In the spring of 1941, Nazi Germany controlled all of Western Europe and the question was where Adolf Hitler would strike next? Would he finally attempt an invasion of Great Britain? Or would he move into the Middle East instead and grab the oilfields? (Few anticipated at the time he would break his nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union.)

Life magazine argued that year that an invasion of the Middle East by way of North Africa was most likely. This would allow Hitler to avoid aggravating the United States on the one hand, which might get involved if Germany invaded England, and Turkey on the other, which had resisted German overtures for an alliance.

“The one little hitch is the open space of water between Italy and the African mainland,” the magazine wrote, otherwise known as the Mediterranean Sea.

After Germany had overrun France and the Low Countries in the spring of 1940, an invasion of Britain — then the only nation still free in Europe — seemed like a distinct possibility. German fighter planes and bombers waged a months-long air war with their British counterparts over the Channel and the south of England in the summer of that year. The Germans meant to follow up with an amphibious assault once the Luftwaffe had established air superiority.

Of course, the Germans never managed. Prime Minister Winston Churchill congratulated Britain’s airmen in August, saying they had “unwearied in their constant challenge and mortal danger” and were “turning the tide of the world war by their prowess and by their devotion.”

“Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few,” he said.

The British had been outnumbered and outgunned yet managed to fend off the Nazi air assault and give Adolf Hitler his first defeat.

Even if they’d failed, though, it is doubtful that a German invasion of Great Britain would have succeeded.