Andy Chatterton

If you're already at a disadvantage, you don't need your enemy to have superiority in the air as well.

It absolutely is, because we saw in Dunkirk actually hitting boats from the air is quite difficult.

But if you're trundling along in a barge and you see a British plane overhead, you know you're pretty much done for.

So, yeah, absolutely, air superiority is a must.

But Goering's supremely confident that's going to happen.

That's exactly right.

And frankly, the German Navy was never really very confident that it was achievable anyway.

So it's very easy for us to look back in hindsight and say Operation Sea Lion was a complete...

washout.

It was never going to work.

At the time, the German army had just sped through Europe.

They seemed capable of anything.

So all the defences we put in place, all the thinking that we had to do, the bravery of the airmen, the bravery of the guys in the pillboxes around us, it shouldn't be misunderstood.

The German army had just sped through Western Europe and they looked unstoppable.

So we had to prepare for the worst outcome.

They are being used by this group called the Auxiliary Units, whose role is to disappear to these bunkers as soon as the Germans come into their area, leave their families, who have no idea what they're up to, and disappear to these bunkers, and then come out at night and disrupt the supply chain.

This isn't about taking on the German army face-to-face, this is about causing as much chaos at night to slow down that German advance.

All of those things.

Anything that's going to take the Germans to take a step backwards, to pause, to allow our regular troops to have more time to recover and counter-attack.

It has its roots in pre-war.