle of Britain was still in progress. The battle for control of the air space over England and the Channel was ultimately won by the Royal Air Force, and most Britons believe that the RAF's victory in the air prevented the Germans from launching an amphibious cross-Channel invasion of the United Kingdom. At the time, the air battle was understood as the first stage of the nation's struggle to repel the invading force. The prime minister Winston Churchill announced a few days after the beginning of the Blitz that: ‘These cruel, wanton, indiscriminate bombings of London are, of course, a part of Hitler's invasion plans.'
The Germans called their cross-Channel invasion plans Operation Sea Lion. They made little attempt to conceal the operation. The whole world watched in part because Germany seemed at that point to be unstoppable; its blitzkrieg across western Europe had taken it to the coast of the English Channel. There it paused, confronting a nation that refused to make peace despite the defeat and retreat of the British Expeditionary Force from the Continent. All the action of the war had narrowed to the confrontation across the Channel. The tides and the weather would do much to determine when and if the invasion began. Would Hitler's war machine be defeated in the attempt or deliver another deadly blow? Ultimately, Nazi Germany did not launch an invasion. But suppose the Luftwaffe had managed to defeat the RAF? Might the Germans then have started across the Channel? And if so, what might have happened then?
The question requires counterfactual historical analysis. Counterfactual history uses hypothetical thought-experiments to imagine the probable results of changes in the historical record. The hypotheses are two-part conditional statements, consisting of an ‘if' and a ‘then' clause: if the Luftwaffe had won the air battle, then the Germans might have successfully invaded Britain. Military historians have used counterfactual analysis for centuries. Among professional historians, they are still the most consistent practitioners. As soon as the German records for that summer had been fully declassified in the mid-1950s, military historians did not hesitate to pass judgment on the feasibility of an invasion. Their verdict: even if the Germans had won the air war, their invasion might never have launched and would have failed if it had. A Luftwaffe victory would have been a necessary but by no means sufficient condition for a sea landing.
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