In Klee's three-part (but still unsatisfactorily short) history of the Luftwaffe preparations for Sealion...only the middle "volume" of which is in any way pertinent...VIII F-K were sent off after they were withdrawn from their part in the Battle of Britain to prepare for Sealion by doing TWO things... 1/ extra accuracy training to allow CLOSE Air Support of the invasion force, and... 2/ training in night takeoffs and formating, so that they could take off before dawn on S-Day and be over the beaches at 6AM to support the advance detachments, and amphibious tanks as they came ashore. Beyond that...Klee says next to nothing about VIII F-K, apart from the fact that they were to cooperate with the Heer and attack coastal defences...But Schenk on the other hand notes that VIII Fliegerkorps' plans are the only Luftwaffe plans for Sealion preserved in any detail - he just doesn't give any much of it at all!!! But buried away in Peter C. Smith's Divebomber!, I found a tiny bit MORE information about VIII F'k's role and preparations.... Apparently at the meeting on September 13th with Hitler, it was decided that one "squadron" of "specially equiped" Stukas would attack the Emergency Battery at Dungeness...while two whole Stuka gruppen were to provide support for the German landings to the north-east of there, at Hythe/Sandgate and towards Folkestone. Now - I've since found online that due to the dpredations they suffered during the BoB, Richthofen's command had dwindled to only four gruppen operational by September 1940 - in three Geschwadern Stab, II/StG 1 Stab, II/StG2 Stab, I/StG 3 and IV (St.)/LG 1 ...and from the middle of the monbth at least some were active against shipping in the Thames Estuary - and quite successful they were too. But I'm trying to fill in some of the obvious blanks in all that! And it's proving very very difficult... If anyone has ANY more information about any of those four gruppen, where they were training, which gruppe was to be used where on S-day and onwards, and what exactly "specially equiped" meant...I'd be very grateful!
