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Originally Posted by Catfish

On the other hand, since Hitler had no real intention to invade or fight England, this general attitude could also be found in the german air force.

Hitler said it best about himself: "At sea I am a coward" And his top commanders agreed with him; considering his overruling and sacking of military commanders who opposed him, on this occasion, the commanders prevailed.

Even if the Royal Navy had been neutralised, the chances of a successful amphibious invasion across the Channel were remote. The Germans had no specialised landing craft, and would have had to rely primarily on river barges to lift troops and supplies for the landing. This would have limited the quantity of artillery and tanks that could be transported and restricted operations to times of good weather. The barges were not designed for use in open sea and, even in almost perfect conditions, they would have been slow and vulnerable to attack. There were also not enough barges to transport the first invasion wave nor the following waves with their equipment. The Germans would have needed to immediately capture a port in full working order, a highly unlikely circumstance considering the strength of the British coastal defences around the southeastern harbors at that time and the likelihood the British would have demolished the docks in any port from which they had to withdraw. The British also had several contingency plans, including the use of poison gas.
The view of those who believed, regardless of a potential German victory in the air battle, that Sea Lion was still not going to succeed included a number of German General Staff members. After the war, Admiral Karl Dönitz said he believed air superiority was "not enough". Dönitz stated, "[W]e possessed neither control of the air or the sea; nor were we in any position to gain it". In his memoirs, Erich Raeder, commander-in-chief of the Kriegsmarine in 1940, argued:.....the emphatic reminder that up until now the British had never thrown the full power of their fleet into action. However, a German invasion of England would be a matter of life and death for the British, and they would unhesitatingly commit their naval forces, to the last ship and the last man, into an all-out fight for survival. Our Air Force could not be counted on to guard our transports from the British Fleets, because their operations would depend on the weather, if for no other reason. It could not be expected that even for a brief period our Air Force could make up for our lack of naval supremacy.
On 13 August 1940, Alfred Jodl, Chief of Operations in the OKW (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht) wrote his "Assessment of the situation arising from the views of the Army and Navy on a landing in England." His first point was that "The landing operation must under no circumstances fail. A failure could leave political consequences, which would go far beyond the military ones." He believed that the Luftwaffe could meet its essential objectives, but if the Kriegsmarine could not meet the operational requirements of the Army for an attack on a broad front with two divisions landed within four days, followed promptly by three further divisions irrespective of weather, "then I consider the landing to be an act of desperation, which would have to be risked in a desperate situation, but which we have no reason whatsoever to undertake at this moment."

The back door to attack of the Festung Europa invasion thus remained 'open' with "political consequences"...One other small fact lost to history which I have previously PM'd and posted on, is the military concept of landing craft doctrine: German 'cowardice at sea' if U will. Allied landing (specialized Higgins boats etc) assault doctrine permitted action up to a level 6 sea. German doctrine (with just barges) only conceived of a level 4 sea; The Channel is a tough place. D-day with a Scotsman's weather report and Eisenhower rolling sixes (if u will) Said "let's go". The Germans with a doctrine firmly adhered to level four, a fixation on the Pas De Calais, assumed and never considered otherwise that the Allies had a similar pain threshold: and having the same weather report, said 'all quiet on the western front" -Rommel, the key to the Longest day, went home to his wife's birthday. Had Eisenhower postponed the invasion, the next available date with the correct combination of tides (but without the desirable full moon) was two weeks later, from 18 to 20 June. As it happened, during this period they would have encountered a major storm lasting four days, between 19 and 22 June, that would have made the initial landings impossible. The weather actually worked to the Allied advantage. When the BBC broadcast the lines from Verlaine's poem indicating commencement of the attack-Blessent mon coeur d'une longueur monotone ("[The violins of autumn] wound my heart with monotonous languor")-the 15th Army in the Pas de Calais went on alert, but Rommel's Army Group B headquarters in Normandy did nothing. The weather was so foul that no one believed an invasion possible. Indeed, many commanders at 7th Army had already left for Brittany to participate in an exercise designed, ironically, to simulate an Allied landing in Normandy... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sea_Lion VS http://www.history.army.mil/brochures/normandy/nor-pam.htm