golden delicious
Posts: 5575
Joined: 9/5/2000
From: London, Surrey, United Kingdom
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External reality?
There's a lot of problems with this. I'll just list off the obvious ones, by sea, air and land:
1) The Home Fleet was based at Scapa Flow, with a major squadron at Rosyth. From Scapa to the nearest point on the Norwegian coast is a good couple of hundred miles, and to operate off locations like Trondheim and Narvik put the Royal Navy a long way from their bases. As it was, the Norwegian campaign effectively crippled the Kriegsmarine as the Navy was able to take out a goodly number of major units for some losses of its own. Shift the action to the Navy's doorstep and it'll be a bloodbath. Then you also have to consider that the British plan to mine Norwegian coastal waters wasn't yet in effect when the Germans landed: the major Scottish ports had been mined at the war's outset to prevent incursions by U-Boats.
2) The Germans used airborne forces to essentially block out a corridor of airfields all the way up to Trondheim: Denmark was invaded to provide bases to support operations in Norway. Fighter cover was very rapidly available all the way up to Trondheim, and in any case there were no enemy fighter bases, so bombers could operate unescorted. By contrast, there are no German bases even in single-engined fighter ferry range of the nearest airfield in Scotland, whilst the RAF has masses of fighter bases (and quite a lot of fighters, since only a few squadrons were staged to France) in easy reach. No air cover except unescorted bombers. This rather exacerbates 1), as the Royal Navy is going to operate more or less with impunity anywhere within 100 miles of an RAF base
3) Norway was unmobilised, and even at full strength the Norwegian army was only a few tens of thousands strong. Moreover, the last war that Norway had fought was in support of Napoleon, and the army's main purpose was to protect the mountain passes in case of an invasion from Sweden. By contrast, Britain had by this point been conscripting for over a year and had more than two dozen divisions in various stages of organisation and equipment. Although these troops were not ready to be sent to France to face the full might of the Wehrmacht, they're going to make short work of the really very modest forces Germany was able to deploy to Norway. You can forget about paratroopers, too: Borkum to Berwick is over 600km, well outside the range of the Ju-52
One could look at it this way: in the First World War, when the Germans possessed a fleet which started to approach the Home Fleet in size, and where airpower was not an issue, the Germans never even considered mounting such an operation (though various authors certainly entertained it- see Riddle of the Sands) because it would have been an impossibility. In 1940, the German fleet is miniscule compared to the Royal Navy, and air power makes operating outside ones own fighter umbrella a really bad idea.
< Message edited by golden delicious -- 4/25/2021 6:21:40 PM >
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Scotland 1940 - 
) The Germans had their own plan to secure the iron, ports and airbases and it involved invading only Norway and Denmark. This invasion would deny any Allied ambitions to secure airbases in Norway and bottle up the Germans at the Skagerrak. 
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