[FalkeEins]

..agreed; I've said no different - the 'so-called' comes from the German historian already quoted here..

France as 'militarily weak' ? - on the basis that they capitulated within six weeks and that their military doctrines/aircraft industry (etc etc ) belonged essentially to another age & had only recently embarked on modernisation, yes....

perhaps not so weak insofar as the Luftwaffe in particular sustained considerable losses over-running them - not to mention destroying the infrastructure that would be needed to fight the Battle of Britain..

No doubt the British would have caved in to, but for the Channel. And Churchill's rhetoric has come to represent the battle, when really it was designed, as you say, for internal consumption ..and the Americans. In terms of industrial production German victories in 1940 were significant for the decisions they precipitated on the other side of the Atlantic, long before December 1941. The British were to inherit nearly 11,000 American a/c before then, not to mention ten times as much oil as the Germans received from Rumania

but while the Luftwaffe inflicted losses on the RAF that appear high during the battle, British production -on its own- was higher still...

what Tooze is saying essentially is that seen retrospectively the Germans hadn't got a hope of launching invasion.

I think that what some German viewpoints of the 'battle' express is that in terms of control of the air - a prerequisite for invasion - then that attempt could only be half-hearted at best......