Leadfoot wrote:

How successful could the luftwaffe had been if they had simply concentrated
on attacking ports?

Successful at what? Certainly not successful winning air superiority prior to
an invasion, which was what they were trying to do. They did bomb ports a lot
during the BoB (Portsmouth, Southampton, Portland, Plymouth, London, Bristol
and Liverpool by night), but except where they were able to damage warships
that would otherwise be available to attack the invasion convoys and/or shoot
down a lot of fighters, it was kind of irrelevant. In any case they didn't
want to damage the port facilities on the south coast too much, because they
figured they'd need them eventually to supply their armies. That presumes the
Brits wouldn't have wrecked them as badly as the Germans wrecked the French
ports in 1944/45, and also assumes that Sealion itself had succeeded enough so
that ports would be an issue, which is damned unlikely given the relative naval
strengths and the ever improving condition of the British Army.

Guy